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But as the minutes continued to tick away, the shadow of the mountain barrier began to stretch longer across the parched clay flats.

The sun was slowly moving past its afternoon peak, and the delay was becoming far too long, even for the lazy, arrogant standards of the Marauders.

Reports kept filtering back from the front rows through the scouts... not reports of a breakthrough or a broken gate, but a continuous, suffocating silence from the inside of the chute.

Every single batch of elite warriors they sent into the smoke simply vanished, their energy signatures cutting off instantly like twigs snapping in a dark forest.

The Grand Chieftain of the Gray Marauders slowly stopped chewing his meat.

His eyes narrowed into two dangerous, yellow slits as he stared down the long, empty approach trail leading toward the mountain barrier.

The delay was no longer a simple tight space in the stone.

It was becoming a humongous, public insult to his personal command. His entire four-thousand-man horde, the greatest assembly of physical muscle the Orrath region had seen in generations, was being completely held up for so long by those weak Veynar monkeys.

If the neighboring tribes heard that his army had spent half a sun cowering outside a mountain pass because of weak humans, his name would become a joke among the tribes.

The insult was scratching hard against his bloated pride.

”Enough,” the Gray Marauder Chief growled, his deep, rumbling voice making the mammoth hides on the floor vibrate.

He slowly got up from his stone chair, his colossal body rising into the sun like a mountain given life.

The lazy, bored look on his face had completely vanished, replaced by a dark, explosive fury that made his thick neck muscles stand out like tree roots.

He reached down with his massive hand, gripping the handle of his primary weapon... a seven-foot club carved from the thigh-bone of a longhouse-sized beast.

He swung the massive bone club once through the air, creating a loud, terrifying WHOOSH that kicked up a heavy gust of white limestone dust across the whole clearing.

”I am going to see what these weak monkeys’s necks look like when I twist them off their shoulders,” the Grand Chieftain bellowed, his pupils flashing with a savage, angry light as he took his first heavy step forward. ”Warriors! Follow my lead! We are going to break that mountain pass down ourselves!”

The surrounding Marauder chiefs immediately jumped to their feet, their giant stone axes and clubs raised as they let out a unified, deafening war cry that shook the entire wasteland.

...

The heavy, rumbling war cry of the Marauder chiefs rolled across the parched clay flats like thunder, shaking the dust off the low ridges.

At the head of the mass, the Grand Chieftain of the Gray Marauders marched forward, his twenty-foot body moving with huge, ground-shaking strides.

The lower-tier warriors scrambled out of his way in terror, falling over their own shields and weapons just to avoid being stepped on by his massive feet.

He carried his seven-foot bone club loosely in his hand, letting it swing casually, but every time it hit the ground it created a deep crate.

His thick, gray skin, hardened by years of war, bristled with anger.

Every step he took dug deep into the dry earth, leaving wide, crushed tracks in the clay.

It didn’t take long for the giant to reach the outer mouth of the mountain pass.

He had expected to find a jammed line of his own warriors finally breaking through the rock, or perhaps a desperate wall of Veynar monkeys trying to hold onto their last patch of dirt.

Instead, he stopped dead in his tracks, his massive teeth grinding as his eyes took in the incredible and humiliating scene.

As he had been told, the opening of the pass was incredibly small... a tight, five-man-wide stone corridor slicing through the towering grey slate cliffs.

But it wasn’t the size of the rock that made the giant freeze. It was the red and green river flowing out of it.

A thick, dark stream of blood was slowly crawling through the white limestone gravel, staining the wasteland floor.

Inside the chute, the bodies of hundreds of his elite warriors along with Zerith were piled high, wedged against the stone walls and trampled into a thick, pulped mass of leather, bone, and meat.

And right at the end of that horrific slaughterhouse, standing entirely alone, was a single human.

Sol stood in the center of the gory lane, his black Rockhorn armor covered from head to toe in thick red and green slime and dripping pieces of meat.

Chunks of flesh and shattered bone clung to his shoulders and chest plate. His face was streaked with blood, but his silver-crimson eyes were calm, and determined.

Even though he was breathing heavily, he looked completely casual, as if he had spent the last two watches taking a hiking stroll through the woods rather than single-handedly butchering an entire army vanguard.

In his right hand, the sapphire edge of the Dreadwing Blade hummed with a quiet, satisfied vibration, its blue light reflecting off the wet stone walls.

The Grand Chieftain’s face turned from gray to a deep, furious purple.

The sheer weight of the insult hit his bloated pride like a heavy club.

His four-thousand-man horde, the strongest force in the whole Orrath region, had been held up for so long, and hundreds of his best fighters had been turned into mashed pieces... all by one lone monkey.

”You little worm!” the giant bellowed, his voice so loud it shook loose gravel off the high cliffs. The sound echoed through the pass like thunder, making the stone walls tremble.

With a wild, furious roar, the Marauder Chief lunged forward, trying to rush straight into the narrow pass to crush Sol into the dirt.

But his body was simply too big and too wide.

His massive, boulder-like shoulders slammed hard against the entry rocks, the rough slate tearing into his thick skin as he tried to force his twenty-foot body into a five-man-wide gap.

The impact was so violent that the stone cracked, sending shards flying.

The Chief roared in frustration, his muscles bulging as he pushed harder, but the pass refused to yield.

His huge body was completely jammed at the entrance, his arms pinned against the walls, his massive club unable to swing properly in the tight space.

In his blind rage, he raised his seven-foot beast-thigh club, trying to bring it down in a devastating overhead strike to pulverize Sol where he stood.

BANG!