The biggest weakness of the orcs is their cruelty. Never let them convince you that it's a strength. Yeah, it's terrifying, the things they do to people. Yeah, it does leave you scarred and traumatized. But we can take it. We can learn from it. We can adapt to their methods. If there is one thing we have over them, it's this: They cannot survive without cruelty. You pin them in place, and an orc atrophies fast.
We're all well aware of how a human or goblin Master can go months upon months without any sustenance and walk it off, depending on their skills.
We kept a Master-Tier orc in a cell as an experiment.
He lasted two weeks.
Two weeks before his muscle mass faded. Two weeks before his bones turned brittle. Two weeks before he started suffering from the effects of fast-acting dementia. Two weeks before his mana fields shriveled away into nothing. Two weeks.
If you can force them to starve, they're going to go feral. And they're going to be driven towards greater acts of psychopathy. Don't think of them as these perfect rational psychopaths. They are intelligent. They are dangerous. But they're not perfect. Not nearly. You can force them to make mistakes. You can force them to decay, to suffer. You can force them through boredom, or simply through stalemate. The best way to hurt an orc is to not fight them at all. Box them in place and make sure that they get no chance to scratch that itch of theirs.
And if you don't have that option, then you should move on to the next best choice. You lure them out. You use their cruelty—their urges—against them. Present easy targets. They'll know it's a trap. Don't get me wrong here. It's not that we're fooling them. It's that they just can't resist after a certain period.
Their cruelty is not their strength. It's their drug. And we can be the dealers.
-Legend-Ranger Marion Crow-on-Graves
143 (I)
Capture [I]
The expeditionary force appeared over the horizon as a splash of tumbling white contrasted upon a midnight sky freckled with scintillating stars. A distant, spiraling mountain was the only other source of light on the horizon, and at its apex rose a high, curved gate that glimmered with dimensionality. Around the gate spiraled crystalline dimensionals and the metallic bodies of automata.
That was apparently Margarita Point, one of the Republic's minor cross-dimensional mines. At present, Whisper and another detachment of orcs were moving towards Margarita Point, erecting a massive dimensional veil to hide the impending ambush about to befall the expeditionary force. The veil extended kilometers wide and high like a grand screen. Valor said, watching the scene unfold. “This is control and experience. They don’t need someone to direct their spellcasting because they have done this over and over again.”
“Yeah,” Shiv said, impressed by how fast the dimensional veil was going up. “I hope I get good enough to pull that off someday.”
“You will. Give it time.”
Margarita Point didn't have much in the way of defenders, as it wasn't a great gate in the scheme of things. But still, a Pathbearer there could jump off and warn the bulk of the Inquisition's forces still stationed at Fortress-City Diego. And Shiv really didn't want them to miss out on their own surprise.
So the orcs went about engineering things to stay subtle. As the army of twenty thousand gray-skinned brutes moved out, they adjusted into a curving shape, spreading around the approaching expeditionary force like the open jaws of a beast. Only a few of the orcs took to the air immediately, and those moved alone, with great distance between them and the next flyer. Most of the orcs remained grounded, but they still moved fast, and more importantly, they moved without making any noise at all.
The orcs along the exterior were the eyes and the senses, and what followed behind them was what Bonk described as the skin—the second layer of orcs. Shiv remained just behind the skin, moving with the bones. The bones were the hard-hitters, the ones meant to crash in and break the enemy. This was the best place for him.
Though Shiv had a Master-Tier Stealth Skill, he was by no means subtle, and the orcs needed subtlety to best deal with the Inquisition's forward scouts—forward scouts that Shiv couldn't even perceive. But they had been there. Uva noticed remains left by the orcs. Blood and viscera. But no bodies. The Inquisition's outermost scouts were invisible. But it did nothing to spare their lives. The orcs were coming, and they were better at walking the darkness than the Inquisition ever was.
Shiv could spot the orcs serving as the eyes in the distance. The orc Scouts were fast closing around the expeditionary force. Their bodies shrouded in faint veils of dimensionality, they surged across the land, gliding as if blots of darkness across plains of sparse vegetation. Through it all, the orcs moved without requiring direction, without creating chaos or confusion. They knew their roles, and they played according to the situation. And as they collapsed around the two thousand inquisitors, maintaining a four-hundred-meter distance, all Shiv could hear was his heartbeat as tension built.
His heartbeat, and Uva’s groans of nausea.
"You alright?" Shiv asked mentally.
"Is it always like this?" Uva asked. She was staring at the sky through his eyes, feeling the world around him using his senses, and her stomach churned. "It's so wide and keeps going. There's so much light."
Shiv was about to say something regarding how the sky was pitch black, aside from the glittering stars and the pieces of the moon. But then he remembered that compared to many places in the Abyss, this might as well have been daylight. Not to mention the whiplash from not having a ceiling above you at all times.
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"I have no idea how you put up with this."
"I'm just used to it, I guess,"
Shiv said. "This was, well, this is what I've known all my life. The sky is just a normal sight to me. So is the horizon.""And you're never worried that you might just fall up, that it will swallow you?"
The Deathless frowned. "No. Why?"
"Because it's just too open. Anyone above could be staring at us. We're so exposed."
He wanted to say that it was paranoia talking, but this was the way an Abyssal lived: hiding in the darkness, using the denseness of the Umbral Wilderness to keep themselves from being spotted. And, in a sense, she wasn't wrong. The expeditionary force proved remarkably easy for Adam to spot from kilometers away.
A shrouded orc approached them, then. Shiv narrowed his eyes and only managed to figure out who it was when the orc's veil splashed over with his.
"We are about to engage," Helix said.
Shiv looked back at the horizon. He could only see a few dots of Dimensionality out there. "How can you tell?" he asked Helix.
"Using my Awareness Skill. The one you’ve neglected. You have eyes, so use them!"
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Shiv snapped. "Alright, Helix, use your wonderful orc eyes and tell me what your orc senses feel."
"My orc senses tell me," Helix said, gesturing out with a large hand, "that our Shadows and Thieves are getting through their final layer of scouts. And that the Inquisition is becoming aware of the danger they’re in.”
"Huh, how can you tell that?" Shiv squinted as hard as he could, but he couldn't see anything from the horizon before him that gave any indication that a series of battles was underway.
"Pay attention to the veils of Dimensionality. Are they moving? How are they moving? Focus your gaze. What can you tell?"
Before Shiv could notice anything, Valor's voice let out a hum of realization. "Ah, I see. Quite.”
"See what?" Shiv replied. "I just..." And then he stopped talking. He watched as a few thousand veiled orcs quickly moved from position to position, but their acceleration happened in bursts, almost as if they were trying to throw someone off or intercepting someone.
At the same time, the tide of clouds carrying the expeditionary force was slowing down dramatically.
Awareness 33 > 34
"Now you see," Helix said. "A series of battles has concluded."
Shiv frowned. "But I don't see anything breaking. There's no dust, no debris."
"That's because they are Shadows," Helix said with a hint of derision in his voice. "Not everyone walks the Path of the Brutish Bomb. Shadows focus on subtlety, on precision. You might have noticed by this point that not everyone's Master-Tier Physicality makes them substantively stronger. Sometimes it makes them extremely adaptable. Or flexible." And that made him think of Uva. "At other times, it makes them more suitable for other circumstances. Consider Bonk for a moment. With the amount of force he outputs, he should be leaving colossal craters everywhere."
"But he doesn't," Shiv said. He remembered Bonk's attacks, how each strike built based on a concept of resonance without causing a shockwave.
And as soon as he realized that, a wall of shrouded figures began moving in on the orcs. At the same time, a few hundred other shrouds went still, holding in place even as the clouds drew closer. "What's happening now?"
"Ah," Helix said, his breath hot with anticipation, "now our Shadows are marking targets. They’ll be firing their shots soon. And you will learn the weakness of having obvious commanders.”
And true to the orc's words, a few thousand projectiles cut through the air. There was no signal, no warning before they fired, and no noise as they tore through the cloud bearing the Inquisition’s forces. As soon as the first orc loosed his shot, the next followed. And soon, a chaotic series of volleys surged up from all directions.
Spells of flame, of ice, of Dynamancy, and more cleaved across the world. But more often than not, Shiv saw spells of Dimensionality splashing over the massive cloud looming on the horizon. The dimensional spell blasted outward, staining the air with a faint veil of static.
“The hells is that supposed to do?” Shiv asked.
“Make sure the Inquisitors can’t just jump out,” Helix replied.
All of a sudden, the entire orc army was surging. The orcs near Shiv accelerated. Those who operated as the skin remained in place, waiting for the rest of the orcs to catch up. Along the exterior, the eyes began to circle the expeditionary force. Columns of destruction blew pockets through the clouds. Faint figures fell from gaps, descending as a rain of bodies. Inquisitors were dying, and orcs shed their veils and roared theatrically—some sounding bestial, while others used the opportunity to practice their singing voices.
This shit is like a fever dream.
"Go, go, go now!" Helix called out, waving his hands. "Go before we lose our flavor, before we lose our pound of flesh!"
And that was all the encouragement Shiv needed. He spiked his field ten times. And just as he used his Biomancy to funnel the venom bound to his armor, his body swelled, his muscles expanded, and his skin hardened. The world around Shiv exploded as he shot forward like a meteor, overtaking several of the orcs.
"Wait!" Helix shouted, suddenly falling behind. “Too fast—don’t leave me—”
But Shiv didn't stop. The shockwaves unleashed in Shiv’s wake launched the orc Biomancer through the air.
"Catch up when you can," Shiv said mentally. There was a faint grin on his face. Helix prided himself on his Biomancy. But despite all of Helix's knowledge, he was an orc in desperate need of humbling. "In the meantime," Shiv called back to Helix, "Work on your Reflexes. Your physical skills are embarrassing."
A chain of explosions surrounded the expeditionary force. A larger storm manifested above and unleashed chains of lightning downward. However, before the massive cloud carrying the expeditionary force could be consumed, a shield, shimmering and multi-layered, pulsed into existence. It gave off a prismatic glow, but along its exterior, Shiv saw shifting wavelengths that distorted the air, wavelengths he remembered seeing from Dynamancy spells. At once, several orcs collapsed their dimensional veils as they began to call out to each other.
"Dynamancers! Singularity Bomb!" an orc bellowed. Shiv guessed that was a Maestro, judging from how several other orcs nearby froze to respond.
Shiv didn't freeze. He climbed higher into the air, building speed and power. But as he did, he froze time and found himself among the few still capable of movement in the world. There were five other orc Chronomancers he could see, but they didn't move as he did. He was the only one that had the Strider of the Unbending Path.
But he corrected that assumption a moment later, as he realized there was a golden shape lurking high above the clouds, fast ascending. A second thereafter, the massive form of a golden dragon burst through, and on its back stood a small figure. A small figure holding a lance a hundred meters long.
Shiv let out a laugh. “Ah, System. You didn’t need to do this for me. But I’ll never say no to a dragon fight.”
The battle thrill was upon him, and the Inquisition came ready to brawl after all. He spiked himself toward the dragon, prepared for anything. At the same time, he began to shape a Vitae Golem. It emerged from his being, drawing out strands of white and red mana. As it comprised itself in his shape, a call sounded through the air.
"Halt!" A woman's voice shook the world. "Halt! You will be engaged! You stand across, facing an Inquisitor!"
"I know who I'm facing!" Shiv shouted, but she didn't respond. He realized her broadcast had been telepathic, and he was just yelling. Yelling while he had already broken the sound barrier. Shiv snorted. This wasn't going to be a matter of dialogue anyway.