As Aris approached the orcs, his heart hammered against his ribs in a frantic rhythm that matched the storm raging in his mind. "What could they possibly want?" The question looped endlessly, overshadowed by a darker fear. "Rill's sister. It had to be about her." Would he even be able to leave this encounter alive?
He forced his gaze upward, his neck craning until it ached just to meet their eyes. They were titans, towering at least two and a half meters tall, their bodies packed with dense, corded muscle the color of weathered bronze.
Indomitable pressure radiated from every inch of them. They wore almost nothing, only rough, dark-brown hides wrapped around their waist, leaving the rest of their massive, battle-scarred physiques exposed. Every knot of muscle and white line of scar tissue seemed to pulse, making the very air feel heavy.
His eyes dropped to their waists. Hanging from thick leather belts were their weapons—crude, heavy bludgeons the villagers called "sticks." Each was a solid tree limb thicker than Aris's torso, caked with layers of dried, blackened blood.
Aris dragged his gaze higher, inch by inch, until he finally met their faces. Every survival instinct detonated inside him, screaming for him to run. His knees locked rigid. He swallowed hard, choking down the raw panic that threatened to rip his fragile composure apart.
Heavy brow ridges cast deep shadows over their eyes, turning their stares into cold, calculating slits. Their eyes moved over him as if already measuring how much meat clung to his bones.
But it was their tusks that truly froze him. Two thick pillars of yellowed ivory curved upward from their lower jaws—stained, chipped, and worn from years of use.
The thought tightened his chest, his fear sharpening into something colder. As Aris and the middle-aged man stepped beside the chief, the air condensed, freezing beneath the colossal shadows of the orcs.
A heavy stench of rotting flesh, old blood, and a thick, musky reek assaulted his nostrils and clawed its way down his throat.
He felt as though he had just stepped into the heart of a slaughterhouse. Every instinct screamed at him to run. The village gate was only meters away, yet it might as well have been on the other side of the world.
His knees trembled with the urge to buckle, to drop and bare his throat in total submission. The hairs on the back of his neck stood like needles. Still, he clenched his jaw until it ached, forcing his teeth to stop chattering through raw, desperate will.
With a shallow, careful bow, he lowered his gaze, momentarily swallowed by their towering frames. When he finally forced his eyes upward, he met the stare of the nearest orc.
Those eyes were appraising him like the gaze of a wolf measuring exactly how much tender meat clung to a lamb's fragile ribs. There was no recognition of a boy, a villager, or even a sentient being in them. Only hunger… and the quiet calculation of how easily his bones would snap.
Aris wrenched his gaze to the ground, heart clawing against his ribs. From far above, one of the orc's voices sounded.
"Grath ul'kar ven."
The words ground against each other like shifting tectonic plates, harsh and brutal.
Orcish. Aris flicked a frantic glance at the chief from the corner of his eye. To his shock, the Chief answered without hesitation, slipping into the same guttural cadence with disturbing fluency.
He narrowed his eyes, tracking every movement in his peripheral vision. This was his chance. He didn't need to understand the words yet, only their structure.
"Prime," he called silently to the biochip. "Isolate phonetic structures. Track repetition patterns. Index as New Language Set and create a dedicated folder."
At the same time, he discreetly triggered the chip's scan. The invisible field reached the chief and the middle-aged man easily, but it fell short of the orcs.
In his vision, the panel flickered to life.
[Task Accepted: Orcish Language Pattern — Recording…]
[Phonetic Isolation in Progress…]
This was leverage, a fragile thread he might one day pull. But leverage was only as strong as the data behind it, and his dataset was still dangerously thin. The chief's words gave him a baseline, yet without the orcs' half of the exchange, his linguistic map remained a broken puzzle missing its most vital pieces.
"Do I have to get closer?"His eyes flicked fearfully toward the massive, blood-crusted clubs hanging at their sides. One lazy swing and he would cease to exist.
He took in a slow, shaky breath, forcing his pulse to steady. No. If they wanted me dead, I'd already be a smear on the ground.For now, his usefulness was the only thing keeping him alive.
Still, terror clawed at his chest as he tested the limits of his courage. Using the balls of his bare feet, he edged a fraction closer to the towering orcs. The slaughterhouse stench thickened, heavy and suffocating.
Cold sweat traced icy trails down his spine. Every instinct shrieked at him to stop, to shrink back into safe, meaningless insignificance.
"Rushing to death like a moth to flame is the act of a fool," he reminded himself, hands clenched tightly. "But hiding in ignorance is its own kind of death."
He took the step anyway.
The two orcs suddenly fell silent. Their heads turned in eerie unison, heavy brows casting deep shadows over their cold eyes as they locked onto the small human who had dared drift closer.
Most humans cowered from them like prey scenting a predator, fleeing the stench of blood and death they carried. But this one had stepped toward them. They were not threatened, he was little more than an insect that had wandered too close.
Still, the strange behavior earned their full attention. They glanced back to the chief, whose face had twisted into a volatile mix of confusion and growing suspicion.
Aris didn't notice the chief's expression. His eyes were unfocused, staring into nothing as the gamble paid off. The biochip's interface snapped into sharp focus, overlaying his vision with glowing data.
[Name: Unknown| Strength: 5.3 | Agility: 4.7 | Vitality: 5.0]
[Name: Unknown| Strength: 5.2 | Agility: 4.8 | Vitality: 5.1]
The numbers seared into his mind. Strength: 5.3.The chief, the strongest human in the village, had only measured 2.8.
Aris drew in a slow, trembling breath. The rage he had once felt toward the villagers' cowardice now seemed childish and pathetic. How could humans, who rarely broke 2.0, ever dream of defying creatures nearly three times stronger than their strongest warrior?
The sickening realization settled over him like ice water. These two are probably just foot soldiers. The lowest rung on a far more terrifying ladder.
Their jaundiced eyes caught every micro-tremor in his jaw, every flicker of fear. They had seen this exact performance a thousand times before. To them, his dread was nothing more than cheap entertainment.
Aris forced himself into a deeper, more subservient bow, using the motion to hide his face. Retreating now would scream guilt and only increase their interest.
He stayed low, letting the biochip greedily drink in the guttural friction of their language, while the middle-aged man behind him radiated a smug silence.
Finally, the chief's rumbling speech ended. He turned, his face stripped of its usual grandfatherly mask. His eyes were cold stone.
"Young man," he said.
Aris straightened slowly, his expression a carefully constructed blank slate.
"Your sister has escaped."
The words struck him like a stone dropped into well. For a single, treacherous heartbeat, wild hope, irrational, and dangerously reckless flared in his chest. His body wanted to believe it, that it's sister was save but he crushed the sentiment instantly, smothering it beneath layers of cold logic.
"What kind of useless orcs can't even guard one little girl?" he seethed inwardly. "Now I'm tangled in an even deeper nightmare."
He slipped seamlessly back into the role of the terrified, pious villager.
"Escaped?" His voice cracked sharply, laced with raw adrenaline he couldn't fully suppress. "How could she? Does she have a death wish? How dare she dishonor the sacred tradition!"
He let his tone spiral toward hysteria. "What if the god grows angry with us all?"
The chief narrowed his eyes, dissecting Aris's outburst with clinical detachment. "They've truly broken him," he thought. Genuine or not, a broken tool was still useful, so long as it didn't shatter completely.
Still, he made a mental note: "I need to rein those brutes in. They either keep beating villagers into submission… or into corpses. I can't afford lunatics like this walking among my people."
Aris felt the mistake the instant the words left his mouth. "Too much." The performance had tipped into melodrama. He quickly let his shoulders slump, collapsing his entire posture into the crumpled, hollow shape of a beaten dog.
Sensing an opportunity, the middle-aged man stepped forward and struck Aris hard across the back of the head.
"How dare you raise your voice before the Esteemed Ones!" the middle-aged man hissed. His eyes darted greedily between the chief and the orcs as he puffed out his chest, swollen with a delusional sense of power. In a fatal mistake, he met the orcs' gaze directly, a challenge they did not tolerate for even a second.
He turned back toward the chief, mouth already opening with some servile remark.
One orc moved, its large, slab-like hand shot forward and clamped around the man's entire skull with horrifying ease. The hopeful smile that had started to form on his face vanished instantly.
Then the screaming began as the orc lifted him off the ground as casually as a man lifting a water bucket. The man's legs kicked wildly in the air like a dying insect's. His fingers clawed desperately at the orc's wrist, thicker than his own forearms, but the hand didn't budge.
Aris glanced at the chief. The old man watched the execution with calm, detached interest. In the corner of Aris's vision, the biochip flashed a single clinical line:
[Emotional Analysis: Disappointment.]
Not fear and not pity, just mild irritation at the loss of a marginally useful pawn. The chief noticed Aris staring and turned to him. "They never learn, do they?"
The warning in his tone was ice-cold and unmistakable, but before Aris could respond, a wet, sickening crack split the air, followed by a heavy thud.
The middle-aged man lay sprawled on his stomach. His body was perfectly still. His head, however, was twisted completely around, facing upward, his dead eyes staring at the sky in a final, grotesque expression of shock.
"Forgive me, Chief. Forgive me, Esteemed Ones," Aris said immediately, his voice a hollow, broken rasp. "Tell me… what is required of me." Not that I have any choice.
He lifted his gaze just far enough to stare at the blood-matted clubs hanging from the orcs' belts, clinging desperately to his mask of terror. "Do you want me to find her? She's my sister… she might listen to me."
The chief studied him in heavy silence, searching for any flicker of defiance. Finding none, he turned and rumbled to the orcs in their guttural language. The biochip silently captured every harsh syllable.
A short exchange passed between them. Then the chief faced Aris again.
"Two days."
"Two days?" Aris echoed, letting genuine shock bleed into his feigned surprise.
"They have given you that long to bring her back." The chief's voice sharpened into a blade. "Fail… and you already know what follows." He didn't need to gesture toward the corpse, as its twisted neck spoke clearly enough.
"I understand, Chief," Aris said, sinking into a final, deep bow. He stepped back, trying to vanish behind the chief as the conversation resumed.
Moments later, the larger orc moved. Without ceremony, it reached down and seized the dead man's ankle. The body rose as easily as a rag doll, head lolling grotesquely, eyes still wide in frozen shock. A thin smear of blood trailed across the dirt as the orc slung the corpse over its massive shoulder like fresh meat.
Aris's stomach clenched. They weren't going to leave it.
The two orcs turned and departed, their heavy footsteps echoing in his ears till they reached far. The dead man's limp arms swayed against the orc's back until they vanished into the treeline.
The moment their suffocating presence lifted, Aris's mind snapped into focus. He opened the biochip's interface.
[Language Database: Orcish
Current Analysis: 21% Complete]
"Twenty-one percent in mere minutes. Impressive… but still far too low for nuance or real understanding." His thoughts turned to the girl. "Two days. If she was smart, she was already miles away. But if she was frightened and hiding nearby instead…"
A cold, calculating light kindled in Aris's eyes. "Maybe I'm not as doomed as I feared. Or maybe she just bought me forty-eight hours to find a solution." But he immediately let the thought die. A solution that could bridge the chasm between races didn't exist in this village, and two days was too short.