Book 6 - Chapter 1 - Minor Interlude – Tortaxx – To Face Chaos (Patreon)

AN: Welcome to Book 6, Divine Instrument!

(Apologies for being a few minutes late.)

Tortaxx was quite proud of his own cleverness. The Chief had always mocked him for being a thoughtless brute, but she was probably dead. And there he stood, far away from both the bandit camp that had been his home and the vast ‘Legion’ that attacked it. From the moment that the centaurs broke through the camp’s barricades, Tortaxx went on the move. He gathered as many goblins as he could.

And he left the shitshow behind.

Because he wasn’t half the thoughtless brute that the Chief or anyone else believed him to be. In fact, there was a good chance that he was the cleverest orc on Pallos. Which was really impressive, considering that he’d been born into the bandit camp. About the only thing anyone there wanted to teach an orc was how to bash a skull in.

But he was wiser than that—he used an axe! Why bash a skull in when he could split it like an overripe fruit with less effort? Cleverness in all things.

A thoughtless orc would have left the goblins behind too, but he had the cleverness to appreciate just how valuable they could be. Sure, goblins were weak, smelly, rude, greedy, selfish, stupid, lazy, and… wait, what was good about them again? Oh, right—they were driven in a way that few others could be! During the depths of winter, when most of the bandits had to eat half-rotten old food while they waited for a caravan to raid, Tortaxx learned that he could order goblins to go out and hunt. The woodlands that surrounded the bandit camp were notoriously lousy for game, but the goblins bravely faced the hazards, even knowing that a few of their number might perish. And they always returned with fresh meat.

Never tasty meat, but even the weird-tasting meat from whatever scrawny beast of winter they found was better than a mango that’d gone moldy a month ago.

But all of those hardships were in the past. The problem with the Chief was that she had no vision for the future. All she wanted to do was to preserve the nothing that they had, while they were forced to venture farther afield with every year that passed, just to raid the dwindling numbers of traders and caravans. Tortaxx, on the other hand, wanted a true future.

Because he was immortal. Not that he ever told anyone about it, not even the Chief.

Tragically, he had a selfish kind of immortality. It would have been nice to offer the boon to his goblin minions to incentivize them to try a little harder. Because as powerful and great as he was, the next several days would depend heavily on the sixteen (or so) of them. No single orc could occupy and run a territory alone.

And the cloven-hoofed fauns were exactly what he’d sought ever since he left the camp to its fate. Their territory was generally safe, yet there was no real government or army to be found within their borders. If he could just take over one of their sleepy, sprawling settlements, it was unlikely that their neighbors could evict him from an entrenched position.

Ideally, he preferred to keep a handful of the fauns alive to work the fields so he never had to worry about food ever again, but he would adapt to whatever the situation called for. Because that was what clever orcs did.

Besides, killing those that couldn’t possibly harm him had never really appealed. Sure, he was a bandit through and through—he was born to do nothing less—but there had to be a reason that the System didn’t richly reward the act. Even finishing off a broken, defiant [Warrior] was better for levels than putting his axe through the sniveling richly garbed man the [Warrior] served. The colors of the levels didn’t explain the difference entirely. There was something else there. Something that only a truly clever orc could appreciate.

Tortaxx shook his head to clear it of his idle musings. He’d picked up the habit because the goblins were horrible conversation partners. They mostly just stared at him while he spoke, waiting for an order to appear.

He missed his drinking buddies, but they were probably dead. And he wasn’t. That was just how life as a bandit went.

Distracted or not, Tortaxx was still the first one to hear anything out of place. He adjusted course, trusting his goblins to follow, until he got close enough to be confident of just what he was hearing.

The fauns used some dumb language that he didn’t understand, but the sounds of a few children playing were pretty bloody universal.

“Go, but do not kill or break them. We gonna let them lead us to whatever adults defend this place. Just scare them.” Tortaxx gave the order.

And his goblins rushed through to obey.

The three young fauns had been splashing around a small watering hole made by a spring, up until the moment that the goblins burst through the surrounding vegetation. By the time Tortaxx reached the spring, it was muddy and defiled by weeks—if not months—of accumulated filth, but it looked like the children fled directly toward the town, just as he hoped.

At full speed, he was significantly faster than the goblins could possibly be, so he only sped up once he was convinced that they were nearly back to the town. Ideally, he wanted the kids to show up screaming about goblins—or whatever word their language used for them—without warning the local protectors about him. [Warriors], [Rangers], [Mages], and [Leaders] that were expecting to punch down to face feeble goblins were far easier to deal with than those that were prepared to face the power of a level 589 orc [Warrior].

Had things gone as he hoped, they should have made it deep into the city before they were challenged. But when Tortaxx emerged from the trees, he found his goblins halted a short distance away from the first house’s sprawling gardens.

What they were stopped by though, he couldn’t possibly explain.

The creature was wearing armor made out of some beast’s scales that hid whatever curves it possessed, though its voice seemed feminine enough as it offered soothing gibberish to the faun children. It was too scrawny and pink to be an orc, too tall to be a dwarf, and it lacked the hooves of a faun. But there were no horns and the ornamented ears were all wrong, so it couldn’t possibly be one of the monstrous elves.

And it was wearing cloth over its eyes, for some reason?

Not that it was terribly impressive. Sure, it was a [Warrior], but the feeble red hue spoke of a level around the early 400’s, if that. Two classes at most.

The creature sent the children off and approached Tortaxx’s goblins with an unconcerned smile on its face as it produced a pair of curved knives from behind its back. It called something out in the fauns’ words as it walked closer, then raised its head as though it were looking Tortaxx’s way and offered words in a different, obnoxiously cute-sounding language.

“Creation, then? Anyone?” The creature finally offered sensible words.

Not that Tortaxx acknowledged them. He just caught the eyes of a few of his goblins and jerked his head toward the threat.

None of them were quite the creature’s level, but he was curious to see how well they fared as a group. If they ended up truly threatened, he planned to step in.

His goblins charged the creature in a loose mob, raising their weapons menacingly. And the creature just shrugged. …Before a second of the exact same creature stepped out from behind the original. With every step a new, utterly identical, one appeared, until there were roughly eight of it.

And then, faster than even his eye could follow, half of his goblins were on the ground.

Blooding speedsters! It wasn’t a great matchup, but he chose to trust his vastly superior level and immortal body to handle whatever feeble attacks the creature made with its build that heavily focused on speed.

Tortaxx rushed forward, bellowing a challenge as he went, though he stopped alongside his upright goblins—he needed one final duty from them before he could safely put the speedster down.

The plurality of creatures watched with open amusement on their face as Tortaxx lifted his arms and nodded to his strongest pair of goblins.

Being immortal was grand. He would live forever and his place among the gods was pretty much guaranteed, so long as he remained just a little clever. But it came at a price.

That dumb white bird appeared after his [Stay Strong] Skill evolved into [Unerodable Strength] and cursed him to lose half of all of his physical stats when he wasn’t bleeding. And even though the words came from a tiny beak, they were true. His own System proved it immediately.

Which was why he had trained his goblins to turn their jagged blades on the sides of his abdomen whenever he required it. The cuts from the poorly maintained weapons stung, but that was the point—they bled for far longer than a clean cut would.

It was always a rush to feel his true strength, speed, vitality, and dexterity return to him at once.

Properly indomitable, Tortaxx readied his axe and rushed at the strange protectors of the fauns. With their eyes concealed, he had no way to be sure what elements the siblings—or whatever they were—employed, but he figured the one in front was the strongest. He had been sure to [Mark] that one when the others started to appear.

Weirdly, the creatures responded to his charge by starting to dance, just as if they were heavily inebriated after winning a massive haul of valuables.

He nearly voiced his confusion as a few of the things slipped past him as they danced toward his remaining goblins, but no. Words could wait until after he had the fauns’ protectors broken at his feet.

Tortaxx started to follow the creatures to defend his goblins, but the [Mark]ed lead attacked him with far more speed and ferocity than he was expecting from such a low-level creature. He was forced to sloppily parry the knife with the haft of his axe before he could use his vastly superior reach to drive the menace back. Not that it stayed back—the damn thing spun like a… something that spun, then immediately came back.

It was annoying to know that the creature was still faster than he was, even while he bled, but he wasn’t worried. However capable it was, his true strength was in, well, his strength. And he was pretty bloody resilient too.

He drove his axe directly into the thing’s questing knife, forcing it to stagger backwards from the force of his blow while he took a quick glance back at the state of his goblins.

They were all down. And the creature’s kin were standing over their bodies.

There just wasn’t enough time to check and see if any of his goblins still lived. But if his horde was dead, he would be executing every single one of the strange creatures instead of giving them the opportunity to serve under his reign. He liked those goblins—they were decently trained and as loyal as any goblin ever was!

With an angry roar, Tortaxx focused his attacks on the accursed creature, swinging his weapon as swiftly as he could. He was on something of a timer—if his vitality stopped the flow of blood from his wounds before he successfully put down the creature and its cohorts, he would have to bait one of them into properly harming him. The stupid curse ignored injuries he inflicted on himself.

He was clearly stronger than the thing, but it continued to dance, using its strange movements to soften his blows to spare itself from getting disarmed or brutalized by his might. He had no idea why none of the others were getting involved, but he was willing to count himself lucky. So long as they remained stupidly overconfident, the battle was his.

Thrice, his opponent tried to slip behind him, but each time he pivoted and used the butt or violent end of his axe to force the thing back. The creature was a decent fighter—fine, he admitted that much. But he was the immortal with the level advantage.

Then, without warning, [Nose for Danger] gave him a whiff of something truly threatening. A strike like any other, except the knife suddenly smelled far deadlier than a knife had any right to be. He parried the sweeping blade with the haft of his axe as he stepped out of the weapon’s piteously shallow arc.

Yet his weapon was missing a chunk out of its haft after that.

The creature redoubled its efforts, with both of its knives suddenly reeking of danger, and Tortaxx found himself on the defense against a mere two-classer—something that should have been unthinkable!

Still, he kept his cool as he carefully dodged every sweep of the creature’s weapons, trying to figure out its attack pattern. Everyone had one.

…Everyone except the strange, pink-skinned creature. He just couldn’t find any logic or sense in the movements, no matter how many sweeps of its weapons he evaded as he let his strange opponent lead him—the superior in levels and experience—in circles around their pastoral battleground.

Worse, he was slowing. And that just couldn’t stand.

With a confident snarl that he hardly felt in his stomach, he stepped forward and swung his axe in a bold arc. One of the creature’s knives swept across his chest while the other slammed into his hip, but he forced himself to ignore them.

Despite delivering two cuts on him, the bloody thing somehow still managed to catch his axe’s blade with its knives. But Tortaxx wasn’t going to let that stop him. He just roared in fury as he pushed his rekindled muscles to their limits.

He overpowered his opponent. Its knives slipped and parted, giving way to the might of his axe. Two nasty tears had been torn into the blade, but that was fine.

The important thing was that the creature died.

Except, instead of the eternally satisfying feeling of his axe splitting through bone and brain, he felt a strangely firm resistance for a single moment—followed by nothing.

The creature crumbled away as if it had never been there, leaving only the bauble that had ornamented its ear, tumbling through the air.

Until it was caught by another pink hand.

“Eh, trying to beat someone like you with an image probably was expecting a lot out of [Latent Reality] at this level.” Yet another of the strange creatures was there—but how?!

Tortaxx hadn’t sensed or felt the approach of anyone else, and he was by far the… highest…

The newcomer’s [Warrior] tag came back in a shade of red that was considerably richer than his own. At least until it slipped the ornament onto its own ear. After that, it went back to showing the same dismal level as before.

He had no idea how to make sense of any of that. So, he just opened his mouth to let out another roar as he readied his axe. If life wasn’t going to make sense, then he just needed to knock things around until it did!

The newcomer effortlessly slid away from the downward cleave and snagged his forearm as it went, pulling him along the same path his axe was already moving. It was just enough to unbalance his reckless footing.

He found himself falling forward, unable to catch himself.

And the last thing that he processed was the dainty little boot that was arcing upward to meet his handsomely scarred face.