Author's Nightmare: Chapter 155 (Patreon)

Solitaire POV: Day 144

Current Wealth: 213 gold 21 silver 32 copper

I’d been having a pretty stressful time waiting for the orcs to get back to us, even after Beam returned. It wasn’t that I was scared, you understand. I was just aware that we had upsettingly high odds of dying if things turned into a fight. 

I didn’t pace, though. I wanted to- fuck did I want to- but nothing in the world made a human panic more than seeing fear in someone it was following. They’re social creatures, and prone to deferring out of some need for guidance. People want to know there’s something bigger than them they can put their faith in, and when that fails them…They get twitchy. 

So I bottled all my emotions up and put on a stoic face. Fortunately I wasn’t left to do it for too long. I’d sent a messenger out with word offering a parlay. Even that much had felt…Dangerous. When you had thousands in your army the idea of a messenger getting iced was nothing big, but for us it meant a three percent drop in our total number of fighters. I’d sent one of the recruits for this reason. Losing Magnus, Argar or another of our elites would have hit harder than I was willing to risk. 

The poor sod didn’t get killed though, and he returned with only the mildest tremble to him. I ordered that he be given a double ration of booze for his dangerous mission, and was pleased to hear that the suggestion for a parlay had been accepted.

Soon after that, I was heading out myself. Keenly aware that this might just be a ploy on Guraganar’s part to get me himself. Well, when wasn’t I aware about a potential ploy to kill me?

The orcs sent out a few of theirs, too, to meet me. Guraganar and his retinue I’d guessed. Beam had mentioned four big bastards guarding the orc during his failed assassination, and I saw four now. I guessed they were regular bodyguards, either that or the number was coincidental. Funny. It almost seemed redundant to give a seven foot magus bodyguards.

On the other hand, Beam might have killed him without them. Magic or no. 

Guraganar was a big fellow, there was no doubting that. Argar-tall and broader than most of the other orcs, looked like a big statue made out of violence and meanness. He glared at me, apparently having taken my successful little opening raid personally. Within those beady eyes, though, I saw…Absolutely nothing. No glimmer of hidden intellect, he was just pissed. Funny that.

“So, you are the giant human.” The orc huffed, lips curling as if I were disgusting him. “Small, still, like the rest of your kind. One of your warriors is bigger, even.”

I knew for a fact I was taller than most of these orcs, at least when I didn’t slouch. He was just being a cock. Well, fine, I could beat him at that game like I beat everyone else.

“Who built your technology?” I asked. “It’s not that I don’t believe it was you, just that…Well, you know, you’re a moron, and whoever made your equipment wasn’t, so I don’t believe it was you.”

Evidently, Chief Grognard wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to like that. I almost expected his face to drop off with the fury twisting it. 

“You know nothing.” He snarled, then inhaled, readying himself for a speech. “I am-”

“-bwah.”

The orc hesitated, eyes narrowing.

“-I am-”

“-Brrrr.” I cut in. 

“-I am-”

“-Bloggledy blee”

“I AM-”

“DUBBLYSHLUBBLES!” I added, matching his rise in volume. Finally, the orc snapped.

“WHAT ARE YOU-”

“SLOGGLEFLOGGLEBLORGELBLIP!!” I cried, quite enjoying the sight of several orcs standing back as if they were fearing for their lives. “Sorry, I just thought since you were going to spew mindless bullshit at me, I’d follow suit. Anything worth actually listening to to say, or should we continue?”

He wanted to kill me. He wanted to tear me apart, to eat me. I could feel it, smell it, taste it. Orcs were people enough that I felt their thoughts slithering into my mind just as keenly as anyone else’s. 

It didn’t take long for anger to turn into murder, and murder was a motivator for all sorts. 

“I wonder, are you lying about your strength too?” I asked, adding a physical element to the insults that I figured would deepen the orc’s fury at them. It turns out, I’d figured right. I practically saw the muscles bunching under his neck, and worried for a moment whether his head might come bursting off its shoulders. Alas, it did not. If I wanted him headless I’d need to do it myself. 

“I am ten times your strength!” The orc snarled, closing in now, standing just a foot back from me. I backed up, an inch. Too little for his men to see, too much for him not to. He needed to get a taste of bullying me, needed to want more. 

“Why don’t you prove it then?” I asked, adding a slight tremble to my voice. The meat on the hook. I saw beady eyes light up as all seven of Dumbass the Barbarian’s neurons rubbed together in stumbling onto the obvious. “Come on.” I urged him. “Prove yourself against us, or do you think a Belahont is too much for you to fight?”

I’d slipped that in on purpose of course. A Belahont, not me. Because I sure as fuck wasn’t going to fight this giant idiot, but Beam would probably take him apart. And I could see the orc was tempted.

“You are arrogant.” He hissed. “You overestimate yourself.”

“Nah.” I snorted. “And you’ll see how wrong you are about that soon, as long as you’re not too much of a quivering pussy to accept the challenge. Come on, the strongest orc vs the strongest Belahont, got a reason you don’t want to see how that one plays out?”

If anyone asked, if anyone claimed deception, I was confident I’d now sewed enough ambiguous wording that I could honestly claim to have been offering a fight with my brother from the start. The trap was set, now I just needed the idiot to waddle into it.

He was about to, I saw. I smelled. Then he paused.

“Hmm. Tricky, and careful with words. Slippery like eel. No, manling, I will not fight you.”

He would not fight me. So he’d fallen for it- even now he thought he’d have been going up against Solitaire Belahont. Which meant…

“I just figured out everything there is to know about your command structure.” I told the orc. As I’d expected, he looked rather fearful for a moment, and was fast in speaking again. 

“You know nothing.”

I sighed. It really was irritating, sometimes, how much everybody insisted on making me demonstrate my cleverness, only to turn around and call me cocky afterwards. 

“Tell whoever’s in charge, whoever’s really in charge, that if you don’t pull out of our town, I’m going to gut every single one of you like a fish and play with your entrails.”

Sometimes it hurt to have a reputation for violent insanity, but it did wonders for making your threats hit home. 

“You would dare threaten us?” Guraganar snarled. I snarled back, hissed actually. Bared my teeth, stepped in, brought my face right up to his and just barely resisted the urge to take a bite out of his cheek. 

“No, fuck you, listen.” I spat. “I’m telling you that you are about to find yourself in the middle of a shitstorm. I have weapons your silly little world won’t see for five hundred years, and they’re all pointed right at you. So grab your shit, grab your idiots, and run away before I start using them.”

By the looks of things, Guraganar was actually considering it. He seemed perturbed, which was a good sign. Perturbation was a short step from worry, which was barely shy of fear, which was, I knew, prone to make idiots do any number of things that weren’t in their best interests. 

Our parlay didn’t last much longer than that, and I was relieved to be allowed to return to my little safety warehouse without having any limbs removed. An hour passed, with more tedious resistance of my body’s ever-strengthening urge to pace. Then the news reached me of a change among our enemy’s forces.

They were falling back. We had, it seemed, won.