Chapter 9: Duel 1
Torug's POV
Just a short distance from where my warband had made camp, the fabric of the sky fractured. Lightning began to rumble wildly, violent and unnatural. A cold, suffocating weight wrapped around my heart, squeezing it until my nerves felt raw. I stared upward, completely paralyzed. A blinding white light enveloped my vision, and suddenly, the prose of the novel's prologue began to write itself directly across my mind, playing out line by line before my very eyes.
My breath came in sharp, ragged pants. I tried to suppress the rising panic, to force my monstrous lungs to steady, but nothing worked.
'It hurts. It HURTS!'
The silent scream echoed inside my head.
I couldn't comprehend the absolute horror of this visceral feeling.
Throughout my brutal years in the gangs, I had always been the apathetic one, the enforcer who cast a cold shadow and rained down crushing pressure on everyone else.
Now, the tables were turned. I felt as though a spectral blade had been placed directly against my throat, slowly inching closer, right on the verge of breaking the skin.
I forced myself to close my eyes, trying desperately to steady my pulse. But every single time I looked back up at the bruised, darkening sky, those cruel, horrible, necessary words from the text were there.
They were words I had memorized long before this nightmare ever began, but I had never expected them to manifest this soon. They were the very sentences I had subconsciously waited for with a lingering sense of anxiety and dread, knowing their inevitability, yet completely underestimating the sheer gravity of their arrival.
Slowly, the peak of the panic attack began to recede, draining from my veins but leaving my massive green frame trembling in the brush. I clenched my fists until my knuckles popped, forcing my eyes open.
A deep, evolutionary trepidation swelled through my core as I raised my line of sight once more to witness the cataclysmic shifts in the heavens.
The Battle of the Gods has officially begun, I realized, my human mind racing. And now, the foreign souls will begin to slip in.
That was the hidden lore of Salvation in Pride. At this exact second on the timeline, a grand, invisible war had broken out among the divine pantheon, completely unbeknownst to the mortal races below. Yet, every monstrous creature aside from the protected Humans, Elves, and Dwarves could feel the enormous, crushing pressure the exact moment the weather fractured.
On this very day, five distinct human souls from Earth, including the protagonist, Davis, would transmigrate into this fantasy world, inheriting drastically different backgrounds, privileges, and races. In fact, the future antagonist's right-hand man was among those five arrivals.
But this cross-dimensional migration was merely one fraction of the impending chaos.
The war among the deities would rage on for several weeks, triggering a succession of terrifying natural disasters across the continent before a divine truce was finally brokered exactly two months from this first bolt of lightning.
Once the dust settled, the gods would begin selecting their mortal champions to wage a proxy war. According to the cosmic laws, each lesser deity was entitled to three champions, while the High Gods were restricted to two. The apex of the pantheon—the two supreme Arch Gods—were permitted only a single champion each.
Ragol, the blinding Sun God, was the Arch God of the Light Faction who would eventually choose Davis. Meanwhile, Ayasey, the Night Mother, the supreme Arch God of the Dark Faction, would bestow her absolute favor upon a monstrous beastman known in the later volumes as Jetos the Tyrant.
Every other lesser deity would eventually align themselves on either side of these two massive factions, dragging even the neutral gods into a continent-spanning meat grinder.
As these heavy calculations hammered my brain, my legs never stopped moving. I broke through the treeline and arrived back at our temporary camp, finding the rest of the warband still visibly shivering from the remnants of the divine pressure.
"Get up. We're leaving," I barked with a heavy scowl, stepping up to an oak tree and violently wrenching my pitch-black battle axe from the wood where it had been embedded.
The Level 7 orc scrambled forward, forced to hoist the heavy sack of smuggled human weapons over his shoulder. The remaining brawlers salvaged whatever greatswords and iron axes they could carry, eagerly equipping the superior steel over their crude clubs.
With our warband fully armed and my blood-red eyes locked on the trail ahead, I led the Black Moon Clan straight toward the Ironbark settlement.
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The Goblin Exodus (Historical Overview)
Two weeks prior to our march, Lovan, the awkward and lazy goblin Alchemist, had just returned to his clan's ancestral camp alongside a small hunting party. He had spent his days sequestered in a makeshift laboratory, desperately trying to synthesize new chemical formulas which he believes would elevate his clan's status, keeping his head down to avoid notice.
But Voru, his aggressive old Chieftain, had immediately dragged Lovan by his tattered collar straight to Hilo, the clan's ambitious shaman, to satisfy her growing curiosity about his experiments.
Hilo had tried to manipulate Lovan, claiming that the brutal Mountain Bloodhorn Clan was rapidly squeezing into Ironbark territory. She insisted that they should preemptively surrender and merge their bloodline into the Bloodhorn horde. Lovan, driven purely by a lazy desire for comfort, flatly opposed the idea.
Frustrated by his defiance and seeing no support from the lazy alchemist, Hilo snapped. She unleashed a volatile burst of curse magic, intending to liquefy Lovan's organs on the spot, but her unstable spell accidentally triggered a catastrophic chain reaction among the volatile chemicals in the makeshift lab.
The resulting explosion tore the tent apart. Coincidentally, the Mountain Bloodhorn Clan chose that exact moment to launch a surprise raid on the camp, turning the interior into a chaotic slaughterhouse. Lovan, crawling out from the burning wreckage of his lab with singed skin, didn't look back; his only purpose was immediate survival, and he fled into the dense woods.
Chieftain Voru died fighting on the frontlines. Meanwhile, the towering Bloodhorn horn captain who had already evolved into a massive, terrifying Hobgoblin—confronted Hilo. Sneering down at her pathetic curses, he barked that she was an unsuitable horn for his horde before completely crushing her skull beneath the weight of his iron warhammer.
Seeing their leadership annihilated, dozens of surviving Ironbark goblins scrambled into the forest, falling in line behind Lovan's retreat. For many moons, the shattered clan ran blindly through the northern wilderness, with Lovan reluctantly acting as their leader simply because he was the strongest survivor left.
They never truly figured out when the Mountain Bloodhorn Clan finally abandoned the chase. They simply kept running until they stumbled upon the secluded ravine, establishing the crude mining site where I had tracked them.
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Torug's POV
Presently, the brush parted. The Black Moon Clan stepped into the clearing directly in front of the Ironbark perimeter, our newly acquired human steel catching the light, our massive frames and menacing faces casting a terrifying shadow over the ravine.
The goblins froze. A second later, the camp erupted into pure, shrieking hysteria, the small creatures scrambling over logs and rocks like scattered insects.
Amidst the chaos, a goblin with dirty, mud-brown skin pushed through the crowd. He was draped in a torn, oversized black robe, clearly a piece of luxury clothing they had stripped from a dead merchant convoy.
Looking closer, I realized something that made my brow twitch: almost every single goblin in this camp wore some form of crude, stitched clothing. I glanced back at my own bare-chested warband, and then down at my own primitive leather loincloth. This complete lack of modesty had been bothering my human sensibilities for days, but I had continually repeated the mantra that monsters didn't need to care about clothing.
But seeing this...
It looked like these vermin possessed some variant of a tailoring skill, however primitive. It was a humiliating realization.
"Orc! Uhm...W- what do you want?!" Lovan shouted, pitching his high, grating voice as loud as his lungs allowed. Despite his bold stance, I could see the visible tremor running through his small shoulders.
"Are you the Chieftain...?" I growled, my deep baritone carrying the full weight of my First Circle evolution as I locked my eyes onto his form to trigger the system.
[Name: Lovan Ironbark
Race: Elite Goblin
Class: Alchemist
Level: 15 (Order of the First Circle)
Power Rating: 2683
Relationship: None]
Lovan looked around at my armed warband, his face twisting into an expression that looked like a deeply bitter, helpless laugh. "Y- yes."
Seeing the confirmation of his stats, a massive wave of relief washed through my chest. My primary fear had been that the alchemist had already breached the threshold into a Second Circle evolution. Judging by his raw power rating and his Class profile, my initial tactical suspicion was completely validated—this goblin's attribute points were heavily stacked into Intelligence and Mana, leaving his physical stats severely lacking.
With that structural confidence anchoring my stance, I took a massive step forward, drove the butt of my black battle axe into the earth, and boomed, "I, Torug Blackmoon, Chief of the Black Moon Clan, challenge you to a Trial of Combat! Witnessed under the sacred Oath of the Night Mother, any who loses this day shall eternally serve the victor!"
The moment the final syllable left my tusks, the ambient mana in the ravine spiked. The winds went completely violent, howling through the canyon as they rapidly manifested a translucent, swirling barrier of kinetic force around the two of us, carving out a spacious, sealed dueling arena in the center of the dirt.
"W... Wait!!" Lovan shrieked, his yellow eyes bulging in absolute shock.
The goblin was completely thrown off—first by the terrifying, articulate intelligence coming from an orc, and second by the fact that I had successfully invoked an ancient cosmic law. This specific Trial of Combat was an archaic, systemic mechanic established exclusively for creatures aligned with the so-called Devil Faction. It was an incredibly rare trump card that a mortal could only trigger twice in their entire lifespan.
Behind the barrier, Dabok's ancient, wrinkled face stiffened in profound shock. The elder shaman stared at my back, his jaw slightly slack. To a primitive orc, these sacred oaths were ancient mysteries hidden in lost tomes or forbidden religious scrolls scattered across Luegad; a regular borderland brawler should never have known the exact phrasing required to bind the Night Mother's attention. I was likely one of the only entities in this entire sector who remembered five or six of these hidden system paths, purely because I had analyzed their usage while reading the novel back on Earth.
Lovan stared speechlessly at the howling walls of wind. He shifted his weight, his instincts screaming at him to turn tail and run as he usually did, but the kinetic barrier was absolute. Escape was mechanically impossible. He forced his eyes back to my frame, realizing his back was against the wall.
With a trembling, clawed hand, Lovan reached into the folds of his tattered black robe and pulled out a small, reinforced leather pouch. The moment the pouch was drawn, the duel formally initiated. Yet, neither of us made the first move.
Outside the gale, Dabok narrowed his eyes, his entire focus locking onto my stance. I had been continuously defying his expectations ever since I took the mantle of Chieftain. Beside him, Urim was sporting a wide, toothy, thoroughly confident grin. My biological brother possessed a completely blind, unwavering trust in my martial prowess ever since he watched me chop Olog in half.
Inside the ring, Lovan nervously wiped a thick bead of sweat from his brow, his fingers rolling a pair of glowing, sapphire-blue marble spheres within his palm.
I squinted, my street-fighter instincts analyzing his posture. 'Another highly expressive, human-like monster', the thought flashed through my mind.
Watching the goblin chief shiver and twitch with nerves, a wave of confusion hit me. In the text of Salvation in Pride, Lovan Ironbark was never portrayed as a timid, cowardly character. He was supposed to be a ruthless, cunning saboteur. 'Did the early timeline shift change his temperament, or is he just acting?'
Suuii!
Without a single micro-movement of warning, Lovan's wrist snapped. A projectile cut through the air with a vicious whistle.
My reflexes, honed by decades of street combat, took over before my brain could process the trajectory. I threw my left arm up, intercepting the projectile perfectly with the thick steel blade of my pitch-black battle axe.
CLINK!
The sapphire marble shattered against the iron. Instantly, a violent, crystalline wave of frost erupted from the point of impact, rapidly encrusting the heavy blade of my axe in thick ice and spreading down across the dirt floor beneath my boots, dropping the temperature to a freezing low.
My eyes narrowed into a dangerous, icy glare as the frost nipped at my green knuckles.
'An elemental frost bomb,' I analyzed, my grip tightening on the handle. 'This class specialization is going to be incredibly troublesome.'