Ug’gut veritably flew through the thick jungle. Each time one of her feet met the ground or a tree trunk, she used it to spring dozens of meters in a single flashing leap. The scent of

  her prey pulled her even as the outrage of their transgressions drove her with ever building speed. She had left her kin far behind now. She was the spear’s tip, and she had unfinished business with a certain cowardly

  giant king.

  She reached the perimeter of their camp, and as expected they were ready and waiting. The troublesome orc had no doubt sensed their approach and roused them. No matter.

  “I think I hear someth-.” A mountain giant started to announce, but his head vanished from his bulky body mid sentence.

  Seven more giants lost their heads within the span of a heartbeat. It appeared to happen simultaneously. Defenses were raised within a few seconds, but by that time the threat had passed deeper

  into the camp. None of the rabble ever caught a glimpse of their killer as she blinked from one hapless victim to the next. They couldn’t afford to waste time looking for the invisible threat, as guttural bone chilling

  shrieks and roars heralded the rumbling of the ground. The goblins had arrived.

  Orithrim, the Mountain Swallowing the Sky heard the far distant commotion and vaguely sensed the approach of his most loathed enemy. With a great heave of his bulk he rose from the throne dragged

  down from the mountains. He towered over the landscape, truly appearing as a mountain of flesh wielding the knotted and blood soaked trunk of an ancient oak tree as his weapon.

  She was distant one moment, and she was before him the next. Orithrim swallowed hard. How had she become even more powerful than he remembered? Still, he was no helpless whelp unlike the scores

  of his soldiers she had killed on her way through the camp. He focused his mind and ignited his long dormant warrior’s spirit.

  “So impatient to be squashed, little green rat?” The power of his voice rattled the stones and would have caused serious damage to the average adventurer.

  “One of us here is afraid.” Ug’gut answered coldly, and the truth in her words could not be denied. “Swing your weapon, Orithrim, and swing it well. It will be the last

  time.”

  Orithrim’s great eyes flicked subtly to the side, and then he leaped back as an explosion centered just below the devilish goblin rocked the entire region.

  “Ha!” The giant king roared in triumph as the heat haze and smoke began to clear. Only a massive glowing crater remained where the smug goblin queen had just stood.

  So many centuries had been poured into the creation of that device. The Soul Energy bomb had been invented for this exact moment. It had no aura, and instantly destroyed anything living within

  its huge blast radius.

  “Perish for your hubris little rat!” Orithrim boomed, finally free of his terror for the first time in millennia. “Go and meet your worthless failure of a god in the next

  life!”

  A pain that began in Orithrim’s right ankle suddenly spiraled up his leg and exploded on his groin. He doubled over even as he was knocked backward, his weapon flying from his limp grasp.

  The sound of his fall was nearly as loud as the Soul Energy bomb. His bewildered and agonized face looked down in growing shock and dread. Blood sprayed from the deep spiraling laceration, and the gruesome state of the area

  between his legs made him nearly vomit.

  “A coward who uses cheap tricks and sneak attacks has no use for these.” Ug’gut’s voice said, and two bloody round objects thumped off of Orithrim’s quivering

  belly.

  A surge of adrenaline and blind rage drove the giant back to his feet then. His regeneration was already hard at work, healing the terrible injuries and regrowing his severed parts. In spite

  of his many years of sloth and gluttony, Orithrim was a Ring Guardian for a reason.

  His foot smashed the ground, and a tremor rolled out like a great tsunami of dirt and stone in all directions. As Orithrim’s Berserk skill took effect, his fear vanished. Pain transformed to pleasure, and the warrior Orithrim finally began to appear for the first time in many ages.

  A flurry of devastating stomps and punches utterly pulverized the landscape, including several of his own honor guards that had rushed to assist him. Any one of the furious blows would have

  devastated a mortal city, yet Ug’gut was unimpressed.

  “A brute who blindly flaps his arms like a baby bird could never be useful to my lord.” She spoke directly into his ear (which was larger than her whole body) as she cocked her arm back.

  The strike that followed caused a shockwave to blast out from the other side of Orithrim’s colossal head, and he lurched to the side.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  A great column of dust swallowed the sky as Orithrim crashed down once more, the impact shattering the bedrock beneath him. His blood - black with divine essence - seeped into the cracks,

  sizzling against the scorched dirt.

  Ug’gut tilted her head at him, mildly curious. This was a broken thing. A spoiled god-child who had grown bloated and indolent on his false throne.

  What a disappointment.

  Then the ground rumbled.

  Slowly, he rose.

  Orithrim planted one meaty hand against the dirt, and something groaned and buckled deep in the ground below. The giant let out a slow, measured exhale, his once-wild breath steadying.

  The deep wounds riddling his body snapped shut, healing instantly. The legendary body control technique was not magical in nature, and only a few beings in history had ever achieved it. The

  flabby mass that had once wobbled uselessly now pulled in, core muscles tightening, refining.

  A hot, oppressive wind rolled off him, his aura shifting from a bloated, gluttonous mass into a singular, razor-thin blade of intent. The sheer density of his presence made the ground beneath

  Ug’gut quiver and creak.

  Her golden eyes widened, just slightly.

  There he is.

  The real Orithrim.

  No longer a fat king propped up by ceremony, but a warrior carved from the marrow of the battlefield itself.

  His fingers closed around the blood-stained oak trunk, and the air screamed as it sliced forward, superheated by the sheer velocity of the flashing overhead chop.

  For the first time in this battle, Ug’gut dodged.

  She landed lightly, surveying the ruin left in the wake of his attack.

  A branching fissure hundreds of meters deep split the land, vanishing into the distant horizon. The jungle itself had been cleaved apart, a deep gouge left in the landscape - a divine cataclysm

  befitting the deity of giants.

  A slow grin spread across Ug’gut’s lips.

  She turned back toward him - and found a proper opponent, at last.

  “Welcome back, ruler of giantkin.” she said, voice low with satisfaction. “Now I may trample you without the shame of bullying the weak.”

  As Orithrim and Ug’gut clashed, the rest of the transformed White Fangs struck the line of defenders like giant green ballista bolts launched from hell itself. Hundreds of giants lay

  dead or dying after a few mere moments. A handful of goblins had fallen, but were already beginning to rise with fatal wounds closing in a cloud of green smoke. The flight of red dragons joined the fray, unleashing indiscriminate

  breath attacks that consumed more allies than enemies. Any dragon that strafed too close to the ground was engulfed by a swarm of leaping goblins and dragged to the ground to be mercilessly dismembered - a lizard caught by fire ants.

  Orfan surveyed the bedlam and carnage from on high, feeling very little at the expected scene. He sighed and was about to join the fray when a screaming sense of danger made him blink several

  meters back. A wave of force tore through the area that made the Soul Energy bomb detonation seem like a candle by comparison.

  The destructive wave was so powerful that it halted the general conflict below. A deep canyon punched all the way down through bedrock had replaced thousands of combatants in the blink of

  an eye. Orfan turned his senses toward the newborn aura that had replaced the wavering, pitiful presence of Orithrim.

  “So that’s why you didn’t just kill him instantly.” Orfan mused to himself. “You’d risk multiple worlds to draw the beast from its cage and have a good

  fight, Ug’gut?”

  Orfan would have loved to observe the coming cataclysmic clash, but he had been spotted. A gigantic goblin hand tore through the air as the leaping monstrosity shot straight past the hovering

  high orc. Orfan wasn’t fast enough to fully avoid the attack. No living thing was faster than the cumulative speed of literally millions of goblins after all.

  That didn’t mean the orc was in trouble, though. Orfan took the dragging cut across his cheek from the bone dagger lashed to the goblin’s middle finger like a long talon. He responded

  with a short strike of his own. His palm impacted the ogre sized goblin’s upper abdomen, and the force of it traveled throughout the goblin’s body instantly, carrying with it Orfan’s alabaster aura.

  The goblin’s body lost all rigidity, and turned into a ragdoll as it continued its upward flight for several meters. Every neural pathway had been shattered, and every node of Soul Energy

  ruptured with that simple touch. The goblin would be out of the fight well after the effects of the Endless Horde elixir faded.

  As Orfan prepared to drop into the bedlam below, a nostalgic aura fell over him from above. He snapped his eyes up, urgently scanning the night sky. It passed as quickly as it came, and he

  shook his head, berating himself for the flight of fancy.

  A moment later, Orfan touched down in the center of a group of eight White Fangs. He put a hand to the hilt of Little Sister, and eight goblins were blasted away in pieces. The single sweeping

  strike passed through the charging bodies without resistance, and the rush of air that flowed in the weapon’s wake exploded out with hurricane force.

  As the first wave of opponents was sent flying the aura from above tickled his senses once more, stronger now. It distracted him for the barest fraction of a second, yet in that moment he

  was brutally stabbed over a dozen times. More enemies piled in. Their strength, speed and utter savagery was suffocating. A jaw full of tangled fangs latched onto his arm. He tore the head from its body, and the decapitated

  head only bit down harder, pure bloodlust and madness still gleaming in the orange eyes.

  A single discordant bubble boiled up from somewhere deep within his calm mind, then another.

  The high orc had grown into a calm, calculating warrior over the centuries, but that had not always been the case. Each stab, bite, and jagged tear across his skin pulled more of that forgotten

  self up from the deepest, darkest root of his being.

  Orfan’s aura shifted in color from cold white to blood red, and a growl escaped his lips. He exploded upward in a spinning somersault, Little Sister flashing in the moonlight. A mist

  of dark blood spread in all directions. Not a single identifiable body part escaped the range of his weapon in those following moments. Only blood and minced flesh splattered out from the cloud of carnage, and when the onslaught

  abated Orfan stood to his knees in a mound of viscera. How could he forget? How could anyone forget? He was the Orphan, the One Who Kills.

  He looked around then, blood hammering in his ears, and red mist swirling in his vision. A semicircle of White Fangs had formed around him several meters away. His first thought was that they

  were hesitating out of fear of his display. A trickle of icy calm ran through his mind, and he noticed. They were… kneeling? All of the nearby violence of the melee had stopped, aside from the occasional earth shaking

  explosion from some distant place where Ug’gut battled Orithrim.

  It was only then that he felt the presence once more, stronger than ever, and right behind him.

  “Looks like I’m late as usual.” It was a voice that froze the blood in Orfan’s veins.

  Orfan turned slowly, and saw the impossible. His dearest ally, mentor, and friend had somehow returned. The urge hammered away from his Soulbrand, demanding that he fulfill his standing orders

  to capture the man immediately. Ignoring it was the easiest thing in the world to him in that moment.

  Orfan went to set his weapon down, but grimaced at the vile pool of eviscerated goblins. Now that he noticed it, the gummy, cooling sensation of blood covering his body disgusted him. His polearm

  then began to pulse in his hand, the worn handle becoming hot to the touch.

  “Impossible.” He breathed. She hadn’t woken up in thousands of years. Why now?

  Little Sister glowed, and suddenly ripped itself from his grip. The weapon spun in an impossibly fast spinning streak aimed straight at the head of the long lost Polemios.

  “No!” He screamed but there was no stopping her.

  The strangely dressed Polemios’ face grew confused and he moved with admirable reflexes, but Orfan knew it would not be enough. Orfan’s despair turned to confusion when the weapon

  glowed brighter and changed shape in mid flight. The voice of a young girl suddenly shouted in glee.

  “Uncle Po!” The little orc girl crashed into the returned god, still covered in goblin gore. They both tumbled to the torn and blood stained ground.