FREE USE in Primitive World

Sol didn’t slow down. He cleared the five paces between them in a single, blurred stride.

The captain let out a desperate, panicked roar and swung his heavy club in a wide horizontal arc, hoping to catch Sol’s neck.

Sol didn’t even bother to parry. He simply ducked his head, letting the stone club shatter uselessly against the thick shoulder plate of his Rockhorn carapace.

The impact kicked up a shower of sparks but didn’t even shift Sol’s balance.

Before the captain could pull the club back for another swing, Sol’s right hand shot out like an iron vice, clamping directly onto the brute’s thick tusk. With a brutal, downward jerk, he slammed the captain’s face straight into his rising knee.

SMASH.

The captain’s jaw shattered into a dozen pieces, his teeth flying out in a bloody spray. As the heavy body stumbled backward, Sol brought the Dreadwing Blade down in a savage, diagonal stroke that cut from the left collarbone all the way down to the right hip.

The high-frequency edge didn’t meet any resistance; it sliced through the thick muscle like a hot knife through lard.

The captain’s body split completely into two wet halves, falling sideways into the pulped mess on the floor.

With the sub-captain dead, the immediate front line fractured completely. The remaining Marauders in the slot broke their formation, as they tried to turn around and fight their own people just to get out of the chute.

”He’s a monster! The black one is a monster!” a Zerith warrior shrieked, its multi-jointed limbs flailing as it tried to crawl over a pile of its own dead captains. ”Run back! Run back, there is a monster ahead!”

Of course Sol didn’t let them run.

He kept moving forward, his sword swinging in short, efficient arcs that left nothing but silent death in his wake.

The sapphire edge hummed its low, exciting song, the air around the blade warping with every clean cut. He was turning the narrow mountain pass into a massive graveyard.

From the high ridges above, hidden behind the illusions, the Veynar and the Zharun warriors watched the slaughter in absolute silence.

Not a single warrior dared to breathe.

They had expected a long, bloody clash where they would have to drop everything just to save the recruits. Instead, they were watching a single man turn a four-thousand-man vanguard into a pile of crushed meat without even breaking a sweat.

Sol stepped over another heap of mangled bodies, his eyes locked on the next wave of terrified faces pushing through the smoke.

The gate of hell was wide open, and he was standing right at the door.

...

The heavy mountain pass fell into a brief, trembling lull.

The thick cloud of white limestone dust and red mist hung low between the slate walls, making the air taste like hot iron and burnt hair.

Sol stood in the middle of the narrow slot, his black Rockhorn armor dripping with dark grease.

The floor around his boots was no longer made of white gravel; it was a thick, slippery pile of crushed bodies, broken wood, and shattered bone.

For a few seconds, the constant pressure from the front stopped. The lower-tier Coalition warriors who had been mindlessly shoving their way into the five-man-wide corridor finally realized the forward line wasn’t moving.

As the dust settled slightly, the warriors in the front rows looked across the heap of their pulped comrades and saw the truth.

There wasn’t a massive army slaughtering their people.

It was just one man.

A single, black-armored two legged monkey was standing alone in the blood slush, casually holding a blue-rimmed blade that was dripping with different colors of blood.

A heavy wave of shame and pure fury instantly washed over the Coalition ranks. To a proud, brutal race like the Gray Marauders, being held back by a single warrior was a humongous insult.

They were four thousand strong. They had marched across the parched flats to trample the last seeds of the Veynar, and here they were, losing dozens of men to a lone fighter in a ditch.

”Back up! You worthless dogs, back up!” a heavy Layer 3 Marauder roared from the middle of the press, using the flat of his giant stone axe to beat his own men out of the corridor. ”Stop shoving like panicked beasts! He’s just one monkey! You’re crowding yourselves into his blade!”

The chaotic, blind rushing stopped. The Coalition sub-captains quickly beat their troops into a rough order, clearing the choked entrance of the pass.

They realized that throwing hundreds of lower-layer fodder into the five-man slot all at once was just feeding the black killer.

If they wanted to take this lone monkey’s head, they had to use their heads and send in their real strength.

So, they changed their strategy and began coming in small, somewhat disciplined batches.

...

The first batch stepped over the rocks. It was a group of five Gray Marauder veterans, all of them solid Layer 2 warriors.

They didn’t carry standard clubs; they held massive, thick shields carved from the heavy shells of river turtles, and they moved shoulder-to-shoulder, completely filling the five-man width of the stone chute.

Behind them, two more rows of warriors held long, fire-hardened bone spears, ready to stab through the gaps.

”Push him back! Pin his blade against the wall!” the front shield-bearer grunted, his thick muscles bulging under his leather straps as they advanced in a solid wall of bone and horn.

Sol didn’t simply wait for them to reach him. He took two long, heavy strides forward, his boots sinking into the wet mud of the floor.

As the turtle-shell shields closed in to crush him against the slate wall, Sol didn’t even lift the Dreadwing Blade to parry.

He threw his left fist forward in a short, brutal punch.

SMASH.

His bare knuckle, loaded with the dense power of his Golden essence and power of Badger, hit the center of the lead shield.