(Attendances… plz…)
….
Everything had happened so suddenly. There had been no warning, no time to prepare for a surprise attack, and certainly not from orcs.
Even if a traveler had come to their village a week ago and told them an orc army was on its way, they would have laughed.
Ogres were vastly stronger than orcs; it was a simple, undisputed fact of the forest. The idea of an orc invasion was a ridiculous joke.
But never, not even in their worst nightmares, did they imagine the orcs would dare to attack them on their own land, and in such ridiculous, overwhelming numbers.
The pink-haired ogre princess, still on the ground, looked up at the man who had just saved her. His red hair and white clothes seemed to glow in the dim, flickering light of the burning village, ruffling as if in a wind that wasn't there.
"Th-thank you," she stammered, her mind still reeling from the near-death experience, a torrent of gratitude and confusion washing over her.
"Thank you for saving me." In her shock, she didn't even question what a lone human was doing here, in the middle of a monster battlefield, at a time like this.
Before she could say anything more, a calm, steady voice asked, "Can you walk?"
She was still on the ground, her fine clothes now dirty and torn, but that was the last thing on her mind. "Y-yes, I can," she said, shakily pushing herself to her feet. "M-my brother… my friends…"
"Please, don't worry," the man said, his voice a comforting anchor in the chaos. "I will see if they are okay and save them." He then turned, his gaze falling on the fresh wave of orcs that were now charging toward them, their crude axes raised.
He bent down and picked up a katana that was lying in the mud, its blade caked with dirt, likely dropped by an ogre running in here or a fallen ogre.
He looked at the oncoming horde, a sea of hungry monsters. Then he vanished.
In the next instant, the charging orcs were cut down. Heads were sent flying through the air, bodies were bisected with clean, effortless strokes.
The princess could only watch in stunned silence.
There was no reasoning with these orcs; their eyes showed nothing but a single-minded, ravenous hunger, a desire to consume everything in their path, alive or dead, even their own fallen comrades.
The orc army numbered in the tens of thousands. The ogre village was small, with only a few hundred inhabitants.
Even a thousand orcs would have been more than enough to overrun them, especially an army that felt no fear and devoured everything in its path.
The princess could only watch, her mind struggling to keep up. In one blink, she was looking at the back of the red-haired man.
In the next, all she saw were the dismembered bodies of orcs falling to the ground, cut to pieces.
No matter how many charged toward her, they were all dead before they could get within ten feet of her.
Reinhard made his way deeper into the burning village, a silent, deadly whirlwind of steel.
He saw a red-haired ogre, his back against a burning hut, a massive blade in his hands, desperately fighting off wave after wave of orcs.
He was protecting a small group of ogre children who were huddled behind him, crying in terror.
"You filthy pigs!" the ogre roared, his greatsword cleaving an orc in two. But for every one he cut down, two more took its place.
He was strong, powerful, but he was being worn down by the sheer, unending numbers. He wouldn't be able to hold on for much longer.
Just as he was gasping for breath, a calm voice spoke from right behind him. "Need a hand?"
A flash of white swept past him, and the dozen orcs that had been about to overwhelm him were suddenly cut to pieces, their bodies collapsing to the ground in a bloody heap.
The one who had saved him was gone before the ogre even saw his face. He sank to one knee, finally able to catch his breath, before forcing himself to stand again. The fight wasn't over.
Reinhard moved through the village, a phantom of death, clearing out the orcs one pocket at a time.
The surviving ogres, fighting for their lives in disparate, desperate groups, would just hear a quiet voice from behind them, and then the monsters they were fighting would fall dead, never even seeing what had hit them.
Within a minute, the two thousand orcs that had been rampaging through their home were all dead.
But the village, while cleared of the immediate threat, was not yet safe.
Reinhard walked to the edge of the village, to the wide, trampled path the orcs had used to invade.
Beyond, stretching as far as the eye could see in the pale moonlight, was the rest of their army.
Thousands upon thousands of them, a silent, waiting sea of orcs and their armors, their hungry eyes fixed on the burning village.
The ogres he had saved, drawn by the sudden, eerie silence, made their way to the edge of the village.
They saw him then: a single man, a human, in pristine white clothes, standing between their ruined homes and the largest army of orcs they had ever seen.
Reinhard stood there, the borrowed, dirt-caked katana held loosely in his hand. "I presume surrender wasn't an option to begin with," he said, his voice quiet but carrying over the unnatural silence of the battlefield.
"I had hoped to resolve this more easily, but it's too late now. You have already killed so many innocents."
He took a simple, ready stance, and the world around him began to change. He began to draw in the magicules from the surroundings, from the air, from the earth from everywhere.
The dark clearing began to glow, the light centering on him, growing brighter and brighter and brighter until he was a shining beacon in the darkness, a figure of pure, radiant power.
To the ogres watching, their hearts filled with a mixture of terror and awe at seeing something incredible they haven't seen in their life, he looked like an avenging angel descending upon the battlefield.
The magicules swirled around him, a torrent of power that flowed up into the sky, creating a pillar of light that seemed to touch the sky.
And then, for a single, breathtaking moment, the world lost its color.
A flash of light so brilliant it bleached everything white, silencing all sound, a moment of absolute, deafening stillness.
And then, a boom that shook the very foundations of the forest.
A beam of pure, white energy erupted from the katana, a wave of destruction that shone like a new star in the night sky. It shot forward, vaporizing everything in its path.
The orcs, their eyes filled with nothing but a mindless hunger, simply ceased to exist.
Their bodies, their armor, their weapons, all of it was erased from the living world. This was not the small, controlled blast he had used on the spiders.
This was an attack that would span kilometers, a wave of absolute annihilation that would not stop until every single one of the ten thousand orcs that had come to slaughter this village was wiped from this forest.
….
A/N: hmmmmm…. sigh sorry for late chapter… i was binging clevatess.
Next two chapters are already on my discord.
Melatonin, spawn and many more on my discord … thanks for beta reading this fic and not to mention suggestions too.
Hoped you all liked the chapter and all.
And if you want to read ahead you can do it by just joining my discord server.
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