The quarantine tent hit him before he crossed the threshold. Sweat. Bile. Sweet rot underneath. The kind of sweet that came from bodies surrendering.

  His nostrils flared. Orc senses picked up what humans missed. Right now he wished for their ignorance.

  Twenty paces deep. Eight across. Hide walls filtered daylight into something dim and sickly. Seven pallets lined packed earth. Five held small bodies wrapped in furs. Two lay empty. Their occupants buried three days past.

  Seven children. Five days. Three dead.

  His hand moved left. Reached for where KyKlaw would stand during inspections. Found empty air. The absence pulled at him. Like fighting without shield.

  She had left three days ago for Sporren village. Three days stretched into thirty.

  "Roar'Z." GroTor rose from beside a trembling form. New lines creased the shaman's weathered face. "You shouldn't be here. The sickness..."

  "Spreads whether I witness or not."

  Roar'Z crossed to the nearest pallet. A mother hunched over her daughter, spine bent like she'd never straighten again. All attention fixed on the small face barely visible through furs.

  The girl had not seen more than eight winters. Gray tinted her skin like old meat left too long in summer heat. Black veins spider-webbed across thin arms. The patterns looked like lightning scars, but these moved. Grew. Spread.

  The mother's eyes, sunken deep, finally met his. "Please, War Chief." Her voice cracked. "Witch doctors tried everything. The spirits won't answer. My baby..." She tried again. "She won't wake up anymore. She just... stares."

  Roar'Z knelt. Healing ribs protested. Ruby's claws had scored deep during their last encounter. He reached out, touched the child's forehead with the back of his hand.

  Cold. Too cold for living flesh. But this wasn't the cold of death. He'd killed enough to know dying when he saw it. This girl wasn't dying. She was being hollowed. Something essential was draining toward her heart, pooling there, concentrating. He could almost feel it through his palm. A wrongness that had nothing to do with fever or infection. Whatever this poison does, it doesn't just kill. It takes something first.

  The girl's eyes tracked toward him.

  She's already turning.

  He had seen this progression in zombies. Eyes emptied first. Left only appetite behind. This child stood at that threshold. One foot already across.

  He stood. The mother's hand caught his wrist. Her grip carried surprising strength for someone who looked half-dead herself.

  "Will she..." The woman could not finish.

  "My mate hunts the answer." He kept his voice low. Steady. Arena training. Never show weakness to the crowd. "She will find it."

  He gently extracted his wrist. GroTor waited at the next pallet.

  A boy, perhaps six winters, clutched a wooden toy against his chest. Fingers locked rigid around it. The toy was carved in the shape of a riding lizard. Paint worn off from constant handling.

  "This one?" Roar'Z asked quietly.

  "Yesterday morning he could still speak." GroTor knelt beside the pallet. "Asked for water. Asked for his father. By evening, nothing."

  A toddler lay on the fourth pallet, too young to understand. The child did not cry. Did not make sound beyond small whimpers that escaped with each breath. His mother sat beside him, humming a lullaby that sounded like broken glass.

  Mothers and fathers kept vigil over each occupied pallet. Hope drained from their faces. Hour by hour. Replaced by something harder. Hate that needed a target.

  GroTor moved between pallets. His hand touched foreheads. Whispered prayers to ancestors. Burned herbs that filled the tent with acrid smoke. But the poison resisted all traditional remedies.

  "How long?" Roar'Z asked when they reached the tent's far end.

  "Days for some. Hours for others." GroTor spoke like a man who'd stopped counting the bodies. "The progression varies. The youngest go fastest."

  "Why?"

  The old shaman pulled out a worn leather journal. Pages covered in scratched symbols and notes. "It prepares them." GroTor closed the journal. His weathered hands trembled slightly. "When I touch them during healing prayers, they feel... wrong. The life-heat concentrates in strange places. Pulls toward their hearts instead of spreading through their blood." He met Roar'Z's eyes. "The ancestors call it spirit-hollowing. I've only read of it in the oldest texts. Forbidden practices from before the Dragon War."

  "This poison chooses its victims."

  "It prepares them." GroTor closed the journal. "They thrash and scream, but always the same words. 'Empty. Hungry. Waiting.' They weaken daily. Like loosening roots before transplant. Like softening leather before it can be shaped."

  The implications hit him. Heavy. Suffocating.

  "This poison doesn't just kill."

  "No." GroTor met his eyes. "It transforms."

  * * *

  The training ground lay two ridges to the east. Far enough that screams wouldn't carry.

  Dawn light cut through the pines in copper shafts, illuminating frost that clung to grass where shadows still held. Roar'Z stood alone in the clearing, practice posts arranged in a half-circle before him.

  He drew Beculum.

  Firelight erupted along cracks spider-webbing from hilt to tip. Each fracture glowed with molten intensity, veins of steel dying from within.

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  Roar'Z planted his feet shoulder-width apart. The arena stance. He breathed. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four.

  The pattern calmed his racing heart, centered his focus, made the world narrow to this moment. The technique had kept him alive in the arena when younger, faster opponents had tried to overwhelm him with speed.

  Heat spread up his forearms as he channeled power through the blade's damaged core. Not the clean burn of healthy magic. This was something else. Something that ate as much as it gave, consuming wielder and weapon alike in its hunger.

  The skin across his palms split. Fresh cracks joined old scars that had never properly healed. Blood welled up, dark and thick. When it touched the superheated metal, it hissed. Steam rose in thin ribbons. The smell hit him immediately. Copper and ash.

  Strike.

  The flaming blade sheared through the practice post in a diagonal arc. Wood screamed as fire consumed it from the inside out. The severed top crashed to the ground, smoldering. Black smoke twisted up through shafts of morning light.

  Roar'Z stood over the fallen post, chest heaving. Beculum burned in his grip, the flames along its edge hungry for more.

  Not enough. Push harder.

  * * *

  His knees locked. It was the only way to stay upright. Hot droplets hit the dirt beneath him. He touched his face, fingers coming away slick with red.

  Nosebleed. Again.

  His hands shook. The tremor ran from fingertips to elbows, muscles seizing in spasms he couldn't control. He could barely maintain his grip on the hilt now, knuckles white with the effort.

  The arena memory hit him. No warning. No defense.

  Arena sand, hot and red beneath brutal midday sun. The crowd a living thing, thousands of throats screaming as one: Death's Veto. Death's Veto. Death's Veto.

  His name. His title. His choice.

  He'd stood in that sand with blade raised high, thumb positioned over his defeated opponent's fate. The crowd had roared for death. But he'd chosen differently. Spared the fighter. Again and again, match after match, until Death's Veto meant something more than slaughter. Until it meant control. Power over mortality itself.

  He had controlled death then. Decided its time and place with the flick of a thumb.

  Now his hands shook so badly he could barely hold his weapon. Control was an illusion. Death came when it wanted, not when he allowed it.

  * * *

  He pulled more power despite every warning sign his body screamed at him.

  Beculum responded with a sound that made his teeth ache. The sword screamed. New fissures cracked along the blade's spine with sounds like breaking ice on a frozen lake. What had been hairline fractures became crevasses.

  His vision narrowed to a tunnel. Invisible fire climbed from his hands to his elbows, searing every nerve it touched. Not the quick pain of a cut or burn. This was slow. Methodical. Thorough.

  Just a little more. Always more.

  The addiction sang through his blood like a dark hymn. Power surged, intoxicating. Even as it destroyed him cell by cell, it promised victory. Promised Ruby's death. Promised safety for his child, for KyKlaw, for every orc who depended on his strength.

  One more strike. One more push beyond his limits. Then he'd stop.

  He never stopped.

  His teeth ground together. Blood taste flooded his mouth. He'd bitten through the inside of his cheek without even noticing. The copper mixed with the nosebleed still running, with the ash taste coating his tongue.

  Strike.

  The practice post exploded. Fireflies showered upward in a fountain of orange and gold. Wood fragments peppered his face, his chest, his arms.

  His legs almost gave out beneath him. He staggered sideways, caught himself on instinct alone, stood swaying.

  The world spun. Came back into focus. Spun again.

  "Enough, Chief-friend."

  GroTor's voice cut through the haze.

  The old shaman stood at the clearing's edge, leaning heavily on his staff. Morning light caught the age lines carved deep into weathered features. Worry showed in every crease.

  "Not enough." Roar'Z lifted the blade with effort. His voice came out rough, grinding like stone dragged across stone. "Never enough."

  "Then you die here." GroTor walked forward, each step measured by the tap of his staff. "Alone. Burning. Is that the plan?"

  "If it kills Ruby first." Roar'Z lowered the sword, chest heaving. "Yes."

  GroTor stopped just outside the radius of heat waves distorting the air. He gestured at Beculum.

  "The weapon reflects its wielder," the old orc said. "Both near breaking."

  Roar'Z looked down at the blade for the first time since GroTor's arrival.

  The cracks seemed deeper in the clear light of dawn. Wider. What had been hairline fractures yesterday were chasms today. A lattice of failure spread through once-perfect steel. The blade that had survived the dragon war, that had tasted Ruby's blood in that final desperate strike.

  Breaking. Dying. Failing.

  His hands wouldn't stop shaking. He crossed his arms over his chest, hiding the tremors.

  Failed. Failing. Will fail.

  "How many?"

  ""Uses?" GroTor's ancient eyes went distant, his scarred knuckles tightening around his staff as he read the patterns only shamans could see. "Three more. Maybe four. Then it shatters completely."

  Three. Maybe four.

  GroTor's breathing filled the space between them, slow and heavy.

  "And when the blade breaks," GroTor said quietly, "what happens to the warrior channeling through it?"

  Neither of them wanted to answer that question.

  Magic conducted through metal. Power flowed from body to blade and back again in an endless circuit. What happened when that circuit broke while power still flowed through it? When a dam burst while the river still raged behind it?

  Roar'Z knew the answer. GroTor knew it too.

  They didn't speak it aloud. Some truths didn't need voicing.

  Roar'Z sheathed Beculum with hands that trembled despite his best efforts at control. His hand brushed the Tako bracelet at his wrist as the sword settled into its sheath. Woven fiber in KyKlaw's colors. Blue and green twisted together. Water and life.

  She'd tied it there the morning she left for Sporran village, her fingers gentle despite the urgency of her mission. Her eyes had been fierce with determination even as unshed tears made them shine.

  "Two paths," she'd said in her reversed orc-speak. "One purpose. The way we've always fought."

  The bracelet anchored him to something beyond fire and pain and the countdown.

  Three strikes left. Maybe four.

  * * *

  Later, in the privacy of his tent, Roar'Z laid Beculum across his lap.

  He ran one finger along the cracks. His eyes saw the movement. His mind sent the signal. But sensation? Nothing. He watched his own hand as if it belonged to someone else.

  The burns had spread past his elbows, advancing toward his shoulders in branching patterns that looked like lightning frozen in flesh. The skin was angry red in places. Black in others where tissue had died completely. Shiny with new scar tissue in patches where his body struggled to heal damage it couldn't possibly repair.

  The burns followed the paths his blood took, mapping his circulatory system in destruction.

  When he flexed his fingers, they responded. Tendons pulled. Joints bent. Muscle obeyed.

  He pressed those same fingers to Beculum's blade. Nothing registered.

  Retry

  Complete loss of sensation in his palms. The nerves were dead. Burned away by fire channeled through flesh that was never meant to conduct such power.

  He thought of his child. Growing day by day in KyKlaw's belly while she hunted for cures in a Sporran village deep underground. A boy or girl he'd never met, never held, never heard cry or laugh. A child who would be born into a world where Ruby's madness spread like plague.

  Strike. Fall. Rise. Again.

  The arena philosophy. The gladiator's creed that had kept him alive through a hundred fights, a thousand training sessions. You fall. You bleed. But you rise. You always rise. That was what separated the living from the dead.

  His throat tightened. The fire he'd channeled through Beculum had scorched something deep inside. Every breath tasted like smoke. Every swallow ground broken glass down his esophagus. His voice had dropped half an octave in the past week.

  KyKlaw wouldn't know his voice when she returned.

  Three uses left. Maybe four.

  He would make them count.

  Deep underground, in caverns lit by unnatural light, Ruby built his armies. Twisted the living into chains for the dead. Turned innocent children into weapons against their own parents.

  His burned hands curled into fists.

  Three more battles. Then nothing.

  But nothing would wait until Ruby fell. A promise sealed in blood and written across dead flesh. Sworn on a child he'd never held and a mate who needed him to burn bright enough, long enough, to buy the time she needed.

  Three strikes left.

  Maybe four.

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  Next time: Sporran village. Answers wait underground — not all of them welcome. Reviews help. No pressure — but if you've got thoughts, I read every one.

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