Ahead, where the rows of houses converged at the gate, two more guards leaned on their spears before the entrance—a thick wooden barrier he estimated at four meters tall. One guard was talking; the other let out a rough, grating laugh that carried all the way to Aris, even from dozens of meters away.
In the open space before the gate, children raced along dusty paths, their bare feet slapping against the dry earth. A girl chased a boy with a wooden sword, both of them laughing, a dog bounding at their heels. Women passed through the gate with clay pots balanced on their hips, talking quietly as they returned from the river in the forest.
The smell of baking bread drifted from the nearby stalls. Aris passed them with greedy eyes, but the owners offered only hard, judging stares. Beside a wooden house, a man hammered a fence post, his young daughter smiling at his side.
Then another man caught his eye. He sat sharpening a blade, the whetstone rasping with each slow, scraping stroke. The face surfaced instantly in the biochip's storage: one of the men who had beaten Rill to death. Anger surged before Aris could stop it. He turned sharply away.
Through the open gate, he spotted three men emerging from the tree line several hundred meters away. They came into focus slowly, hauling a carcass between them, it was an overgrown deer, nearly two meters long and perhaps two thousand pounds. As they neared the entrance, the details sharpened: dark blood smeared across its fur, flies buzzing in a cloud around the wound.
What struck him most was the size. It had taken five men to carry it. Suddenly, one of them shouted, and a woman hurried toward them, a heavy knife already in hand.
Aris watched the skinning begin, then forced his focus back to his goal. He approached one of the food stalls. The seller behind the counter met his eyes with a complicated expression, pity mingled with unease, but the old man said nothing. Aris noted it and let it pass; his attention was already snagged by the aroma of fresh bread. The old man slipped smoothly into his sales pitch. "What do you need, young man? I have brown bread, honey-baked, and loaves with honey inside."
"How much for the brown bread?" Aris asked, triggering both Scan and Analyze simultaneously.
[Name: Unknown | Strength: 1.3 | Agility: 1.0 | Vitality: 0.9]
Just as I guessed. The average hovers around 1.0. He reached into his pocket.
"Two copper coins," the old man said.
Aris dug into his pocket and pulled out two copper coins, halving his meager wealth. He pressed them into the old man's calloused palm and took the loaf. It was hard, but the crust still carried a faint warmth from the oven. Narrowing his eyes, he activated the biochip, and a translucent blue panel flickered into view above the bread.
[Object: Brown Bread | Composition: 46% Coarse Barley, 28% Crushed Millet, 12% Tuber Starch, 4% Husk, 2% Ash]
[Quality: Low | Nutritional Value: Moderate | Digestibility: Low]
"Ash and husks," he thought as the panel flickered and vanished. "Just filler for the stomach. I'll need better food soon."
He turned to leave, the baker's gaze watching his back with a heavy, unreadable expression. Aris tore off a piece of the bread. It was dense and flavorless. Even the most incompetent baker back on Earth could have produced something better but he swallowed anyway.
He moved through the streets with measured, deliberate strides, shoulder to shoulder with the villagers. Behind his eyes, the biochip swept every body that passed within its one-meter scan range, his vision flickering with a relentless stream of scrolling data.
Most of them were women. The men were scarce, the majority were out in the forest, hunting wild beasts, and the few who remained, Aris avoided. He wasn't ready to test how hard their fists could be. More than that, he didn't want to know what this body would force him to do if he locked eyes with a face that had beaten its owner to death.
For minutes, he recorded their stats as they passed, but the villagers watched him in return. Their eyes held a thick, wary tension. They were waiting for the crack—a tremor of grief for his sister and wife, a flash of mourning, a flare of suicidal rage aimed at the Chief's house. They wanted the drama that would follow.
Aris simply tore another piece of the hard bread and chewed with slow, steady rhythm, his face a mask of false calm.
After scanning dozens of villagers, his theory solidified. The baseline for a healthy adult registered at a flat 1.0. Women, children, and the frail flickered in the decimals, their vitals dimmed by malnutrition or age. Laborers and load-carriers edged slightly higher, their frames toughened by work, but even the most capable men he'd mapped so far averaged only 1.4. Still, Aris kept his mind open to the possibility of higher numbers.
For minutes, he moved through the village as though navigating a low-fidelity simulation. Life carried on with an insulting domestic normalcy, as if two girls hadn't died in the depths of the forest.
A strange dissonance settled in his chest. "How can they live like this?" he murmured, halting in the center of the path. His eyes swept across the rows of straw and wood, the smoke rising from chimneys like peaceful white flags. "Sleeping. Laughing. While orcs roam just miles away?"
He turned toward the open gate and the dark line of the treeline beyond. "And why do the orcs allow it at all? Is it arrogance—the kind that comes from knowing the livestock has nowhere to run?" He paused, jaw tightening. "Or is it something worse?"
The answer came as a scream that tore through the lively air, followed by the frantic clanging of bells from the gate.
Aris snapped his head toward the sound. The two guards were straining against the heavy gate, fighting to close it. Above them, the archers in the watchtowers loosed their first volleys, the thrum of bowstrings vibrating through the chaos.
The village erupted. Women and children scattered like spooked livestock, vanishing into their homes. Stalls stood abandoned. Within moments, dozens of men emerged from doorways, gripping crude swords and notched spears, their faces pale with terror of an enemy still unseen.
Aris stood at the junction of houses, a silent anchor in the current of chaos. He made no move to reinforce them—nor did he want to. For several minutes, he simply watched the men scramble, their movements jerky and inefficient. These were not a people of war. Their long, fragile peace had been bought with the blood of young girls, sacrificed for generations. Their muscles knew the plow, not the pike.
He walked toward the gate, then veered right, putting deliberate distance between himself and the congestion at the entrance. His sights were set on a weathered section of the wall where children usually played. Behind him, shouted orders rang out, but he ignored them.
As he passed the shuttered houses, the low, trembling murmur of prayers rose like smoke through the gaps in the wood. Through one worn window, his gaze caught a crude statue—an orc, carved with a wheel behind its head. "The irony," he whispered, startled by the sight.
He filed the matter away and scaled the three-meter wall with painful effort, muscles protesting every inch. Gripping the rough logs, he peered over the top to witness the threat.
Below, a roiling tide of yellow-skinned creatures surged into view. The tallest among them barely reached a meter and a half, armed with nothing more than sharpened sticks and stone daggers. Goblins.
A frown tugged at his brow. What were these vermin doing here? This was orc territory—strictly.
His gaze swept past the chittering horde toward the treeline. Two large orc silhouettes stood far in the rear, arms folded, motionless. They weren't part of the assault, but looked like spectators at a bloody sport.
The sacrifice had already been made. Rill's sister. The price of peace for this year, paid in full. So why this?
At the gate, arrows hissed through the air. The thrum of bowstrings mingled with the wet thud of spears finding flesh. A few goblins reached the gate, but spearheads punched through their skulls before they could even notch the timber. United, the humans handled them with ease. On their own, goblins were a negligible threat.
So why send them at all? Aris wondered. A slaughter of the weak? Or is something else at play here?
An hour later, the ground before the gate lay carpeted in the slick, yellow rot of goblin blood. The stench carried even to Aris, a hundred meters away. He climbed down from the wall, his bare feet hitting the dirt with a heavy thud, and made his way toward the gate.
He needed to understand the why of this slaughter, even if the men there wouldn't look on him favorably. As he walked, he rehearsed how to defuse some of that hostility in his mind.
He found the village chief standing among dozens of men, issuing orders with the ease of long authority. The sight of the lean old man, graying hair, shoulders unbowed, stopped him cold. A surge of rage lanced through his chest, hot and sudden.
Aris clenched his fists and forced a calming breath into his lungs. Not yet. He held himself still, the words repeating like a mantra. One must abide their time when seeking revenge from a powerful foe.
He stepped forward, stopping several meters from the gathering. Some men were lethargically wiping blood from their spearheads; others worked beyond the gate, treading over the small corpses to clear the path. The chief, feeling a searing heat against his wrinkled cheek, turned—and his eyes locked onto Aris.
Huh. The brat is still alive. The chief's brow furrowed. Even after the beating they gave him.
Looking at that wrinkled, strangely vibrant face, Aris felt his fury boil over. New memories, jolted loose by the chief's presence, surfaced from the body.
The Sacred Agreement. Generations of it, etched into the minds of these villagers. The chief's forefathers had struck a bargain—or perhaps the orcs had simply dictated terms—three hundred years ago. Every year, a virgin girl of age ten was surrendered as tribute to the orc god. They called it the Price of Peace. This year, the sacrifice had been Rill's younger sister.
In his mind, Aris could see her clearly now: a tiny frame, small for her age, thrashing in the grip of four village men. Her voice had gone hoarse from screaming his name… screaming until her throat dried and she couldn't anymore. The memory was no longer a folder in his mind but an open wound, raw and bleeding. This dead girl was becoming a sister he had never known, her spirit weaving into his core, the biochip's storage feature rendering every detail cruelly sharp.
He remembered them dragging her toward the treeline. The men's faces hadn't been conflicted, not even a flicker. They had been merciless, as though they'd done this so many times they'd gone numb. When Rill had thrown himself at them, they hadn't hesitated. Fists. Boots. Thick sticks against his ribs. No mercy for the boy. No mercy for the girl. Not in the face of the Sacred Agreement.
Tradition, they called it. They wrapped their cowardice in the language of the divine, calling it a holy necessity to avoid defying the gods. They blinded themselves to the pathetic reality: they were not a village, but a farm. And they were the ones handing over the livestock.
Aris forced his bare feet to root into the soil. He wrestled with the body, fighting the wild emotions that threatened to drive him to stupid decisions. His hands trembled with the phantom weight of a blade he longed to draw across the old man's throat.
But the memories were a floodgate that wouldn't close. He had opened Rill's folder, and now more came surging through.
The chief's face surfaced again, twisted by the threat of Rill's rebellion. Men like Rill were a contagion to a status quo built on sacrifice. To cauterize the wound before it spread, the chief had set his sights on Rill's wife.
If he cannot provide the village with children, the chief had proclaimed, his voice cold and merciless, then others will be tasked to help him.
Aris's stomach lurched. The memory of her death followed, a final, bloody act of defiance. She had sliced her own throat before they could touch her, choosing the grave over the example the chief had sought to make of her.
In his fury at being denied his prize, the chief had forbidden her burial. No mourning. Her body was tossed into the forest like waste, left for the scavengers.
Even the dead are not beyond my reach. The words rang in Aris's skull, a mantra of absolute control, the chief's grip over the village made chillingly clear. He dug his nails into his palms until the skin split. The sharp smell of his own blood grounded him, pulling him back from the edge. His next actions would define everything—whether he survived, whether he could take his revenge.