Chapter 60: The Orcs
The forest was quiet as they moved through it.
Ren walked at the front, his sovereign shell form cutting through the undergrowth with ease, the others falling into a natural formation around him. Ragna to his right, Remu to his left, Riker and Ezra behind them, and Luna somewhere between Ezra and Ren’s back, close enough that he could practically feel her presence without turning around.
"Question," Ren said, not breaking stride.
Ragna glanced at him.
"Your people. What do you think they’ve been doing since we haven’t gone there yet?"
Ragna was quiet for a moment, thinking it through properly before speaking.
"They would not have gone anywhere," he said. "Or done anything drastic. The orcs have nowhere to go. This mountain has been home for longer than most of them can remember." He paused. "The other forest lords’ territories border ours. Walking into those without invitation means death. They know that."
"So everyone is still there," Ren said.
"Everyone is still there," Ragna confirmed.
Ren nodded slowly, processing that, and then something else caught his attention, a thought that had been sitting at the back of his mind since the battle.
"The weapons," he said. "The ones your people use. They are well made. Really well made. Who makes them?"
Ragna’s expression shifted slightly, something moving through it that wasn’t quite pride and wasn’t quite discomfort but sat somewhere between the two.
"Rumors," he said. "From long before I was a general. The story was that the Calamity Orc found a dwarf at some point. Captured him and brought him back." He kept walking, eyes forward. "Put him to work producing weapons and tools. The dwarf resisted at first, from what was said. But over time he kept doing it. It has been that way for as long as anyone can remember."
Ren stopped walking.
Ragna stopped with him.
"A dwarf," Ren said.
"That is what the rumors said."
Ren started walking again, faster now, his mind already three steps ahead of his feet. Every webnovel, every piece of fiction he had consumed in his previous life had made one thing abundantly clear about dwarves, if there was one thing they were above everything else, it was the finest craftsmen in existence.
The weapons the orcs carried had already impressed him. If those were the output of a captive dwarf working under forced conditions, what could that same dwarf produce working freely, with motivation, with proper materials?
The thought had barely finished forming when the system activated.
[New Quest: Convince the Dwarf to Become Your Blacksmith]
[Reward: Unknown]
[Penalty: None]
Ren read it once and the grin that formed on his face was immediate and genuine.
"Speed up," he said, already moving faster. "Let’s go."
The mountain was silent when they arrived.
Not the empty silence of an abandoned place but the held silence of somewhere full of beings choosing not to be heard. Ren could feel them, the weight of presence distributed throughout the cave openings, behind the rocks, inside the small stone structures built against the mountain face that he hadn’t noticed from the air during the battle.
He looked at Ragna.
Ragna stepped forward.
He drew a breath so deep his entire chest expanded, held it for a moment, and then released it in a bellow that rolled across the mountainside and into every crack and crevice and cave mouth simultaneously. Not a war cry. Something else. A call, shaped in the language of orcs, carrying the specific meaning that the battle was over, that those who heard it were safe, that they could come out.
The echo of it died.
Silence again.
Then a single figure appeared at a cave mouth near the top.
Then another at a lower opening.
Then more, coming slowly, carefully, the particular movement of beings who wanted to believe what they had heard but had learned through long experience that wanting to believe something and being safe to believe it were different things.
They emerged from the main cave, from the crevices, from behind rocks, from inside the rough stone structures. Orcs, tall and broad, carrying the weight of lives lived entirely under something that had consumed their kind without hesitation. Goblins filtering through the lower openings in small clusters, staying near the walls. Hobgoblins behind them, larger and more cautious, eyes moving constantly.
They all came to a stop when they saw Ren.
The silence that followed was a different kind. Not hiding. Waiting.
Ren looked at all of them.
He spread his wings and lifted off the ground slowly, rising until he was high enough that every eye in the gathering could find him without effort, and then he spoke.
"All of you," he said, his voice carrying across the mountain without strain, "have spent your lives under something that treated you as fuel. The Calamity Orc took from you.
He took your people, your strength, your family members, and he used them for himself. Your lives were not your own. Your safety depended entirely on being useful to him and nothing else."
Nobody moved.
"That ends now," Ren said. "I am Ren Crimson. I killed the Calamity Orc. This territory is mine, which means you are under me going forward." He let that land for a moment. "But I want to be very clear about what that means. This is not a new version of what you had before.
Your lives matter. Every single one of you. Your wellbeing matters. You will be fed. You will be looked after. You will have something you have not had before, which is safety that does not depend on being useful to someone who sees you as a resource."
He looked across the gathered faces.
"All I ask is that you follow me. Become people under my name. In return, I give you my word that no one under my name goes without."
The mountain stayed quiet for a long moment, no one made a move, even the air went still.
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