Outsiders 22.2

The Orc from the Poster, Part 2

If there was one thing monster hunters were good at, it was tracking something dangerous. Grognak Urk-Slayer's wanted poster had given a few last known locations, and with instructions from José, List and Xigbar got the details they'd needed about the army's encounters with him from soldiers and townsfolk.

The stories from the army were all variations on "he came out of the woods, killed all the urks, and anyone who tried to stop him," circulated exclusively by those few elites who'd survived running into him. The townsfolk stories of him were more varied. Whenever he wanted something, he either stole it, or drastically overpaid, with no middle ground. It seemed to depend entirely on whether or not anyone had the audacity to tell him he needed to pay.

Importantly to Valerie, he hadn't killed anyone outside the Chosen's army. Even in the rare stories of him getting into fights—very brief fights—he left his opponents battered, but alive.

That eased her nerves somewhat. Valerie didn't want to work alongside an indiscriminate murderer, no matter how strong he was or how many of the Chosen's forces he'd killed. It was odd that he seemed to be specifically targeting the urks, and only killed elites when they got in his way. That felt backward to Valerie somehow. She hoped they'd find an acceptable explanation for that, and further hoped that the explanation wouldn't be something reprehensible.

If everything went according to plan, they'd know soon.

With all their information, they'd narrowed down Grognak's most likely location to a small area east of Lochmire Keep. Now they were shadowing the search teams of elites and urks the army had sent after him, waiting for them to find him. Or more accurately, for him to find them. Grognak had a tendency to turn hunters into hunted.

Since the army had sent several small teams, Valerie and the others had split up, each shadowing a team into the forest. It was a slight risk, but none of the search teams had more than two elites. Backed up by urks, that wouldn't be an easy fight for any of them on their own, but it also shouldn't be anything they couldn't escape, even if they couldn't win. If things went sideways, they all had ways of signaling one another.

And besides, they weren’t the army’s targets this time. Valerie reminded herself of that as she stalked through the woods on the trail of her hunting party. Keeping track of them wasn't hard—the urks had all the stealth and subtlety of belligerent rock slides as they stomped through the forest in heavy armor, wading through brush and breaking every possible twig and branch in their path.

There had to be some kind of plan to corner Grognak in play, because if they intended to sneak up on him like this, Valerie was looking at a level of incompetence that defied sense.

"Don't move."

The hair on the back of Valerie's neck stood on end as something sharp and crackling with power came to rest just to the side of her head. She froze, and swept her gaze ahead to the rest of the hunting party she'd been following. They were all still loudly marching through the forest, completely unaware of her. She recognized her mistake immediately.

The group was advancing in a very spread out formation, and more than once she'd lost sight of some or even most of it through the trees. There'd always been enough of them visible to keep following, so she hadn't worried over the fact that one of the elites was missing from the team ahead of her.

Rookie mistake. Arden would be disappointed. List would probably mock her over it for a week. If she lived through the next ten minutes.

"Drop your weapons. Hands behind your head," the elite ordered.

Instead following either orders, Valerie dove forward and spun as she fell. The elite's first slash cut through empty air, taking a few inches off her ponytail but missing flesh. An armored fist still caught her arm before she could hit the ground, but she'd already turned around enough to aim her wristbow, and loosed a bolt straight into the elite's face.

His helmet stopped it from killing him, but his head still snapped back from the impact, and he lost his grip on Valerie. She kicked off him, rolled away, and came up with wristbow reloaded and silvered blade extended. 

"Contact rear!" the elite shouted, and as one, the hunting party turned.

Valerie couldn't afford to drag the fight out. The next crossbolt she loosed was wreathed in blackfire, and it punched clean through the breastplate of the elite that had gotten the drop on her. She was spinning around to face the rest of the hunting party before his corpse hit the ground.

She was still too slow.

The other elite in the party threw a sphere at her that expanded in mid-flight into a length of weighted ropes that wrapped around Valerie. It pinned her arms to her sides, and the entire rope lit up red as it cinched itself tight around her. The surge of electric pain that raced through her was enough to drop her to the ground.

She writhed, trying to come up with a way to escape through a haze of pain. She couldn't reach her signal bolt to call for help, and wouldn't be able to loose it if she did. She couldn't get her blade at the right angle to cut through the ropes. She couldn't resist the full body spasms wracking her long enough to stand, let alone run.

She was trapped. Caught. Finished.

So why hadn't they killed her already?

There was an awful sound—a three way pileup of a visceral crunch, wet splatter, and sharp metal creak, and the other elite let out a panicked scream. A deep roar resounded through the forest, briefly swallowing the sounds of battle. 

Through the vice grip of pain the restraints still had on her, Valerie only just managed to raise her head to watch.

The wanted posters had sold Grognak short.

A full-blood orc stood in the midst of the urks, a foot and a half taller than any of the soldiers. He wore only rough pants and a pair of boots, and his skin was bright, vibrant green that made the urks look even more sallow by comparison. A tapestry of scars was woven across his skin, and his dark hair had been pulled back into a tight pony tail that hung all the way down to his waist.

He carried no weapon, but his fists dripped with blood that wasn't his. Two urks already lay dead around him, one with its helmet crumpled to half the size it should have been, the other with a deep dent in its breastplate.

"Grognak find!" he roared, and his face became a twisted snarl of pure rage. "Grognak kill!"

The urks threw themselves at Grognak with an abandon that betrayed no fear, and the orc took them apart with his bare hands. Their armor gave them all the protection of a polite request, and as strong as Valerie knew urks were, Grognak ignored their every blow.

He tore the arms off of one and used it as a club to beat another to the ground so he could stomp its ribcage flat. He punched another into a tree, and then kept punching until the tree broke in half. Then he picked an urk up and impaled it on the tree's jagged stump.

The elite tried to fight alongside her troops—once. She thrust with an enchanted spear, and without looking, Grognak seized the weapon, and threw it and its wielder aside. She hit the ground hard, and he paid her no further mind. She didn't get back up.

He killed the last urk by snapping its neck with one hand, and let it drop like a sack to the forest floor. His massive chest heaved with his heavy breathing, but none of the blood that smeared him was his. He searched around for further enemies, and gave a grunt and a nod when he found none.

Then, for the first time, he noticed Valerie. He stomped toward her, kicking a urk's corpse aside as he drew closer. Valerie's whole body locked up, fear and pain combining to leave her completely paralyzed. Any information they'd gathered about Grognak not killing anyone who wasn't in the Chosen's Army vanished from her mind in the face of the carnage she'd just witnessed. She'd never seen anything that wasn't a monster fight with brutality on that level, and in that moment, Valerie saw no difference between them and this man. When Grognak reached out to her, she knew with bone deep certainty he was about to pick her up and snap her in half.

She wanted to scream, but it came out like a whimper. Grognak's fist, easily bigger than her head, closed—around the ropes still binding her. With a simple tug, he snapped them off of her, and the pain they'd been sending through her vanished. He cast the remnants of them aside like someone flinging away cobwebs.

Valerie stared up at him, too stunned to speak. He looked from her to the body of the elite behind her with her crossbolt still in its chest, and he gave another grunt and a nod.

"Good kill," he said. Then he walked away. His stride was casual, but it was so long that in only a few seconds he was already disappearing into the trees like a ghost.

When Valerie finally recovered her wits, she hurriedly scrambled to catch up to him.

"Wait!" Valerie shouted.

Grognak stopped walking, and Valerie felt a renewed moment of panic. She hadn't actually expected that to work. She was actually sure what to do now.

"Grognak no wait long, Small Girl," Grognak grunted. "More urks come. Grognak kill."

"I know," Valerie said. "I mean, I've heard of you. I know you've been fighting the Chosen's Army. I have too. I came looking for you because I thought—"

"Grog no fight Chosen," Grognak said. "Grognak kill urks."

Valerie's words momentarily got stuck in her throat as she tried and failed to figure out what the difference was. "They're . . . the Chosen's Army is urks."

Grognak narrowed his eyes and made a deep rumbling noise that was either a contemplative hum or a grow. The sound sent a shiver down Valerie's spine, and she only just resisted the urge to ready her weapons. She still felt shaky from whatever restraints the enemy elite had locked her in, and after having seen what Grognak could do to steel armor with his bare hands, she didn't want to risk antagonizing him.

Luckily, it turned out to be a hum. "Urks come soon. Grognak explain, then Grognak kill."

He spoke as if deciding a simple matter, and as casually as his tone had been, he walked over to the closest tree, and pushed it over. He stomped twice on the jagged wood of the stump that remained, flattening it out beneath his boot, and then sat down on his new chair.

Valerie could only stare, silent screaming, wondering what List had gotten her into.