Lilly's gentle touch on his right shoulder snapped Aris out of his spiraling thoughts. "Brother, what happened?" she asked, her gaze dropping to his hands, still buried in his ruffled hair, though the trembling had finally stopped.
Meeting her eyes, he saw worry and confusion written across her face and forced a faint smile, rubbing his forehead. So that's how it settles. Focusing on something else, on her, had dampened the urge to leave, exactly as he'd suspected it would.
Even so, a lingering dread remained. He needed certainty about this thing, needed to understand as much as he could—whatever it was.
He looked at Lilly, his mind fighting itself. No. I shouldn't. She only got this far with so much difficulty. Forcing this on her might resurface everything. He stayed silent for a long moment, then finally gritted his teeth and looked away, toward the orc instead.
It has to be done. It has to be done. Some part of him already suspected, if she was under the same influence, she might simply forget the moment it happened, the same way he had. He stood abruptly, head snapping left, then right, then finally to her. "We have to hurry! Gather the meat! We have to escape this forest!"
Lilly tensed, her gaze darting to the orc, saliva still dripping from its fangs, its brutish face glazed in stupor. Then she looked at Aris, catching the panic etched across his own. Her expression twisted, eyes widening, dread crawling across her skin. She bolted toward the heap of loot against the right wall, rummaging through it in a frenzy.
Moments later, she returned clutching a cloth bundle of dried meat and one of the empty bamboo containers.
Aris remained frozen before his straw bed. Seeing him motionless, Lilly faltered, her expression clouding with confusion. Aris understood the unspoken question in her eyes. He clenched his fist and took a step forward.
True to his grim prediction, the instant she saw him move, she pivoted toward the cascade—then stopped. Her whole body seized, muscles locking rigid for three agonizing heartbeats, caught mid-step with nowhere to go.
Then, just as suddenly, she unlocked, her head dropped to the bundle of meat in her hands. She fumbled it open, forced herself to chew mechanically on a strip, and turned back to Aris, unaware, it seemed, that anything had happened at all.
Every second of it sent cold sweat tracing down his spine, his own thoughts spiraling faster than he could hold them still. "As expected. Intent. It's about intent." He mumbled it, sitting back on the bed, his grip instantly finding the bow and the poison-smeared arrow.
He turned toward Lilly, who had walked back to his side. For the briefest moment, he'd hoped, hoped the entity was targeting him alone, punishing him specifically for spying on it, that Lilly was untouched by its reach. But this force stretched wider than that.
"Here," she murmured, extending a strip of dried meat. He parted his lips, and she fed it to him, as a sudden giggle escaped her, all of it, the panic, the terror, the frantic running, gone from her awareness as if it had never happened.
Aris smiled slightly, then shifted his gaze back to the bow, the notched arrow, and finally the dazed orc. He stayed silent, chewing, his mind dissecting the phenomenon. What struck him hardest was that she remembered none of it—not even a flicker of confusion over why she was suddenly holding a bundle of dried meat, why she was short of breath.
A cold tremor seized his body as he grasped the sheer fortune of possessing Prime, capable of safeguarding his memories from whatever this thing was doing to hers. Yet even with Prime, he'd only been granted a faint glimmer of light. Understanding the trap gave him no means to break it.
I can't just give up. I have to do something. Even if I have no chance of leaving, I can't let them go untroubled.
He stood and watched Lilly return the bundle and container to the heap of loot. What about her? I can't draw the enemy's attention if— He stopped, a bitter realization cutting through the thought. What would it matter? You can't escape anyway. Her future and yours are already doomed.
He turned his gaze to the orc, then recalled the boulder at the bottom of the pool, blocking the entrance to the underground. Hide. What if I hide underground? Become neighbors with the enemy.
The idea sounded absurd. But the closer he stayed to the threat, somewhere they'd least expect to find him hiding, the better his odds of survival might actually become.
He weighed it over, finding the primary obstacle was moving the three-meter boulder. Using an orc might have been tempting, but a boulder of that scale weighed between twenty and twenty-five tons, no single orc could budge it. Kidnapping five more and poisoning them into compliance carried its own dangers, and worse, the absence of five at once risked alerting the chief.
Explosives offered a faster solution, but the detonation's noise would draw attention, and procuring volatile materials remained a massive hurdle, though the basalt stones he'd repurposed as hot stones hinted that a volcano might once have existed here.
Shelving both ideas for now, he returned to the orc and resumed the interrogation.
For minutes Aris pressed forward, question after question, the hallucinogen's window narrowing, eleven minutes remaining and every revelation only deepened the crushing weight of his predicament.
"What happened to the harvested humans?"
The orc's dazed face twisted with bewilderment, as if silently demanding, How can the mastermind be asking me this?
Aris seized the cue instantly. "Answer part of Mighty Valrog's questions," he said, leaving no gap for it to recover clarity, though the poison coursing through its veins had already dulled its cognition.
"This one knows they are offered to Mighty Volrag. It is their honor to be gazed upon by Mighty Volrag."
Aris absorbed the words, the answer aligning with his expectations, yet skepticism gnawed at him. Would a true god require sacrifices of ordinary humans? If strength or flesh were the goal, orcs vastly outperformed humans. Perhaps souls? He forcefully reined in his racing thoughts. One question at a time. Every new answer risked spawning more questions he had no means to answer, just a waste of time.
He swept his gaze over the orc's body, tracking the dwindling clock inwardly. Its eyes were bloodshot, veins bulging from its thick neck down to massive arms, unmistakable signs that the agony from its severed limbs was fighting through the poison, dragging clarity back with it.
Even amid the despair and confusion, the rippling density of those muscles involuntarily sparked his fascination with the so-called sacred body-forging art.
"You claimed you reached the limit of the strength aspect." Aris flicked his eyes to the data panel hovering before his chest.
[Name: Olod | Strength: 5.5 | Agility: 4.9 | Vitality: 3.1]
If its strength limit was 5.5, its baseline stat must have been 3.0 at minimum, perhaps even lower. But for now, he chose to give an untrained orc a baseline of 3.0. Better to overestimate them than underestimate them.
Will I be able to reach 5.5? The question hung in his mind, heavier than he wanted to admit. If this art truly had a hard ceiling, and the very phrase "reaching limit" implied it did, then a human starting from a baseline of 1.0 might, if he was being generous, reach 3.0.
Triple the average. Nothing to dismiss. But the thought that this "limit" might simply an orc's starting line scorched through his mind like acid, leaving a bitter, unacceptable taste in his mouth.
He clenched his fist, his gaze hardening with grim resolve. I will shatter it. I will surpass it.
An undefined limit, after all, could just as easily mean a limitless one.
As time was running out, he pivoted back to the orc, its eyes flickering with agony where its limbs had been amputated.
"Lastly," Aris pressed, "Mighty Volrag doesn't choose sacrifices solely by physical prowess, but also by the strength of the mind."
The orc stayed silent. Its drug-induced haze was fading, waves of agony surging up from its ruined lower body, yet it instinctively fought to cling to the words echoing from its presumed chieftain. As the poison wore off and the end drew near, coherent words grew harder to extract.
"Ask! Ask! This… one will… answ—"
"Describe the body-forging art for the strength aspect." Aris interjected as Prime began recording.
"The body-forging art of the strength aspect… th… the breathing pattern matters. Then the meat—humans. Then fighting." The orc's words came out struggling, its tone thick with pain.
Aris glanced at the timer. Three minutes remaining. He zeroed in on the part he judged most crucial. "Describe the breathing method." The rest was already clear enough.
The moment the words left his mouth, the orc began to inhale deeply, its abdomen caving inward. A full minute passed, and no matter what Aris commanded, it ignored him, locked in.
Several short exhales followed, which he let pass, simply tracking the act with Prime. Then came another deep breath, this time with its abdomen held rigidly flat, followed by several more rapid cycles of inhale and exhale.
All the while, Prime analyzed, mapping the shifts inside its body and feeding the live discoveries back to Aris, whose eyes went wide with shock. Its heart wasn't simply beating faster—it was pausing, holding for a fraction of a second longer than any living heart should dare, then slamming forward in a single, brutal contraction that punched blood through its arteries like a fist.
Pause. Surge. Pause. Surge. It was a rhythm too controlled to be a malfunction and too violent to be anything but deliberate. For the briefest moment, he wished he had the eyes to see it directly; the arterial blood surging through its veins at speeds Prime flagged as utterly suicidal, slamming into cardiac chambers with a force that would rupture a human heart instantly.
But an orc's heart which was three times more massive than a human's, its muscle wrapped in equally dense tissue, absorbed the shock easily, driving hyper-oxygenated blood toward the brain before violently redistributing it through the muscles throughout its body.
Before he could process the full scope of Prime's readout, the orc's eyelids fluttered open, vacant and dazed for a fleeting second. Then raw agony twisted its face, instantly replaced by a wave of fury so violent it whipped its left arm toward Aris, who was already springing backward, arrow drawn and nocked.
Its right hand lashed out as well, straining against the chains fixed to the iron spikes. They held, though barely as the fury behind the movement fighting through a body already gutted by three days of starvation, poison, and amputation.
Thwack!
Two arrows pierced its chest. It only gritted its teeth and let loose a roar so violent it dropped Lilly to her knees near the cascade.
Aris planted his stance and fired again.