Read Novel Full Chapter 381: Feral Orcs
Chapter 381: Chapter 381: Feral Orcs
Sianna held a wet towel out toward Jax. Once he worked out for what it was, he took it and wiped the blood from his face first, then his hands.
“I still can’t tell what you’re really after, Your Majesty,” Jax said, dragging the towel across his knuckles. “But whatever it is, I’m not about to complain about having someone like you standing on my side.”
The same easy smile, the same light tone, and the threat slid in underneath them without changing either. “Just keep one little thing in mind. The moment you get clever and start spinning something behind my back, you’ll be the next one whose blood I’ll be—”
She cut him off. “It won’t come to that. I have nothing I could hand you that would prove my intentions, so I’ll simply ask you to decide for yourself, once this war is over, whether I held to my resolve or whether I was scheming the whole time.”
Jax could already feel the change in her, even though nothing about her had so much as twitched. Her face, her voice, all of it stayed exactly as cold as before. The shift was somewhere underneath all that.
A few minutes passed and Jax, Sianna, and her group pressed on ahead.
The Aleris estate was so absurdly vast that reaching the main mansion from the outpost on foot ran a full hour and that was only if you sprinted the whole way, which was precisely why the place had teleportation gates wired into every last facility on the grounds.
It was a staggering flex of wealth, the jaw-dropping kind, because even the royal families of this world broke a sweat trying to raise a single gate, let alone keep one humming, given the obscene heap of resources each one devoured.
For most of them, a gate was a thing you saved for a true emergency and prayed every day you’d never have to spend.
And here? Here, even a handful of butlers and maids had clearance to use them, which meant maids were casually blinking from one building to another just to drop off a basket of laundry.
Right now, though, those gates sat dead and useless. The instant the outpost guards saw what was coming, they’d have smashed their own gate to sever the connection across the network, rather than hand the enemy a free door into the heart of the estate.
Jax and Sianna led the way, trading information as they walked, while Delphine and Nadia trailed a fair distance behind alongside the rest of the corps.
“So let me get this straight,” Jax said. “You’re telling me you signed on with the other faction purely to pull intel out of them. And the task they handed you was to play spy inside our side and follow whatever orders they fed you.”
Sianna nodded.
“And you joined up,” Jax went on, frowning, “because you’d worked out Harry was their leader, and the whole war reeked of people hunting me specifically.”
Sianna nodded again.
But this time Jax just stared at her, eyes fixed and flat, plainly not buying a word of it.
Sianna pivoted off the topic before it could circle back to questions she didn’t want to answer. “I was curious what was unfolding in the territories bordering mine. There’d been all sorts of power shifts these past few weeks, and I realized it traced back to Harry. Once I signed on, I learned more. I learned about you being a champion, and about you being his one and only target. But I also realized Harry was nothing but a puppet, dancing on someone else’s strings.”
Her voice cooled further. “And the worse part is that this person’s target is also you. For that, a monstrous enemy force is now arrayed against us, and going by the confidence that dead necromancer was throwing around, I’m certain this won’t be anything close to easy.”
She continued. “Whoever’s pulling the strings gathered them all up by feeding their greed. Some were promised a throne. Some, their revenge. Some, control of the academy, or a hand in conquering the lands next door.”
“And the next of them we’re bound to run into, the one we’re walking straight toward, is exactly that sort. The orcs of the Bloodtusk Tribe.”
She let that settle, then explained. “The puppet master was sharp enough to exploit the fury season of the female orcs.”
“The what season?”
“Fury season,” Sianna repeated without a blink of shame. “Once a year, at the start of spring, every female orc in the tribe enters a month-long state. Their bodies burn from the inside out with raw, uncontrollable need. They turn feral, violent, and completely consumed by the drive to mate. Aggressively.”
“Their own tribal law made the situation worse. The orc chief had banned all infidelity within the tribe. A woman in season can only seek her own partner and no one else. Those without a partner are locked up for the full month.”
She continued, tone still flat as a reading from a textbook. “Even for the paired ones, the arrangement falls apart. One man is nowhere near enough to survive a female orc in that state. Armed patrols circle the village day and night. When the guards find a man screaming for his life, his lower body gone numb, bones cracked, or in the worst cases, damaged beyond the point of ever breeding again, the woman responsible is dragged off to the same prison as the unmarried ones. Until the season ends.”
Jax’s mind was quietly assembling a portrait of these orc women, and it was not a comforting one.
“So in short,” Sianna said, “they live buried under restrictions. And that is precisely the lever the enemy leader pulled. They were offered a choice. Suffer that same fate all over again in a few days’ time, or pick our side, escape those laws forever, and pocket a small mountain of offerings besides.”
“That person told them to butcher every man in the village. Poison them, murder them, all at once, and buy their freedom with it. They even helped the orcs pull the whole thing off, and crowned their leader a queen for it.”
“And after that,” she finished, “from what I’ve gathered, they were promised free rein over any man their eyes landed on out on this battlefield. Any race, beastmen to dragons, theirs to do with as they pleased, so long as the poor soul belonged to the opposing faction.”
Jax exhaled slowly. None of this was getting better.
“The order handed to me,” Sianna said, “was to supply some men capable of satisfying the female orcs who were charging in from the east. The Selection of worthy ones was done to make sure those hundreds of women stayed motivated, since the buff their state grants them makes them genuinely useful on a battlefield. Though that was only a side errand. My real task was to slip Harry through, as he traveled toward your position from a distance.”
“It was a tangled job. But it all clicked neatly into place the moment Archmage Rashida split our combined alliance into three, sending two wings to cover the flanks while her main body charged dead center.”
Her tone never wavered as she laid out the betrayal. “I maneuvered myself onto the left flank, then nudged her into stacking those barbarian clansmen onto my side, since they made the finest fodder I could ask for the orcs. After that, I signaled everything to Harry, and the whole thing unfolded exactly as planned. I betrayed the barbarians. I even helped the orcs along, cutting down the barbarian women, a guildmaster, and his subordinates, because none of them were worth keeping. Then I followed Harry to wherever he was headed.”
She glanced ahead. “Now that Harry’s out of the picture, all that’s left clogging our path are those orc women. And slipping past them unnoticed, with this many bodies in tow, simply isn’t on the table. So they’ll have to be dealt with.”
As her words finished landing, Jax was busy painting the grimmest possible image of those orc women in his head. And right in the middle of that, the realization struck him, the system, and the only objective he still hadn’t crossed off to close out his main quest.
[ULTIMATE QUEST: THE GRAND TOUR]
[TIME LIMIT: 1 YEAR]
[OBJECTIVE: ACHIEVE INTIMACY WITH ONE MEMBER OF EACH LISTED RACE]
[PROGRESS:]
Human: 6/1 ✓
Dwarf: 4/1 ✓
Elf: 2/1 ✓
Vampire: 1/1 ✓
Dragonkin: 1/1 ✓
Beastfolk: 1/1 ✓
Demon: 1/1 ✓
Celestial: 1/1 ✓ (Halfling accepted)
Orc: 0/1
‘What the hell do I do here? I only need to fuck one orc. Just one. But I don’t even know if this stupid race is going to survive long enough for me to sort my head out and actually get it done. They’re out there digging their own grave as we speak.’
‘This whole tribe dies tonight. Every last one of them. And I have no clue if more of their kind exist anywhere else in this world. If I let them all get wiped out without handling this first, that objective could be gone for good. Way too risky to just leave it.’
His jaw tightened as the resolve locked in. ‘No. I’m not losing this. It’s one orc. I just have to grab one, fuck her, and it’s done. Simple as that.’
But while he was still wrestling the thought, a man came crawling into their path. A muscular barbarian, dragging himself along and leaving a wet red trail behind, as though a boulder had been dropped squarely onto his lower half.
He forced the words out through the pain, hissing up at Sianna. “You traitor… agh… why would you do this to us…”
Jax took one look at the tears streaking down that mountain of a man, a physique that practically shouted “punch me harder” rather than “please, stop,” and felt a deep, secondhand sympathy he couldn’t quite put into words.
He turned back to Sianna, eyeing the sorry state of the crawler. “Actually, I’ve got a better idea than throwing down with a pack of berserk orcs. Look at it this way. Every one of you is a woman, and in their eyes a comrade besides, so I’m the only one here who is in danger… ahemm.. I mean only one who actually needs to slip past them,. Which makes it simple.” He gestured vaguely at himself. “I just blend in with you guys and go past them.”
[The road is yours to choose but the destination belongs to fate.]
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[A/N: preview images and videos for chapter 382 and 383 are up on discord and trust me you do not want to open those without headphones, there are some mature and muscular visuals in there that are definitely not workplace friendly so go check it out but consider yourself warned!]
Also, a huge thank you to Ordici_T, Brandon_Clark_1855, Simon_Madsen_2893, Bodger, Rod_Snow, and Brandon_Clark_1855 for the Golden Tickets!
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