The System did its careful, distant bookkeeping.
Poisoned (Soporific) applied.
Orc Warrior — Asleep.
Orc Spear-Bearer — Drowsy — Prone.
Not everyone drank. Not everyone trusted. But enough did to warp the room’s maths .
Three things happened at once:
- An Iron-Guard with good bones smelled his half cup and barked—too loud, too late.
- A wrangler lifted his head from a joke and saw a quarter of his world going soft. He reached for a horn then forgot how to lift his eyelids.
- Scrug did what only an orc with a spear and a fresh idea of himself can do: he owned the moment. “SPOILED!” he roared, pointing at the second barrel as if it had personally insulted his mother. “Throw! Throw!” He kicked the tap free; black liquor drooled like a wound.
Kevin moved. Not the way a fighter moves—the way water finds seams. Stealth: Hidden hummed at the edge of his sight; the cape breathed; the ground agreed to hold him until it had to tell someone. He slid behind the Iron-Guard who had smelled wrong and used the edge of his fore-shield to interrupt him—low, short, a stroke like a spare thought; the kind that makes breath forget what lungs were invented for. The guard wavered, knees suddenly interested in philosophy. Kevin’s hand found the back of his neck and asked it to meet the ground while the ground still remembered its job.
Subdued — Iron-Guard. Status: Unconscious
A slinger farther off fumbled for his pouch; Kevin let the shield’s shadow be a wall and passed it between them, then introduced the slinger’s head to that wall without exchanging names. Sleep found him where he fell, with help.
He was careful with the next two. He guided a war-hog handler down by the elbow instead of the throat and let the spear-butt tap out the light; he eased an elder woman into a lean against a post and left her there, hand on the hilt of the knife she wouldn’t wake in time to remember.
Not all of it was clean. A young warrior with a face still learning where to set its bones convulsed—the dose too much for a heart that had been a drum since birth. Kevin knelt; there are fast things you can do, and he did them forcing potion and poultice down its throat as best he could, it stirred, but he drove its breath out again around the neck. The System ticked something he did not watch.
He let himself feel it later. He made it simple.
Scrug played his role with growing, terrible pleasure. He took the tap from the first barrel and threw it into the fire. He kicked over the second and called spoiled again, loud and righteous. When a foreman shoved him for arrogance, Scrug shoved back harder, and the foreman—half-stunned by a dose of sleep and the surprise of someone lower refusing to be lower—hit the ground with a grunt that turned the conversation around.
“New tap!” Scrug roared. “New barrel! Boss hate rotten drink.” He lifted his spear and pointed—a benediction that carried the weight of practical command. Orcs moved because someone was shouting properly. The few who still had their feet left their opinions there and fetched what they were told.
In the lull, Kevin subdued three more like a rumor: a cutter who kept waking; a drummer who tried to remember the rhythm for alarm and forgot how to hold sticks; a gate-watcher whose eyes went wide at the sight of a man in a cape moving like a lie and then went wide the other way. The cape earned its keep again when a frightened cutthroat tried the usual thing—a knife through the back—heat flared off the cloth in a thin orange peel; the hand recoiled blistering; the knife made a new home in the dirt. Kevin turned on the recoil and used bone and wood and gravity until the fight remembered who owned it.
Across the camp, voices rose like weather. A few orcs died. More slept. Most stumbled into the edges of their strength and found it moved like furniture in the night. The smell of pepper and old pennies spread just enough to write doubt into mugs. Someone laughed in the wrong key and then stopped because nobody else had.
The System kept its clerk’s mask but could not hide its satisfaction.
Espionage Action: Successful.
Camp State: Disoriented.
“Better than boring,” Scrug said when Kevin ghosted back to his shoulder. His eyes shone with a light that had nothing to do with amber. “They say ‘Scrug clever’ after this.” He grinned, showing his tusks. “I like this game.”
“I think that’s got most of them.” Kevin said. “They really love their grog, huh?”
Scrug grinned—not friendly, but real. “Scrug is Boss of drink,” he said, tasting the title. He rolled his shoulders like a man trying on a larger shirt. “Scrug make no.”
“Kevin - Orc Drowser,” the AI said, “maybe not so boring after all, Rat Slayer.” Kevin smirked, but the smirk broke fast - I promised… No indulging them - but he knew all he was doing was surviving. How would he prevent himself being interesting or entertaining when all he was doing was trying to be strong, to be alive? He let the thought settle into the back of his skull instead of dwelling on it.
Kevin felt the familiar tug inside that meant the System wanted to put a ribbon on his day. The edges of his vision warmed, not with amber light but with the sober, paperwork glow of acknowledgment. He did not look directly. He didn’t need to. His wrists knew the weight of another tiny, needed increment.
EXP Gained
Around them, the orc camp moved as if a sentence had changed tenses mid-word. Men who hadn’t fallen took orders from a voice they hadn’t heard in that posture before and found that it fit the day. Women dragged sleepers into the shade and asked questions they’d argue about later. Children watched from under tusk-curtains and learned, fast, the shapes of new.
The cape lay warm between Kevin’s shoulders, coal-cozy, a promise he had not meant to make and would keep anyway. He checked the angle of his shields, found Scrug’s shoulder at the proper place in his periphery, and let the cave’s draft carry their conspiracy-like scent.
“Pit?” Scrug asked, almost cheerful now that the world had chosen to be possible for him.
“Soon,” Kevin said. He glanced toward the long lane that led to the hollow where Skarrott liked to make nouns into verbs. “Let’s go show him just how interesting we can be first.”
They moved—two figures among many laid prone and snoring—through the camp. Under the stalactite sky, the amber made everyone look briefly gilded, even the sleepers, even the dead
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They found him in the lane that led to the pit—a corridor of tusks and old banners where the amber light from above fell in a long, accusing stripe. The camp around them moved in slow, uncertain sentences: half the warriors groggy, a third asleep in their shadows, the rest loud with the business of pretending nothing had changed. Fat hissed; bone chimes worried the draft; somewhere a horn tried to remember the note for alarm and kept finding yawn.
Skarrott came like weather anyway.
He ducked under a tusk-arch with a stagger that had nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with fury being drunk. His eyes were glass-bright; his breath tasted of bitterroot and iron; a smear of blister shone along two fingers where he’d tested the cape and refused to learn. The hooked mace hung in his fist like punctuation.
The UI, clerkly as ever, slid into Kevin’s periphery:
Skarrott (Elite): Level 30
Status: Weakened (Soporific), Enraged
He planted himself in the stripe of amber and made the lane belong to him. The wall of a man unfurled his figure as best he could. “WHO SAYS SPOILED?” he roared, and the walls thought about answering.
Orc heads turned toward Scrug as if called by a magnet. Scrug took a breath that changed him a size and stepped into the stripe. Kevin drifted half a pace to his left and behind, shields making shapes out of air; the cape warmed his spine like a coal deciding.
Scrug rolled his shoulders as if they were new and raised his spear to the yoke. He spoke in Orcish, voice low but carrying—flat vowels, spat consonants, a grammar that made the statement a dare.
“Uzhk gra Scrug. Khrag takk. Un-ga.”
“Leave it to me. I’ll take him.” - The words translated themselves inside Kevin's head.
For half a heartbeat Kevin saw it land—the idea, not the words. A dozen orcs who had been told all their lives not to imagine anything more complicated than a larger boot suddenly imagined it anyway.
Skarrott didn’t argue. He didn’t posture. He didn’t explain rank or history or custody of pain. He moved.
The hooked mace went from idle to sky to problem in one contemptuous, practiced arc. Scrug got the spear half up—just enough to make the blow ring down bone instead of into face—and then the weight did what weight always does. Wood sang. Iron kissed. Scrug’s knees did the polite buckle of a man trying to keep dignity in the air a fraction too long. The second strike was a backhand—almost lazy, a bored cruelty—across the temple.
Scrug went out like a lamp someone pinched.
He hit stone with a hollow thud that made the bone chimes flinch. The spear clattered, rolled, and fetched up against Kevin’s boot like a dog that had lost its man.
The System, efficient and indifferent, noted it:
Party Leader Incapacitated
Bond: Wall-Man — Suspended (Leader down).
Kevin didn’t look at the ribbon; he felt the absence where it had been—a little softening in the air between his shield and the orc’s back, a tiny loyalty turned to worry. He took one step forward and set his door-skins at angles a room could understand: fore-shield high and canted, back-shield low and braced, cape a dark ember against the lane’s light.
Skarrott’s lip twitched. He looked from Scrug on the ground to Kevin’s stance as if comparing tools, then lifted his eyes to meet Kevin’s and found in them precisely what he wanted: not bluff, not bravado—work.
The lane narrowed to a sentence with only two nouns: the Boss in the stripe of amber and the wall-man in the shadow.
“THAT BEST GOT?!” He thudded his mace against one wall, gouging a strip from the wood.
Kevin took a step that made geometry out of breath. Wood and leather became planes; the cape a dark ember at his spine. Scrug lay to his left with his cheek on stone and a thread of blood making grammar at his ear.
The System adjusted its ribbon, cool and clerkly:
Skarrott: Level 25 (Weakened)
Status: Weakened (Soporific taking hold), Enraged.
They closed until the tusk-arch framed them both.
Skarrott came first, because men like him always do—mace low, then high, a contemptuous hook meant to turn doors into splinters. Kevin took it the only way a Bulwark ever does: on angle. The fore-shield kissed iron, let the blow crawl its face, and bled the worst of it into his frame. The rest arrived in his shoulder like a storm getting its act together.
He answered short—Shieldwall Bash, the ugly little sentence. Mace met rim, jaw met force, teeth clicked like dice in a cup. Skarrott grinned around them, pleased to have been spoken to correctly.
“Good,” he rasped, breath bitter with grog. “Make me awake.”
High-Tier Recipe Discovered: Radiant Salve
Kevin remembered the salve he had crafted what seemed like a lifetime ago. Biting the cork off the bottle and tipping it onto his foreshield. He went to work against Skarrott.
It wasn’t dance and it wasn’t poetry. It was work done with tools: arc and parry, hook and catch, a shove that clarified a lie, a half-step that made a man heavy in the wrong direction. Skarrott tried to circle and learned the cape’s one trick the hard way—a lazy backhand that cut for kidney met heat; flame licked his forearm in a fast orange peel. He snarled and pulled back reflexively, and Kevin put a rim across his cheekbone for the sin of trying to learn mid-swing. Kevin blocked firmly a harsh strike coming straight for his chest - a bright flash came from the shield, Skarrott, dazed and confused, moaned “Urghh!” and Kevin brought another rim jab along his jaw.
The lane around them made a ring without deciding to—drowsy warriors propped on spears, women with hands on children’s shoulders, old men remembering fights their bones had not forgotten. The grog stain bled across the dirt where Scrug had kicked the barrel. Kevin stepped in it once, felt the slick try to steal his stance, and corrected; two exchanges later he gave that patch to Skarrott with a small, deliberate retreat.
It struck Kevin that the carnotaurus, ferocious and unpredictable, was a much larger threat than Skarrott weakened. It was easier to see the options laid out in front of him: block, dodge, parry, bash. No wild teeth or indecision. It also struck him: fight, or die.
The Boss took it like a man who thinks floors are opinions. His heel went a whisper sideways, his weight got into a sentence that had no verb, and Kevin read the gap the way water reads cracks. A shove, a twist, a bash that turned a knee into a question. Skarrott answered with a roar and a blind hook that would have cut a lesser man in half; it slammed the back-shield and bit deep with a gunshot crack. It felt as if Kevin's back was breaking and suddenly he was acutely aware of the intricate anatomy of his own spine and fully acquainted with the anatomy of Skarrott's mace too. Pain turned Kevin’s breath into light; the cape flared hot along the Boss’s wrist. They parted, both smoking—one from heat, one from effort.
He found the weariest truth: the fight was longer than his lungs wanted to carry, and he was not the only creature in it who had learned from gathering scars on his body. Skarrott started using the tusk-arch like a lever, raking the hooked mace against bone to add weight to the return. Kevin started using posts as corners—glancing blows along them to steal momentum, letting wood hum the echo out of iron.
They broke each other down by inches. The bandage at Kevin’s hip turned warm and then warmer; the strap under his left forearm raised that maddening itch that meant mending had not abandoned him; his teeth hurt from clenching and he made himself let go before that, too, became something the Boss could use. Skarrott’s breath went ragged; his eyes, bright with rage and potion, got that glassy edge that says a man is awake too hard. Twice the mace came slower than it should have. Twice Kevin took the offered half-heartbeat and paid it forward in rim and shoulder.
An opening came like a dropped coin.
Skarrott overreached—a bored cruelty he’d used on Scrug, tried again on a door that refused to be furniture. Kevin let it glide and bit back: shield high to knock the mace wide, shoulder into ribs to make a pocket, boot behind heel for the trip the lane had been saving. The Boss went down to one knee with the grunt of a boulder realizing it has found bottom. He started to surge up—because he always had—and that was the moment Kevin had bought the whole grim hour for.
He stepped through him.
Fore-shield down, not to crush but to pin the weapon hand to dirt; back-shield forward to turn Skarrott’s rise into a bad idea. The mace clanged, trapped. Kevin’s knee came up under the Boss’s wrist—something gave with a small, wet pop—and the hooked head fell from numb fingers. Skarrott made a sound that wasn’t a word. He reached with the left, but the angle was gone. Kevin let the weight he’d been wearing since the staircase to this world do its only trick: he put every no he owned into a single, final shove and drove the rim across throat and jaw until bone made that flat cupboard sound and stopped asking for verbs.
Silence stumbled.
The System did what it always does when blood finishes counting.
Skarrott (Elite) slain.
Gilded Chest manifested