FREE USE in Primitive World

Korash’s face crumpled. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he pressed himself harder against the rock.

”Please... I’m not like him! I never wanted this! I just... I just followed orders! I was only a Layer 2! What could I have done against him?!”

Sol’s neon-crimson eyes didn’t soften even a fraction.

”You could have spoken,” he said. ”You could have warned someone. You could have chosen the tribe over your father’s ambition. Instead, you stood beside him. You wore that fine armor while others bled. You stayed silent while he planned the deaths of people who trusted him.”

Korash’s voice rose into a desperate, broken scream.

”I’m young! I made a mistake! Please have mercy! I’ll serve the tribe! I’ll do anything! Don’t kill me like you killed him!”

Sol stared at him for a long moment.

Then he spoke

”You had your chance to choose. You chose wrong.”

Korash’s eyes widened in pure terror as he realized there would be no more talking.

Sol didn’t even slow his stride.

He didn’t run, nor did he waste a complex technique on the boy.

With a casual, almost indifferent flick of his wrist, Sol threw the Dreadwing blade like a spear across the fifty-foot gap.

WHOOSH-THUMP!

The blade tore through the air, impaling Korash cleanly through the back, pinning his chest straight to a rock behind him.

The boy’s legs twitched once, his eyes going blank as his blood dripped onto the ground.

Sol walked over slowly, grabbed the leather hilt of his sword, and pulled it free with a smooth, effortless motion.

SQUELCH.

Korash’s body slurred onto the dirt, completely lifeless.

...

For a calm minute, the wind howled through the battlefield carrying with it the thick, metallic stench of spilled blood, charred meat, and the fading, ozone tang of shattered spiritual essence.

Sol stood atop the stone mound where Korash’s lifeless body had just collapsed. The sapphire blade of the Dreadwing blade rested casually over his right shoulder once more, as Sol liked this pose more and more, its surface painted in dark streaks of fresh blood of father and son.

A dead silence blanketed the whole battlefield.

Across the blood-soaked limestone floor, the surviving coalition forces stood paralyzed.

The mighty Great Orrath Coalition.... a force that had marched into the valley with terrifying arrogance, intent on executing a total genocide of the Veynar clan.... had been reduced to a broken, leaderless remnant.

Their Grand Chieftain, Bruga, lay decapitated, his twenty-five-foot frame drained into a withered husk.

Their elite assassin, the Zerith Chief, had been bisected in a single breath.

Another Maradurer layer 4 warlord was also dead. Even the remaining Human layer 4 warrior and Chief Vane of the Zharun tribe had also been tortured, skinned, and crushed into a ruined stain upon the bedrock.

Even the traitors within the Veynar lineage had been purged. Thorne lay dead, poisoned by his own needle and impaled upon the stone, while his arrogant son Korash was pinned to the rock behind him.

Sol slowly turned his head. His visor shifted toward the eastern flank, where the surviving Zharun forces were gathered.

There were a few hundred of them, he didn’t care about counting them all carefully, all hardened Layer 2 veterans with a few layer 3 here and there who had been lucky to be far from Sol when he killed the Zharun Layer 4 earlier.

They hadn’t taken a single step forward since Vane’s head had exploded under Sol’s boot.

They stood frozen, their knuckles white around their shaft hilts, sweating profusely in the mountain chill.

Sol stepped down from the stone mound. His boots hit he limestone floor with a heavy, echoing THUD.

SCREEECH...

He tilted the Dreadwing Blade slightly, letting the tip drag against the white slate as he began to walk toward the Zharun ranks at a calm, almost leisurely pace.

The soft scrape... scrape... scrape of sapphire edge against stone was somehow louder than the panicked breathing of the warriors ahead.

”You know,” Sol murmured, his raspy voice cutting through the whistling wind like a drawn bowstring, ”if there’s one thing in this world that disgusts me more than a loud-mouthed beast...”

He stopped exactly ten paces from the front line of the Zharun spearmen.

The entire formation had gone rigid. Spears trembled in clenched fists. Eyes darted between Sol’s blood-drenched form and the withered husk of Thorne still pinned to the ground behind him.

”...it’s a snake that bites from behind,” Sol continued, neon-crimson eyes sweeping slowly across their ranks. ”Your chief made a point of joining hands with Veynar. Smiling. Nodding. Swearing cooperation. And the entire time, he was planning to butcher their women and children the moment it became convenient.”

A heavy silence followed his words.

The remaining Zharun commander at the front ... a broad-shouldered Layer 3 warrior with deep scars crisscrossing his jaw... swallowed hard.

He tried to raise his spear, though his arms shook visibly.

”Wait!” the man barked, voice cracking despite his attempt at authority. ”We were only following Chief Vane’s orders! We didn’t know the full extent of—!”

Sol tilted his head slightly, expression unchanged.

”You didn’t know?” he repeated, almost mildly. ”You stood in the same camps. You marched beside him. You watched him smile at Veylara while sharpening the knife behind her back. And now you want to claim ignorance?”

The commander’s face twisted with desperation. ”B-but we’re not the ones who planned it! Spare us and we’ll—”

Sol’s eyes cooled further.

”Spare you?”

”Yes, yes.” they all nodded eagerly, though their mind were running on opposite thoughts.

He took one slow step forward.

”Well, I refuse!”

WHOOSH...CLEAVE!

With the terrifying speed of his Layer 3 Peak baseline strength, Sol took a single step forward and executed a casual, almost lazy horizontal arc with the Dreadwing Blade. There was no dramatic wind-up.

No shouting of some technique name. (not like he knew any)

Just a clean, economical motion that looked almost too simple for the destruction it produced.

A thirty-foot crescent wave of compressed sapphire-gold wind erupted from the sword’s edge.

The air itself screamed as the blade-wave tore forward, carrying the same high-frequency cutting force that had already ended so many lives that day.