Chapter 37: Orkhan
Over these weeks hunting orcs, I’d torn a whole pile of skills from their corpses. Double Impact was one of them. And the way I had with goblins, I’d married them together — until only two were left, two broad skills that summed up everything this people knew how to do.
The first.
[ Warrior’s Stride — Lv. 3 ] — Heavy movement and charges. Anchors the body into the ground with each step and transfers its full mass into the momentum.
The second.
[ Law of the Strongest — Lv. 3 ] — Heavy close combat. Every strike aims to break. The force of the blow grows with the raw strength of the one who lands it.
But there was a difference with the goblins.
The two wouldn’t fuse. Not the way Goblinia had. However many times I offered one to the other, the System stayed silent. Something was missing.
So I’d gone back to hunting. Days spent watching orcs, dissecting every blow, every gesture, every way they moved — looking for the missing piece.
Nothing.
Not one of these orcs had shown me a single thing I didn’t already know.
There was only one explanation left. What I was missing, only one of them held — the one none of his soldiers could imitate. Their chief. And for a month now, I hadn’t really been trying to wipe out this forest.
I’d been waiting for him.
Now he was here, in front of me. This monster of muscle and scars. And somewhere under that mountain of flesh, the last piece I was after.
He charged.
The ground shook under him, already cracked by my Double Impact earlier, slabs of earth still standing giving way beneath his steps. A wall coming straight at me.
Goblinia kept me steady. My body found its own footing in the broken ground, without my thinking about it. I opened the Eye of Infinity to its peak, until I could see the mana flowing through his muscles before the muscles themselves moved.
I had to read all of it. Not take a single one of those blows — one would be enough.
His weapon rose two-handed, high, and came down hard enough to split the earth in two. I slipped aside with an oblique step; the iron buried itself where I’d stood, up to the haft, throwing up a spray of dirt. Without pause, his free fist came round in a hook toward the angle the first blow was meant to open — where an off-balance opponent should have been.
I wasn’t there. I’d already slid to the other side, and his fist split empty air.
He was fast. Far faster than any orc I’d crossed. He wrenched his weapon from the ground with one motion and pressed on, low backhand, rising blow, the iron whistling on every pass, his footing tearing up the earth at each pivot. No dead beat. Where his weapon missed, his fist followed; where his fist missed, his shoulder drove in.
And I stayed inside it. Under the blows, between them, the Eye wide open, every trajectory drawn a fraction before it left. I blocked nothing — I couldn’t have blocked anything. I slipped, by a hair, every time, just enough.
Off in the distance, the last orcs still standing didn’t move. They watched.
He struck again, and the mana rose into his arm a certain way. A skill armed itself.
Not that one.
A charged backhand, a shockwave packed behind the iron. I went under it, the wash of it whipping my hair.
Another swell of mana. Another blow. Another technique.
Still not that one.
Blow after blow, he emptied his arsenal on me. And all of it, I already knew. Every skill he armed, I’d seen a hundred times on his soldiers, learned, absorbed, fused. Nothing new. Nothing I was after.
I was starting to lose patience.
So I decided to force it.
His weapon came down again, vertical, from his full height. This time I didn’t slip aside right away. I let it come, close, until I felt the air compress in front of the iron — and at the last breath, I pivoted off its line. The weapon slammed into the ground exactly where I’d been, and lodged there, deep.
One second. His weapon was stuck, his arm stretched down.
I sprang.
My foot came down on his outstretched forearm, and I ran up the length of it, toward the shoulder, light, my footing precise. He saw it, let go of his weapon, and his other fist crashed down at me to flatten me against his own arm.
I felt it rise before it left. I didn’t pull away — not yet. I stayed square on its path, his closed fist swelling in my vision, until he no longer had time to change course. Only then did I let myself drop, flat, between two of his closing fingers.
His fist smashed into his own forearm with a dull shock that tore a grunt out of him.
I’d already rebounded. One last push off his fist, and I hauled myself up onto his skull in a single leap.
I drew Laia and Naia in the same motion, as I landed.
Three lines. Fast, precise, across the back of his neck, where the grey skin was stretched tightest — the blood sprang on the third. Then I shoved off his skull with both feet to fling myself backward, out of reach, the sabers already back in guard.
The king roared.
A roar of pain that rolled across the whole plain.
Three red lines across his neck. The blood ran down his grey shoulders.
Around us, the murmurs rose.
"The king... the king bleeds."
"Whitedeath... to the orc king..."
The king was breathing harder now. He began to circle me, at a measured pace, and I turned with him, never letting him out of my sight.
"Whitedeath. You good fighter."
"You too, orc king."
He stopped.
"I show you what makes me the king. Not just an orc."
And his mana went wild.
I saw it through the Eye before I saw it on his body. The mana churned inside him, turned on itself, folded layer over layer — he was compressing it, packing it into a smaller and smaller space, until it shook with the strain of holding, a charge knotted so tight it seemed about to tear him open from within.
Then he roared.
A cry that came from the bottom of his chest and rolled across the whole plain, so deep I felt it in my ribs. The ground fractured under his feet, in a star, his pressure alone enough to split the earth. The air around him began to ripple, scorching, the way it does over a furnace.
My heart clenched all at once.
That’s it.
That’s it!
His body overheated. The grey skin stretched to breaking, the veins standing out along his arms, his neck, his temples, thick, black with that compressed mana surging back into every fiber of muscle. His scars deepened. His fists clenched so hard the blood beaded between his fingers. He seemed to grow, to swell, steam rising off his shoulders into the evening air.
And when he charged again, it was something else.
Stronger. Faster. A different creature.
He was barely ten meters off, and he closed the distance in a single beat. His weapon split the air at a speed that had nothing to do with the orc from before — I dodged it by a hair, and the wash of the blow alone flattened the dust behind me for ten paces. The next one grazed my ribs. I was giving ground now, step by step — and while I dodged, I kept trying to redo what I’d just seen. Knot my own mana. Compress it the way he had.
It wouldn’t take. The mana slid, came undone, refused to pack down.
Again.
Nothing.
His right came round. Too fast. I threw all my mana into my forearm to parry, in time — but the impact still sent me back, both feet off the ground, my arm numb to the shoulder, before I rolled through the dirt to soften it.
I got up. He was already charging.
I shut my eyes.
"Whitedeath... crazy."
"Whitedeath close eyes. Whitedeath know. Over for him."
Focus, Kuro. You can do this.
I stopped seeing him, hearing him, feeling the ground shake under his run. Only my mana was left. I took it, and I did exactly as he had — turned it on itself, folded it, packed it down again and again, until it shook.
And it held.
[ New skill acquired ]
[ Berserk — Lv. 1 ] — Compresses the mana to the extreme and drives it through the whole body at multiplied speed, amplifying strength and speed for as long as the charge holds.
My whole body caught fire.
I understood, in the same second, what it really was. It wasn’t my flesh growing stronger or faster — it was the mana. A state where it ran everywhere at once, at a mad speed, gorging every muscle, every nerve, carrying my body far past what it could do on its own.
I opened my eyes again.
The king was on me, his weapon already swinging for my flank. I dodged — and this time without giving an inch, my body answering in a quarter-second where the moment before I’d have fallen back. I gave him a line of steel across the flank and broke away before his counter. He grunted.
Right. Next.
Warrior’s Stride. Berserk. Fuse.
[ Skill Fusion ]
[ Warrior’s Stride ] + [ Berserk ] -> [ Warrior’s Frenzy — Lv. 1 ]
My mana sped up again, in bursts — and my body with it, stronger in flashes, every charge, every step struck with a power that came and went like a pulse. I fell on him, the warrior’s anchoring in my legs, the berserk’s speed in my blood, and for the first time it was him who gave ground.
But it wasn’t over. Like with Goblinia, I knew. There was one more step.
Warrior’s Frenzy. Law of the Strongest. Fuse.
[ Skill Fusion ]
[ Warrior’s Frenzy ] + [ Law of the Strongest ] -> [ Orkhan — Unique Skill ]
[ Orkhan — Unique Skill ] - The forgotten combat style of an orc god from another age. An art of pure force and relentlessness in which compressed mana pours into every muscle, in which the body endures rather than breaks and strikes to shatter, and in which the one who advances never gives ground. Grants its bearer innate knowledge and mastery of the style.
And everything changed.
Like with Goblinia. My whole body grew stronger, again, and again, as the knowledge of an entire style poured itself into my flesh. I understood all at once, without having learned it, how the Berserk was meant to knot my mana, how every orc skill sharpened under that state, how the strength, the anchoring, and the speed became one and the same.
The knowledge of a whole people, poured into my veins in a single instant.
I sheathed my sabers.
I didn’t need them anymore.
What followed was no longer a fight. My fist found his jaw before he’d finished cocking his own. He staggered; I was already under his guard, a blow to the ribs, another, each strike carried by that mana racing through me at a mad speed. He struck empty air, I struck flesh. He backed away under a hail of blows he no longer saw coming, blood running from his neck, his flank, his mouth.
He stopped at last, out of breath, bleeding everywhere, barely standing.
"That was a good fight," I said. "Thanks to you, I’ve cracked the last skill I was missing."
The king lifted his head. And in spite of it all, he was smiling.
"I am glad to have met a fighter this strong, in my lifetime."
Then he charged.
One last time. Everything he had left in a single run, wild, desperate.
I just said:
"Dash."
I reappeared against his stomach. My fist settled there, flat, right against his skin, and my mana knotted at a speed I’d never reached before — not a second charge behind the first.
A third.
The first folded him in two. He spat, and it wasn’t a thread but a flood — liters of blood let go all at once, the organs burst from within, the breath torn clean out of his chest.
The second struck before he could fall, into the same point, driving deeper what the first had crushed. His flesh heaved, his ribs gave outward.
The third did the rest.
His torso exploded around my fist. The ribcage burst open at once, thrown apart in shards, everything it held scattered in a red spray that erupted from his back and rained down over the broken earth and the corpses of his soldiers. What was left of him sagged, emptied, around my still-outstretched arm.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 68 — Path of the Spellblade applied
>Level 69 — Path of the Spellblade applied
Silence fell back over the plain.
Then, all around, one by one, the last orcs still standing spoke.
"New orc king... Whitedeath..."
And they went down on one knee.