The assignment sounds like science.
Collect blood samples from the Fel Orcs. Analyze the corruption. Understand what happened to them. The framing is clinical, detached — the kind of language that implies laboratories and controlled conditions and peer review. What it actually means is: kill orcs, drain them into vials, hand the vials to a Forsaken apothecary who will do things with the contents that you are not required to understand.
Jezarman is an alchemist. He knows what blood carries. In Outland, orc blood is something that has been processing demonic compounds for long enough that the compounds have become structural — not contaminating the system, but constituting it. The Bonechewerscream when they charge with the specific fury of something that can no longer distinguish pain from rage. Their skin has gone the deep red of an organ under sustained pressure.
They chose this, the internal log notes. Or someone chose it for them and called it a gift.
He fills the first vial.
Tagar Spinebreaker is an elite and he appears without announcement from behind a boulder, already mid-charge, which is either a tactical choice or the specific behavior of something that has been running at things for so long it no longer knows how to approach slowly.
He is considerably larger than the standard Bonechewer. His spine has grown additional processes that extend upward from his shoulders in a configuration that suggests the fel corruption didn't know when to stop making him more.
Jezarman runs the standard protocol: Flame Shock to prime, Lava Burst to convert, Earth Shock when Tagar tries to close. The elite mechanic is that Tagar doesn't flinch. He takes the lava and keeps coming. He takes the earth shock and stumbles but does not stop. He requires the full sequence twice before he finally decides the situation has become untenable.
On this planet, the internal log notes, watching the body settle into the dust, the bones of the powerful grow until they can no longer support themselves. There is a lesson here about the relationship between strength and sustainability that I will not be filing with anyone who asked.
The Rogue has four Bonechewerscircling him in the specific formation of a situation that has become four situations.
He is managing. Barely. The evasion mechanic is doing what it was designed to do but the Bonechewerswere not designed to care, and there are four of them, and his health bar is doing something concerning.
Chain Lightning solves four targets the way a sentence solves a paragraph — all at once, from a single source, with the connecting structure doing most of the work. The bolt moves through them in sequence, each arc diminishing slightly but none of them negligible, and by the third jump the Bonechewerswho were circling the Rogue have new priorities.
The Rogue finishes the last one.
"thx"
"np"
He goes one way. Jezarman goes another. The vials are nearly full.
Apothecary Zelana doesn't have the equipment.
This is stated without apology. The blood of the Bonechewersis chemically complex in ways that her current field setup cannot accommodate. There is a facility at Spinebreaker Post that has what is required.
I am a member of the Horde, Jezarman does not say out loud, which means I have a flight path. He flags the wind rider and is airborne before the apothecary finishes explaining why she cannot help him.
From above, the Hellfire Peninsula looks like a problem that solved itself by eliminating every variable except rock and fire. The Bonechewer camps are visible as geometric interruptions in the otherwise uninterrupted devastation. He has been inside those camps. They have interior structure. From up here they look like accidents.
The wind rider does not charge for transit. This is, improbably, one of the better-organized aspects of the operation.
The experiments fail.
The blood was collected correctly. The vials were sealed properly. The documentation was accurate. The problem is that the blood of the Bonechewersdoes not respond to standard extraction protocols because it is not, in any technically meaningful sense, blood anymore. It is something that occupies the same structural role that blood occupies but has been modified at a molecular level by decades of demonic compound exposure until the modification is the structure.
The solution, the researchers at Spinebreaker Post determine, is thermal processing. Fresh blood, introduced to a specific cauldron at a specific temperature, before the demonic compounds can stabilize.
A cauldron, Jezarman registers. I am going to stand next to a cauldron in a burning village and cook orc blood for science.
He finds the Bleeding Hollow next.
Zeth'Gor is three structures and most of them are on fire.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
The name sounds like a fortress. The name sounds like a place that survived something. The Bleeding Hollow Clan, in the period before fel corruption, were shamans who ritually removed their own eyes to achieve prophetic visions — a practice that suggests a culture with a very specific relationship to the concept of sacrifice. What they sacrificed their eyes to see was presumably not this: a collection of burning huts on a dead planet, populated by the remnants of an army that a larger army decided to use as infrastructure and then stopped maintaining.
Home, the internal log notes, with the specific weight of a word applied to something it does not fit.
The blood drop rate is low. This is a data point and also an experience: for every three Bleeding Hollow eliminated, one yields usable material. The ones that don't have, somewhere in their corroded biology, hoarded the one resource that still belongs to them.
The cauldron is not a scientific instrument. It is a large metal container over a fire, into which Jezarman deposits the collected vials and then takes two steps backward.
The first thing that emerges is not processed blood.
It is scarabs.
Indiana Jones, for the record, had a whip.
What Jezarman has is Chain Lightning, which would be more useful if the scarabs conducted electricity reliably, which they do not, being small and fast and individually close to weightless. The cauldron produces them in quantities that suggest the cauldron is generating them rather than releasing them, which implies something about the nature of the cauldron that the researchers at Spinebreaker Post chose not to mention.
The optimal procedure, discovered through iteration, is this: deposit vial, step back, wait for the scarabs to lose interest and disperse, step forward, deposit next vial.
Twelve times.
There is a factory in this somewhere. Not the cauldron — the process. The step-deposit-wait-step of it, repeated until the quota is met, transforms what began as field collection into something with shift patterns and productivity metrics. A person can do this without thinking. A person should do this without thinking, because thinking about it introduces questions that have no productive answers, and the quota is twelve, and the quota will be met.
This is what work is, the internal log notes. Not the interesting parts. The parts between the interesting parts.
Apothecary Antonivich has additional requirements.
The blood was a preliminary analysis. What is needed now is primary data — twenty souls from the Shattered Hand clan, collected not through ritual or extraction but simply through being present when the Shattered Hand die near enough to the collection point.
Twenty orcs, Jezarman processes. The souls enter the device automatically. I do not have to do anything except provide the deaths.
Aha, he decides. I am a mercenary. I have an assignment. I should not spend time thinking about what I am doing because thinking about what I am doing requires forming opinions about it, and forming opinions about it requires having opinions, and the thing about Outland is that everyone here is operating under constraints that make opinions expensive. The Forsaken apothecaries want the data. The data requires the deaths. I am good at deaths. This is the transaction.
He goes to provide deaths.
The Demoniac Scryer requires defense.
Jezarman places the device at the designated location, which requires standing in a position that is immediately attacked by Hellfire Wardlings — constructs, not orcs, fast and numerous and not individually threatening but collectively capable of destroying the device if given enough time.
The device begins to speak.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. In the specific register of something addressing you from inside your skull, using the linguistic architecture of thought rather than the linguistic architecture of sound, suggesting that whatever is doing the speaking has been in spaces like the space behind your eyes before and knows the layout.
Don't fight it, Jezarman decides. It is doing its job. I am doing mine.
The Wardlings fall. The device finishes its transmission. The speaking stops.
It didn't even hurt, the internal log notes. And then, after a pause: That is either reassuring or exactly what you would say to yourself if you needed to believe something was fine.
Gorax is the right hand of Kargath Bladefist and he stands on a terrace above the citadel's outer wall with the kind of presence that comes from having survived the process that destroyed most of what was around him.
He is surrounded. The obstruction is not a problem — Chain Lightning addresses multiple targets the way the problem was always meant to be addressed, and the obstruction clears in stages, each arc taking something off the board until the board has only one piece left on it.
Then Lava Burst. Then Earth Shock. Then the specific silence that follows a hard target's health reaching zero.
The head goes in the pack.
Nazgrel receives it with the controlled acknowledgment of someone who has been receiving evidence of completed contracts for long enough that the evidence has become routine.
The gold moves from his account to Jezarman's. The DPS log shows Lava Burst at 29.8%, Chain Lightning at 11.8%, Earth Shock dropping to 18.1% — the fire has grown more central, the earth less. Something about the nature of the work in Hellfire Peninsula selects for burning rather than stopping.
This was a successful session, the internal log concludes. All objectives were met. The blood was boiled. The souls were collected. The device completed its transmission. The target is dead.
It would be irresponsible to note that at no point during any of this did anyone explain why the cauldron produces scarabs. The cauldron produces scarabs. You step back. You wait. You step forward.
This is how it works here.
?? END OF LOG — SESSION STATS
- Time Played: 4h 52m 13s
- Level: 12 → 13
- Gold: 14g 06s → 31g 44s
- Zone: Hellfire Peninsula — Bonechewer Territory / Zeth'Gor / Hellfire Citadel
- Key Completions: Bonechewer Blood, Boiling Blood, Apothecary Zelana, Spinebreaker Post, A Burden of Souls, The Demoniac Scryer, The Foot of the Citadel
- DPS Breakdown: Lava Burst 29.8% / Earth Shock 18.1% / Lightning Bolt 13.6% / Chain Lightning 11.8%
- DPS vs S006: Earth Shock ?9.9% (less interrupting, more burning) | Chain Lightning debuts at 11.8%
- Reputation: Thrallmar — Friendly (5885)
- Unit Status: Possessed once. Recovered fully. Operational.
Next log: Hellfire Peninsula still has questchains. The blood work is never finished.