CHAPTER 112: CHAPTER 111: ONE, TWO, THREE

The light flickered, casting long, dancing shadows that made the goblin guards seem like monstrous puppets against the walls.

Their guttural laughs echoed, a sound that grated on my nerves worse than any screech of metal.

And above it all, on a throne carved from the very bedrock of the cavern, still sat Tharnok.

He was less a person and more a monument of black, featureless armor.

Not an inch of skin, not a hint of a face, was visible.

His helmet was a smooth, impenetrable shell, with no eye-slits, no grille for breathing, just polished, dark metal that drank the torchlight.

He hadn’t moved since he mysteriously brought the three so-called ’awakened’ back from their attempted escape.

He just sat there, a silent, judging idol, and the weight of his unseen gaze was a physical pressure on them.

The three men shifted their weight nervously.

The first awakened suddenly clenched his fists, his knuckles white.

"What do you want you coward!" he roared, his voice booming in the cavern, momentarily silencing the goblins.

Tharnok’s head tilted a fraction of an inch. It was the first movement he’d made.

There was no anger in the gesture, no reaction at all.

It was the cold, considered motion of a man observing an insect.

Then, Tharnok moved.

Slowly, deliberately, he lifted his right arm. The black metal of his gauntlet gleamed.

He held his hand before him, fingers splayed.

Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by novel•fire.net

For a long moment, he just looked at it, as if examining a tool.

Then, with a calm, almost graceful finality, he straightened his fingers, pressing them together until his hand was a rigid, straight-edged blade.

He didn’t stand. He didn’t even lean forward.

He simply held that straight hand high and then slashed it down through the air in front of him, a short, dismissive gesture, like a king casually waving away a servant.

The air itself rippled.

It wasn’t a flash of light or a burst of energy.

It was a distortion, a wave of concentrated pressure that shot from his hand.

I felt it more than I saw it, the the gravity in the path of that invisible slash had become a thousand times heavier.

It didn’t whistle or roar; it was utterly silent, a vacuum of sound that was more terrifying than any noise.

It happened in less than a second. The man, who had been standing firm, his chest puffed out in fear, and defiance, was simply... hit.

There was no blocking it. The force caught him square in the torso.

It didn’t slice him open like a blade; it was far worse.

It was like an invisible giant had flicked him with a finger of pure, condensed weight.

A sickening crunch, the sound of a dozen ribs giving way at once, echoed through the sudden silence.

The man didn’t cry out. The air was driven from his lungs in a single, choked gasp.

He was lifted clean off his feet and thrown backward as if he weighed nothing, his body crumpling like a discarded rag doll.

He landed ten feet away in a heap of broken limbs, motionless.

The man body lay at an angle that was all wrong, a broken doll discarded by a careless child.

The cavern was dead quiet. The goblins had stopped their jeering.

The people around had stopped their whispering.

I looked briefly at the still form of the man, then I moved my gaze upward, back to the throne.

Tharnok’s arm had returned to rest on the arm of his throne.

He hadn’t shifted his posture. The gesture had cost him no effort.

It was as simple as breathing. The sheer, effortless power of it froze the very air around.

The murder of a man had required less effort from him than it takes to swat a fly.

He simply sat, that blank, faceless helmet turning with an almost lazy deliberation from the first corpse to the second man.

The second man was trembling so violently I could see the shivers wracking his frame from where I stood in the crowd.

He was staring at the first man body, his face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror.

His mouth was slightly agape, but no sound came out.

He was drowning in fear, right before all of us.

He was paralyzed, caught in the gravity of Tharnok’s presence as surely as if he were pinned to the floor.

Then, Tharnok’s hand lifted again.

It was the same unhurried, casual motion. The same straightening of the fingers into a rigid, metallic blade.

This was it. He was going to do it again. This wasn’t a lesson or a display.

It was a systematic cleansing, and we were just items on a list to be checked off.

The man seemed to sense it too. His eyes, wide with horror, snapped from the corpse up to the throne.

A choked whimper finally escaped his lips.

"P-please..." he stammered, the word barely a whisper, but it carried in the dead air.

It was a useless, desperate sound that was snuffed out before it could even properly exist.

Tharnok’s hand slashed down.

There was no roar, no flash. Just that same silent, invisible wave of distorted air.

I felt it again, that lurch in my gut, a wave of nausea as the very laws of physics were twisted into a weapon.

It was so... clean. So effortless.

The force hit the second man square in the chest.

There was that same awful, wet crunching sound, the sound of a body being collapsed in on itself by an impossible weight.

He didn’t even have time to scream. He was thrown backward, his limbs flailing for a split second in a grotesque parody of flight before he landed in a heap next to the first man body, a second broken toy.

A collective, sharp gasp rippled through the crowd of captives, followed by a fresh wave of sobs that people tried to stifle into their hands.

The goblin guards cackled, the sound like grinding stones, enjoying the show.

Tharnok hadn’t killed them in anger or for a cause.

He had killed them because he could, because it required no more thought than breathing.

Tharnok’s blank helmet turned, with that same slow, inexorable finality, toward the third man.

A high, thin whine escaped his lips before he even made a sound, the sound of a teakettle about to scream.

Then the pleading started.

"Please," he begged, his voice cracking and reedy. "Please, my lord... I... I have money! My family! They can pay! Anything you want!" He was wringing his hands together, the gesture frantic and useless. His eyes were wide, showing a perfect circle of white all around the iris. "I’ll serve you! I’ll do anything! Just... just don’t..."

Tharnok didn’t move. He didn’t acknowledge the offers, the bribes, the desperate promises.

He just sat, a monolith of dark metal, and he let the man plead.

He was letting the moment settle, not out of mercy, but like a cat allowing a mouse one last futile scramble before the final pounce.

It was worse than the quick killings. This was torture.

And the third man knew it. When his words bounced off that impassive armor and faded into the silent cavern, his desperation shifted.

His head swiveled, his wild eyes scanning our faces, the crowd of us he’d been captured with.

He was looking for a savior. He was searching for any sign of help, any flicker of solidarity.

His face crumpled. No one moved. Not a single soul.

And a terrible, cold part of me understood why.

Ut wasn’t just the fear of Tharnok’ power, the certain death that awaited anyone who intervened. It was something uglier.

These three, the "awakened," they had tried to save themselves, to run, leaving the rest of us in here.

They almost left everyone here to die. Now, they were being culled, and a dark, shameful part of me thought.

They deserve it.

It was a horrible thought, but it was there, curling like a snake in my gut.

Diving into a fight you don’t understand is suicide.

And diving in to save someone who saw you as disposable?

That’s just stupidity. This was the enemy’s heart, their absolute domain.

There was nothing any of us could do.

The third man saw all of this on our faces. The last of his hope drained away, leaving only a hollow, empty shell of a man.

He stopped pleading. He just stood there, shaking, waiting.

Tharnok’s helmet tilted a fraction, as if he’d been observing a mildly interesting experiment that had now reached its predictable conclusion.

He was bored. The entertainment was over.

The armored hand lifted. The fingers straightened into that familiar, terrible blade.

There was no urgency, no anger. It was just... time.

The silent slash. The gut-wrenching pull in the air. The wet, crushing sound.

The man joined the other two in the dust.