Chapter 77. Bully
The ground was a mess.
That was Sael's first coherent thought after landing. The field south of Darransh had been churned into something closer to a bog than solid earth. Mud squelched ankle-deep around his boots when he touched down, and the orc lord hit the ground beside him with considerably less grace, cratering into the muck with a wet, heavy thud that sent brown water spraying in every direction.
Above them, the sky had cleared. The afternoon sun hung bright and almost offensively cheerful, as if the weather had collectively decided to pretend the last hour hadn't happened. Warm light fell in long golden strokes across the ruined field, catching wisps of steam where rain-soaked earth met sun-warmed air. Somewhere in the treeline to the east, birds were even singing again.
Oh, and Barek was trembling.
The massive orc lay on his back in the mud, armor cracked and scored from their fight, and his eyes were wide with a terror that had nothing to do with the man standing over him.
He was dying as the parasitic signature of Corruption flickering, destabilizing, losing its grip on a host that no longer had enough fight in him to sustain it. The thing inside was cutting its losses, it seemed.
Barek's mouth opened. For a moment, nothing came out. Then a sound clawed its way up from deep in his chest: a rattling, wet, choking gasp just before the purple wisp.
It rose through Barek's throat in a slow, thick tendril, visible even in the afternoon brightness as a bruise-colored vapor that pulsed with its own faint, sickly light. It coiled out from between the orc's clenched teeth almost reluctantly, clearly aware of what waited outside. For one surreal moment, the wisp of Corruption hung in the air above Barek's face like smoke deciding which direction to drift.
Sael didn't give it the chance to decide.
"[Purification]."
The golden light that erupted from his palm wasn't gentle. It struck the tendril the way a boot strikes a spider, and the purple vapor didn't dissolve so much as cease to exist, snuffed mid-coil with a faint hiss that Sael might have imagined. If the thing had been trying to flee, it hadn't been fast enough. If it had been looking for a new host, it had picked the single worst moment in its long and parasitic existence to emerge into the open air in front of Sael.
Speaking of which, he thought, perhaps it would be wise to verify wether mages these days could still cast [Purification]. The silence that followed was remarkably ordinary. Birds continued. Mud continued to settle. The sun, naturally, did not care.
The orc lord had now gone still.
His eyes were shut, his breathing shallow but steady, and his health had stabilized at a threshold that Sael didn't love: alive, but thinly, the way a fire looks when only the embers remain and one strong breeze could finish the job. Sael crouched beside him, one knee sinking into the muck with a soft squelch he chose to ignore, and pressed his hand flat against the orc's chest.
"[Heal]."
And the light spread in overlapping waves of gold and soft green that rippled outward across Barek's torso and limbs, pooling wherever the damage was worst. And the damage was considerable. Sael could feel the spell working through ruptured vessels, inflamed tissue, something distressingly close to cascading organ failure in at least three systems he'd rather not catalogue. The green light lingered in Barek's throat and chest, dense and steady, before gradually dimming as the tissue knit itself back together.
It took longer than Sael would have liked. He kept his hand in place and watched the orc lord's health climb away from the edge. Not to where it had been during their fight, not remotely, but to something a body could sustain. Something a person could wake up from and remain awake.
And then there was the level.
Now, stripped of the Corruption's fake power, that number was falling. It rapidly dropped past nine hundred, then eight hundred, and finally settled at seven hundred and forty-five.
"Hmm."
The tone didn't quite land the way he intended, but this was a hmm of genuine surprise. From the high three thousands to the mid seven hundreds was a significant drop, but it also meant the Orc Lord had remarkable natural potential. Corruption didn't create strength from nothing; it only accelerated you toward a ceiling that was already yours. A ceiling in the three thousands was nothing to dismiss.
And knowing they were looking for an avatar, Sael found himself wondering whether Theranel's encounter with the Orc Lord had truly been coincidence...
Perhaps he was overthinking it. But it seemed like a fair question to ask, maybe later.
Sael sat back on his heels, resting his forearms on his knees, and waited.
It didn't take long. Barek's eyes opened, and the first thing Sael noticed was the color. During the fight, those eyes had been shot through with violet—a permanent, ugly stain that bled across the sclera like ink in water. Now they were amber and thoroughly confused.
"Welcome back, Barek, son of Jorek."
The orc stared at him.
It was, Sael had to admit, probably not the most reassuring thing to wake up to: a mud-covered human crouched beside you in a ruined field, addressing you by your dead father's name.
...Erm, assuming his father was dead, that is. Sael paused at the thought. Was Jorek dead? Because now that he thought about it, most orcish tribes didn't wait for the sitting lord to die before passing on leadership. Succession by combat was far more common or a son proving himself worthy and the father stepping down or being made to. Jorek could very well be alive somewhere, retired and missing a tusk, tending to whatever orcs tended to in their twilight years.
He probably should not have assumed.
Barek's mouth opened for a moment, but closed soon after. His brow furrowed as he looked down at his own body—the cracked plate armor, the mud, his hands—then back at Sael.
"...W-where..." Barek's voice came out raw and scraped. He swallowed thickly and tried again, in orcish. "...Where am I?"
"About three hundred kilometers south of Darransh," Sael said. "In a field. Specifically, in a field that is now mostly mud. Sadly, we caused that."
Barek didn't process the aside, or even seem to hear it. His gaze had drifted past Sael, focused on something internal, and Sael recognized the look. The memories were coming back. Probably not all at once, but in fragments, jagged pieces of recollection slotting into place one after another, and every piece drew blood on the way in.
Sael watched it happen as the confusion on Barek's face curdled into recognition, the recognition darkened into disbelief. And then, slowly, Barek's amber eyes widened. His breathing hitched. His massive hands, each one large enough to crush a human skull without much effort, curled into the mud until the knuckles went pale.
He'd reached the bad parts.
"I," Barek started, and the single syllable came out broken, barely voiced. He didn't finish.
"The time for that conversation will come," Sael said. "Not now. There are more pressing matters to tend to first."
Barek's eyes refocused on him.
"Sael? You're Sael the Great?" the orc lord asked, hoarsely.
"Indeed I am," Sael replied, getting back up and offering the orc lord a hand. "Can you stand?"
A small shape suddenly hovered near the edge of Sael's vision, swirling and reforming with each gust of wind. The bird-like elemental—the same one he'd encountered on the way to Enariel, the one that had asked his name—perched on a chunk of displaced earth a few meters away.
It was watching him. Or rather, watching them, Sael and the orc lord standing together in the middle of a devastated wasteland, surrounded by the aftermath of forces that had torn the sky apart.
Sael looked at the little thing and smiled.
The elemental tilted its head—a gesture so birdlike it was almost comical given that it had no actual head to tilt—then lifted off its perch and spiraled upward. It caught a thermal, rose higher, and turned south. Toward Darransh.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Good, Sael thought. Let your master know.
He turned back to Barek, who was still standing where Sael had pulled him upright, swaying slightly, his hand still clasped in Sael's grip. The orc lord's amber eyes were unfocused, tracking more memories, probably, surfacing in fragments the way they did when Corruption receded and left behind the wreckage of everything it had made its host do.
Sael could see it happening. The way Barek's jaw tightened and his breathing changed. He needed to move before the orc lord drowned in it.
"Let's go," Sael said.
Barek blinked. His gaze refocused, finding Sael's face. "...Where?"
"Your army first, I suppose. I think they need to see you."
The orc lord's expression shifted into a complicated one, but he didn't argue. He let Sael pull him forward, and a moment later the ground fell away beneath them as Sael's magic lifted them both into the air.
***
The flight took approximately five minutes.
Sael kept the pace moderate, because Barek was in no condition to handle the kind of speeds he'd used earlier. The orc's grip on Sael's arm had tightened considerably the moment his feet left the ground, though he said nothing about it.
Below them, the barren wasteland stretched in every direction: flat, brown, and featureless save for the massive earth Sael's teleportation had carved into the land. They spotted the army from a considerable distance.
Six hundred orcs, give or take, spread across the wasteland in loose clusters that bore no resemblance to the disciplined formation they'd held outside Enariel. Some were sitting. Others lay flat on their backs, still recovering from the teleportation. A few had managed to stand and were milling about.
Near the center of the disarray, four armored figures lay in the mud where Sael's shadow clones had dropped them. The generals. Their bodies were still, chests rising and falling in shallow, erratic rhythms. Scattered among the army in smaller clusters were the thirty-four corrupted lieutenants. They lay where the lightning had felled them, some curled on their sides, others sprawled face-down in puddles of rainwater that hadn't yet drained into the dry earth. Steam no longer rose from their armor, but the scorch marks remained, dark lines etched into metal where the electricity had found its path.
No one seemed to be in charge.
That was the first thing Sael noticed as they descended. There was no one giving orders or assessing the situation. The army had simply... stalled. Without their lord, their generals, and even their corrupted lieutenants to relay commands, six hundred warriors had been reduced to six hundred individuals sitting in the dirt, waiting for something to happen.
Some of them had noticed the approaching figures in the sky.
Heads turned upward. Hands shielded eyes against the sun. A murmur rippled through the nearest cluster, spreading outward in concentric circles of whispered alarm as more and more orcs looked up and saw what was coming.
Sael landed first, his boots touching down on the packed earth with barely a sound. Barek landed beside him a moment later, less gracefully, his knees buckling slightly before he steadied himself.
The orcs closest to them scrambled backward. Weapons that had been set aside were snatched up again. Those who'd been lying down pushed themselves upright with panic. A perimeter of empty space formed around Sael and the orc lord, a ring of cleared ground that expanded as warriors retreated from the figure who had, less than an hour ago, teleported their entire army across the land, called down lightning from a storm he'd created, and punched their strongest general hard enough to shatter enchanted iron.
Their eyes were on Sael. Every single pair. Wide with a fear so absolute it had moved past panic until one of them looked at Barek.
The recognition spread faster than the fear had. Heads turned as murmurs shifted from alarm to confusion and warriors who'd been backing away stopped, squinting, trying to reconcile the figure standing beside the mage with the lord they'd followed into battle.
Barek looked... diminished. That was the only word for it. The corruption that had threaded through his body for years was gone, and with it had gone the unnatural size. What remained was a large orc—still impressive by any standard, broad-shouldered and powerfully built—but recognizably mortal in a way he probably hadn't been for a very long time.
"It's alright," Barek said.
His voice carried across the wasteland, clear despite his exhaustion.
"Stand down," he continued. "All of you. It's over."
The army didn't move. Six hundred orcs stood frozen, caught between the instinct to obey their lord and the very reasonable fear that the man beside him could unmake them with a thought. Which—and Sael knew this was not the most important thing happening right now—was a little offensive. He wasn't going to do anything to them. He didn't just go around smiting people. He had criteria.
He said nothing, obviously. "Please don't be afraid of me, I have very reasonable smiting standards" was not a sentence that had ever reassured anyone.
Hmm... this would make a funny joke. Well, it was funny to him, at least, and a small huff of laughter escaped him before he could stop it.
Three soldiers in the front row flinched.
Oh...
He straightened his expression immediately, setting his face back to neutral.
Barek took a step forward, separating himself from Sael. "I said stand down. Put your weapons away. No one is going to hurt you."
Slowly—very slowly—weapons began to lower. A sword here, an axe there. The movements were quite tentative. Sael let the orc lord have his moment. He said nothing, did nothing, simply stood with his hands at his sides and waited for the army to settle.
When the last weapon had been lowered and the last orc had stopped retreating, Sael walked toward the fallen generals. The army parted for him as orcs stepped aside with haste, clearing a path wide enough for three people to walk abreast. None of them met his eyes.
The first general—the one with the massive pauldrons, whose neck had been snapped sideways by Sael's clone—lay crumpled in the mud. His breathing was barely perceptible, a thin whistle of air through a throat that was half-crushed. The corruption had receded from his skin somewhat, leaving behind the purple-black veins as fading stains, like old bruises, but it hadn't left. Not fully.
Sael knelt beside him, placed a hand on his chest, and assessed.
Critical condition. Severe, certainly. But not severe enough. With Barek, the corruption had been forced out because the body it clung to had been pushed so close to the threshold of death that sustaining the bond became impossible, the parasite had to either release its host or die with it. These four were damaged badly, but Sael's clones had been precise. They'd only incapacitated, not annihilated. Which meant the corruption was still entrenched, weakened but clinging.
He needed them closer to the edge.
Sael stared down at the unconscious general for a long moment, then turned and looked at the army.
They all stared back at him.
"I need to..." He paused. Considered his words, reconsidered them, and started again. "What I'm about to do is going to look—it's not what it looks like. I'm not—" He gestured vaguely at the fallen generals. "The corruption won't release unless the host body is in sufficient mortal peril. Their condition is critical, but not sufficiently critical, so I need to, erm, the point is, I'm going to help them. This is helping."
No one said anything.
"I want to be very clear," Sael added, "that I am not bullying your generals."
The silence that followed was so complete he could hear the wind moving across the wasteland. Alas, it seemed they were not believing him. It was a sad thing to observe, but he turned back to the general, exhaled once through his nose, and punched him in the chest.
It was a measured strike, calculated to the exact degree of force necessary to push the orc's failing body past the threshold without killing him outright. The general's ribcage buckled inward, something cracked wetly, and his entire body seized. His back arched off the ground, limbs rigid, muscles spasming in violent, rhythmic contractions that made his armor rattle against the mud.
Sael could feel the army's stare on the back of his neck. He cleared his throat. "...This is normal."
No one spoke.
"He's dying," Sael continued, realizing too late that this clarification was not, in fact, clarifying anything. "But he'll be alright. I'm going to heal him right after the Corruption—"
The general's mouth opened in a silent scream, and something tore itself free out of it. A wisp of Corruption. It rose from the orc's convulsing body and several soldiers in the front row gasped audibly, stumbling backward.
"[Purification]."
White-gold light erupted from Sael's palm and the wisp shrieked and disintegrated. The tendrils of smoke burned away to nothing, consumed by light that left no residue, no shadow, and no trace that the thing had ever existed.
"[Heal]."
Golden-green warmth flooded from his hands into the general's broken chest. Ribs realigned with wet clicks. The crushed cartilage in his throat reformed. Bruised tissue healed. The normal orcish green returned to his face green, without the sickly gray undertone the corruption had left behind.
The general's eyes opened and they were brown. Ordinary, clear, uncorrupted brown.
He stared up at Sael with an expression of absolute bewilderment, then his gaze shifted past Sael to the sky above and he made a sob.
Sael moved to the next general and did the same. Then the third, and the fourth. The process was identical each time, and each time, the army watched in the same stricken silence. By the third general, a few of them seemed to understand what was happening and by the fourth, some had stopped flinching at the punch.
The lieutenants required less. Their corruption had been weaker to begin with and the lightning Sael had hit them with had already pushed most of them close enough to the threshold. A firm strike to the chest, the wisp, the light, the healing. Thirty-four times over until the field was dotted with orcs sitting up and staring at their own hands as if seeing them for the first time.
Some of them were weeping. Not all, but enough that Sael noticed.
When the last lieutenant had been healed, Sael stood and walked back to where Barek waited.
"...Now what?" Barek said quietly.
"We go to Darransh," Sael said. "All of us."
The words landed with visible weight. Barek's jaw tightened, and a decision seemed to be forming.
"Sael the Great."
The orc lord's voice had dropped, low enough that only the two of them could hear. His shoulders squared despite the exhaustion, and he drew himself up to his full height, which, even without the corruption's enhancement, was considerable.
"My men," Barek said slowly, "followed me. Everything they did, they did because I led them to it. The raids, the killings, the..." His voice faltered for just a moment before steadying. "They would not have walked this path if their lord had not gone astray. Whatever judgment comes, whatever punishment Darransh or anyone else demands—"
He began to lower himself, one knee bending, but Sael caught him before his knee touched the ground.
One hand on Barek's shoulder, firm but not forceful, holding him upright. The orc lord looked up, startled, and found Sael's expression calm and unreadable.
"Not now," Sael said.
Barek's mouth opened.
"There will be time for that conversation," Sael continued. "For all of it. The responsibility, the judgment, what comes next for you and your people. None of that is going anywhere." His hand stayed on Barek's shoulder, steady. "But right now, there is a city full of people who watched their gates shatter. There are survivors from a caravan attack who need to reach their families and there are wounded who need tending and dead who need burying and a great many things that need fixing before the sun sets."
He released Barek's shoulder and stepped back.
"So we go to Darransh," Sael said. "And we fix what can be fixed. The rest... the rest comes after."