I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 863: Baelok Zor-Grimmarch

The strike came without a warning roar, without the hiss of dragged steel, and without a single fluctuation of hostile intent.

It was a strike born of twenty years spent surviving in the lightless belly of the mountain.

Pure, unadulterated pragmatism meant to sever the spinal cord before the target’s nervous system could register an attack.

The curved iron sickle was three inches from the flesh of Jack’s neck when steel met steel.

CLANG!

The collision did not produce a clean metallic ring; it detonated like a thunderclap inside the cavern. A circular shockwave of displaced air blasted outward, flattening the sulfur vapors and shattering the fragile volcanic glass beneath their boots.

Ren Ryzard stood between Jack and the shadow, his body angled sharply, the flat of his katana locked precisely against the inside curve of the attacker’s upper sickle. The swordsman’s arm was rigid, his dark blue eyes narrowed into sharp, lethal slits.

For the first time since Jack had met him, Ren’s boots were driven an inch backward into the basalt.

Standing before them, locked in the weapon-bind, was a phantom of the deep rifts.

He was massive, but he possessed none of the proud, armored bulk of Chieftain Kragor.

He was lean, corded with sinewy muscle like a starved mountain panther, his broad frame stripped of heavy plate.

He wore cured hide cut from subterranean drakes, bound together with strips of dried tendon and iron wire. His face was weathered, his skin mottled gray-green and stained with soot and ancient mineral salts, his left tusk snapped off jaggedly near the gum line.

Dozens of white, puckered scars ran across his chest and arms.

Trophies of things that had tried to drag him into the acid pools and failed.

But his hands commanded attention.

From his wrists down to his scarred, calloused fingertips, his flesh was not green. It was a deep, indelible, oxidized crimson.

Dyed in the ancient blood-pigment of the clan’s banishment rites, permanently marking him as the pariah who had butchered from the dark.

Baelok Zor-Grimmarch. The Red Hand.

Baelok’s red-stained left hand twisted the lower sickle with terrifying, hydraulic force. The jagged, serrated hook swept upward in a vicious arc aimed to gut Ren from groin to chin.

Ren did not attempt to parry the secondary blow; he vanished.

His body dissolved into a blur of displaced space, reappearing four paces to Baelok’s left flank. Ren swung his katana downward in a vertical slash meant to sever the exile’s arm at the shoulder.

A strike fast enough to outpace the speed of sound.

Baelok did not panic. He did not even turn his head.

Relying entirely on the subtle shift of air pressure against his scarred skin, the exile threw his upper body into a violent, low spin.

He caught the flat of Ren’s falling blade against the twin cross-hooks of his sickles, grinding the edges together with a screeching shower of orange sparks. Instead of resisting the kinetic force, Baelok diverted it downward, driving Ren’s strike straight into the volcanic bedrock.

The stone exploded between them.

Taking advantage of the flying debris, Baelok kicked a pocket of acidic sulfur dust directly toward Ren’s eyes, following the blinding maneuver with a horizontal sweep of his left sickle aimed at the swordsman’s throat.

Ren tilted his head back by a fraction of a millimeter. The rusted edge whistled past his chin, severing three strands of dark hair.

In the same breath, Ren’s left hand shot out. He drove an open-palm strike infused with his mana directly into Baelok’s sternum.

The concussive impact sent the massive orc skidding back ten paces across the slick basalt, his bare heels gouging deep trenches into the stone before he arrested his momentum.

Ren lowered his blade slightly, his breathing steady, his blue eyes locking onto the orc with genuine, cold focus.

“Fast,” Ren murmured, the highest praise he ever offered an opponent. “You don’t fight like an orc. You fight like an assassin who forgot how to die.”

“And you don’t fight like a human,” Baelok rasped, his voice sounding like iron dragging over broken bone, unused to speaking after decades of silence. “Surface dogs don’t bend the air like that.”

Baelok lowered his sickles slightly, his wild, bloodshot amber eyes darting from Ren to Jack Kaiser, who had not moved a single step from where he stood.

“Surface whelps,” Baelok growled, spitting a wad of black spit onto the stone. “You carry the scent of the upper fortress. Who sent you down here to die?”

Jack stepped around Ren, his hand remaining buried casually in the pockets of his dark coat. He looked at Baelok not with the disgust the clan had displayed, but with the cold, assessing gaze of a craftsman inspecting a masterwork blade left to rust in the mud.

“Nobody sent me,” Jack said, his tone flat and unhurried. “Your brother Kragor gave me an iron brand because he owed me a debt. Your brother Grom warned me that you would slit my throat before I could speak. It seems the Shaman was almost right.”

At the mention of his brothers’ names, Baelok’s jaw locked tight. The muscles in his neck bunched like twisted steel cords, but there was no sorrow in his face, no tragic regret. Only the hard, unyielding cynicism of a man who had made his peace with the dark a lifetime ago.

“Kragor sits on his clean throne,” Baelok spat, a dark, phlegm-filled laugh rattling in his chest. “Grom chants to dead spirits who couldn’t keep a child warm in winter. They tell the cubs around the fire that Baelok is a craven. That the Red Hand is a coward who struck from behind.”

Baelok pointed the jagged tip of his right sickle directly at Jack’s throat.

“I saved their lives,” the exile hissed. “I buried my blade in a traitor’s spine because my brother was too weak to win and too proud to admit it. I took the brand so our people wouldn’t drown in their own blood. I don’t give a damn about their debts, human. Speak your business, or I will feed your companion’s liver to the rift-crawlers and use your skull as a grease cup.”

“I know what you did,” Jack replied smoothly, taking a slow step forward, entirely unfazed by the weapon leveled at his throat. “And unlike your brothers, I don’t care about their pathetic fairy tales of honor. Honor is a disease that gets armies slaughtered, and nations burned. You did what was necessary to win. That makes you the only competent warrior in this entire mountain.”

Baelok’s amber eyes narrowed, searching Jack’s face for mockery. He found only the chilling, unshakeable confidence of a man who never doubted a word he spoke.

“Flattery doesn’t buy your life down here, boy,” Baelok said. “What do you want?”

“I don’t offer flattery, and I don’t offer redemption,” Jack stated with absolute clarity. “I have my own forces. A legion of killers who know how to obey, but fight like beasts without discipline. Ren is a master of the sword, but he cannot teach what he does. His power belongs to him alone. I need someone who understands war without rules. I need someone who knows how to kill from the dark, how to exploit every weakness, and how to forge an army that doesn’t waste time roaring at the sky before they strike.”

Jack met Baelok’s wild, feral gaze without flinching.

“I want you to train my soldiers,” Jack said. “And I want you to teach me.”

Baelok stared at Jack in dead silence, the tip of his sickle hovering steady in the sulfur air, his scarred face unreadable as the proposal settled into the dark.

Then, a low, dry chuckle broke from the exile’s throat, building into a harsh, mocking bark of laughter that bounced violently off the cavern walls.

“Teach a surface prince?” Baelok sneered, his broken tusk bared in vicious amusement. “You think words buy service down here? If you want to talk about war, boy, you had better find my den. If you can survive the heat of the lower faults.”

The exile turned on his heel without waiting for an answer. He melted into the dark of a narrow basalt fissure with the silent speed of an ambush predator, leaving Jack and Ren standing on the threshold of the deep rifts where the volcanic chasm plummeted straight toward the planetary core.