FREE USE in Primitive World

”That’s one,” Sol muttered, his expression completely unbothered as he yanked the blade out, letting a dark stream of blood font up into the air. ”You still have three more limbs to go before we talk about your face.”

In the distance, the Veynar warriors watched the execution with a savage, burning pride.

The young recruits were clenching their fists, their tears drying on their charcoal paint as they saw the monster who had taken Lumi being broken into separate pieces in the dirt.

The sapphire edge of the Dreadwing Blade flicked through the air again, casting a cold blue reflection across the slick, red-stained gravel.

Sol didn’t look at the thousands of frozen witnesses around him. His eyes remained locked on the screaming Malphas pinned beneath his foot.

”Now for the other one,” Sol said, his voice entirely flat.

SHUCK.

The blade descended into Malphas’s already broken right knee.

The high-frequency vacuum effect violently disintegrated the cartilage, turning the solid joint into a wet, boiling mush of liquefied marrow and fragmented bone.

Malphas’s back violently arched off the cracked clay, his remaining good hand tearing into the hard dirt until his fingernails ripped completely from his skin, leaving bloody streaks in the limestone dust.

A sound tore out of his throat that didn’t sound human... a high-pitched, bubbly screech of absolute agony that made the frozen Zharun warriors shiver.

Sol didn’t pause. His movements were mechanical, rhythmic, and chillingly precise.

He yanked the blade free, allowing a jet of dark, hot arterial blood to splash directly onto Rockhorn armor.

”That’s the legs,” Sol muttered, his silver-crimson eyes glowing with a quiet fire. ”You don’t need them anymore anyway. Cowards only use them to run.”

He shifted his weight, his foot stepping off the chest and coming down directly onto Malphas’s left elbow joint.

The thick leather armor protecting the arm groaned under the immense physical weight.

Malphas, his face completely covered in a mix of white dust, sweat, and crimson foam, tried to look up through his swelling eyes. ”P-please...” he gurgled through his shattered jaw, all his Layer 4 pride, his savage marsh training, and his identity as a tribal elite gone, replaced by the raw, desperate begging of an animal in a butcher’s pen. ”Mercy... Chief... anyone... just cut... cut my throat...”

”I told you,” Sol whispered, leaning down so close his black shadow completely swallowed his face. ”No.”

And didn’t anyone tell you? You talk too much,” Sol muttered.

With a chilling indifference that made the watching Zharun warriors break into cold sweat, he raised the Dreadwing Blade vertically, pointing the tip directly at the center of Malphas’s left shoulder socket.

He didn’t drive it in with a fast stab.

Instead, he applied a slow, crushing downward pressure, letting the high-frequency edge grind its way through the thick muscle, millimeter by millimeter.

CRUNCH. FIZZ.

The sound of the vibrating sapphire edge liquefying the thick muscle fibers and slowly dissolving the shoulder bone filled the silent clearing.

The extreme friction seemed to cook the surrounding flesh from the inside out, releasing a sickening smell of burnt meat and hot iron that made the nearest Zharun recruits gag.

The Zharun warriors were completely paralyzed with horror. Some of the older veterans felt their stomachs turn, their hands shaking so badly against their wooden spear shafts that the flint tips rattled.

They looked at Sol’s black silhouette, a sickening question rising in their minds: What kind of monster did we invite into the pass? Is that thing even a human?

...

On the other hand, Malphas’s body convulsed so violently his spine made loud, snapping popping sounds against the hard clay.

His eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible, his veins bulging so hard across his neck they looked ready to pop through his skin.

Sol watched the white-hot torment reflect in the giant’s eyes with cold detachment. When the shoulder joint was completely erased, leaving the left arm attached by nothing but a few thin shreds of scorched skin, Sol calmly pulled the blade out.

”Three,” Sol counted, his expression as calm as a craftsman working on a piece of wood.

He stepped around to the giant’s right side. Malphas’s right arm was his last remaining functional limb, the one that had held the cleaver that terrorized the nearby tribes.

Sol didn’t use the blade this time. He simply lifted his foot and brought it down directly onto his right hand, which was frantically clawing at the gravel.

STOMP.

The force completely pancaked his hand into the limestone flats.

The five thick, scarred gingers were crushed into a flat, bloody paste of shattered bone splinters and torn flesh, completely embedding the remains into the dry clay.

Malphas didn’t even have the breath left to shriek.

His body simply gave a massive, silent jolt, a thick gout of dark blood spraying out of his nose and mouth as his lung pathways began to fail under the sheer trauma.

The brutal breakdown was so incredibly graphic, so intensely brutal, that a heavy, sickening dread began to infect the surrounding armies.

To the people of the Great Orrath, war was a brutal matter of clubs, axes, and quick slaughter. You smashed a man’s head, or you got your chest pierced by a spear. It was fast, bloody, and driven by wild rage.

The level of raw, cold-blooded brutality unfolding in the middle of the clearing was completely beyond anything the primitive tribes had ever witnessed.

Up on the ridges, the Veynar warriors... who had initially felt a surge of savage, burning pride... found their cheering voices dying in their throats.

They stared down with wide, hollow eyes.

They hated the Zharun with every fiber of their being, and they loathed Malphas for what he had done to Lumi, but watching Sol dismantle him so calmly was starting to make their skin crawl.

There was no warrior’s honor in this, no heat-of-battle rage. It was the cold, unyielding execution of an even bigger monster.