Chapter 36: Whitedeath
The forest had gone almost black.
The sun had dropped behind the canopy, and under the cover only a grey light remained, dying out between the trunks. The ground vanished beneath ferns and roots. Not a breath of air.
I crouched on a high branch, my back to the trunk, silent.
It smelled of wet moss and bark. And beneath that, heavier, a reek of sweat and raw meat drifting up from the west. I knew it by heart now. It had been waking me every morning for weeks.
I opened the Eye.
The dark of the forest filled with currents. The mana of the sap, slow and green, climbing through the trees. That of the water, lower, beneath the earth. And three thicker, murkier knots of it, moving between the trunks a hundred paces off, shifting with every step.
Three orcs. They hadn’t caught my scent.
I closed the Eye and followed them. Branch to branch, above them, without setting foot on the ground.
I didn’t want to kill them yet. I wanted to see where they were going.
Below, they were talking.
"Me hungry." The biggest, in front. "You say village that way."
"No. Me say not that way." The second stopped, scratched his skull, looked at his own fingers. "...Or that way."
"You say that way before."
"Before, yes. Now, no."
The third brought up the rear.
Smaller than the other two, leaner. Snout in the air, sniffing every couple of steps.
He was the one I was watching.
The time I’d spent here had taught me to read them. There were the ones who charged and the ones who ran, and you spotted the second kind by exactly this — that way of sniffing the air before they knew why. This one wouldn’t fight. This one would run.
And an orc that runs always runs toward its own.
That was all I needed from him. A guide.
He stopped dead, snout pointed up.
"It smells," he said.
"It always smells." The big one didn’t even turn around.
"No. It smells white."
The other two went still.
There was a silence. The time it took, with them, for the thought to reach the far end.
"...Whitedeath?"
Right.
He’d done half the work for me. The two big ones would want to fight. The lean one would want to run. All that was left was to sort them.
I let go of the branch.
I dropped between the first two before either had looked up. Laia left the sheath in the same motion.
The big one started to turn. Too late. The blade went in under the ribs, where the leather of his cuirass stopped, rose, came back out. He didn’t cry out — with them, the pain runs late. He looked down at the blood soaking his hip, then his legs gave and he collapsed, forehead in the ferns.
The second had time to cock his fist. Not to throw it.
Naia opened his wrist to the bone. His hand fell open on its own, the weapon dropped, and while he stared at fingers that no longer answered him, I drove Laia up under his jaw to the guard. He went over backward, heavy, and stayed on his back.
I turned to the lean one, a saber in each hand.
He didn’t charge. Of course he didn’t.
He took a step back, his little eyes going from the two bodies to my face. Then he did exactly what I’d expected: he spun on his heel and bolted.
I sheathed the blades and went after him.
He fled straight ahead, never looking back, smashing through everything in his path. Trunks gave way in front of him; he went through them without slowing, throwing off splinters and clods of earth. Behind him the forest lay flattened, a trench torn open for dozens of meters.
All he could think about was running. Getting back to his own.
Perfect.
I drew level with him without pushing the pace. He turned his head, saw me running beside him, my breathing even, and his terror climbed a notch.
"Groink... leave me, Whitedeath."
"So you know me."
"You white. You the death."
His arm came around without warning. A backhand, the whole weight of his run behind it.
I saw it coming long before he threw it. The mana rising into his shoulder, the second charge already packing itself in behind — the one that only waited for my dodge to burst open at my back. They’d been serving me the same blow for weeks. I’d learned it the way they had, and I knew it better than he did.
One step aside would have put me square in it. I took three.
The fist split empty air. The second charge blew out behind me, a snap of compressed air that flattened the trees around us and threw up a wall of dust exactly where a beginner would have been standing.
I came back level with him.
"That," I said, "used to work the first week."
He smashed through one last line of trees, and the forest opened all at once.
Ahead of us, nothing grew. A wide circle of bare earth, the trees torn out to the last one, piled into banks along the edges. The ground packed down, leveled. Prepared well in advance.
And on it, ranged in an arc, a hundred orcs. Standing. Armed. Waiting.
My guide stopped in the middle of them, turned to me, and puffed out his chest.
"You stupid, Whitedeath. Me trap you."
He was proud of himself.
I’d been following him for the last half hour precisely so he’d lead me here.
Might as well let him have it.
"Nooo?!" I stopped dead, one hand to my cheek. "This was all planned?"
He nodded, very serious, pleased I’d finally understood.
I gave him the smile back. Then I let it drop, and the urge to play along with it.
The stares of a hundred orcs pressed on me, weapons ready, the circle closed. They were waiting for it to start.
So I moved.
Not backward — into the middle. I drove straight into the thick of their ranks, where they were packed tightest, and they closed around me roaring, axes and maces raised on every side.
I bent my knees, and I struck the ground with my fist.
Nothing.
A whole second, nothing at all. Just my fist against the earth, and the orcs already swinging their weapons down at the back of my neck.
Then the mana let go.
Boom.
Everything I’d packed into that fist blew out into the ground at once. The earth burst under me and the shockwave leapt outward in a ring, heaving the plain up in whole slabs. The ones around me went with it — thrown into the air, swallowed by the cracks, cut down at the legs by the slabs that reared up. An orc lifted off beside me and came down farther away on the back of his neck, still. Two others rolled into the hole that had opened under them.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 66 — Path of the Spellblade applied
Double Impact. The skill the little orc had shown me earlier — the blow that strikes twice, the second charge after the first. Sharpened by my fusions, by a body that had grown stronger in a few weeks than it had ever been.
They’d been serving it to me for weeks. I was handing it back.
The dust rose all at once, thick, and hung suspended over the crater.
I got to my feet at its center.
For a moment, no one moved.
Then one of them howled — a low, guttural cry that woke ten others, then fifty, then the whole plain. The entire line surged at once. They poured in, from everywhere at the same time, a tide of leather and iron closing over me, hammering the ground hard enough to shake it.
At last.
"Infinite Arsenal."
The sky split open. Thirty-odd lances, longer than tree trunks, spinning on themselves — and they came down in the same breath that I threw myself forward.
A lance ran three orcs through in a line on my left and pinned them together in the earth while I opened a fourth one’s throat in front of me. The body sagged; I pushed off his shoulder to hurl myself into the gap, and two more lances came down on either side of my path, gutting the ground, throwing up sprays of earth and dead without my losing a step.
I no longer chose my footing. It came on its own.
A knee, a bent back, a fallen weapon, a shoulder giving way — each thing became a place to push off from, one more step up into the mass. I ran on them as much as between them, and everywhere I passed I left a blade opened and a body down, while overhead the lances kept punching through the ranks I couldn’t reach.
There were too many of them. That was exactly what made it beautiful.
They fouled one another, trod on each other to get to me, packed into the space I’d just left. A mace came down at me; I dropped under it and it caved in the skull of the orc charging at my back. Naia rose into the first one’s belly. A lance took a third above us. Three dead in the same beat, and I was already moving on.
"It’s Whitedeath!"
"Kill him! Kill Whitedeath!"
They screamed my name from every side at once, a hundred throats, and not one of them could land a hand on me.
One craftier than the rest feinted — cocked high, held it, waited for my dodge to loose the real blow, low. The delayed strike. The one they’d taught me.
I didn’t dodge it where he expected. I stepped inside it, inside his guard, too close for his bulk to be worth anything. My fist found his solar plexus, mana already packed in. I struck once. Nothing. He had time to smile.
Then the second charge let go, inside him. He folded in two, ribs burst from within, and while he dropped I was pushing off his shoulder to leap the next rank.
Double Impact. Far better at point-blank.
Dash. I crossed the five blocking my way in a single stroke and reappeared at their backs before they’d begun to turn. Three fell under my blades before the other two understood where I’d gone — and a lance came down to finish those two while I was already running elsewhere.
[ Level Up ]
> Level 67 — Path of the Spellblade applied
It didn’t stop. It couldn’t stop. Every second, a lance punched through, a blade opened, a foothold flung me farther — all at once, without a single dead beat, one continuous motion that crossed the plain and cut down everything across its width.
The tide that had swallowed me was already ebbing back into corpses.
A hundred at the start. They fell far too fast to count.
When only a handful were left standing, in the middle of a field strewn with their own, the cries changed. It wasn’t rage anymore.
"Whitedeath... too strong."
"We can’t. We can’t kill him—"
Some were backing away. Others had already dropped their weapons.
Then the ground shook differently.
One step. Then another. Slow. Heavy. Each impact came up through my soles before the sound even reached me.
The last lances died out one by one in my hand. I let them go.
At the far end of the plain, the dust was parting around something coming through.
The orcs still standing had frozen. They weren’t looking at me anymore. They were looking behind me, toward the back of the field, and on their faces the fear I’d put there had given way to another. Older. Deeper.
They were more afraid of what was coming than of me.
He came out of the dust.
The word orc no longer covered it. Three heads above his own kind. A mass of muscle under grey skin seamed with scars, every step sinking a finger’s depth into the earth.
He dragged a two-handed weapon one-handed — black iron and rough stone, so heavy the edge cut a furrow behind him.
One of the survivors threw himself toward him, his voice cracked with relief.
"King! Orc king! Help us, Whitedeath is too—"
The king didn’t slow.
His free hand closed over the orc’s skull and covered nearly all of it. He lifted him off the ground with one arm. The other kicked at empty air, clawed at his wrist with both hands.
The king didn’t even look at him.
He squeezed.
The skull gave between his fingers with a wet sound, and with a turn of his arm he tore what was left of it from the body. The trunk dropped to one side. He opened his hand to be rid of it, without slowing his march.
Around him, nothing moved.
"The weak," he said — a low, deep voice that carried to me without effort, "have no place in my army."
Then he raised his eyes. And he looked at me.
My fingers closed around Laia’s grip, then Naia’s.
"...Finally."