I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 862: Blood Red Sickles

Grom’s jaw locked tight, the muscles bunching beneath his skin until the silver wire on his tusks groaned under the pressure.

The old orc looked at Jack for several long seconds, searching for a trace of fear, doubt, or hesitation. He found nothing.

Jack’s aura was an impenetrable, freezing void, humming with the cold, dormant authority of the silver streaks woven into his soul meridians.

“Then go to your slaughter, human,” Grom rasped, stepping aside and gesturing toward the descending ramp that plunged into the lightless belly of the mountain. “Follow the sulfur drains down to the third garrison. When you reach the iron gates of the Maw, do not say the Zor-Grimmarch bloodline failed to warn you.”

Jack did not offer a nod or a parting word.

He stepped past the Shaman, his dark coat rustling against the rough volcanic rock as he descended into the subterranean dark, leaving the High Shaman standing alone beneath the smoky glare of the torches.

Behind him, Ren Ryzard matched his stride, the swordsman’s katana whispering against its scabbard with every downward step.

“A pleasant family,” Ren remarked, his tone dry as ash as the heat of the lower vents began to wash over them. “The brother upon the throne looks like he wants to weep into his beer, and the brother in the robes sounds like he expects us to be eaten before nightfall.”

“They are scared of their own ways; they do not know any better,” Jack murmured, his hand resting inside his coat pocket, his fingers tracing the cold, jagged teeth of the Iron Blood-Brand.

“Barbarians build legends out of their own shame to excuse their weakness. The Chieftain sits on a stolen throne, the Shaman chants to dead ghosts, and the only orc with the spine to do what was necessary is rotting in a ditch.”

Jack paused at the landing of the second descent, where the stone walls turned from dry basalt into slick, weeping sheets of obsidian running with scalding mineral condensation.

The air grew rapidly thinner, heavy with the suffocating tang of raw volcanic gas that burned the back of the throat.

Jack pulled the heavy, chain-bound iron skull from his pocket and held it up into the dim, reddish glow of the magma gutters running alongside the path.

The ancient, acid-pitted metal felt heavier now, humming with a low, parasitic resonance that vibrated directly against the bones of his hand.

“Keep your blade loose, Ren,” Jack said, his heterochromic eyes locking onto the dark tunnel yawning open below them. “When we pass those gates, anyone who breathes without my permission dies where they stand.”

….

The path leveled out at the landing of the third subterranean garrison.

It was an iron-banded bunker anchored straight into the throat of the volcanic chasm.

Thick slabs of beaten slag iron were bolted across the archway, braced by heavy structural struts that groaned under the shifting weight of the mountain above. Eight orc sentinels stood before the barricade.

Their hides were mottled, scarred by deep acid burns and pale from lifetimes away from the sun. Their jagged tusks were chipped, their leather harnesses reinforced with rusted plates scavenged from dead cavern beasts.

In their hands were heavy, barbed hook-pikes designed to drag intruders to the stone and pin them until their throats could be crushed.

As Jack and Ren approached, the sentinels leveled their pikes in unison, their iron-shod boots grinding against the slick pavers.

“Halt, surface-crawler,” the lead guard rumbled, his single eye narrowing from a sunken socket of scar tissue. “No passage through the third ring. Turn back to the upper halls, or we feed your marrow to the chute.”

Jack did not break his stride. He drew the heavy, blackened talisman Kragor had yielded on the dais and held it into the red glow of the magma gutters.

The moment the guards saw the split skull bound in barbed chain, the air seized.

The lead sentinel took a stumbling step backward, his boots sliding through the grime. His remaining eye blew wide, darting from the brand to Jack’s calm, heterochromic gaze.

“The Blood-Brand,” the orc rasped, his pike point dipping toward the rock. “The Chieftain’s personal seal.”

“Open the gate,” Jack commanded flatly.

“Human,” the guard warned, his tusks trembling slightly. “That is the Black Maw. The execution chute. The clans send only traitors, exiles, and corpses down that drop. Once the counterweights fall and the teeth lock, there is no coming back up.”

“You talk too much,” Jack said, his voice dropping into icy dismissal. “Turn the gears before I decide your men are in my way.”

The guard took one look at Jack’s unblinking eyes and barked toward the capstan: “Clear the chains! Release the counterweights!”

Six massive orcs threw their weight against the wooden levers. Link-chains thicker than an anvil rattled through grease-troughs, screeching with the deafening sound of stressed iron. With a concussive blast of venting subterranean steam, the massive iron slab rose.

Beyond lay the Black Maw.

A lightless, vertical abyss that exhaled a freezing draft of pulverized basalt, stagnant acid, and rotten marrow.

Jack stepped over the threshold without a second thought. Ren followed at his shoulder, thumbs hooked loosely over his scabbard.

Behind them, the iron gates slammed down with an earth-shattering crash, sealing them into the dark.

“Pleasant accommodations,” Ren remarked dryly, his dark blue eyes cutting through the pitch-blackness. “Smells like someone pickled a thousand carcasses in acid.”

They didn’t wait long.

Fifty paces down the glass-slick descent, the silence fractured into a frantic clicking.

From the fissures overhead, more than thirty rift-crawlers dropped.

Chitinous, horse-sized horrors sheathed in bone-white carapaces weeping yellow bile. Their barbed talons scraped against the stone, snapping their mandibles in a rabid frenzy.

Jack didn’t pull his hand from his pocket. “Ren. Clear the path.”

“Understood.”

Ren didn’t take a stance. He stepped ahead, his left hand holding the scabbard at his hip.

A beast lunged from eighty paces, its mandibles dripping corrosive bile meant to melt flesh and armor alike.

Click.

Ren’s blade cleared the sheath by half an inch. Eighty paces away, the abomination split cleanly in half along a diagonal plane, black blood splashing across the walls before its upper body hit the stone.

Ten more dropped from the ceiling, their heavy mass descending like falling boulders.

Ren pivoted, his katana flashing three times. He cut only empty air, carving invisible tears in space. The beasts plummeted through the coordinates and came apart in mid-air.

Heads lopped, legs severed, mandibles clattering against the rock like hail.

A colossal burrowing worm forty spans long tore through the rock to their left, intending to swallow the entire stone shelf. Ren, without turning, whipped his blade horizontally. A shockwave of severed air compressed across the cavern, bisecting the titan’s armored skull and collapsing it into its own tunnel.

Within minutes, the descent was silent. Hundreds of severed limbs and pools of black ichor littered the rock behind them. Ren hadn’t broken a sweat; his breathing was entirely undisturbed.

They stepped onto the floor of the rift.

A vast expanse of black glass and bubbling sulfur fissures stretched endlessly into the deep subterranean dark.

Suddenly, the ambient temperature plummeted as everything went silent.

From the deep shadow of an overhanging outcrop behind them, there was no sound of claws, no displaced wind, and no surge of hostile mana.

There was only a pair of twin, blood-red sickles, curved hooks of jagged, rusted iron emerging from the void like fangs, slicing silently toward the back of Jack’s exposed neck.