Debauchery In A Woman's World

Garkash stood on the low rise behind his warband, his massive shoulders heaving, the bone crown on his head tilted slightly. He pointed a thick finger at the tall figure cutting through his ranks like wheat. "What is that tall woman, Jibreel?"

The shaman had just released a dark blast from the ancestral staff of bone and yellowed teeth to knock her down.

The moment his eyes locked on Gabriella, he knew exactly what she was—an Angel.

Overpowered, self-righteous agents of heaven who had slaughtered Orc-kind for centuries whenever the mood took them.

Jibreel had lived more than two hundred years by feeding infants and virgins to the old rites that kept his flesh from rotting. He was probably the only living thing on this field who had ever seen one of them before and lived to speak of it.

Decades earlier, an angel had hovered above a different battlefield and erased a thousand Orcs with light that burned the eyes out of anyone who looked too long. The ground had still been smoking when the survivors fled.

This woman was not that strong. Something had clipped her wings and dimmed her divine fire. That made this the perfect moment for revenge, if he was careful.

The last blast had drained half the power stored in the staff. It had only cracked her armor. Jibreel was not certain he could put her down again. Still, the king demanded answers, and a shaman who refused a king did not keep his head for long.

"My king," Jibreel said, his voice low and rasping. "She is an angel. A vile agent of heaven. You can see with your own eyes how many of us she has already massacred in so short a time."

Garkash's thick lips pulled back from yellow tusks. A string of spit ran down his chin and dripped onto the furs across his chest. "An angel, huh?"

His small eyes never left the full curves of her body, the way the white armor clung to heavy breasts and the wide flare of her hips.

Even from this distance, he could see the strength in her thighs and the clean power of her arms. The thought of pinning that body under him, of hearing an angel scream for something other than battle, made his blood run hot.

"She is so voluptuously attractive. I want to fuck her."

Garkash was nearly as tall as she was. In the crude orc arithmetic of his mind, that made her a perfect match, never mind that he was ugly, reeking of blood and old sweat, covered in scars and boils, while she still carried the remnants of divine beauty.

Garkash had taken human women and elf women and even a witch once. An angel would be the greatest prize of all.

"My king, do not make that mistake," Jibreel pleaded, stepping closer so only he would hear. "If she is allowed to close the distance, she may succeed in killing us both. Angels are not like the soft humans and elves we break for sport."

Garkash was dripping with lust, the heavy bulge under his furs impossible to hide, but he was not entirely stupid. He had stayed leader of the orcs this long by knowing when a fight might end him. "Can you defeat her?"

Jibreel tightened his grip on the staff until the old bones creaked. "The last attack took half of what my magic still held. I can fire one more. I cannot guarantee it will put her down. The divine power in her is wounded, but it is not gone."

Across the field, Gabriella growled and advanced in a straight, relentless line. The Labrys rose and fell with the steady rhythm of a blacksmith's hammer.

Orcs died around her like overripe fruit under a heavy blade. Green blood sprayed in wide arcs and painted her white armor in streaks.

One tried to hamstring her from behind, and she reversed the axe without even looking, splitting him from crown to crotch.

The aura pouring off Gabriella was so strong that any green-skin who came too close felt their flesh begin to singe and blister as if they had stepped into open flame. They fell back howling, leaving a clear path of broken bodies and steaming blood.

The smell of cooked Orc meat mixed with the copper reek of the battlefield.

Jibreel raised the bone staff again and poured everything that remained into a second dark blast. Black light cracked out of the skulls and teeth set into the wood.

This time Gabriella was ready. She was a seasoned divine warrior who had ended civilizations. A mere orc outfit was nothing for her.

The angel swung the golden axe in a tight, economical arc. The black energy struck the blade with a sound like a great bell being rung underwater, bounced, and slammed into a dense knot of Orcs behind her.

Two dozen of them simply came apart in a wet explosion of green flesh, shattered bone, and flying limbs. The survivors nearest the blast screamed and clawed at their own burning skin.

Jibreel cursed in the old tongue, words older than most of the hills around them. "My king, we must escape! That angel is coming to kill us!"

Garkash turned and slapped the shaman across the face hard enough to spin him halfway around and drop him to one knee. Blood flew from Jibreel's split lip.

"You pathetic coward! You ask me to back off? The King of the Orcs? If you were not still useful, I would take your head right here and mount it on a spear!"

He dragged his massive axe off the ground—an ugly slab of notched iron almost as large as his own body—and jumped down from the low rock he had been standing on.

The earth shook under Garkash's boots. Then he began jogging straight toward Gabriella, each step heavy enough to leave deep prints in the bloody dirt. Orcs scrambled out of his path. None of them dared speak.

Jibreel pushed himself up, blood running down his chin, eyes burning with rage and the cold calculation of a creature who had outlived every rival by knowing when to abandon a sinking ship.

"Foolish king. You walk toward your own death. Your fall will be the death of the Orcs. Remember that when she opens your belly."

Garkash no longer heard him. Battle lust and the raw, animal hunger for the angel's body had drowned out every other sound. He advanced through the thinning ranks of his own warriors, eyes fixed on the tall figure in white, the heavy axe swinging loosely in one hand as if it weighed nothing.

Gabriella noticed him at last. She swung the Labrys in a wide horizontal cut. A powerful wave of force and wind roared out from the blade, slamming into the remaining Orcs and hurling them aside like dry leaves in a storm.

Bodies tumbled end over end. The ground between her and Garkash cleared in an instant until only the two of them remained, standing in a circle of corpses and churned mud.

Garkash stopped a dozen paces away, chest rising and falling like a bellows, axe resting on one thick shoulder. His small eyes drank in the sight of her—the cracked breastplate, the blood on her skin, the way her wings hung half-spread and still somehow magnificent.

Even fallen, even marked, she was the most gorgeous thing he had ever seen or imagined. The thought of breaking her made his pulse hammer in his throat.

"You are beautiful, angel of heaven!" he bellowed. Spittle flew from his mouth and caught in the coarse hair of his chest. "Become my wife and lover. I will spare you then! I will put strong sons in that belly of yours! You will sit at my side while the rest of the world burns!"

Gabriella reached down without looking, seized a still-twitching Orc by the ankle, and tore the head clean off with one violent twist of her wrist. She flung the head one way and the body the other.

Both landed with wet thuds that sprayed mud and blood across her boots. Then she spat into the bloody ground at her feet.

"I will tear out the eyes that looked upon me with lust," she said, her voice flat and cold as winter stone, "and feed them to you through your own mouth. Then I will do the same to the rest of you, piece by piece, until nothing is left but the memory of how foolish you were to speak to me."

Garkash's grin widened until it looked like it might split his face in half. A low, eager growl rumbled up from deep in his chest. The sound was almost happy. "I like you already!"

He lunged, the massive axe rising high over his head as he closed the distance in three long, pounding strides. The ground shook under each step. Behind him, Jibreel watched with narrow eyes, already calculating how far he would need to run if the king fell.