Chapter 5: The Orc Prince's Challenge
The quiet by the fire didn’t last. Before dawn, the war horns sounded—a deeper, more savage blare than the human calls. It wasn’t a call to form up. It was the sound of a dam breaking.
The Gallow’s Foot were rushed forward to plug a breach in the crumbling mercenary line. The rocky pass, yesterday a site of isolated skirmishes, had become a slaughterhouse funnel. The air was thick with the reek of emptied bowels, crushed pine needles, and a new, overwhelming stench: unwashed orcish bodies in the thousands.
Leon fought not as a soldier in a line, but as a node in a frantic, shrinking knot of survivors. The black sword was a scalpel in a butcher’s yard. He didn’t swing wildly; he used its impossible edge for precision kills—severing tendon behind a knee, punching through a gorget’s weak rivet, opening a thigh to the bone. Efficiency. Conservation. Kiriko was a blur of snarls and steel beside him, her world reduced to the immediate threats on her fangs and her flanks.
But the tide was too strong. He saw Varka, her voice gone ragged, hewing at a wall of green muscle with a notched axe. He saw men he’d shared ale with vanish under a wave of crude weapons, their screams cut short. The ghost-memory in his head screamed too, tactical assessments flashing and dying: Flanking maneuver impossible. Defensive position overrun. Only option: controlled retreat. No retreat available.
Then the earth shook with a different rhythm.
Through the press, a path was cleared not by force, but by sheer terror. Orcs scrambled back, making way. The creature that emerged was the size of a cart, a direwolf of matted black fur and eyes like burning sulphur. On its back sat an orc unlike any other. His armor wasn’t scavenged scrap; it was forged black steel, intricate and cruel, covering a body thick with cords of muscle. One tusk was capped with gold. This was Baratos, son of Markos, the Ironback.
His gaze swept the chaotic field and landed, with unnerving accuracy, on Leon. Or more precisely, on the black sword that had just cleanly bisected an orc’s spearhead.
Baratos grinned, a wide crack in his brutal face. “Little human pup,” he bellowed, his voice cutting through the battle din like a rockslide. “You have a shiny toy! Let me break it for you!”
The direwolf charged. It wasn’t a run; it was a thunderous, bounding demolition. Leon’s old-world instincts took over. He didn’t stand his ground. He calculated the angle, the speed, the weight.
“Honey, don’t be a hero!” Kiriko yelled, her voice tight with panic, already moving to intercept a flanking attacker.
“Wasn’t planning on it, wife,” he muttered, muscles coiling.
At the last second, he dove not away, but sideways, rolling beneath the sweep of a massive, clawed paw. As he came up, he didn’t aim for the rider. He aimed for the momentum. The black sword, held low and angled, caught the direwolf’s leading foreleg at the joint.
There was no dramatic clash. The leg parted. The creature’s roar of agony was cut short as its own bulk drove it face-first into the rocky ground, snapping its neck with a wet crunch. Baratos was thrown, but he turned the crash into a brutal, tumbling roll, coming up onto his feet with his weapon already in hand—a length of spiked iron chain, each link a blunt tooth.
“My favorite wolf,” Baratos growled, the grin gone, replaced by a cold, focused wrath. “You’ll pay for that in skin, pup.”
The chain lashed out with a demon’s speed. Leon parried with the sword, but the chain wrapped around the blade, the spikes shrieking against the dark metal. Baratos yanked, a force designed to disarm or pull Leon off balance. Leon held, boots skidding in the blood-slick gravel. The strength was unreal.
“Just a toy!” Baratos spat, surging forward, pulling Leon closer into the reach of his free, massive fist.
Leon let him come. He released one hand from the sword’s hilt, dropping his weight suddenly. The sudden slack made Baratos stagger a half-step. In that fragment of a second, Leon’s freed hand dipped to his boot and came up with Gregor’s old skinning knife. He drove it into the gap at Baratos’s hip where cuirass met fauld.
The orc prince grunted, more in surprise than pain. His huge hand clamped around Leon’s wrist, bones creaking. “Clever flea,” he hissed, his breath foul with rot and meat. He raised the spiked chain high, aiming to bring it down on Leon’s exposed head.
A gray and silver shape impacted Baratos’s side. Kiriko, having battered her own opponent aside, threw herself into him with a feral scream, her short sword stabbing at the armpit. It was a desperate, suicidal move. Baratos backhanded her with his armored forearm. The blow lifted her off her feet. Her shield took the main impact, the wood splintering, and the chain he’d been aiming for Leon came down in a glancing, redirected arc.
CRUNCH.
It wasn’t the clear snap of a sword. It was the dull, terrible sound of something thick and vital giving way. The spiked links caught Kiriko across the ribs as she fell, crushing armor, fur, and bone beneath.
She didn’t scream. The air just left her in a shocked, wet gasp. She hit the ground and didn’t move.
Something cold and vast emptied out in Leon’s head. The noise of the battle faded. The pain in his wrist vanished. There was only the geometry of violence: the orc’s grip on his wrist, the orc’s exposed neck as he turned to confirm the kill on the beastkin, the black sword still held between them, tangled in the chain.
Leon didn’t pull the sword back. He shoved it forward, twisting his body with every ounce of desperate strength. The black blade, still partly wrapped, slid through the chains like they were smoke. It punched through the black steel plate over Baratos’s heart as if the armor were parchment, through the dense muscle and bone beneath, and erupted from his back in a gout of dark blood.
Baratos looked down, his fierce eyes wide with pure disbelief. He coughed, a bubble of blood bursting on his lips. “That’s… a good toy,” he gargled, and the light went out of his eyes. His weight collapsed, dragging Leon down to one knee.
Leon wrenched the sword free. He didn’t watch the body fall. He was already scrambling over to Kiriko.
She was conscious, her amber eyes wide with shock and pain. Each rapid, shallow breath hitched with a liquid rasp. Her hand pressed weakly against the ruin of her side, where the crushed leather and mail were already soaked through, the dark red stark against her gray fur.
“Don’t you die,” Leon heard himself say, his voice flat and strange in his own ears. He ripped a cloak from a nearby corpse, folding it clumsily into a pad, pressing it hard against the wound. “You hear me? You owe me twenty silvers.”
Kiriko tried to snarl, but it turned into a grimace of agony. “Shut… up,” she wheezed. “Just… get the surgeon…”
The orcs around them were faltering. The death of Baratos rippled through the horde like a shockwave. Their aggressive press stuttered, becoming disorganized, confused.
From the higher ground at the pass’s mouth, a new horn sounded. Clean, commanding, noble. Through the chaos, a wedge of heavy cavalry, their banners bearing the griffin of House Grimville, plunged into the orcish flank. It was less a charge than a controlled massacre, exploiting the sudden lapse in morale perfectly.
The man who led them didn’t fight. He observed from a armored horse, dressed in dark, unadorned plate. Lord Crow Grimville watched the rout begin, his eyes, sharp and calculating behind his visor, scanning the field. They passed over the heaped bodies, the fleeing orcs, and settled on the isolated scene: a young black mercenary kneeling over a wounded beastkin, a strange black sword lying discarded in the mud beside him, the massive corpse of Baratos at his feet.
A thin, cold smile touched Crow’s lips. An asset had just identified itself.
Leon didn’t see him. All his focus was on Kiriko’s face, on keeping pressure on the wound, on the terrifying rhythm of her struggling breaths. Varka arrived, her own arm hanging limp, her face pale under the grime. She took one look and barked for stretchers.
“Stubborn mutt,” Varka said, her voice rough. “You took a hit for the cheat-sword.”
“He… was in the way,” Kiriko forced out, her eyes finding Leon’s. There was no insult in them now. Just a raw, animal fear.
The camp that night was a hospital. The surgeons’ tents glowed with lamplight, the air thick with the smell of herbs, boiling wine, and blood.
Leon sat outside Kiriko’s tent, cleaning the black sword meticulously. He couldn’t get the feel of her ribs giving way out of his mind. The sound of it.
A shadow fell over him. He looked up. A knight stood there, his green surcoat impeccable despite the day’s filth. He had the weary, impassive face of a man who’d seen too much and preferred not to see any of it.
“Leon,” the knight stated. It wasn’t a question. “Lord Crow Grimville wishes to speak with you. Now.”
Leon slowly sheathed the sword. He glanced at the tent flap, then back at the knight—Valmont, he realized. The Butcher of Levandaire. A man whose presence meant Crow’s interest was serious, and dangerous.
He stood, his body aching in a hundred new places. “I’m listening,” he said.
But as he followed Valmont through the camp, towards the opulent pavilion of the highborn, the only thing he truly heard was that soft, crushing sound, and the memory of Kiriko’s hand, slick with her own blood, briefly gripping his own before they pried her away.
But as he followed Valmont through the camp, towards the opulent pavilion of the highborn, the only thing he truly heard was that soft, crushing sound, and the memory of Kiriko’s hand, slick with her own blood, briefly gripping his own before they pried her away.
Lord Crow’s pavilion smelled of waxed canvas, incense, and cold power. The nobleman himself had shed his plate, sitting in a high-backed chair dressed in a simple black doublet. He looked younger up close, with sharp, intelligent eyes that missed nothing and held no warmth. He gestured to a folding stool.
“Sit. You look like you’re about to fall over.”
Leon remained standing. “With respect, my lord, I’d rather hear what you want.”
“Direct. Good.” Crow sipped from a silver cup. “You killed Baratos Ironback. My scouts confirm it. Do you know what you’ve actually done?”
“Removed a tactical problem from the field.”
A faint smile. “You’ve made a mortal enemy of Markos the Breaker, who is currently marshaling his personal guard less than a mile from this tent. And you’ve handed me a rather useful symbol. The lowborn mercenary who avenges our noble dead.” He set the cup down. “I want to hire you. Personally.”
Leon’s gaze flicked to Valmont, a silent statue by the entrance. “I’m already under contract with the Gallow’s Foot.”
“Contracts can be amended. Bought out. I am offering you a position in my personal retinue. Training. A path to legitimacy that doesn’t end face-down in a bog for three silver coins a month.” Crow leaned forward. “And protection. Markos will be coming for you now, specifically. My walls are higher than Captain Varka’s.”
The offer was a gilded cage. It was also everything he’d supposedly wanted—a patron, a path. But the price was written in Crow’s calculating eyes: the black sword, and his own freedom, would become this man’s property.
“I need to consider it,” Leon said, which was a polite refusal.
“You don’t have the luxury of time,” Crow replied, his voice cooling.
It was then that the sound came.
It wasn’t a horn or a war cry. It was a roar that vibrated up from the ground itself, a throat of pure, unadulterated malice that tore through the night air and silenced the groans of the camp. It spoke of centuries of hatred, of a loss so personal it could only be washed in a river of blood. Every hair on Leon’s arm stood up.
Outside, the camp’s uneasy quiet shattered into frantic bellows. “THE KING! THE KING IS ON THE FIELD!”
Through the open pavilion flap, Leon saw the distant torchlight of the orcish lines churn. A single, colossal figure was moving through them, not running, but walking with the inevitable force of a landslide. Orcs parted before him, their earlier uncertainty burned away, replaced by a frenzied, rapturous rage. Markos the Breaker had come to collect his debt personally.
Chaosis immediate and absolute. The orderly human lines, celebrating a hard-won reprieve, dissolved. A tide of green fury smashed into the outer pickets. It wasn’t a battle tactic. It was a grief-driven massacre.
Leon was already moving, pushing past Valmont and out into the screaming dark. He had to get to the surgeon’s tents. He had to get to Kiriko.
A soldier from his platoon—Jory, the one who always sang off-key—sprinted past, then skidded to a halt. He shoved two cold glass vials into Leon’s hand. “Here! From the quartermaster! One’s for knitting bone and blood, the other’s for keeping your eyes open! Forget about resting!”
Jory’s face was white with a terror that went beyond fear of death. It was the terror of being erased. “We’re all dead today, mate. We’re all dead!”
Leon looked at the vials. One glowed a faint, healthy green. The other shimmered a disturbing, electric yellow. Delay fatigue. He thought of Kiriko’s liquid rasp, of the endless green tide, of Crow’s gilded offer. There was no choice. There was only the next moment, and the one after.
He uncorked both with his teeth and swallowed. The health potion was cloyingly sweet, spreading a warm, false sense of repair through his bruises. The yellow one was acid and copper, a jolt that locked his jaw and sharpened the world into painful, hyperreal clarity. Every flickering torch, every screaming face, every guttural shout from the advancing horde snapped into perfect, awful focus.
A strange, quiet smile touched his lips. It held no humor, no bravery. It was the simple acceptance of a final receipt. If this was the profession he’d chosen, then he would be professional.
“Alright then,” he said, his voice calm in the maelstrom. He drew the black sword. The hum against his palm was eager. “Let’s get to work. I’m going to be the most prolific orc killer in the realm.”
He did not charge alone. Varka was there, her broken arm tied roughly across her chest, a hatchet in her good hand. A dozen other Foot survivors formed up, their eyes wide with the same yellow-potion glare. They were a ragged, blood-caked knot in the streaming chaos.
“You’re a fool!” Varka shouted at him, but she fell in at his side.
“I know!” he shouted back.
Then they moved, not as a shield wall, but as a spearhead. Leon became a single, focused point of violence. The potions coursed through him, muting the ache in his muscles, burning away the fog of exhaustion. He saw everything: the arc of a crude axe, the opening in a rusted chest plate, the stumbling foot of a larger foe. The black sword answered each observation with inhuman efficiency.
He did not feel heroic. He felt like a gardener pulling weeds, methodical and endless. Chop, step, thrust, twist. The green tide pressed, and he reaped. He lost track of time, aware only of Varka’s ragged breathing beside him, the feel of hot blood spraying across his face, and the endless, hammering need to push the line back from the surgeon’s tents.
He fought towards the sound of the roaring king, into the very heart of the rage, his world reduced to the next kill, and the next, the black sword a constant, humming extension of his will.