Chapter 61: I’ve Made my peace
Then Ragna stepped forward from beside Ren, and that single movement did more than any words could have. The orcs who knew him, who had fought beside him, who had watched him become what he now was, saw him standing there on the side of the dragon without chains and without fear, and the calculation running behind their eyes shifted.
One orc bent its knee.
Then another.
Then the goblins began to follow, and the hobgoblins, and the rest of the orcs, one by one until the mountainside was full of beings with their heads bowed and the silence had become something entirely different from what it had been when they arrived.
[New Subordinates Gained]
[Races Added: Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins]
[New Title Unlocked: Master of Many Races]
[Title Effect: Passive 50% buff applied to all subordinate combat ability, physical output, and activity performance. Permanent. Scales with host strength.]
Ren read the title effect twice.
"Fifty percent," he said under his breath. "Permanent."
He closed the screen and flew back down, landing among them, and the celebration that broke out was not the organized disciplined response of soldiers acknowledging a new commander. It was something rawer than that, the release of people who had spent so long carrying something heavy that the moment it was lifted they didn’t quite know how to hold themselves without it.
Ragna was already moving through the crowd.
Ren saw him before he reached her, the way his pace changed, the particular speed of someone crossing a room toward something they had already given up on being possible. His wife stood near the cave entrance with a young boy pressed against her side and an older girl behind her, all three of them watching Ragna come toward them.
She broke before he reached her.
The sound she made when she did was not loud, just the sound of someone whose prepared grief had been interrupted by something it wasn’t ready for, and Ragna caught her with both arms and held on.
Ren watched for a moment, said nothing, and turned away.
He gave them the time.
The cave was dark and it smelled of death.
Not fresh death, but the accumulated weight of it, the residue of years of the Calamity Orc’s life drain practice soaked into the stone walls, the kind of smell that suggested the bones scattered across the floor were not the only remains the place had to offer.
Ren raised one hand and let flame curl from his fingers, illuminating the space around them. The light reached a massive stone throne at the far end of the cave, crude and enormous, with skulls arranged along its base in the particular deliberate way that said they were there as decoration rather than accident.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then from somewhere deeper, past the throne, through a tunnel that opened in the back wall, came a sound.
Metal on metal. Rhythmic. Consistent. The sound of someone working who had not heard them arrive or did not care.
Ren moved toward the tunnel. Remu, Luna, Ezra, and Riker followed.
The warmth reached them before the light did, the particular warmth of a forge fire that had been running for a long time, and when the tunnel opened into the chamber beyond, the scene that greeted them was so incongruous with everything the cave had been that all of them stopped in the entrance for a moment.
A dwarf stood at an anvil.
Short and broad with a completely bald head and a full beard that had seen better days. Tattered leather clothing covered in old burn marks and metal dust. His forearms were bare, and from wrist to elbow both arms were covered in tattoos so detailed and intricate that they looked less like decoration and more like notation, the record of something important kept close to the skin.
He was mid-swing when they walked in, the hammer coming down clean on the piece of metal on the anvil, and he finished the strike before he did anything else. Then he paused.
Then he turned.
He looked at them all in turn, his eyes moving across the group with the unhurried assessment of someone who had been surprised before and had decided that showing it was optional.
"Who in the bloody hell are ye?" he said, his voice carrying the particular roughness of someone who had spent more time talking to metal than to people. "And how in the blazes did ye get in here?"
"I’m Ren Crimson," Ren said. "I killed the Calamity Orc."
The dwarf stared at him.
"Aye, and I’m the King of the Mountains," he said flatly. "Try again."
"I’m not joking," Ren said.
"No one kills the Calamity Orc," the dwarf said, turning back to his anvil. "That thing has been here longer than I have. That thing has been here longer than most things in this forest. Ye don’t just walk in and kill it."
"And yet," Ren said.
The dwarf stopped.
He didn’t turn around immediately. He stood with his back to them for a long moment, the hammer held loosely at his side, and something in the set of his shoulders changed.
Then he put the hammer down.
He walked to the bench along the side wall and sat down on it with the slow deliberateness of someone whose knees had opinions about sudden movements, and he looked at Ren with the eyes of someone running a calculation they hadn’t expected to need to run today.
"Then I suppose," he said quietly, "my job here is finished."
He looked at his hands, at the tattoos covering his forearms, at the forge still burning behind him.
"I’ll not pretend it was all suffering," he said. "Being taken by force, that was what it was. But this place." He glanced around the chamber. "This place let me work. Let me grow. My craft is at a level I would never have reached had I stayed in the world outside." He looked back at Ren. "So if ye’re going to kill me now, get on with it. I’ve made peace."
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