Chapter 62: Ogre King
Kill you," Ren said. "For what reason exactly?"
The dwarf blinked.
"I want you to come work for me," Ren said.
The dwarf looked at him for a long moment, and then something complicated moved through his expression, something between suspicion and a feeling he wasn’t sure he was allowed to have.
"I’ve been in a cage for a long time, boy," he said. "Whatever ye’re offering, I think my time has passed. I’ll find my own way from here."
"I have three divine armaments blueprint," Ren said.
The dwarf went very still.
The forge crackled behind him. Nobody else in the room said anything.
"Three," the dwarf repeated.
"Three," Ren confirmed. "And if you’re willing, you might get to work on one of them."
The silence lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
Then the dwarf’s eyes came alive in a way that the entire conversation before that moment had not managed to produce, something igniting behind them that had nothing to do with the forge and everything to do with a craftsman hearing the one thing that a craftsman of his caliber could not walk away from.
He opened his mouth.
The mountain shook.
Not the subtle tremor of something shifting underground but a genuine, violent impact from outside, the kind that sent loose stone skittering across the floor and made the forge fire flutter. A sound followed it, enormous and deep, the sound of something that had not been there a moment ago announcing that it was there now.
Ren was already moving.
He flapped his wings once and the sonic boom of it blew him out of the tunnel and through the main cave and out of the cave mouth in a single continuous motion, emerging into the daylight and lifting into the air in one fluid burst.
He looked down.
Standing in the ground below the mountain, looking up at him with the particular stillness of something that had arrived and was waiting to be acknowledged, was a figure of enormous size and terrible presence.
The Ogre King Tempest.
’Who the hell is this?’
Ren looked down at the figure from above, reading what he could from the distance. The presence coming off it was not the slow rolling weight of the Calamity Orc’s aura. This was sharper. More immediate. The kind of presence that arrived before the body did.
The Ogre King looked up and found Ren.
A smile spread across his face. Wide and wicked, the kind that carried equal parts excitement and violence, the expression of something that had been looking for exactly this and was very pleased to have found it.
"There you are," the Ogre King said. "Little dragon."
He kicked the ground.
The sword came from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, manifesting out of thin air in his grip, massive and single-edged with a slight curve to the blade that caught the light as it came up, and before Ren had fully processed the draw the Ogre King had already swung.
The slash that launched from the blade was not the blade itself but what came off it, a crescent of red energy that screamed through the air with the particular sound of something moving too fast for the air to get out of the way in time.
It hit Ren dead center and threw him.
He went backward hard, the force of it slamming him into the mountain face behind him, and the impact drove him up rather than down, bouncing off the rock and continuing upward until he was nearly at the peak before his wings caught and he arrested the momentum.
He pushed off and created distance, breathing hard, reassessing.
Below him the Ogre King planted both feet and swung again, not at Ren but at the space between them, and the barrage that came off the blade was not one crescent but a dozen in rapid sequence, each one a different angle, covering the air between them in overlapping arcs of red energy that cleaved through rock and tree and anything else in their path without distinction.
Ren moved.
He went sideways, folding one wing to drop fast and change his level, and the first three passed over him. He rolled right and the next two went left. He tucked and dropped and felt the sixth one graze his shoulder, the edge of it opening a clean line that burned immediately.
He landed on the mountain face, wings spread, looking down.
"Who the hell are you?" he called.
The Ogre King looked up at him with that same wicked expression.
"Your worst nightmare," he said. "You little brat."
He launched.
The speed of it cracked the ground at his feet, a spiderweb of fractures spreading outward from his takeoff point, and he covered the distance between ground and mountain face in a time that had no business belonging to something that size. The sword came around in a wide horizontal arc aimed at taking Ren off the mountain entirely.
Ren got his gauntlet arms up.
The block caught the blade and the force behind it drove him sideways along the mountain face, his feet carving a line through the rock as he was pushed, sparks flying from the contact between gauntlet and blade edge. He dug in and stopped himself, pushed back, and the Ogre King pulled the sword free and came again immediately.
No pause. No reset. The next swing was already moving before the last one had finished.
Ren blocked again, absorbed the impact across both forearms, felt his arms protest the weight behind it, and ducked under the follow-through swing that came across at neck height. He came up inside the Ogre King’s reach and drove a Rending Claw into his side.
The Ogre King took it.
He didn’t flinch. He turned with it, letting the strike land rather than creating distance, and used the turn to bring his elbow around into Ren’s chest with a force that sent him back off the mountain and into open air.
Ren spread his wings and caught himself, hovering.
The Ogre King stood on the mountain face where Ren had been, feet planted against the vertical rock like gravity was a suggestion he had considered and declined, and looked at him across the gap.
Then he smiled again, and launched himself off the rock face directly at Ren.
They met in the air.
Blade against gauntlet, energy against scale, the collision producing a shockwave that rolled outward in every direction and set the trees below swaying. Neither of them gave.
They exchanged three strikes in midair, each one fast and heavy, each one answered, and Ren was reading the Ogre King’s patterns the same way he read everything, looking for the gap, the tell, the half second of commitment that would open something usable.
He wasn’t finding it.
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