Early the next morning, Aris was back atop the lookout tree, his eyes fixed on the orc settlement. Sleep had come only in fragments, his mind too consumed by the previous day's horrors to grant him any real rest. As for telling Lilly, the thought hadn't even crossed his mind; there was no reason to burden her with what he'd witnessed.
And today, the settlement seemed to have resumed its usual rhythms. Several orcs were brawling outside, their guttural grunts carrying through the morning mist, which was slowly being burned away by the sun's golden light.
Aris despised them, but he couldn't deny their discipline; the consistency of their morning training was something no human in the village had ever matched.
Then again, that was looking at the situation through a narrow, biased lens. Humans at the village had never even been afforded the freedom to pursue a life of strength, so what did the comparison matter?
He looked closer. A few others stood further back, performing measured, controlled fist movements. Watching for some time, Aris realized there was a distinct rhythm and pattern to it, not the random brawling he'd initially assumed, but something deeply structured.
He filed the observation away for later analysis and drifted his eyes past them to thirteen orcs seated cross-legged on the grass. Meditating? The notion felt almost absurd. How could orcs, creatures he'd only ever seen as savage and violent be sitting so calmly, so still? Or was he simply limiting himself to what he had seen of them, failing to account for capacities he hadn't yet witnessed?
He watched for minutes longer, cataloging the settlement's movements, trying to map the pattern of how they patrolled the perimeter around their walls.
No orcs ever ventured out for water. Did they have deep wells hidden inside the settlement that he couldn't see from his vantage point? Perhaps. Or maybe—he thought back to the underground drainage system, and a chilling possibility surfaced—some link between that and the humans being swallowed by the earth yesterday.
Finally, after about an hour, four orcs strode from a large circular building adjacent to the monolith and marched toward the four cardinal directions, disappearing into the trees.
One passed near his lookout tree, but Aris reined in his curiosity, forcing himself to wait. As he expected, another orc eventually emerged from the forest to relieve the first. A shift change.
Once the replacement had returned to the settlement, Aris descended and began his pursuit. For minutes, he tracked the orc, darting through the undergrowth, keeping to the sides, weaving between bushes and trees; fortunately, the dense canopy on this side of the forest cast the ground in deep, forgiving shadows that allowed him to blend into the gloom. Finally, he halted, pressing his back against the rough bark of a massive trunk.
He peered around the edge, and his eyes widened. In a small clearing stood a tree, barely three meters tall, with sparse leaves and a narrow, twisted trunk. It was encircled by five iron rods—or, at least, he assumed they were iron. They were etched with strange, swirling purple characters.
The moment his gaze locked onto the markings, a wave of vertigo crashed into his skull. His vision splintered, and he teetered on the brink of blacking out before he violently tore his eyes away, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
This time, Aris didn't let himself freeze in paralyzed shock. He already understood that this forest was governed by something beyond his comprehension, and his survival thus far had been a testament to his restraint, to his ability to see something impossible and walk the other way.
He steadied his breathing and peered around the trunk again, keeping the iron rods strictly at the periphery of his vision. The orc had stopped before the tree, head bowed not in prayer, but in a practiced, mechanical reverence. It moved with the air of a sentry performing a routine inspection, checking the rods for any irregularities before it turned and vanished back into a massive tree, leaving the strange tree behind.
Still pressed against the trunk, his mind churned. His plan needed adjustment, though nothing drastic, just the target. Kidnapping one of the rods' guards was an unnecessary risk; better to pluck an orc from the settlement's peripheral rotations, or one on solo patrol.
But the rods themselves haunted him. Was the statue's scan tied to these rods? He suspected the other three orcs were stationed at identical points, creating some sort of geometric seal or sensor web. He forced the thought to die. Speculation was a trap. He clung to the cold rule that had kept him breathing: Do not be an obstacle to the entity.
But the survival instinct was beginning to chafe against his ambition. As long as he remained a ghost, he was safe, but he was also a prisoner, with no guarantee escape would even mean freedom.
The "wider world" outside this forest, was it any better? What if he escaped this horror only to stumble into the lap of another, perhaps even hungrier master?
The ambiguity was suffocating. He needed information. He needed to know what these things were, why they existed, and how to kill them, not just escape them, because he couldn't always be on the run. The drive to snatch an orc and strip it of the secrets of the forest became more than a tactic; it became a necessity.
He withdrew and returned to the lookout tree, waiting for a fresh opportunity. Three hours bled away, but the settlement remained a closed loop. The orcs cycled through their brutal training, sparring, kata-like fist drills, interspersed with the sickening consumption of human remains and their eerie, statue-like meditation.
Perhaps he was looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe he shouldn't be hunting the ones in the field, but finding someone who could actually tell him something. The chief. With that thought, he descended, moving stealthily toward the forest's edge.
At the treeline, he leveled his gaze at the watchtowers of the human settlement. Two men stood motionless against the sky, bows gripped in their hands. Sentries. But the term felt generous. What was the point of watchtowers if they couldn't even guard against a single orc? Were they meant to keep watch for fellow humans, or perhaps to corral the survivors like cattle? As for the goblins, they hardly registered as a threat; he'd already seen the humans massacre them with ease.
He didn't make a move. The risk of detection was too high in the daylight, and he refused to alert the chief to his presence before he was ready.
Tonight, he decided, or perhaps the following night. There was no point in rushing into a grave.
He turned his back on the village and began the trek back to the cave. The hunt for meat would have to wait since the forest was devoid of even small game. For now, he scavenged whatever edible fruit the forest offered to supplement their dwindling food.
He moved from brush to brush with the focus of a man who had already decided that he was going to turn predator, even if he still felt like prey.
Sometime later, he parted the cascade and stepped into the dim light of the cave. Lilly was at his side in an instant, her small arms locking around his waist, heedless of the cold water dripping from his clothes. Aris's free hand hesitated, caught between the old instinct to keep his guard up and the need for connection, then settled, ruffling her hair as the weight of her fear settled into his chest.
"Okay, okay. Don't worry. I'm back now."
She leaned back, her cheeks flushing as she realized her desperation had been on full display. Aris caught the look and managed a soft, weary laugh. "And here you were boasting last night about how unafraid you were."
She didn't refute it, and the resulting silence stung—a clumsy joke that fell flat in the suffocating quiet of their hideout. He handed her the fruits and sat by the cavern wall, motioning for her to join him.
They ate in near-silence, Lilly tucked against his side, her eyes darting between his lost-in-thought expression and the bamboo containers that had begun to emit a faint, pungent reek. She seemed to swallow whatever questions were burning on her tongue.
Moments later, Aris rose, his focus shifting to the bow and arrows. It was time.
He walked to the edge of the cascade, turned his back to the water, and faced the fifteen meters of dark, cavernous space. He laid the eight arrows on the ground. Forgoing Prime's combat-optimization overlays, he drew the string and loosed an arrow.
It whistled through the damp air, struck the stone wall with a hollow thwack, and clattered harmlessly to the floor, completely lacking the force to pierce or even bite into the rock. He followed with the rest, each shot landing with the same pathetic lack of impact.
But he wasn't aiming for destruction yet; he was testing the capability of his own body, ensuring it wasn't too far gone to bridge the gap between intent and action.
For an hour, the cave echoed with the cycle: a clumsy shot, the soft patter of Lilly's feet as she ran to retrieve the arrows, and another attempt. He forced himself to work without Prime's crutch, sweat beginning to bead on his forehead. By the end, the repetition had begun to burn, his shoulders aching with a dull, promising fire. He felt ready to move outside.
Outside, the forest seemed eerily still as always, the only sound the crash of the waterfall they were wading through. Besides the orcs, there were no other clear predators, and even then, based on the intel he'd gathered, he suspected the orcs had little interest in this specific region.
He possessed a grim certainty that yesterday's "harvest" meant they were well-fed for the moment. If his calculations were wrong, if he did stumble into a patrol, he had a desperate backup: he could pose as one of the village's own slaves. His grasp of ten percent of the Orcish tongue might be enough to mimic the cadence of a subordinate.
They might mistake him for a larger slave, a potential enforcer, the thought left a bitter taste in his mouth, but survival was a game of masks, and he was ready to wear whatever face was required to keep them alive.