The cloud drifted through empty sky, following a heading the orcs had indicated with varying degrees of reluctance. The landscape below shifted from ruins to rocky hills to patches of scraggly forest that looked like they'd given up halfway through growing.

  Sael stood near the front edge, watching the horizon. Behind him, the orcs had settled into an uneasy silence broken only by the occasional shuffle of weight or cleared throat.

  Finally, the older orc spoke. "You shouldn't go."

  Sael glanced back. The orc's arms were crossed again, that familiar defensive posture from earlier, but his expression had shifted from terror to one closer to grim concern.

  "The general is dangerous," the one with the cracked sword added. "Korreth the Unyielding. He's earned that title through three decades of combat. Even before the lord's transformation, he was one of our finest warriors."

  The mage nodded slowly. "And he's been Enhanced. The lord's power—whatever it is—he's shared fragments of it with his most loyal followers. They're stronger now. Faster and more resilient."

  "He killed a level 700 adventurer in single combat," Sarek said quietly. His hands were loose at his sides, but his jaw was tight. "Ripped his enchanted armor apart like it was paper."

  Sael absorbed this information without comment. The orcs took his silence as permission to continue.

  "The lord himself..." The older orc shook his head. "You asked where to find him. The answer is that you don't. Not if you value your life."

  "He killed two Pillars," the one with the cracked sword said.

  "Hmm."

  This was a hmm of awareness.

  The mage's hands pressed against his thighs. "I was there. I saw what he did. The Sultan threw everything he had at him and the lord just... walked through them. Then he..." The orc's voice dropped. "He devoured them. Both of them."

  A sick silence followed those words.

  "We don't..." Sarek started, then stopped. His jaw worked like he was trying to find the right words. "We don't eat people. That's not—we're not monsters. We don't do that. But the lord..." His voice went quieter. "The lord isn't what he was."

  "He's not just strong," the older orc continued. "He's beyond anything we've encountered. Beyond what should be possible. The army follows him because they're terrified of what he'll do if they don't. And because he's given them victories. He's turned us from scattered refugees into a force that makes kingdoms tremble."

  "You're powerful, mage," the one with the cracked sword said, looking at Sael directly. "We've seen that. You healed injuries that could have eventually killed us, and you fly through the air on a cloud like it's nothing. But the lord..." He shook his head. "He's something else entirely."

  Sael turned to face them fully and found the orcs were all watching him.

  "I understand your concern, b—"

  "Do you?" The older orc cut him off, his expression shifting toward frustration.

  Well. That was rather rude, though Sael supposed the orc was agitated enough not to notice—or perhaps didn't care. Either way.

  The orc continued without pause. "We're not trying to frighten you away because we doubt your abilities. We're trying to keep you from walking into certain death. The lord devoured the Ashen Sultan and the Buried King. Everyone knows those names. Everyone. And he consumed them like they were nothing."

  "Even if you could match him in direct confrontation," the mage added, "which I'm not certain anyone could, he has an army. Hundreds of warriors who've been trained and equipped. You'd be facing impossible odds."

  Sarek leaned forward slightly. "Who are you, exactly? To be so confident about confronting someone who killed two Pillars?"

  The question hung in the air as Sael blinked. Then blinked again.

  Oh.

  He hadn't introduced himself properly. He'd just launched into healing them, then brought them onto the cloud, then started asking questions about their lord and their circumstances.

  That was... remarkably rude, actually.

  Heat crept up the back of his neck. "I apologize," he said. "I should have done this earlier."

  He stepped forward and extended his hand toward the older orc, who stared at it for a moment before cautiously accepting the gesture.

  "I'm Sael," he said, keeping his grip firm but not aggressive. "Sael of Hel."

  The older orc's hand went still in his grip. His eyes widened fractionally.

  "Gorek," the orc said after a pause that lasted just slightly too long.

  Sael moved to the next orc, repeating the gesture. "Nice to meet you, Sael of Hel."

  "...Marak," the one with the cracked sword said, his voice careful. His eyes flicked to Gorek, then back to Sael.

  "Sael of Hel, pleasure."

  "Theron," the mage offered, his expression unreadable.

  Halfway through extending his hand to the fourth orc, Sael realized he probably didn't need to repeat his full name every single time. They'd all heard it. They were standing right there. But now he'd already done it three times, and if he stopped, would the last two think he was being dismissive? Or that he considered them less worthy of a proper introduction? He was already committed to this approach, and changing it midway would just make things awkward.

  "Hello," he completed the handshake. "Sael of Hel."

  "...Dresh," said the fourth orc, who'd been mostly quiet until now. His handshake was brief, almost uncertain.

  Finally, Sael turned to the youngest. "Sael of Hel."

  "Sarek," the young orc said slowly. "Son of Barek."

  The silence that followed was heavy with something Sael couldn't quite identify. The orcs were all looking at him now with expressions that ranged from skeptical to cautiously curious to outright disbelieving.

  Gorek cleared his throat. "Sael of Hel," he repeated, testing the words. "The Sael of Hel?"

  "Yes."

  The orcs exchanged glances.

  "The Sael of Hel who fought in the Battle of Yrsult," Gorek said. Not quite a question, not quite a statement.

  "Yes."

  "The one from the histories."

  "Hmm."

  Another exchange of glances.

  Sael wasn't entirely sure if they believed him or not. It was a reasonable thing to doubt— the news of his return may not have spread here yet, and also, historical figures were supposed to stay historical, after all, safely contained in books and stories where they belonged. Having one appear on a cloud and heal your wounds while asking about your corrupted warlord was probably not something covered in most people's expectations for how their day would go.

  "That's..." Theron started, then stopped. He tried again. "You're supposed to be dead."

  "I got better."

  That was a joke. And he'd thought it was a pretty good one, too: light, self-deprecating, the kind of thing that might ease the current tension. But sadly, the orcs just ignored him.

  "Sael the Great..." Gorek repeated again, like saying it more times would make it make more sense.

  No one even cracked a smile. Not even a polite courtesy chuckle. They'd just... moved right past it like he hadn't said anything at all.

  Sael kept his expression neutral, though something in his chest felt a bit deflated. Well. Perhaps humor didn't translate well across the language barrier. He nodded to each of them, then gestured back toward where Robin and Oz had taken up positions near the rear of the cloud. "That's Robin," he said in orcish, pointing to the fox.

  Robin, who'd been examining something on the cloud's surface, looked up at the sound of his name. His ears perked forward, expression curious but uncomprehending, they'd been speaking orcish this entire time, after all.

  The orcs looked at Robin with mild interest, though their attention was clearly still mostly on processing Sael's identity.

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  "And that's Oz."

  The chicken stood near the edge, perfectly still, one eye fixed on the horizon. He hadn't moved in several minutes.

  "I think... I heard this chicken talk earlier?" Theron asked, sounding genuinely curious despite his obvious distraction.

  All five orcs were staring at Oz now.

  Oz's head turned slowly. One unblinking eye fixed on Theron, then swept across the other orcs in sequence. The look could only be described as withering.

  He opened his beak.

  "Impudent," Oz said, his voice carrying that particular quality of disdain, as if he'd been personally insulted by their existence. "Stop looking at me without my permission."

  The orcs didn't react. They just kept staring, clearly not understanding a word.

  Oz's feathers ruffled. "I said stop."

  There was only more staring.

  The chicken turned his glare on Sael, radiating accusation.

  "They don't speak Common," Sael explained in Common, then switched to orcish. "Please don't stare at him. He has... a temperament."

  "The chicken has a temperament?" Marak repeated slowly.

  "Yes."

  "...Why?"

  That was a reasonable question, and Sael didn't have a good answer for it. "He just does. It's best not to provoke him."

  Oz made a sound somewhere between a cluck and a scoff, apparently satisfied now that the staring had stopped, and turned back to watching the horizon.

  "So," Sarek said slowly, his voice still carrying that note of disbelief. "You're Sael of Hel. The hero from the Ash Wars. And you now have a talking chicken with a temperament."

  "Yes."

  "And you're going to confront our lord. Who devoured the Ashen Sultan and the Buried King."

  "Indeed."

  Sarek looked at the other orcs and they looked back at him. No one seemed to know what to say to that.

  "Smoke," Robin interrupted.

  Everyone turned. The fox was standing now, one hand raised slightly, pointing toward the southern horizon.

  Sael followed the gesture and spotted it immediately: a dark column rising into the sky, thick and black in a way that suggested substantial burning. Too much smoke for a simple campfire or even a forge.

  He stepped to the edge of the cloud, focusing on the smoke's source and he could make out movement at the base of the column: tiny figures scattered across what looked like open ground.

  His vision sharpened as he channeled mana through his eyes and the distant scene snapped into clarity.

  It was a caravan, strung out across a cleared stretch of ground between two patches of forest. Multiple wagons were on fire, their canvas coverings sending up those thick black columns. People were running, some trying to fight, others just fleeing. And moving between them, weapons raised, were orcs.

  A lot of orcs.

  "Hold on," Sael said.

  The cloud surged forward and the landscape blurring beneath them. Robin already had his crossbow in hand, fingers working the mechanism. The bolt slid into place with a soft click.

  "That's them," Gorek said, his voice tight. He'd moved up beside Sael, hands clenched into fists. "Those banners. That's the general's battalion."

  Marak stared down at the chaos. "Korreth the Unyielding. They sent him to find Sarek."

  The scene below grew clearer as they approached. Sael counted roughly fifty orcs, maybe more, moving through the chaos. The caravan had been large: a dozen wagons, perhaps thirty or forty people. Now it was carnage.

  Bodies lay scattered across the ground. A woman in merchant's clothes, face-down in the dirt, her blood soaking into the earth. Two guards in mismatched armor, their weapons still in their hands, throats cut. A younger man, barely more than a boy, crumpled against a wagon wheel, his eyes open and empty.

  The survivors were being herded together, pushed into a cluster while the orcs ransacked the wagons. Some were still fighting: a guard with a spear was trying to hold off three orcs at once, bleeding from a dozen cuts but refusing to go down. A woman with a dagger had positioned herself in front of what looked like children, her hands shaking but her stance defiant.

  And there, at the edge of the massacre, an old man knelt in the dirt.

  He wasn't fighting or running. Just kneeling there, head bowed, hands loose at his sides. Resigned. An orc stood over him, axe raised, taking his time with the execution. Savoring it.

  The axe started to fall, and Sael stepped off the cloud.

  The wind tore at his robes as he dropped, but he was already moving and casting. The first spell caught him mid-fall, redirecting his momentum not down but forward, turning his descent into a horizontal lance of speed that blurred the air around him.

  The world compressed into a tunnel of motion. Ground, sky, smoke, all of it reduced to streaks of color as he closed the distance in less than a heartbeat.

  He hit the orc like a meteor.

  Not physically—he never touched him. The kinetic barrier that surrounded Sael's body caught the orc instead, and the force of Sael's velocity transferred through the magical construct like a battering ram. The orc went flying, his axe spinning away, his body tumbling end over end before crashing into a burning wagon twenty feet away.

  Sael landed in front of the old man, feet touching earth, and the ground beneath him cratered from the residual force.

  The old man looked up, eyes wide, mouth open in shock. He flinched as Sael's hand moved, instinctively raising his arms to protect his head.

  Sael glanced back at him, and for just a moment, his expression softened. "Please be at ease, friend," he said, his voice quiet but carrying clearly despite the chaos. "No one else will hurt you today."

  Then his right hand flicked backward.

  A shimmer in the air—barely visible, like heat haze—and suddenly a dome of crystallized atmosphere enclosed the kneeling figure. The barrier was seamless, reflective, diamond-hard. The old man lowered his arms slowly, staring at the protective shell around him, then at Sael's back.

  [Wrath Level: 1%]

  The first three orcs reached Sael simultaneously, coming from different angles. The one on the left had a spear, aiming for his chest. The center one swung a massive club overhead. The right one went low with a sword, trying to cut his legs.

  Sael's left hand came up, fingers spreading.

  For a heartbeat, nothing happened. The three orcs were still charging, weapons raised, close enough that he could see the bloodlust in their eyes.

  Then his hand clenched into a fist and the world exploded outward.

  A shockwave of pure kinetic force erupted from Sael's position, invisible but devastating. It caught the three orcs mid-stride and simply erased their momentum. Their bodies snapped backward like they'd been hit by a giant's hammer, limbs flailing, weapons spinning away. The spear-orc's arm bent at an angle it wasn't meant to bend, bone cracking audibly. Blood sprayed from his mouth as ribs shattered. The club-orc took the force in his chest and his armor caved inward with a metallic screech before he was launched backward, tumbling through the air. The sword-orc's leg snapped—clearly, violently—and he spun as he flew, blood streaming from his nose and ears.

  They weren't the only ones.

  The shockwave kept expanding, a sphere of devastating force that swatted aside everything in its path. Six more orcs who'd been charging from different angles were caught in the blast. They were thrown like ragdolls, bodies flying through the air, colliding with each other, with wagons, with the ground. One hit a tree trunk so hard the wood splintered. Another crashed through a burning wagon and didn't get up. Blood misted in the air where the force had been strongest, where noses shattered and teeth broke and skin split.

  The sound came after: a thunderous CRACK that echoed across the clearing, followed by the meaty thuds of bodies hitting earth, the clattering of dropped weapons, the groans and screams of broken orcs.

  Before the sound even finished echoing, Sael's right hand rose toward the sky.

  The heavens darkened.

  Above them, the nimbus cloud that had carried Robin, Oz, and the orcs suddenly swelled. It expanded outward, doubling, tripling in size, its edges boiling with unnatural speed. The white-gray turned to charcoal, then to black—deep, roiling black shot through with veins of purple light. Thunder rumbled, deep and continuous, a sound that made the air itself vibrate.

  The orcs looked up, some of them froze, others started backing away, primal instinct screaming danger.

  Sael's fingers curled, directing and targeting. In the storm cloud above, light gathered. And it was a harsh, terrible brilliance of lightning. It built in a dozen places at once, crackling networks of electricity that illuminated the underbelly of the cloud in stark flashes.

  His hand dropped, and with it, lightning crashed down in a cascade of violence.

  Eleven bolts striking simultaneously across the clearing. Each one found an orc: some running, some standing frozen, some trying to rally. The bolts hit with surgical precision and catastrophic force.

  The first orc's armor flared with protective enchantments as the lightning struck; Sael could feel the mana woven into the metal resisting, trying to disperse the energy. The bolt hit him square in the chest and launched him backward, his body convulsing, blood streaming from his nose and ears.

  The second orc's armor held better, the enchantments absorbing much of the impact, but the lightning still cooked him from the inside. He dropped like a puppet with cut strings, smoke rising from the gaps in his plate.

  The third, fourth, fifth—each strike was devastating. The enchanted armor saved their lives but couldn't spare them the violence. Orcs were thrown to the ground, bodies seizing, blood vessels bursting under their skin from the electrical trauma. One orc's weapon detonated in his hand, the metal superheated in an instant, and he collapsed clutching a ruined, smoking stump. Another was lifted off his feet and slammed into the earth hard enough to leave a crater, his armor cracked but intact, his body broken beneath it.

  The thunder came after, eleven separate cracks that merged into one prolonged roar that shook the ground and rattled the wagons and made the survivors cover their ears.

  When the light faded and the thunder died, twenty orcs lay scattered across the clearing. Some were moving, writhing, screaming. Others lay still, chests rising and falling shallowly. All of them were out of the fight—alive, but barely, their enchanted armor smoking and cracked, having absorbed just enough of the lethal energy to keep their hearts beating.

  The smell of ozone and burned metal hung thick in the air.

  Two seconds had passed since Sael landed.

  The rest of the orcs—thirty-two of them—stared at the carnage: their fallen brothers, the figure standing in the center of it all, hands at his sides, expression unchanged.

  At the storm cloud still churning overhead, waiting.

  Some were backing away. Others stood frozen, weapons half-raised, uncertainty written across their faces.

  Then a sound cut through the clearing.

  A roar, filled with such fury that it made the air itself seem to vibrate. It came from the tree line, from the north, and it carried a single word in orcish that echoed across the battlefield:

  "COWARDS!"

  Every orc in the clearing froze.

  Heavy footsteps. Something massive moving through the underbrush, branches snapping, and then he emerged.

  The orc was enormous, not just tall but broad, built like a siege engine given flesh. His armor was dark iron, scarred and dented from countless battles, and in his hands he carried a double-bladed axe that looked like it could split a horse in half. His face was a map of scars, his tusks were filed to points, and his eyes—

  Purple.

  Not entirely purple. The whites of his eyes were still there, but threaded through with veins of deep purple and black, like ink spreading through water. The veins crawled across his skin too, visible at his neck, his wrists, anywhere flesh showed. They pulsed with a faint, sickly light.

  Corrupted, as expected.

  The general—Korreth the Unyielding—stepped into the clearing and his gaze swept across the battlefield, then his eyes found Sael and they locked.

  Across the clearing, maybe sixty feet between them, their gazes met. Sael saw the purple veins pulsing, the corruption threading through the general's body and the axe rise, the tip pointing directly at him.

  Sael's eyes swept the battlefield. The burning wagons. The bodies: merchants, guards, people who'd been trying to make a living, now lying in pools of their own blood. The survivors huddled together, terrified. It was a massacre, the like of which he used to see four-hundred years ago.

  [Wrath Level: 3%]

  The ground began to shake, and the the sky darkened further.

  Sael's gaze returned to Korreth as the general's mouth opened. "Who are y—"

  Alas, the general never finished speaking.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, the distance between them collapsed. The general's eyes went wide as shock broke through that mask of fury, the question dying on his lips—because Sael hadn't walked, or run, or even seemed to move for that matter. He'd simply stopped being there and started being here, right in Korreth's face, close enough that the general could see every detail of the mage's fist coming right toward his face.

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