Chapter 155 : Chapter 155
Chapter 155 - The Leader and the Half-wit (1)
As the leader descended the rock wall, he worked very hard to hide the fact that he was short of breath.
It was not as if he was even climbing upward. He did not want to reveal that even this much was difficult for him.
Compared to that, the half-wit’s steps were unhesitating.
The leader found it deeply awkward to follow behind the half-wit, so he kept glancing at the back of his guide’s head.
And at the same time, the leader was startled by his own behavior.
Why am I watching that bastard’s mood?
The other party was the half-wit.
A simple and stupid idiot who could not do anything on his own.
A bastard who had been more lacking than the others from the moment he was born.
So lacking that the moment he was born, he could not even support his own body and rolled down the cliff.
At the sensation of rippling water touching his toes, the leader came back to his senses.
It seemed they had already descended to the place where the rock wall met the water.
The leader moved his gaze to follow the half-wit, who had arrived first and was staring fixedly at the floor.
A lot of water had drained, but the floor still had not been revealed.
Hanging here and waiting does not sound very appealing.
Splash.
The moment he swallowed that complaint inwardly, ripples spread over the surface of the water with a splash.
The startled leader turned his head, and the half-wit who had been clinging to the wall was already gone.
“Kkwek!! What the hell?!! Kkwek!! Are you mad enough to want to die?!!”
The leader swung his head around, searching for the half-wit who had vanished into the water, and shouted.
“Kkwek!! Get back up here right now! Kkwek, if you don’t......!”
If he did not?
The leader asked himself.
The answer had already been proven by the half-wit himself.
Nothing would happen to the half-wit.
After all, there was no reason a bastard who had jumped down from the top of a cliff and returned alive and well would die just because he jumped into a depth like this.
As the leader’s reason began moving again belatedly, other questions followed one another inside his head.
How is a bastard who fell from that height still alive?
Does he know how to swim?
How?
......Since when?
While he pondered problems he could not answer on his own, the half-wit finally appeared from beneath the water.
“Kkwek......!”
Whether he knew of the suspicion inside the leader or not, the half-wit reached out a hand.
At the clear intention telling him to take that hand and jump down, the leader hesitated.
It was true that part of it was because of his doubts toward the bastard.
If he, unable to swim, grabbed that bastard’s hand and jumped down right now, it would be no different from entrusting his life entirely to the half-wit’s hands.
But if he had to name one more reason for his hesitation, it was because a fragment of memory overlapped with this situation.
The memory of the day he had gone down to look at the defective bastard who had rolled down below as soon as he was born.
The leader recalled the memory of that day, which was growing clearer and clearer, and grabbed the hand the half-wit held out.
***
The birth of a new orc was something welcome and unwelcome at the same time.
Because an increase in subordinates also meant one more bastard with eyes lit up, watching for the leader to weaken.
The irony was that his role was to watch the birth of those enemies and guard the place where those bastards came into being.
The leader had no particular thoughts about such an unreasonable system.
This was only the fixed order.
Just as all orcs hated humans from birth, orcs were made to move according to a certain cycle from birth.
Besides, the strongest one was him anyway.
It did not matter who attacked, as long as he won.
The leader, who was still ignorant of the concept of aging, thought comfortably.
But like all living creatures, strength could not last forever.
***
Recently, his body had felt heavy.
His movements also seemed slower, and for some reason, places all over his body seemed to ache.
Why is my body like this?
As the days when his body felt unwell continued despite the fact that he had not been injured, the leader’s heart began to grow uneasy.
A heavier body meant it had become harder to fight.
Among them, the sharp-eyed bastards had surely noticed that something about his condition was strange.
He could feel the gazes directed at him changing day by day.
Every time he felt obedience change into wariness, and wariness change into a desire to compete, the leader’s nerves only grew sharper.
He shouted louder, puffed up his body more, and stayed on guard until later to avoid revealing that his body had grown weaker than before.
On the day the leader’s sensitivity reached its peak, the half-wit was born.
***
That day, the day the cave’s waterfall suddenly dried up, the leader was furious at the tips of his hair.
The group was restless with anxiety that some great change had occurred.
Even at the leader’s order to shut up and keep doing what they always did, the tension spreading through the group would not settle easily.
On top of that, when it was revealed that there were bastards who had gone out hunting in the evening and not returned, the leader’s temper shot up to the sky.
Not listening to his order was no different from refusing to acknowledge him as leader.
If bastards like that appeared, it was obvious that before long, bastards who attacked him would also appear.
The leader had an excellent ability to find things that threatened his position.
This time as well, the leader made full use of his talent and, for the first time in a long while, moved his feet outside the cave.
Normally, leaving the place at the center was unthinkable, but that day, the leader had nearly lost his reason.
His only thought was that he had to kill the bastards who had disobeyed his order somehow and make an example of them.
Thinking back on it now, that day was a truly strange day where nothing was not strange.
But he had no time to feel any dissonance toward himself.
Because the sight that greeted the leader as soon as he stepped outside the cave was shocking enough to make him forget all of that.
The river water had completely dried up.
As the leader stared blankly around at a scene he had never even imagined, what caught his eye were several footprints.
The footprints stamped chaotically across the wet dirt led all the way to a small box in the distance.
It was not difficult to infer what had happened.
Because a thick smell of blood flowed out through the hole in the box.
Without needing to think deeply, the leader began running toward the box.
They dared to eat prey inside without bringing it back?
Rage toward the orcs who had not obeyed his order made the leader’s eyes roll back.
He intended to catch them and make them pay the price without fail.
What greeted the leader when he leaped inside the small box at once were two orcs in the middle of feeding.
And one more thing.
No, one was not the appropriate number.
A human, half-eaten by the two bastards, was rolling on the floor.
The leader recognized at once what it was.
A human. It was a human.
He had never seen one up close before, but he could tell.
At the same time an instinctive hatred crawled up the back of his neck, he understood how the situation had gone.
The bastards must have lost their minds upon seeing the human, just like him, and been unable to endure their appetite and anger in this place.
Flames rose in the leader’s eyes.
“Kkwek, you stupid bastards! Kkwek, if you catch prey, you should have brought it to me!!”
The leader lost his temper at the two, who flinched at his sudden appearance.
The leader, who had been striding forward to punish the two, suddenly stopped.
In the air, though faint, the scent of humans other than the dead one was scattered.
It seemed these stupid things had even let the other two go because they were too distracted eating one.
The fact that things that did not even know the basics of hunting had dared to disobey his orders made the leader even angrier for no reason.
The leader flared his nostrils and stuck his head outside the box where the human had lived.
Perhaps they had not fled far yet, because the lingering scent of humans remained.
Thanks to the river drying up, their scent was clear.
He could not simply let them go.
Those bastards had run into those two fools, so if they brought other groups of humans after learning that orcs lived here, even more annoying things would happen then.
“Kkwek, damn it.”
The leader, who had been about to immediately chase after the humans, remembered something he had forgotten and turned back around.
The two bastards, their mouths covered in blood, stood stupidly as if waiting for his order.
The leader drew his sword exactly as he was and swung it at the two.
In an instant, the head of the bastard standing on the right rolled across the floor.
-Kkweeeek!!!
The remaining one, horrified by the sudden attack, screamed, but the leader only silently prepared his next strike.
“Kkwek, you have to pay the price for disobeying my order.”
And he could use this chance to make an example for the others for the first time in a while too.
***
With the heads the two orcs had paid as the price of disobedience in one hand, and his sword in the other, the leader leisurely moved his feet.
He had not known that humans lived inside the box.
Even when he had roamed around at night, he had not seen anything resembling humans.
Could it be that humans originally could not walk around after the sun went down?
The leader could not walk beneath sunlight.
After walking only a little, pain as if his skin were being seared followed.
Then did humans’ skin melt under moonlight or something?
Thinking he should see them writhe in pain once, the leader moved leisurely as the humans’ scent led him.
Human hunting was far too easy compared to hunting other animals.
It was not as if they could hide their scent, and they could not fly through the sky, nor were their legs fast.
There was no prey easier than this.
Drawn by the scent, the place the leader arrived at was beneath a tree a little away from the box.
To think that once they realized they could not flee far, the choice they had made with all their effort was climbing a tree.
A sneer appeared on the leader’s face, excited by hunting for the first time in a long while.
Waiting below until those bastards were exhausted would be fine too, but he had no time for that now.
Without delaying any further, the leader swung the sword in his hand toward the trunk.
CRASH!
The thick trunk of the tree shook greatly, and from above came both a deep scream and a thin scream.
The leader raised his head and checked the two humans.
The large human was desperately clinging to the tree while pulling the small human into his arms and hugging the child tightly.
Really, humans were weak and stupid beyond measure.
To think the place they had run away to after all that was merely somewhere like this.
CRASH!
“Kyaaaaak!!!”
When the leader kicked the thick tree trunk, a high scream fell from above the tree.
A faint sob was mixed into the scream.
When he lifted his head toward the top of the tree, just as the leader had expected, the two humans were trembling as they held each other tightly.
No, was it really two?
There was one human with long hair and a small build, and one human who was absurdly small compared to that, so perhaps one and a half was more accurate.
The leader, who had been narrowing his eyes and looking up, soon realized it was one human and a human offspring.
It seemed humans had offspring like other animals.
Well, it would be harder to find an animal that did not.
While accepting that, the leader began growing angry again.
What? Then those bastards let the offspring go and ate the large one first?
Stupid bastards.
If they were going to kill them, of course they should have killed the small one first.
Thinking that bastards who did not even know something so basic had dared to disobey his order made him even angrier, so he kicked away the two heads in his hand.
“Kyaaaaaak!!!”
Then another scream rang out from above.
“Kkwek, noisy!!”
At the high sound stabbing his ears, the leader kicked the tree once again.
It only had the opposite effect.
The high scream rang out once more.
“It’s t-talking......!”
The human that seemed to be female muttered in shock.
Yes, I talk too.
Though I’m the only one who knows how.
But he had no intention of leisurely having a conversation with a human.
Because he intended to catch those two bastards as quickly as possible and return to the cave.
The leader raised his sword high, intending to cut down the tree entirely since he could not wait until they came down.
It was at that moment.
When the frightened human hugged the tree trunk tightly with both arms, the small human appeared from the loosened embrace.
The leader’s eyes met the eyes of the human offspring.
Eyes filled with tears, and looking stupid.