The arrow struck the center of the orc's forehead, snapping its head back against the wall. Before it could recover, Aris recoiled, twisted, and lunged for his bed, his fingers closing around the shaft of a lethal poison-tipped arrow waiting atop it.
The chains rattled louder as the orc swung its arm forward and ripped the iron spike to its right clean from the cavern wall, slamming it into the floor with a crack that swallowed even the roar of the waterfall for a heartbeat.
Aris's head whipped toward the sound, then to Lilly, still crumpled near the cascade, and finally to the space between them.
Thirty-five feet. Maybe forty.
Enough.
His gaze snapped back to the orc, already wrenching at the remaining chains, the second iron spike dragging several inches from the cavern wall.
Aris nocked the arrow, drew, and released. The tip bit deep into the orc's chest. It roared, chains rattling as the second spike tore farther from the wall—then it froze mid-yank, its massive body slumping back against the stone.
Its hand crawled to its chest, fingers fumbling, and wrenched out the arrow, then the one still embedded in its forehead.
In the dim, flickering candlelight, violet necrosis bloomed outward from the chest wound, clawing up its thick neck and plunging toward its waist like ink swallowing every vein it touched.
Its eyes dilated as it stared at the human before it, at the gaze that did not blink, its massive hand pressing flat against its chest as though its own palm could keep the poison contained.
Aris watched its face twist, muscles seizing and releasing, seizing and releasing, each spasm wedging it deeper toward death. Its hide darkened from brown to bruised violet in a creeping wave, though barely visible in the gloom. Its grip on the chain went slack, adrenaline finally spent, and its arms fell motionless.
Its head lolled to the side. Seconds later, all movement ceased. The cave's silence returned, the only sound Aris's breaths, muffled by the waterfall.
Even then, Aris remained motionless, watching—only when he was certain it no longer twitched did he turn and bolt to Lilly, dropping to his knees beside her. His eyes swept her elbows, her shoulders, her head, while Prime scanned her in parallel.
A ragged breath escaped him when the scan confirmed she was unharmed, though the orc's final frenzy still shook her small hands and left her face pale with fright.
He pulled her close, one hand stroking the back of her head. "It's okay. It's dead. It's okay," he murmured, over and over, until her trembling stopped, until color seeped back into her cheeks, until her breathing slowed to match his own. Only then did he stand and walk back to the corpse, leaving her still on the ground.
He stood over the corpse, his gaze tracing its sheer size, the lingering agony on its face, the wound on its chest, then shifted to the immediate problem of removing it from the cave.
Dragging it in had left his shoulders aching, exhausting him for hours even with the makeshift cart. He looked at the cart, leaning against the right wall near the cave mouth; it was still useful, but even with the orc's legs already gone, the remaining bulk would be punishingly heavy.
His eyes drifted to the leg stumps, then to the heap of loot where the sword lay, meticulously cleaned by Lilly just to keep her hands busy.
He strode over, picked up the sword, and returned to unlatch the remaining chains, letting the corpse collapse heavily to the floor.
Activating Prime, numerous green and red grids overlaid his vision onto the body, glowing green points highlighting the elbow and shoulder as vulnerable joints, mapping precise paths for a clean cut. Stepping to the corpse's left side, he set the blade against the shoulder and began to slice.
As he'd expected, even with Prime flagging the weak points, dense muscle fiber fought his blade every inch of the way.
He wondered briefly what his odds would be against a single orc in direct, unassisted combat—against muscles this strong, practically zero. He discarded the thought as useless the moment it formed.
Even if the odds had been a relatively favorable sixty percent, he wouldn't have rushed the fight without backup; sixty percent still meant a real chance of dying.
Finally, he reached bone and settled into short, sawing strokes, occasionally stomping on the limb to snap the joint at a calculated angle. Minutes bled together in brutal labor, though it was still less punishing than hacking through the femurs. Those had nearly broken him. This was merely exhausting.
Half an hour later, the damp air sat thick with the iron reek of blood mixed with poison, dark pools spreading across the stone. The dismembered parts lay scattered—head, both arms, and the massive torso, all severed from one another.
He grabbed the arms first, wrapping thick scraps of fabric tightly around the weeping stumps to stem the flow, then hoisted the heavy limbs onto his shoulder and hauled them toward the cascade.
Lilly knelt near the severed limbs, a makeshift cloth mask tied across her face as she scrubbed the bloodstained floor in slow arcs.
The poison was lethal only to orcs, harmless to humans, and inert once the heart stopped pumping. Aris knew that. Still, he paused for a beat, watching her, some instinct refusing to accept the math.
She looked up briefly, then returned to her work, trying to lighten her brother's burden, the least, she thought, she could do.
The current Aris wouldn't have minded if she simply sat idle. Hopefully, the labor kept boredom at bay. Or perhaps she was using it to keep her own fears at bay. Either way, the distraction was welcome.
Minutes later, moving through the deep shadows of the trees, Aris crept toward the spot where he'd disposed of the legs. His clothes were damp, and the heavy stench of blood clinging to the arms over his shoulder kept him on edge with every step, dreading that wandering orcs might catch the scent of their own kind. But he reached the spot without incident.
As he'd half anticipated, the legs had already undergone rapid decomposition. Looking closer, he saw the forest floor had partially swallowed them, leaving only bare femurs jutting from the dark mulch, just like the chief's corpse.
This time, though, the unnatural sight failed to spark fright, perhaps because they belonged to an enemy, or perhaps because he was the one who'd severed them.
The faint, nagging impulse to escape surfaced in the back of his mind. He let it go. Let whatever was tinkering with his thoughts have this one; he was too tired to fight it, too exhausted to feel the horror he knew he should.
He walked past the decomposing remains as if they were nothing out of the ordinary.
Minutes later, he dropped the arms in separate locations, camouflaging them beneath thick layers of leaves and rotting branches before hurrying back to the cave.
The oppressive smell of blood inside had already lessened, thanks largely to Lilly and the draft. He stepped over to her as she continued scrubbing the floor, reached down, and ruffled her hair in a silent gesture of gratitude.
Careful not to break her focus, he pivoted to the orc's head, scooped it up, and hauled it into the forest to discard. Sometime later, he returned for the heavy torso, using the wooden cart to carry it out before dragging the empty cart back inside.
Exhausted, he dropped onto his straw bed in his dripping clothes, too tired to change. Crossing his legs, he turned his focus inward to Prime, opening the folder labeled Escape—no. Breathing Method. The data Prime had recorded and analyzed flooded his mind, and the deeper he explored, the deeper his brow furrowed.
First, the data was woefully incomplete, roughly twenty percent finished by his estimation, and likely much lower in reality.
A pang of regret flashed through him for having to kill the orc before extracting the full method, though he rationalized it quickly: the orc had begun shaking off the poison precisely because it had initiated the technique.
Was it possible the breathing method cleansed the body of toxins, or had the poison's window simply expired? But looking at the mechanics of how it worked, the former seemed far more likely.
As he mentally simulated the patterns of inhales and exhales, harsh reality set in. His human lungs were physically incapable of matching an orc's capacity, even with Prime assisting.
Worse, he lacked an orc's oversized heart. A fleeting, morbid curiosity surfaced. What might happen if I force my body to execute the method anyway? He slammed the thought down instantly and redirected his focus to Prime.
Prime, calculate survival probability.
[0.1% success rate. Failure rate: 99.9%, due to catastrophic cardiac shock. Vascular walls insufficient. Incapable of sustaining target blood acceleration.]
Zero point one. Not even a measurable margin of error. Aris's teeth clicked together. He'd anticipated a low number, but not this low, it meant all that grueling risk might have been for nothing. He glanced up, watching Lilly carry a bundle of blood-soaked cloths toward the waterfall to rinse them in the cascade.
He snapped his attention back to the problem. What if a human built like an orc tried to force the method? But a human heart was still a human heart, at the end of the day. It would shred itself trying to pump blood at that velocity.
Yet he refused to wallow in a dead end. Prime, what's the probability of reverse-engineering a viable human breathing method? And how would its efficacy compare?
[Insuff—]
"Yeah, yeah, I know." Aris cut it off. He'd already half anticipated the answer. Insufficient data. As always.
But where was he supposed to get more? Kidnap another orc and force it to perform the method? Doing so would inevitably purge the poison from its body, he'd witnessed it firsthand.
He paused, recalculating. Execution. If he timed the dosage precisely, he could make a captive perform the breathing method before it broke free of the hallucination, perhaps even push it through multiple rounds despite the toxin. And he could use them to move the boulder, too.
He paused. No, one wouldn't be enough. He'd need five to seven of them just to shift it. Two birds, one stone. More orcs, more data.
As for explosives, he discarded the idea entirely. The materials were far too scarce and unstable in this damp forest, and he hadn't found a single reliable lead.
Returning to the village for materials, if they were even available, was out of the question; the chief's two sons were likely still tearing each other apart over the succession.
Even if he somehow managed to synthesize black powder, relying on a crude blast to shift twenty tons of rock was pure guesswork. He'd also need a waterproof fuse, and worst of all, the explosion might draw the entity's attention. The last thing he wanted was for him and Lilly to be wiped out like gnats.
Kidnapping carried staggering risks, but it remained the lesser evil. If he managed the hallucinogenic poison with absolute precision, the odds of success might be high.
Brewing a massive reserve was no hurdle in a forest teeming with toxic plants. Delivering it was equally feasible, he'd already decided to refine it into a fine powder, ensuring rapid absorption through skin or lungs.
The bow would offer poor odds if the number of orcs exceeded two.
The immediate bottleneck was finding five orcs isolated together. The only realistic approach was hunting them down one by one, picking them off the fringes like Olod.
But before that could begin, he needed a sufficient stockpile of paralytic poison and the recovered body-forging art. With that knowledge, building a personal breathing method would go from impossible to merely difficult.
He stood and walked over to where Lilly was collapsing onto her bed. Glancing toward the northern wall where the orc had been chained, he noted the iron spikes, scrubbed entirely clean of blood and dirt.
A small smile crossed his face as he wondered if she'd always been a clean freak, or if the trauma was slowly turning her into one.
He opened his mouth to ask her to help him prepare his tools, then shut it, her face too exhausted, too drained to ask anything more of her.
He turned toward the cascade and focused inward. Prime, synthesize hallucinogenic poison powder recipe.
[Task initiated… Estimated time: 4:00:59]
Satisfied with the timeline, he slipped through the cascade and into the forest. Minutes later, as he neared the clearing where Olod had practiced daily, he froze.
Heavy, familiar footsteps echoed from beyond the tree line. His hair bristled instantly. Without a sound, he scrambled up the nearest trunk, hauled himself into the dense foliage near the crown, and peered down through the gaps, breath held, pupils darting.
Nine orcs were scouring the ground, tearing through brush and overturning boulders. Several dug frantically into the soil.
The body-forging art.