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Thankfully, they’re my food source. Perhaps I’ll treat them with more respect.
“Oh… this is going to be fun!”
I roar, overpowering the storm before bounding forward and clinging to another tree branch.
I let them hear me, but they will never know where I am. I want to ensure they know fear and helplessness before they die.
It will make their corpses that much more delectable.
“What in the war god’s name?”
The one who looks to be in charge is swinging his neck around, wildly swiveling his head to try to find me.
First, they try to make sure I’m not a hallucination.
“Did you hear that?”
“Of course, I heard that, idiot!”
My lips curl into a smile, watching them squabble before they decide to spread out.
“Let’s fan out and find him,” the leader says.
Though even he must realize that he couldn’t identify me if he found me. He’s looking for a voice in a torrent of rainfall.
Like many of the orcs who call the forests their home, their movements are illogical and disorganized. They have no eye for strategy or patience. Killing them is going to be easy.
I have many chances to claim them from above. I could kill them all in a group if I wanted. All they have is brute strength, and even in that regard, I supersede them several times over.
But something about their deaths in each collective instant doesn’t seem suitable enough. As I leap from tree to tree, watching the orcs paralyzed with fear, shaking every tree I can in my wake, I realize how utterly inept they are.
Having identified each of their scents, tracking them is effortless. While I deliberate on how best to end their pathetic lives, I juggle each of their fear responses. Occasionally, one of them becomes convinced that I was just in their imagination.
Then I rattle another tree, taunting them about their unworthy kills or picking on their individual insecurities.
“Why don’t you come out and face me!”
“Try saying that to my face, you coward!”
Their responses are always indignant, as though by shouting loud enough, they might stand a chance of living longer.
They don’t know how this works. They should be begging me to spare their lives.
Through a little planning, I manage to bring them back to where they started… back in the same clearing, with the dae they killed.
Only I change the scene a little for them when they arrive.
“What in the…”
While they were running around the forest and I was biding my time, trying to develop a plan, I played with the dae skeletons, tying their bones and melding their flesh together to form one towering, standing presence. A large bipedal dae, bound together by vines and two times taller than the orcs, stands prominently in the grove.
As they converge in the center, I only offer one word, its source still a mystery to them.
“Run.”
But as each of them peel out, rushing out of the clearing, I reach down from above, gripping them and strangling them in the trees.
To those too hesitant to flee, it looks like their friends are getting slain by some unseen force.
