Chương 6: Chapter 5 - Orcs (2)

"Defend yourself! My spiritual essence is nearly gone!" Gordon, the orc leader, roared. Krkk! Krkk! Several of Dendron's branches snapped, fruit tumbling down along with them. The orc leader lunged and snatched one out of the air. Dendron tried to strike him down, but Gordon threw up earth armor at the last possible second, absorbing the blow. The roots still attached to it shattered on impact. Even so, the impact sent Gordon staggering.

A loud thwack rang out as he was hurled backward into a rock hard enough to draw blood from his mouth. His hesitation cost his men dearly. With their leader distracted, their defenses thinned, and Dendron seized the opening, cutting down orc after orc until only four Mid-Stage warriors remained. Strong as they were, fighting his roots was like fighting a force of nature, relentless and unyielding, even as those same roots kept getting torn apart in the process. Dendron struggled against the last four.

Each one carried its own defensive trick, and none of them went down easy. Gordon closed his fist around the fallen fruit. It pulsed with condensed spiritual essence, warm against his palm. His mouth watered before he even lifted it. He bit into it without hesitation. Warmth flooded through his chest, refilling his exhausted reserves in an instant. He might have wept from the relief. Instead, he laughed.

"What a waste," he said, wiping juice from his chin.

"This fruit alone could've made five pills of the same rank." A cold weight settled in Dendron's trunk. Contending with Gordon was already hard enough without this. He activated a portal behind Gordon. A root coiled and ready to strike. The root fired forward, and missed. Gordon spun, catching the root in midair. He clamped down with both hands and pulled. A scream ripped through Dendron's consciousness. His roots snapped off completely, and the pain slammed into him.

"What was that?" Gordon exclaimed, scanning the trees.

"Lost control of your own attack, did you?" Dendron forced himself to remain still. The pain was blinding. He could not think. If he'd aimed slightly to the left, the fight would have ended there. Gordon was now on guard. Careless. Stupid and careless.

"Shit, should've grown these with some kind of fail-safe." Desperation clawed at the edges of his mind, though it wasn't the first time he'd felt it. He'd grown used to that particular flavor of dread by now. Every injured root he had left, he threw into a strike against the Mid-Stage orcs, more distraction than damage, then slipped a portal into their blind spot and called on a fresh, untouched root to finish the job. Whoosh! A pained grunt rippled through the group.

Two orcs dropped instantly—no scream, no stagger, just weight leaving a body the way it does when whatever was holding it up simply stops being there. The remaining two froze at the sight of their fallen comrades, faces going grim, a chill settling over them as if death itself had come to collect. Harn and Gorak. Gordon's finest. Gordon stared down at their bodies, eyes still wide with disbelief, chests punched clean through. For a moment, the mask he wore cracked wide open.

"You... you bastard," he rasped.

"Gorak had a litter waiting at home. A boy and a girl. Harn was going to propose to the chief's daughter this spring." When he saw Harn's face frozen in mid-scream, something inside him shattered. He had approved Harn's courtship. He had sat with the chief, vouched for the young warrior's character, and said, "He'll make a good husband." But Harn would never marry anyone. He would never have the chance to ask. Gordon's hands trembled. Not for fear, but from pure fury that burned.

"You took more than their lives," he said, his voice lowered almost calm.

"You took their futures. Every child they would've had. Every moment they would've lived." Then, harder than before, the mask slammed back into place. Something flickered across his face for half a second—the closest thing to a question a dying man's expression could ask. Whether the tree in front of him understood any of what he'd just said. Whether any of it mattered if it didn't.

"You don't even understand me, do you." It wasn't really a question either. He laughed, short and humorless.

"Of course you don't."

"Eat this!" He drove his fist onto the ground, pouring every ounce of his rage into the earth spike that tore free, smaller than his last, but no less furious. Dendron watched it come. Whatever fight Gordon had left in him, all of it was riding on this one throw.

"You take from me, I take from you! That's how it works! That's how it's always worked!" Dendron couldn't understand the words, but the fury behind them needed no translation. He braced for impact, throwing every remaining root into a wall to catch the spike. Roots splintered violently, pierced clean through, until eighty percent of what he had left was gone. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

The spike slammed into his trunk and his whole body shuddered, wood cracking further, branches snapping and crashing to the ground. And still, somehow, he remained standing, stubborn as an unbreakable fortress.

"Ughkk!" Dendron ground out, pain surging through every fiber of his awareness. Another fruit dropped free, and this time Dendron moved first, coiling his remaining roots around Gordon before the exhausted orc could react. All Gordon managed was a hasty layer of earth armor. The roots wound tight around Gordon's throat. His earth armor held for a heartbeat, then guttered out like a candle starved of air.

"You think..." Gordon choked out, voice ragged.

"You think this means something? You think you're special?" The roots tightened further. His eyes went wide. Then the last of his earth armor cracked apart. Dendron bore down on his neck and squeezed with everything he had left. Gordon fought to the very end, clawing uselessly at the roots wrapped around his throat, the same hands that had protected his tribe his whole life now powerless to save him. A memory of his daughter surfaced, unbidden.

"Dad, you're going to hunt again? Isn't that dangerous?" she'd asked once, pouting up at him. Another came right behind it.

"Dad, when will you retire? We're already doing fine. Isn't living a safer life better?" Memory after memory came, faster than he could hold onto any single one. Then the light dimmed, and with it, whatever those memories had still been trying to say. His eyes went empty. His body went limp. He was dead. Choked out by a tree.... In the Orc Tribe's village, a young girl sat in a field of tall grass when a gust of wind swept past her, pulling a loose strand of hair across her face.

Her chest tightened without warning, an ache with no name and no source. She murmured, "Dad..." Dendron stared at the body. The orc's hand was still reaching for something. The sky beyond the branches was growing dim, and the sense of quiet that filled his surroundings was more intense than the fight itself. It was over. He had made it through alive. He should have felt relieved; that much was certain.

"Before you attacked me, you spoke something. I could not discern the words, but I heard you," he said quietly. He allowed the silence to persist, long and heavy.

"I guess I'll remember them anyway." Gordon's body sagged as the roots loosened. A few broken twigs fell from Dendron's canopy. Somewhere, a bird chirped, then the sound died too, leaving only a deathly silence behind it. No one moved. The two remaining Mid-Stage orcs were still breathing, but their spiritual essence was completely spent.

"The captain is dead..." one of them muttered, and let his weapon fall.

"Tree god, please, spare our lives," they begged, voices cracking with desperation. He looked at their tear-streaked faces and couldn't look away. Half of him wanted to let the roots loosen. The other half was already doing the math. Then a thought surfaced, cold and clear. If they lived, they'd come back. He held onto that and didn't grant them mercy. What was left of his damaged roots coiled around their bodies. He squeezed until it was over.

Blood splattered across the ground, painting the dirt crimson like a blank canvas suddenly filled in. Something in him recoiled from what his own roots had just done—the way a hand flinches back from a stove. This was the first time he'd killed something that could beg for its life. Beasts or not, they carried enough intelligence to plead. In video games, movies, and every idle daydream from his old life, he'd imagined a moment like this. Victory. Justification. At least some measure of relief. None of it came.

All he felt was emptiness. Gordon's hand remained on the ground, fingers curled as if reaching for something he'd never hold again. Somewhere, a daughter was still waiting for a father who wasn't coming home.

"I didn't want this," he told the empty clearing.

"I just wanted to survive." The trees didn't respond. They never did. His sap ran sluggish. His leaves stopped rustling. His branches hung lower than before. Dendron felt like throwing up for a long time. Trees, however, do not vomit. A leaf, just one, dead and brown, drifted down from his canopy and spun toward the earth. He watched it fall and felt something loosen in him. Rain began to fall, soft at first, then harder. Droplets slid down his bark like sweat, tears he couldn't shed.

He watched as they traced the cracks left by Gordon's spikes. He remained motionless for a long while. His roots refused to respond. Whatever strength his trunk had left, it wasn't spending it on standing up any straighter than it had to. The rain kept falling.

"I'm still standing," he said.

"I'm not sure if that's a good thing yet." Dendron listened to the rain, trying to recall what it was like to be human. The memory was just out of reach.

"This world was built this way," he told himself.

"Only the strong get to choose mercy, because the strong don't have to fear what comes after."

"Perhaps it's not so different from where I came from. The only difference is people there hide their cruelty behind laws and smiles." Thin comfort. But it was what he had. Dendron went quiet for a long while, taking in the clearing. Wherever he looked, something had died. Some trees lay flat on the ground. Others, ones that had stood untouched for months, now lay splintered beside them. Strong as they were, trees could still fall.

Beneath them, the earth was riddled with cracks, some no wider than a hairline, others deep enough to swallow a limb. One hole even bore the rough shape of a foot, pressed in as if something absurdly heavy had stood there. Victory looked nothing like he'd imagined. Across the top of the soil, grass lay shredded, torn out at the root in patches. That, at least, he didn't feel bad about. Overgrown and obstructive, it had never done him any favors, blocking his view.

"I'll probably cut them soon anyway." Not out of spite, he told himself. Just preference. Even so, looking out over the wreckage of the forest, he doubted anyone could feel good about it. Dendron began gathering the corpses closer, telling himself it would at least feed his roots. But his roots hesitated the moment they neared the bodies, some instinct pulling them back before he could stop it. He didn't know why. A while ago he'd choked one of them to death with his own hands.

Now, touching the corpse felt wrong in a way he couldn't name. Earlier, corpses had been numbers. Rank 1. Eight points, then four, then another eight—a tally he'd been almost proud of, once. He hadn't thought about what any of them looked like before they stopped moving. Now they had faces. Bruk, still young enough that his voice had cracked mid-sentence before it ever went silent for good. Harn, whose expression hadn't finished screaming by the time Dendron got to him. He hadn't asked their names.

He knew them anyway, the way you know a word you've heard shouted enough times in the middle of a fight. Eventually, the roots wrapped around the body anyway. The body was still warm. As he worked, he noticed his roots slowly healing. Not as fast as he'd have liked, but they were healing. Some relief returned. At least his regeneration hadn't slowed to anything. He tested a few more roots, checking what still moved and what didn't. Some responded fine. Others were wrecked beyond what time could mend.

He wished he could see his own trunk. He couldn't.

"I might as well call Luan." At least having him nearby would push back the silence a little. His trunk had probably taken the worst of it, he figured, but there wasn't much to do but let it heal on its own.

"I wonder if these corpses will attract anything nearby." Unease crept in. He was in no shape to fight again so soon. Scavengers would probably clean up what was left. As long as he didn't produce more fruit, whatever showed up should be manageable.

"They'll smell the blood eventually." Sap moved slow through his trunk, thick and reluctant, like it didn't want to be anywhere near the rest of him right now.

"Killing something that could think really did feel different." The rain had stopped sometime before dawn. Dendron didn't notice when. He'd stopped counting the time. A bird then landed on his highest branch—it was the same bird from before, and it stayed there, quiet, as if it too was waiting for something. I should absorb them, he thought, and the thought felt like swallowing glass. He let his roots move. Even then, they hesitated.

After a long stretch of silence, Dendron began absorbing the soul cores scattered around him. [Successfully absorbed Rank 1 Peak Stage Soul Core] [+8 points] [Successfully absorbed Rank 1 Mid-Stage Soul Core] [+4 points] [Successfully absorbed...] [Absorb soul core to rank up:] Rank 1 Peak Stage 6/20 or Rank 2 Early Stage 0/4 [Mission: Rank up to Rank 2 Early Stage.] [Reward: 40 points] [Points: 72] [Draw a random skill (50% success chance): 50 points] Draw, he willed.