FREE USE in Primitive World

Their clothes were in rough shape... Kira’s leather hunting pants were caked in dirt, and Zeyra’s combat gear was stained dark with the greenish-yellow fluid of the stalkers... but their strides were long, fast, and entirely stable, without any sign of serious injury.

A middle-aged woman near the front of the gate suddenly let out a sharp, gasping shriek, her hands flying to her mouth.

She had spotted her son, Bran, jogging near the front of Team One. His face was caked in dried giant blood, and his tunic was ripped across the shoulder, but his arms and legs were completely whole.

"Bran! By the ancestors, he’s walking!" she sobbed, her knees buckling as she reached through the logs.

Right next to her, an old veteran saw Torin and Kael moving in formation, their expressions full of a fierce, silent pride as they hit their chest armor in a synchronized salute to the crowd. The recognition triggered a sudden, explosive wave of shouting through the entire gate line.

"Look at the rear!" a high scout shouted down from his branch, his voice cracking with pure, unrefined shock as he leaned over the rail. "Look at the rear of the group! There are no stretchers! Nobody is being carried! There are no dead bodies!"

The words hit the crowded tribe like a tidal wave of pure energy. The gloomy, suffocating atmosphere that had hung over the spire all morning shattered in an instant.

A massive roar of pure jubilation erupted from the throat of every man, woman, and child inside the walls, the sound so loud it shook the loose plaster off the mud huts.

The heavy ironwood gates were violently thrown open from the inside, the wooden rollers groaning as the crowd poured out into the dirt road like a broken dam.

They swarmed the returning warriors, laughing, crying, and grabbing at their limbs to verify they were real.

Mothers wrapped their arms around their sons’ bloody necks; old fathers slapped the shoulders of the squad leaders, their faces flush with an intense, chaotic relief.

The group didn’t break its discipline entirely, but the warriors couldn’t hide the wild grins breaking through the mud on their faces.

They had marched into two separate enemy strongholds in a single night, drawn deep blood, and returned under the sun without leaving a single comrade behind in the muck.

"Get the shamans! We have injured ones in the center packs!" Hargon barked as he walked through the gate, his hand still firmly pressed against the crude fiber bandage on his chest.

Four other veterans from the rear squads were being supported by their mates, their legs limping from deep claw gashes or their shoulders bruised from heavy club impacts, but their core pathways were still humming with warm essence.

They hadn’t lost any limbs, and their bone-structures were intact.

Three old tribal shamans wrapped in long fiber shawls rushed forward from the medical huts, carrying jars of crushed river-leaf paste and soothing spirit water.

They took one look at Hargon’s chest gash and sighed in relief; it was a wide skin wound, but the muscle beneath hadn’t been liquefied by venom or pulverized by a heavy strike. With the help of their spirit essence and the healing herbs, these men would be standing on the walls ready to fight before the sun hit the center sky.

Warchief Veylara and High Shaman Zephyra stepped down from the central wooden platform, walking straight through the parting crowd until they stopped right in front of Sol.

Veylara’s eyes were wide, burning with an intense light as she scanned the one hundred and eighty spirit warriors filling the clearing.

She looked at the blood on their axes, the green fluid on their boots, and then fixed her gaze entirely on Sol’s calm face. Her heavy chest rose and fell as she let out a long, deep breath she had been holding since midnight.

"You brought them all back," Veylara said, her voice a low, heavy rumble that carried a profound weight through the immediate circle. "Our scouts on the high ridges said they saw black smoke rising from both the northern swamp and the southern ridges at dawn. They thought something bad had happened."

"The smoke wasn’t ours," Sol said, his tone entirely casual but rough as he unbuckled his weapon belt to loosen the tension on his hips. "Despite some small complications with a pack of hounds and a loud sub-commander at the mud huts, the strike was a total success.

We completely cleared their forward Zerith outer ring, burned their supply houses, and then swept through the outer ring of the Marauder camp while they were still sleeping. We killed plenty of their warriors, left the Veynar war signs on their doors, and didn’t leave a single one of our warriors in the dirt."

Zephyra stepped up beside Veylara, her eyes fixed on Sol’s chest armor.

As a High Shaman, her core perception was hyper-tuned to the spiritual currents of the forest, and the moment she got within three paces of Sol, her breath caught.

She could feel the faint, radiant essence hum vibrating beneath his Rockhorn carapace... a dense, noble energy that felt entirely different from what he had carried yesterday.

It felt like living sunlight, carrying a natural aura of pure dominion that made her own ancient channels thrum with a strange, submissive warmth.

She looked at Kira and Zeyra, noting the clean, expanded flow of essence inside their widened pathways, and a silent, knowing look passed through her eyes before she looked back at Sol with deep respect.

"The spirits of the Orrath are singing a bloody song today, Sol," Zephyra whispered, her voice smooth and stable. "You have completely gouged out the enemy’s eyes. They are blind."

"They’re more than blind... they’re going to be insane with rage," Sol smirked, his eyes gleaming with earth’s cold, practical military logic. "Right now, their rotating guard is probably finding those carcasses. When their grand chieftains see their sub-commander’s head sitting in the mud with our tribe’s crest dug into his skull, their pride will fracture completely. They won’t wait to plan a strategic siege, they all will be rushing over in fury."

He turned his head, looking toward the narrow mountain pass that led straight into the rocky basin behind the spire.

"They will mobilize their entire thousands-strong horde within hours," Sol stated, his voice flat, heavy, and definitive. "They’ll be foaming at the mouth, running as fast as their lanky legs and heavy limbs can carry them, sprinting blindly through the brush just to come and crush our walls before sunset. And that is exactly what we want."

Veylara’s lips pulled back into a terrifying, cold smile, her eyes burning with absolute finality as she hit her heavy fist against her thigh armor. "They’ll march straight into the narrow pass to catch us, and they won’t look at the ridges until the rocks start falling."

"Exactly," Sol muttered, closing his eyes as he leaned his shoulder against a wooden post. "The first phase of the saw is done. Now, we just wait for the rabbits to run straight into the mouth of the butcher’s shop."