Chapter 118: Fire and Frost
Ethan walked through the front gate fearlessly.
Night sat heavy over the tents. Cookfires still burned. Guards walked the inner ring like this was any other watch.
His agility was maxed. His feet barely touched the dirt. He did not use the Lightning Step skill. He did not need it yet. The extra speed in his legs closed the first thirty yards before the nearest sentry finished turning his head.
Dragonfang burned in his right hand. Dragonfrost smoked cold on his left. He fed both blades a thin thread of MP as he moved.
[MP: 148/160]
The first Orc raised an axe. Ethan went under it and opened the green throat with Dragonfang. The fire tooth burned through the hide and meat like paper. The Orc did not scream. He dropped.
The second one took Dragonfrost in the ribs. Ice burst from the wound and locked him mid-swing. Ethan kicked the frozen body aside and kept going.
Behind him, three howls tore the night open.
Lupin hit the left flank first. Largest of the three, black as the gaps between tents, jaws closing on a whole shoulder.
Sylvan came in silver and fast, hamstringing two before they understood they were hunted.
Grimm hit like a falling wall. Gray fur, gray muscle. An Orc's chest folded under him with a wet crack.
The camp woke up all at once. Horns. Steel. Roars. The panic arrived a second too late.
"Ghost Hands."
Four phantom arms ripped out of him. One snatched a spear out of the air. One crushed a wrist until the bones ground. One seized a screaming face and slammed it into a cookfire.
The fourth tore a shield away so Dragonfang could take the throat behind it.
An axe bounced off Ethan's side. The blade should have opened him. Jelly Skin turned it into a bruise. The Orc stared at the unmarked hide. That half-second was enough.
The Secas spell cut the spear in two. Liquisha melted the iron head down the green fingers like hot wax. The Orc screamed. Dragonfrost climbed his throat and shut him up.
Ethan smashed a blue bottle against his teeth as he ran.
[MP: 160/160]
The wolfkin were not clean about it. They were not supposed to be. Their father had commanded so.
Lupin ripped an Orc in half at the waist and threw both pieces into the next rank. Sylvan took legs. Grimm took spines. Green blood hit the tents in sheets. Opened guts mixed with woodsmoke and fear.
An Orc spear found Ethan's thigh. Poison ran up the shaft it cracked. Poison Resistance turned the weapon against itself. He ripped the broken spear out, closed the hole with Anima sans, and kept killing.
[HP: 91/100]
[MP: 140/160]
They tried to swarm him. Orcs trusted numbers. Numbers were what he had come to break.
"Lapor!"
The nearest cluster boiled from the inside. Skin blistered. Eyes burst. They dropped clutching their stomachs while the spell finished cooking them where they stood.
Ethan was already past them. Dragonfang burned a hole through a shield. Dragonfrost froze the arm that held it. The limb shattered when he kicked it.
Stealth took him for three seconds, long enough to leave the archers looking at empty dirt and find him behind them. Two died on the daggers. Ghost Hands took the other two by the necks.
The camp was no longer a camp. It was a slaughter yard.
He drank another blue bottle. Then another. MP dumped into the big spell.
"Magmatis stagnum!"
The ground in the center of the yard split. Magma punched up through the dirt in a bubbling sheet. Orcs standing on it did not have time to jump.
Feet went first. Then shins. Then the screaming. Shields dropped into it and came up as slag. A war-horn melted in a captain's fist.
Lupin leaped the heat like a creek. Sylvan drove a frozen Orc into it and let the body cook. Grimm waded the edge, fur smoking, and tore another throat out anyway.
Ethan was gasping now. Not from fear. From exhaustion. His arms shook. His lungs burned.
An Orc came in from the blind side with a club raised for his skull. A fourth bottle. Ghost Hands again, one twist, and the shoulder left its socket with a sound like wet wood.
[MP: 95/160]
[HP: 74/100]
Anima sans closed the worst cuts. The rest he left.
A last knot of spearmen tried to pin Grimm against a burning tent. Ethan put Dragonfang through the first one's eye. Grimm finished the rest and stood in a pile of parts, breathing like a bellows.
Thirty percent of the camp was down. Maybe forty. The front ranks broke, not a full retreat, just a step back from the boy with two dragon teeth and the three monsters at his shoulder.
Ethan stood in the middle of it with both daggers down, chest heaving, green blood to the elbows. His hands would not stop shaking. He let them shake.
Lupin came up on his left, muzzle black to the eyes. Sylvan and Grimm flanked right. None of the three looked tired. They looked like they wanted more.
The surviving Orcs packed themselves into a thick knot at the far end of the yard and waited for someone to tell them what to do.
The crowd parted.
Garkash walked out of it like the fight had been a door he was done using.
He was still wounded. The stitches along his side were open and wet. He did not seem to care. He looked at the magma, at the dead, at the three wolves, and then at Ethan.
Satisfaction sat on his face. Not rage. Something calmer and worse.
"You have come for me," Garkash said. His voice carried over the hiss of the lava. "I know."
Ethan lifted Dragonfang. The fire in the tooth still pulsed.
"Where is my mother?"
Garkash tilted his head. For a moment he actually seemed to think about it.
"I do not know who your mother is. I do not know where she is. If I had her, boy, I would not waste her in a cage. I would fuck her and put her on a stake where you could see her."
Ethan's growl came up from the chest. The wolves answered it. Lupin first, then the other two, teeth bared, bodies coiled.
"You are lying."
Garkash smiled. It was not kind.
"If I am lying, then make me tell the truth. Come. One against one. No wolves. No shaman. No tricks from the dirt. We will see whose blood is stronger. We will see whose line is meant to stand."
He put a hand on his torn side, almost fondly, as if the wound were a badge.
"Destiny does not hide in tents, Fondel boy. It walks out and asks for the fight. I am a King. I have what I came to this world to make. A future to rule. A child that will rule it after me. That is enough for me. Is it enough for you to die tonight?"
He said it like a fact. Like the child was already born in his head and the rest of the night was just paperwork.
The remaining Orcs beat weapons on shields and shouted their king's name. The wolves snarled back.
Ethan stepped forward until there was nothing left between them but ten feet of scorched ground. Behind Garkash the last of the warband leaned in.
Behind Ethan the three sons lowered their heads and waited for the word.
"I thought you would never ask."
Garkash's grin widened. He drew the massive axe off his back. The wolves growled. The Orcs roared. The magma popped and spat, lighting both of their faces the same ugly red.
They stood there, face to face, and neither of them moved for the next ten seconds.
Then they lunged at each other.