FREE USE in Primitive World

Sol let out a heavy breath, wiping a thick streak of black boar gore from his cheek with the back of his hand.

He looked down at the massive, twitching four-ton carcass beneath his bare feet, then turned his gaze toward the edge of the pond where Zephyra stood watching.

”Barbaric?” Sol chuckled, as he rolled his shoulders, the dense muscles along his upper back cracking with a sound.

”Coming from a high shaman who is watching a man fight buck-naked in the dirt, with such an excited expression, I’ll take that as high praise.

Though I would have appreciated a stick, instead of you focusing on my stick, so I didn’t had to dirty my hands, after all I just took a bath.”

Zephyra’s smirk widened slightly, her blind, milky eyes reflecting the pale moonlight. ”Weapons are for the weak. A weapon would only slow you down.

The ancestors carved men to tear beasts apart with their hands, didn’t they? And where can I watch such a pure display of human power.

Sol snorted, stepping off the Blood-Bore’s head and walking back toward the edge of the clearing. He stopped near the perimeter of the pond, his crimson eyes locking onto the center of the hollow, where the roaring pillar of essence showed zero signs of dying down.

If anything, the phenomenon seems to have expanded its appetite.

The pale, grayish-white funnel had swollen, its upper rim stretching past the highest branches of the willow trees, dragging in raw, unfiltered essence from miles away, pulled through the night sky like glowing spider silk caught in a cosmic drain.

The canopy of the Great Orrath shivered, thousands of ancient ironwood branches swaying in uniform surrender toward the willow clearing.

The air pressure in the hollow was so intense that the dead leaves on the ground were being pulverized to fine powder before they even touched the water.

The sheer density of the power coalescing around Veylara was turning visible, forming shimmering, translucent bands of golden light that whipped around her suspended body. In fact Veylara’s silhouette inside the eye of the storm was barely human anymore. She was more like a beacon of pure, raw essence.

And that was precisely the problem.

In the Great Orrath, where survival was governed by the cruelest laws of fang and claw, an unchecked congregation of high-density energy was not a sacred event.

It was an open carcass tossed into a pit of starving jackals.

And right on cue, the jungle began to sing a discordant song.

Sol’s eyes narrowed into razor-thin slits.

The expanded perception suddenly spiked with dozens of hostile vibrations. It was the frantic, thundering stampede of beasts driven completely out of their minds by the primal scent of a ripening sovereign core.

”More incoming,” Sol muttered, his voice dropping all trace of humor.

As he focused all his attention on surrounding through the violent storm of essence tornado which was interfering with the senses, pushing deep through the dense jungle, the signals multiplied more and more.

Ten. Twenty. Forty. Easily more than fifty distinct signatures, tearing through the jungle like a chaotic flood.

His senses parsed through the horde with cold detachment.

Thankfully, there were no Layer 3 or even Layer 4 behemoths among them. The Blood-Bore he had just slaughtered seems to be a coincidence, after all the territories of Layer 3 beasts were far away from settlements, those near were already slaughtered by the Layer 4 warlords of respective tribes.

As for Layer 4 beasts? They were deep in the jungle and were kings of their massive territories.

What was coming now was the opportunistic scavengers, pack hunters, and territorial predators of the middle jungle.

The vanguard was led by a pack of Shadow Wolves, lean, slate-furred canines with eyes burning like baleful yellow embers, moving at blinding Layer 2 speed. Behind them churned a heavy knot of Stone-Hide Boars, smaller cousins of the dead behemoth but sporting thick, flint-like ridges along their spines.

Further back, Sol picked up the low, rattling hisses of Stone-Spine Lizards... eight-foot-long reptilian beasts whose tails ended in jagged, bone-crushing clubs... alongside a charging herd of Blood-Horned Stags, their broad, multi-tined antlers gleaming with crimson sheen.

Scuttling along the flanks, carving trenches into the tree bark, were several horse-sized Spiked Carapace Beetles, their heavy mandibles clicking in an eager, metallic cadence.

The strongest among them sat barely at Layer 2 Peak, with the rest scattered across Layer 1 and mid-Layer 2.

Individually, to a man who had crushed Layer 4 chieftains and wrestled four-ton monsters to a dead stop, each one was nothing more than an overgrown insect.

But they had numbers. And worse, they were blind with feral greed. If fifty of these beasts poured into the pond clearing at once, their chaotic kinetic thrashing, spraying blood, and wild roars would create massive spiritual turbulence.

If even a single beast stumbled into that delicate essence funnel, Veylara’s could violently misalign, triggering an internal backlash that would tear her core to shreds.

”They’re swarming from the southern gorge,” Sol said, glancing over his shoulder. ”If they make it past the willows, this whole hollow becomes a slaughterhouse. That tornado won’t hold if fifty bodies start splashing in the pond.”

He paused, glancing down at himself.

His body was covered in cooling blood, sweat, and the dried residue of his night with the Warchief. His cock hung heavy and exposed between his thighs.

While he didn’t give a damn about modesty in the middle of a war zone, charging into a dense thorn thicket completely unprotected was just asking for an errant briar to take a chunk out of his most prized asset.

”Well,” Sol muttered. ”Can’t exactly go to war looking like a plucked rooster.”

He walked over to a nearby ancient fern growing near the damp rock wall. He grabbed a massive, broad-leafed jungle frond... thick as cured hide and tough as canvas... and ripped it from the stalk with a casual twist of his wrist.

Stripping a length of tough, fibrous vine from the base of a willow branch, Sol wrapped the broad green leaf around his waist and groin, knotting the vine tightly against his hip.

It was crude, primitive, and completely ridiculous, but it kept the essentials tied down and guarded against potential hazards.