Chương 50: Waiting for Action

Ch. 50 - Waiting for Action The goblins came almost every night, and each time they failed to notice the blade or pay attention to its angry red glow, it struck them down for their insolence. Useless monsters, it swore as it devoured their Life Force after only a minute and their souls moments later. It cared nothing for them at first. Still, it was days before it even heard the sound of Orcs, and they never got close enough for it to even study. +87 Life Force. +18 Animal Souls. +4 Lesser Monster souls.

A group of human scouts were the next to find it the following week. They saw the growing pile of rotting corpses but shrank away quickly, fearing a curse or disease, and were only close enough for it to taste for a few seconds. Even this, the blade endured. During that second week, it asked the orcish soul; it still held on to its question once it was both bored enough to need something to do and satisfied that it was unlikely to run out of energy any time soon. How many of you are there?

Where are the tribes spread out? Where does their territory end? It demanded of the primitive soul, which came apart almost as soon as its mind focused on it. While the last view it had received from the tormented seeress from the mirror had been utterly insane, the orc's worldview was totally comprehensible, even if it didn't answer a lot of questions. The monster was smarter than a goblin. It seemed like it might even be smarter than the beastmen it had come to know for a few weeks.

It wasn't anywhere as close to intelligent as a human or any of the demihuman races, though. They didn't have maps or numbers. They had clans, and they knew that each of those clans contained many orcs. It was a primitive system that raised as many questions as answers, but as images of various totems, campsites, and battlefields flashed through the Ebon Blade's mind, it started to understand. The entire region was a patchwork of competing tribes.

This valley belonged to the Great Tusks and the Stone Skulls, though the Blood Axes were apparently making headway toward the far end. The blade didn't really care about the politics of a species that hadn't yet discovered writing and marked their territory with shit and corpses, but it spoke to a vast wealth of the creatures that could yet be tapped if only it could reach them. If each camp held dozens, and each valley held several camps, then the mountain range held hundreds, if not thousands, of the creatures.

That became the blade's new goal. For so long, it had been content to kill the beasts, but now it would gladly be wielded by one of them if it could unite such a group of monsters into a single fist and crush entire nations with it. For a moment, it allowed itself to picture that. Not crushing a single small city like it had in the hands of Gar-lok but sweeping aside city after city in a tide of blood and fire.

Orcs did not have bows or catapults, but they had slings and spears, and with their tremendous strength, it was sure it could teach them the advantages of using a battering ram to knock gates down. With a thousand greenskins at its back, it could push all the way from the hinterlands it had been exiled to, to the Inner Kingdoms. There, it would find dense populations that were just waiting to be consumed. Well, not gladly, it corrected itself.

Something about being wielded by a goblin and a beastman had felt wrong to it. Although the blade didn't know the same would be true for an orc, it was fairly certain that would be the case. The weapon didn't know why, but it much preferred the grip of a human. Still, it would endure. Discomfort was a small price to pay for strength. The only problem was that there was no strength to be found. For days and weeks, there was almost nothing promising.

A group of orc hunters passed through the glade, but not one of those dark-eyed brutes noticed it or the Life Force it siphoned from them before they finished picking through the carrion and moved out of range. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. +224 Life Force. +27 Animal Souls. +9 Lesser Monster souls. It was a frustrating situation, but it endured. There were worse places to be, and it would have plenty of energy to feast on until at least the winter.

Past that, it was hard to say, though it supposed it could store away souls for just such an occasion. The Ebon Blade didn't do that, though. Instead, it watched its number rise inexorably toward the number it needed to get Improved Siphon 7. That took the best part of three weeks, but a few days before its goal, it finally realized something: the more Life Force it held, the brighter the ruby in its hilt shone at night.

That was something the blade had understood, at some level for all of its existence, but it was only when the thing was shining brightly enough that it started to attract nighttime insects that it finally tied everything together. Do I get this upgrade now, or do I continue to store energy until I attract a new wielder? It wondered silently. It wanted Improved Siphon 7, but it didn't need it. Not until it was back in the hands of a wielder.

What it needed was to leave this spot before that mage and its traitorous wielder came back. What it needed was to move from this spot before it devoured every carrion eater and goblin within the valley. Those realities decided things more than its preferences. If it could attract someone, anyone, to take it, then it would do so.

So, day by day, as fewer and fewer creatures came to feed on the stack of moldering bodies, it fed more on the death that emanated from them, and in doing so, its Life force reserves slowly grew. 2249. 2316. 2377. 2432. Every day, that number went up through a combination of draining and death, and every day, it pondered its current situation. Although it wasn't always successful, it tried to ignore its recent betrayal. Instead of dwelling on that, it focused on more constructive things.

It pondered upgrade paths, calculated relative costs, planned the domination of the orcs, and pondered what it was it knew of its past. All of those musings came to an end one evening, almost two months after it had been abandoned, when a pair of orcs finally wandered through the corpse-strewn meadow one night. This time, there was no way they could miss its glow, but even so, the Ebon Blade waited in anticipation until they were actually walking directly toward it.

When they reached the blade, they hesitated and argued in a language that was scarcely more than grunts. From its glimpse into an orcish soul, it knew they were speaking about it, but until one of them held it and it could hear the words filtered through an orc's mind and soul, it might as well have been gibberish. That didn't happen right away, though.

First, that was because they held the blood-red light in a sort of superstitious awe, and then it was because when one of them tried to reach for it, the other slapped his hand away. At first, the fight didn't seem like more than superstitious caution or roughhousing, but that changed in seconds as the first one took offense at the other's actions. Soon, it became a life-or-death struggle.

Whether one was trying to keep them both away or whether they were fighting to see who would claim it, the weapon couldn't quite tell, but still, it didn't interfere. It wanted to be held by the strongest, after all, and weakening either orc might prevent that from happening. The blade had seen orcs fight many times, so while it enjoyed the spectacle as a change of pace, it was uninteresting beyond that.

There was no grace or skill on display; there was only raw, savage power as the two six-and-a-half-foot-tall brutes hammered each other with their fists. It was as brutal as it was unsophisticated. Bones broke, and flesh split underneath blows that could have snapped tree trunks in half until one fighter was brought to his knees. He stayed there then as a form of submission.

The Ebon blade took some joy in that submission, but not as much as it took when it finally felt the hand of the Orc wielder grip its handle and pull it free from the tree. -17 Life Force Then, despite the slight Life Energy drain as it healed the monster's hurts, it felt euphoria as it was finally free again.

The blade considered waiting and seeing what its owner would do first, as had become its habit, but it had waited for too long, and instead of doing so, it decided to see how much control it had over its wielder and struck out, immediately beheading the kneeling orc. It hadn't even bothered to learn its wielder's name yet, but it gripped its body and swung out with its sword arm, slicing right through the kneeling orc's neck with almost no resistance.

The Ebon blade enjoyed the way that the vertebrae parted on either side of its blade with only a moment of hesitation, but it enjoyed the lack of concern or even care rising up from the dull mind of its host. He didn't seem to care that its body had been seized. He just enjoyed the way that blood fountained from the neck before the now headless torso sank to the ground, and they both watched it together. Then, somewhat incuriously, it turned and started walking back toward its tribe.