Aris's gaze darted across the small clearing, snapping from one orc parting dense brush at the edge of the clearing to another tearing into the soil at the center, and finally to a third heaving the one-meter boulder Olod had used for training, searching its underside for the body-forging art.
Several grunted in heavy annoyance, their guttural growls and the shifting rustle of debris the only sounds in the silent forest.
Aris narrowed his eyes, straining to eavesdrop on their fragmented chatter. From his elevated perch, the voices were heavily muffled by distance, and creeping any closer would be sheer suicide. He activated Prime, commanding it to isolate and filter the noise into clear, audible Orcish.
"Where is this damn thing? Why does Olod make us waste our training time?" demanded one of the orcs tearing at the center of the clearing with bare hands, his voice reaching Aris with some clarity.
"Don't call it that!" snapped another near the edge of the perimeter, digging furiously beneath a tree. "Just because your father is an Aura Master doesn't mean you can speak of the sacred art like garbage."
Aris listened in silence. Most of their conversation consisted of mutual cursing, directed primarily at Olod for his greed and cowardice in stealing the art, though Aris could detect a sharp competitiveness in their voices and movements.
All the while, he kept his eyes fixed on one of the massive trees surrounding the clearing: the very spot where Olod used to sit cross-legged. It was the most logical place for the art to be hidden, and watching the orcs dig nearer and nearer to its roots set his teeth on edge. His hand clenched tighter around the branch, though he knew he had no choice but to wait and watch.
Then a fragment of their chatter yanked his focus back entirely.
"What's wrong with the chief? Does he really want to wipe out the remaining humans entirely? Why call for another harvest this soon?"
"Yeah," the orc digging beneath the targeted tree grunted, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow. "It would have been far more amusing to let them slowly rebuild their fragile hope over a few seasons, only to crush it completely. They're still pissing themselves from the last harvest. The chief should have let them rot a bit longer."He resumed clawing at the dirt with renewed vigor.
"Ha! Ha! True enough," another said with a coarse, booming laugh. "I heard one of their little leaders even vanished into thin air. Probably slit his own throat out of sheer, pathetic fright. What a waste of meat."
Aris absorbed the words, turning them over in his mind. Harvest or not, it changed nothing. Every human trapped in this area was slated for extermination, blocked by an insurmountable wall from ever seeing the outside world. Still, a quiet breath escaped him at the mention of the chief's disappearance, relieved they hadn't connected the dots or found any traces to follow.
His attention snapped back to the orc tearing into the soil near what Aris had mentally designated as Olod's favorite tree. His grip clenched harder on the branch the moment the orc's hands began flinging damp soil aside with the same casual brutality as the rest. Then, without warning, it straightened and pivoted toward the next tree.
Aris's eyes widened. Not there?
He swept his gaze across the broader clearing, but from his elevated vantage point, the dense underbrush and canopy shadows obscured any subtle visual cues that might hint at where the art was hidden. For the next several minutes, he watched their movements and recorded their fragmented chatter.
Their hostile posturing made it clear they weren't just comrades searching for the art but rivals competing aggressively for status, eyeing the art itself and the potential seat of Urul's successor as Aura Master.
The realization gave him pause. Is becoming an Aura Master an inherited title, or is it attained strictly through mastering the body-forging art? Or a combination of both? He shook his head slightly, clearing the distraction. No. There has to be far more to becoming an Aura Master than simply the body-forging art.
As time passed, the sunlight filtering through the canopy slowly dimmed as twilight crept in. Only when the forest plunged into darkness did the nine orcs finally stop, cursing as they turned to leave empty-handed toward the settlement, though from their muttering, returning at first light was already guaranteed.
Aris waited in the upper branches for several minutes, listening to their retreating footsteps fade. Only then did he climb down and stride into the clearing.
Holes marred the ground everywhere he looked, as if the orcs had expected Olod to bury the art deep underground. Aris took over where they had left off, using Prime's one-meter scan to scour the entire space, but found no trace. Returning to Olod's favorite tree, he scanned its base once more, just to be thorough.
Prime immediately flagged two faint, weathered dents in the thick bark.
Aris crouched, peering closer. The marks were barely visible; even in broad daylight, they would have looked completely unassuming. Without Prime's scan, he would have overlooked them entirely.
He scrambled up the massive tree at once, and the higher he climbed, the more distinct the scuffs became, clearly worn down by repeated use.
As he neared the upper canopy, he found it, his smile widening: a thirty-centimeter book wedged securely among four thick branches. Olod had known his brute peers would never think to look up.
Aris's grin widened as he reached out and took it. Settling onto the branch, he held the body-forging art in his hands at last. Its cover was rough, and a quick scan by Prime showed it was crafted from hide durable enough to resist swords and spears, though Aris doubted that claim and resolved to test it later, back at the cave.
For now, he opened it.
The first page, obscured in the deep shadows of night, was barely illuminated by a sliver of moonlight. The text, a dense array of archaic hieroglyphics as he'd expected, was entirely unreadable. Flipping through revealed diagrams, while the final thirty pages consisted of unbroken text. Aris simply closed the book. He already had a solution waiting for that.
He felt the cold night wind caress his cheek from the left, noted its direction and strength, and climbed down. On the way back to the cave, he navigated the dark forest with ease using his mental map and Prime's scans, while simultaneously foraging for poisonous herbs.
Every few minutes he spotted another, and by the time he returned, he carried fifty of them bundled in cloth in his left hand, the sacred book heavy in his right.
Inside the cave, he placed the herbs on the cart and turned to see Lilly already fast asleep, utterly exhausted by the day's trauma. A single flickering candle near her bed illuminated a few meager scraps of dried meat.
His eyes drifted to the loot pile, and his smile faded as he realized their food rations were dwindling much faster than anticipated. A return trip to the village was out of the question; time was far too tight. Guess we'll have to survive on forest fruit, he muttered.
Walking over to the loot, he picked up the sword, threw the book to the floor, gripped the hilt with both hands, and brought the blade down hard against the cover. Not a single mark appeared. Not even a faint white scratch. He tried to stab it, but the blade slid off uselessly.
Hide reaching this level of endurance—could a human body ever achieve it? He cut the thought short with a shake of his head. Dwelling on distant hypotheticals wasted precious seconds.
He placed the book at the head of his bed, then gathered his tools: the stone pestle, a wooden mortar stolen from the village, a cooking clay pot, and the bundle of poisonous herbs. Stepping back outside, the cold night wind sliced through his damp clothes, shaking his body.
Moving to a small clearing a short distance from the humid air of the waterfall, he crouched and began digging a Dakota fire hole. Minutes later, he had the flames roaring and set the pot over them.
While waiting for it to warm, he unwrapped the cloth and laid out the herbs. Once the pot reached the precise temperature, Prime monitoring every degree, he dropped ten herbs inside.
Wrapping his face with three layers of fabric, he leaned back, shielding his hands from the chill of the flames, and began tracking the herbs' water content at strict intervals, careful to conserve Prime's processing stamina for fear of overheating the batch and wasting precious time.
Minutes later, Aris inspected the herbs in the clay pot, and a satisfied smile touched his lips as they'd reached the exact state of desiccation he needed.
He carefully lifted them out, set them aside on a cloth, and added ten more to the pot, leaning back to monitor the heat. From time to time, he fed thin dry twigs into the Dakota pit.
Slowly, hours bled away. Six hours later, fifty dried herbs lay sprawled on the cloth before him, sorted into reactive groups. Out of those, six specific samples represented the optimal mixture Prime's new recipe called for.
To his left sat the cleaned pestle and mortar; to his right, five bamboo containers, the last of his reserve. Four others had already been used, two still containing the hallucinogenic poison paste he'd concocted two days prior.
Satisfied, he wrapped himself in thick cloth, covering his face, hands, and skin completely, then ran a quick self-scan with Prime to ensure no powder poison could breach his body.
He knelt, gathered the pestle and mortar, placed the first six chosen herbs inside, and partially covered the opening with cloth.
He began pounding, each beat calculated precisely by Prime. Twenty grueling minutes later, he'd ground them into a fine powder, slowly transferring it into one of the bamboo containers until it was filled a quarter of the way.
He cleaned the tools and resumed grinding the next batch.
Time bled away until pale dawn sunlight filtered through the canopy, illuminating the row of tightly sealed bamboo powder containers. He tied them together with a supple vine and cinched them around his waist like a belt.
Beside him lay his bow and fourteen arrows, half smeared with paralytic poison, the other half laced with lethal poison capable of dropping an orc in seconds, much like it had Olod.
He donned the quiver, bow in hand, the poison vials secured at his waist, and the book strapped tightly against his chest as a makeshift breastplate, though he knew orcs favored blunt force over blades, and the cover wouldn't stop a crushing blow.
He took a deep breath to steady his nerves, then strode toward the clearing, scanning the undergrowth on the way for a second vine to suspend the book from a branch.