FREE USE in Primitive World

Sol kept it like that for a long time… fist buried in its guts, slowly destroying it from within while keeping it alive through sheer force of will and corrupted healing energy.

Only when the sun had moved noticeably across the sky did Sol finally decide it was enough.

He pulled his hand free with a wet squelch, then grabbed the captain by what remained of its head. With one final, brutal twist, he snapped its neck … but not cleanly.

He left the spine partially intact so death wouldn’t come immediately. The captain’s body twitched and jerked in the mud for several more minutes, eyes still wide with awareness, before the last spark of life finally flickered out.

Sol stood up slowly, covered in green blood and yellow ichor. His breathing was steady. His expression was ice-cold.

He looked at the carnage around him.

All around him, the Zerith “elites” were laying dead in the mud. The gully was dead silent.

They were completely broken, their pride shattered, their terrifying reputation reduced to a pile of dead meat.

But before going he did one last thing, he walked over to the first stalker, lifted his heavy boot, and brought it down directly onto the creature’s elongated skull.

POW.

The skull popped like a ripe melon under the power of the Badger, green fluid and brain matter splashing into the mud.

He moved down the line, systematically stepping on their heads one by one, the dull, wet cracks echoing through the silent gully until the clearing was completely quiet once again.

Six targets. Six piles of yellow and green gore.

Sol walked over to the stagnant pool, dragging the edge of his boot through the scum-covered water to clean off the dark green blood. He wiped the Dreadwing Blade with a piece of clean fern and sheathed it with a sharp, metallic click.

The dark, swirling vortex of golden essence in his gut settled down, humming with a dense, vicious, and completely unyielding power. He looked toward the eastern tree line, his silver-crimson eyes narrowing into cold, lethal slits.

Next second, he turned east, breaking into a dead, silent sprint through the rotting darkness of the Great Orrath. The next phase of the war was here, and Sol was going to ensure he was the one who finished it.

…

Sol sprinted through the dense, tangled undergrowth of the Great Orrath, leaving the bloody clearing behind. He was an obsidian blur, cutting through the low-hanging, thorn-choked canopy with a fluid grace.

His new black Rockhorn carapace didn’t make a sound, absorbing the ambient light and rendering him practically invisible against the twisted, prehistoric roots.

He didn’t look back at the six crushed skulls or the pool of rotting green slush. His mind was completely empty of everything except a cold, calculated reality.

He knew that the six scouts were just the tip of the knife. A coalition planning to harvest a whole tribe wouldn’t stake their entire infiltration on one squad of lanky monsters.

There were definitely more out there, moving through the rotting dark, creeping closer to the tribe while the Veynar warriors slept behind their wooden walls.

Returning to the village to report to Warchief Veylara was out of the question. By the time he navigated the inner ring guards, got past the staring elders, and convinced them to deploy units into the pitch-black jungle, half the peripheral scouts would already be hollowed-out hulls, their muscles liquefied by necrotizing venom.

Thorne would definitely notice the sudden movement and leak the deployments and the enemy would just scatter back into the rot.

“No point waiting for a meeting,” Sol muttered, his boots clearing a massive root without touching a single dry leaf. “Let’s clean the perimeter first.”

He didn’t know why instead of being afraid or anything, there was a maniac cold smirk on his face. He felt an excitement he couldn’t explain, maybe he was born for stuff like this.

While running, he extended his perception outward, utilizing the hyper-sensitive kinetic senses of his Dreadwing spirit.

The jungle stopped being a chaotic mess of shadows and turned into a grid of vibrations, heat signatures, and essence pressure.

He wasn’t just looking for movement; he was scanning specifically for that irregular, jerky, twitching frequency that belonged only to the seven-foot skeletal stalkers.

And he really found them, a few miles northeast of his initial clearing, near a cluster of weeping petrified willows, his senses twitched.

The air here held a foul, sour tang… the distinct stench of Zerith secretions… a smell like damp moss mixed with stale bile. Underneath that stench, he picked up a rhythmic, rapid thumping of human hearts, beating fast and desperate.

Sol adjusted his path mid-stride, planting his boot against a mossy trunk and launching himself twenty feet upward into the thick canopy.

He ran along the branches, a silent shadow hidden by the thin membrane of silver essence wrapped around his body. He peered through the dark leaves.

A three-man Veynar patrol had their backs pressed against a hollow trunk, their heavy bone-shields locked together. Surrounding them were four Zeriths. The lanky monsters weren’t rushing their kills; they were playing with them, shifting their skeletal limbs in weird, twitching patterns that made them look like giant insects.

One Veynar scout was already down in the muck, his left arm turning a bruised pitch-black as the necrotizing venom liquefied his muscles from the inside out, as he screamed a ragged, bubbling sound.

He was chewing on a piece of leather to keep from screaming.

“Hold the line!” the squad leader roared, his bone-sword shaking as the lead stalker’s horizontal eyes flashed an ugly orange light in the dark.”Don’t let them get past the shields!”

The lead Zerith let out a wet, clicking laugh, its long arm reaching past its knees, its double-length fingers tapping against the mud. “Soft meat,” it hissed, its slit-mouth peeling back to show rows of needle teeth. “The little cubs in the tribe will taste much better than you old—”