FREE USE in Primitive World

Sol turned away from the southern clearing and walked toward the secondary clearing near the inner area.

Huddled in the dirt were the three hundred young recruits and unawakened youths who had spent the last day dragging ironwood logs under his brutal discipline. They were the young reserves who had never personally participated in a deep-jungle expedition.

They weren’t eating with the wild, loud hunger of the older veterans; they sat in small, quiet clusters, their hands gripping their long bone-spears so tight their knuckles were entirely white. They were terrified. They had heard the scout’s shout; they knew a four-thousand-man horde of giants and multi-jointed monsters was coming to erase their names from the Orrath.

They knew they were the fodder... the weak outer shell meant to take the weight of a four-thousand-man horde.

Sol stopped five paces in front of their huddled mass, his massive, blood-stained frame casting a long shadow over the front row. He crossed his arms over his chest, his silver-crimson eyes locking onto their pale faces.

”How are you?” Sol asked, his tone casual but rough.

The boys blinked through the dust, looking at each other with hesitant, terrified glances. A few of the older youths near the front tried to straighten their backs, their voices coming out in a weak, uncertain rattle. ”We... we are good, General Sol.”

Sol’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes suddenly flared with a terrifying, silver-crimson light. He took a single step forward, his Great Badger foundation maximizing his internal bone density until the mud beneath his heavy boot cracked with a loud, sharp STOMP.

”I can’t hear you,” Sol said again, ”Are your lungs filled with mud? I asked you a simple question. HOW ARE YOU?” Sol roared, his voice exploding through the northern sector of the clearing like a sudden mountain slide, the sheer volume violently rattling the loose thatch on the surrounding log huts.

The sudden, deafening blast of his voice slammed into the recruits’ chests like a physical blow. The shock completely broke through their frozen terror, their primitive tribal instincts firing in a reflex reaction that bypassed their fear entirely.

The three hundred boys stood up from the grass in unison, as the collective fear in their chests suddenly turned into raw, volatile adrenaline. They hit their chest armor with a massive, synchronized slam, and screamed back with everything their lungs had.

”WE ARE GOOD!” they shouted, the synchronized roar of three hundred voices echoing through the whole tribe like a wave of thunder.

”Better,” Sol muttered, his expression completely flat. He leaned forward, his silver-crimson gaze sweeping across the rows of young faces.

”Let’s get one thing completely straight before we leave these walls,” Sol said, his voice carrying a brutal, unvarnished candor that stripped away any tribal delusions of glory. ”This is the decisive war for your tribe. By sunset, the fate of the Veynar tribe will be entirely settled. It will decide whether you survive and live proudly on these ridges, or whether you fail and die in the dirt.”

He paused, letting the weight of the words sink into their minds.

”And honestly... dying is nothing,” Sol continued, his tone entirely casual, almost dismissive. ”We are all going to die one day. A hunter gets caught by a shadow panther, an old man rots in his furs, a youth catches a disease or your core will simply run dry when your hair turns grey.

Death is just a shadow that catches every single piece of meat that walks through this forest. If it’s just about your own skin ending in the grass, it doesn’t matter.”

The recruits stared at him, their breath shallow, their young minds completely gripped by his rough, unvarnished logic.

”BUT...” Sol’s voice suddenly dropped an octave, turning into a low, terrifying growl that made the skin on their necks crawl, his fingers pointing straight at the inner mud huts where the women and children were working. ”It does not end with just you dying. Think about what happens if you drop your spears today because your knees are shaking.

If you fail tomorrow, if your lines break and you let those monsters trample your bones, they will not stop at your carcasses. The Zerith and the Marauders will just throw your bodies to the vultures and leave and will walk straight through those ironwood gates.”

He stepped closer, his burning eyes locking onto a young boy near the front row who was barely sixteen summers old.

”They will enter your houses,” Sol whispered, the words cutting through the silence like a cold iron needle. ”They will take your mothers. They will take your sisters, your daughters, your lovers, and your wives.

He stepped further ahead, his face twisting into a cold, merciless smirk. ”And they will subject them to the worst, most primitive humiliations possible in the Orrath. They will treat them like breeding cattle and old meat until their spirits are completely broken. That is the price of your failure.”

Hearing this, Hearing the raw, graphic truth of his words, a sudden, violent shift took place inside the recruits’ ranks.

The pale, shivering terror on their faces completely vanished, instantly replaced by a dark, volatile hatred that turned their eyes red.

Their eyes flared with a sudden, deep-seated hatred, their chests heaving with an intense, raw fury.

The young boys clenched their teeth so hard the bone jaw-joints groaned; their knuckles turned white, splitting the plant-fiber bindings on their spear-shafts as a wave of pure, unrefined fury rolled through the three hundred boys.

They didn’t shout, nor did they chant; they simply stared at Sol with hands that were shaking with the urge to kill, because they knew every single word coming out of his mouth was the absolute truth.

They knew he wasn’t telling a myth; they had seen the neighboring tribes erased last season. They knew this was the primitive world they lived in.

A world where the law of the jungle reigned absolute supreme.