FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 299: Chapter 299: Taking Lumi Away

“A true Zharun wedding requires a proper feast. We will perform the rituals after the war. The blood of the Zerith warlords will serve as the perfect sacrifice to celebrate our victory, and the sealing of our bond.”

He stood up, his massive, corpse-like frame dominating the room once more. He didn’t wait for Veylara to officially agree. He turned his head and locked his oily eyes on the weeping girl leaning against the wall.

“Come,” Gorr commanded, extending a single, pale finger.

Lumi flinched as if she had been physically struck. She looked around the room one last time. She looked at the elders who had traded her away. She looked at Kira, who had tightly squeezed her eyes shut, entirely unable to bear the shame of witnessing it.

Finally, Lumi looked toward the shadows where Sol stood.

Sol didn’t look away. He held her gaze, his expression completely unreadable, a mask of cold, hard stone. He offered her no comforting smile, no false promises of rescue. He simply witnessed her sacrifice, committing the brutal, unforgiving reality of this moment to his permanent memory.

Lumi let out a small, broken sob. She pushed herself off the wall. With her head bowed and her shoulders trembling, she slowly walked across the stone floor, her bare feet making almost no sound, until she stood in the suffocating, rotting shadow of the Zharun Prince.

“Good,” Gorr rasped. He didn’t offer her his hand. He simply turned on his heel, his bone armor clacking loudly. “The alliance is struck, Warchief. Prepare your walls. We will be watching for the smoke.”

Without another word, Prince Gorr marched out of the High Hall. His gaunt, pale-skinned elders followed him like silent wraiths. Lumi walked behind them, her head down, a small, fragile prisoner swallowed up by the procession of monsters.

The heavy timber doors of the High Hall groaned shut behind them, sealing the Veynar tribe in with the bitter, agonizing reality of what they had just done.

The silence that descended upon the room was absolute and suffocating. It wasn’t a silence of peace, it was the silence of a graveyard. The toxic, rotting gray aura of the Zharun slowly began to dissipate from the air, but the stain it left on the pride of the Spirit warriors was permanent.

Elder Thorne stood in the center of the room, looking incredibly awkward. He had secured the alliance, he had saved his own political skin, but looking at the furious, disgusted faces of the other elders, he realized he had entirely alienated himself from the soul of his own tribe.

“It… it had to be done,” Thorne muttered weakly, trying to justify the cowardice. “For the survival of the many.”

“Get out of my sight, Thorne,” Warchief Veylara whispered.

Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried a lethal, absolute venom that made the massive elder physically flinch. Veylara finally raised her head. Her storm-colored eyes were burning with a terrifying, uncontainable grief.

“All of you. Get out,” Veylara commanded, her voice rising in pitch and volume until it echoed like a thunderclap. “Return to your posts! Sharpen your spears! Check the perimeter runes! If a single Marauder breaches the walls, I will personally throw you into the rot!”

The elders didn’t need to be told twice. They practically scrambled over each other to escape the Warchief’s wrath, pouring out of the High Hall and rushing back out into the settlement to prepare for the impending war. Kira lingered for a moment, looking at her mother, before she too turned and hurried out the side door, her face a mask of profound shame.

Sol was the last one left in the shadows.

He didn’t say a word to the Warchief. There was nothing to say. Apologies were useless, and comforting platitudes were an insult.

He pushed off the petrified pillar, adjusted the grip on his Void-Oak spear, and walked silently out of the hall.

Stepping back out into the daylight of the Veynar settlement, Sol felt the heavy, oppressive weight of the Great Orrath pressing down on his shoulders harder than ever before. The atmosphere was incredibly grim.

The joyful bonfires of the previous night were cold ash. Warriors were moving with frantic, desperate energy, hauling heavy bundles of obsidian arrows to the watchtowers and reinforcing the wooden palisades with thick vines.

The air smelled of fear, sweat, and impending death.

Sol walked steadily back toward the Feline Spire, his mind a cold, calculating machine. The event in the High Hall had fundamentally shifted his perspective.

He had spent the last few days reveling in the sudden, intoxicating surge of his own power. He had anchored two Layer 3 Sovereign spirits. He had crushed an elder. He had thought that raw strength alone was enough to dictate his own fate in this primitive world.

But watching Lumi walk away with Prince Gorr had brutally shattered that illusion.

Power isn’t just about how hard you can punch a beast, or how fast you can run, Sol thought grimly, his boots thudding against the wooden ramps of the Spire. True power is having the absolute, undeniable agency to say ’no’. It is the ability to look a tyrant in the eye, reject their terms, and walk away without losing everything you care about.

Right now, Sol didn’t have that power. He was strong, yes, but he was still just a single piece on a massive, chaotic chessboard. He was constrained by the weakness of the allies he needed to survive. He was forced to compromise with rotting bastards because he couldn’t hold the walls alone.

He reached the heavy doors of his quarters and pushed them open. The room was empty, the fire pit burning low.

Sol walked out onto the eastern balcony. The morning sun was high in the sky now, baking the vast, unbroken sea of the jungle canopy.

He didn’t feel despair. He didn’t feel helpless. What he felt was a cold, absolute, and terrifying resolve settling deep into his bones. He refused to ever be put in a position like this again. He refused to stand in the shadows and watch while someone else dictated the terms of his survival.

He needed to get stronger. He needed to transcend the baseline of this world entirely.

Sol sat down heavily on the smooth wooden floorboards, crossing his legs. He closed his eyes and turned his focus entirely inward, diving back into the vast, boundless golden ocean of his core. He was just about to reach Level 1, and will be able to awaken the passive traits of the Dreadwing and the Great Badger.

But it wasn’t enough. Not anymore.

“I need essence,” Sol muttered into the quiet air, his silver-crimson eyes snapping open, blazing with a dangerous, predatory hunger.

He looked toward the Great Orrath, where the distant, rhythmic rumbling of the beasts was echoing. The greatest collection of raw, unadulterated essence in a hundred miles was present right to his doorstep.

He gripped the shaft of his Void-Oak spear, a dark, anticipation-fueled smirk slowly pulling at the corner of his mouth.

“Seems like I gotta take another round to my friends in the jungle” Sol whispered. “I have a lot of leveling up to do after all.”