Asha was pumping her legs as hard as she could, and then a bit more.

With the red thirst running rampant throughout her body, she was faster than she had ever been. Also angry. Asha was very angry.

It had taken her some time to understand the cryptic conversation that had happened in lady Lucifers tent a few weeks ago, but she eventually understood.

Some of her kin had betrayed the tribes as a whole. To whom did not matter, all that did matter was that they were now enemies.

She had mulled over who it could have been, but Asha was the first to admit that she wasn’t the smartest of orcs. That's what she had her brother for. While she could fight fairly well, politics was something she left to him. Not that they had needed it until now, but her brother had picked up more than enough in his studies.

Ever since she had understood the situation they were in, Asha had been angry. Angry enough for the red thirst to pulse through her body, even when she was not training. This constant presence of the thirst allowed her to figure out something interesting.

With a grunt, the thirst pulsed through her body, moving like warm honey along her muscles.

With a bit of mental effort, the thirst concentrated itself in the muscles of her right arm, shoulder and back.

Then with a forceful exhalation, that was more of an angry yell, Asha hurled her axe at Carborg Fire Mountain.

While she had aimed for the head, she wasnt dissatisfied with the hit to his shoulder and the subsequent destruction of his barrier.

Asha used the moment he was distracted and focused on her axe, to shift the bubbling red haze, from her arm down to her legs. Once the haze pulsed through the entirety of her lower body, she dashed forward even faster. She looked like a blur leaving behind a hazy red afterimage.

Once she was no more than a few meters away from the traitor, she leapt high, coming down on Carborg with a heavy dropkick.

Sadly Carborg reacted just in time, blocking her incoming feet with the flat side of his longsword.

For a moment, Ashas mind went into overdrive, the animalistic instincts she had tried to cultivate showing her the correct path.

Letting her upper body tilt backwards, Asha used the tiny bit of contact she had with the flat side of his sword to kick away. For a moment she soared through the air in a surprisingly graceful backflip, before she landed back on the ground, already in a crouched position.

The red thirst was still in her legs and so, she exploded into motion again, this time staying low to the ground. With her mind firing on full blast, Asha observed Carborgs lower body for any opening she could exploit. Sadly there was nothing she could immediately identify as a weakness.

Instead she stayed low to the ground, dodging beneath Carborgs return stroke and chopped the spike at the back of her axe into his right ankle.

The spike did not penetrate too deeply, but Asha felt that she had at least landed a hit while pulling the axe free.

From her crouched position she dodged into a backwards roll as the tip of Carborgs sword came down on the spot her head had moments ago been. Once she was back on her feet she observed her adversary for a moment.

He was no longer very steady on his feet, favoring his left side slightly. Additionally a small smear of blood could be seen at the side of his boot.

He snarled at Asha, but she only grinned at him, picking up her second axe from the ground, having arrived at its location after their short engagement.

With two axes in hand she felt magnitudes more safe than with one.

Now repositioned she stood across from Carborg and her brother directly opposite of her.

Carborg positioned himself sideways and took steps backwards, trying to escape a pincer attack, but Asha was already ahead of him, keeping the blasted traitor squarely between the two of them.

All around them the battle continued to rage, orcs fell and spilled their lifeblood onto the dirt from grievous wounds, while it rained a consistent trickle of golden blood and feathers as the marksmen of the Open Sky tribe shot the angels from the sky.

For a moment Ashas awareness expanded. Time seemed to slow down as she looked past Carborg the traitor and to her brother. There he stood, naked as the day he was born, his body marred with hideous burn scars, skin ripping in places where the heat had caused it to grow too tight and his skull showing on the right side of his face.

The sight alone was enough to throw her into a murderous frenzy, the red thirst already bubbling through her body in anticipation.

Grommash had always been a handsome orc. His quiet and intellectual charisma being enough to get him apprenticeships with clan mages. It had also gotten him into more than a few tents for the occasional night. Many young women and a few of the shaman boys would miss his visits.

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While orcs appreciated a few visible scars, Grommash’s right side would always be horribly disfigured. Even with the orange flames licking along his mangled body, Grommash would never again be called handsome.

As his older sister, this was unacceptable.

Yet before Asha could do anything stupid, she looked into the hollow socket of his skull.

There burned a tiny floating orange spark, bobbing up and down. It stilled the moment Asha looked into it and she knew.

There was no one she was closer to in this realm than her brother, and as many twins do, they had managed to communicate more than a few words could say with just a look.

Now, holding eye contact with the tiny flame, Asha felt the same reassurance she usually felt when she looked into his eyes.

The moment passed and time resumed again, Asha pumping as much of the red thirst into her body as she could manage, before once again rushing at Carborg.

Usually the feeling of her body working this perfectly would bring her immense satisfaction, but right now asha felt only concern. She had never once landed a solid strike on Lady Lucifer, even when she and her brother were working in perfect harmony.

Carborg Fire Mountain was a seasoned warrior. Would they be enough? Would he kill her brother? Would he read her like Lady Lucifer did?

In the end, none of that mattered right now. All ashe wanted was to bury her axes inside his face. Shoving all the unnecessary thoughts from her mind, she sank deeper into her instincts.

With a few more steps, Asha was close enough to strike. One chop with her heavy axe at his right side. He catches the handle of the axe below the blade. Asha pulls downward, moving the blade away while it is caught under the head of her axe. With her left hand she thrusts, the tiny spike at the top of her other axe just barely nicking Carborgs face.

They stand body to body for a moment. This close asha can feel the power his muscles hold. She only managed to move his blade out of the way because she pulled with her entire body weight.

Then Asha’s instincts scream at her to dodge. Not hesitating even an instant, she jumps and pulls her knees in, only to kick Carborg into the path of an oncoming fireball.

Landing after another backflip, Asha expected to see Carborg on fire. Instead the orc seemingly cut the projectile in half, the tip of his blade still shimmering from the heat.

Asha grunts in disappointment.

One look into her brother's eye and she knows that this is just the beginning, they both have more to give.

Asha rushed back in, exchanging a flurry of lightning fast blows with Carborg. Her axes moved like the fangs of a beast, fast and vicious. A few times she disengaged to reposition, always so that her brother was behind the enemy.

Both so that he had an open line of sight and so that she could look into his eye.

Everytime a wave of fire or a fireball came, Carborg managed to deflect or destroy her brothers magic, leaving him unaffected.

Asha was growing frustrated, but she immediately pushed the feeling away.

With her muscles burning from the exchange of blows, Asha pumped more and more of the red thirst into her body. Her muscles twitched and coiled beneath her skin as the might of her ancestors burned through her body. She could feel blood vessels burst as the pressure rose, her joins creaking and tendons tightening.

She knew that this was too much, but her rational mind was producing too many thoughts, so she shut it off.

All that she needed were her instincts, her axes and the connection to her brother.

Asha released the mental block that kept the red thirst from flowing into her head. It poured in as if a dam had broken, refreshing the land after a drought.

The red thirst flowed through the long unused channels in her head, suffusing her mind in its violent call. Asha could feel the blood vessels bursting in her eyes, her pupils growing into a vertical slit and her canines elongating. Sensations became overwhelming for a moment, before the beast took over.

An ethereal apparition of a bipedal canine came into being behind her back as asha hunched low to the ground.

With an animalistic snarl she exploded into motion, low to the ground, feinting at Carborgs lower body, only to shoot high into the sky the moment he brought his sword low to guard.

Ashas axes fell like the jaws of a rabid beast, one crashing blade to blade with Carborgs sword, the other biting deep into the armor on his shoulder.

Were asha in the right mind to notice, she would have seen the shocked expression on his face. Instead she sank deeper and deeper into her mind.

Leaning backward, Asha violently yanked her weapons away, only to immediately press the advantage instead of resetting her feet. From her unbalanced position, she began to strike from odd angles that made it impossible for Carborg to respond with traditional swordwork. He had to resort to kicks or shoulder tackles in the hopes of keeping this rabid beast off him.

In the middle of such a lightning fast exchange, a bolt of orange fire suddenly impacted Carborgs injured foot, causing him to stumble.

Seizing the moment, Asha hooked her own leg behind his and pulled backwards. Once Carborg began to fall, she hooked the backside of one of her axes into a strap of leather on his chest. With the sudden leverage, she pulled Carborg upright for a moment, before throwing her fist, still gripping her axe, into his face.

For a moment Asha allowed herself to feel grim satisfaction at the feeling of Carborgs nose crunching beneath her fist, before the older orc immediately got back to his feet.

With a look of fury on his face, he cleared his nose from the fresh blood now clogging it, only to be immediately hit with a fresh bolt of fire right into his unprotected back.

So the dance began anew, Asha continuing her wild and frenzied offensive, while Grommash took every opening he could to disturb Carborg’s rhythm.

And so they continued, a wild and unpredictable melee, during which all sides lost focus of the world around them. None of them noticed the fact that there were no new arrows raining from the sky. None of them noticed the orcs of tribe Fire Mountain be either captured or killed by their kin.

None of them noticed that the other orcs wanted to stop them, only to be held back by a tall black haired woman.

They fought on and on as a crowd of orcs encircled them, keeping a respectful distance as to not be hit by a stray attack.

Both Asha and Carborg were littered in wounds when they finally separated. Carborg stayed vigilant in case of a sneaky fire blast, but a quick look at the panting and exhausted Grommash told him that he would no longer need to worry about that.

He tried to step in the young mages direction, only for his injured ankle to buckle under his weight, causing him to sink to his knees.

Asha tried to raise herself from her crouched position, but a sharp pain in her right leg caused her to look down. A large and deep cut ran from her right hip down her thigh, ending just above the knee. The flesh was held together by a wispy red haze, her femur being just barely visible beneath the bubbling liquid.

All at once the haze of the red thirst receded and Asha felt her normal thoughts come back. The apparition of the rabid beast that had followed her like a shadow dispersed into a fine red mist.

With a violent heave she vomited a mixture of blood and bubbling red liquid, the contraction of her abdominal muscles causing another spike of pain to shoot through her body.

She was spent. That much was certain. Her body could not keep this up, but her mind was still full of unimaginable fury. Her fists trembled as the rage tried to animate her body, but her muscles could no longer cooperate.

Using his sword as a crutch Carborg struggled back to his feet. Once upright, he staggered for a moment, before catching himself. Slowly he made his way towards Asha’s kneeling body. His face was bloody and bruised, his nose was broken, as was his jaw, but he still managed to force a few words through his lips.

“I should have been more thorough back then.” he wiped the blood pouring from his nose with the back of his hand.

“If you were allowed to grow you would surely have risen too fast to stop. I spent years planning for this and once you and your brother are gone, the only thing standing in my way is going to be that wretched old shaman.”

Asha tried to rise to her feet again, but her legs were growing unresponsive. Instead she funneled the rest of the red thirst into her right arm, the one with the heavier axe.

Looking for any opportunity to throw it into his face, she suddenly caught sight of her brother. He was limping towards Carborg, hidden from sight. The flames that had animated his body having winked out long ago. But now both of his eyes were open, and Asha knew the look he was giving her. It was one she normally used on him, whenever she was about to do something dumb.

Now on the receiving side of that look, she could understand how her brother was oftentimes annoyed with her antics.

She smiled in response, watching as Carborg closed the distance to her.

Once he was no more than a few steps away, he opened his mouth to speak. Before any sound could leave his lips, Asha hurled her axe at his face. The throw had more power than she had anticipated, causing her to overextend and fall into a heap on the ground.

Carborg, seemingly having expected a surprise attack, dodged the axe, causing it to sail past his face.

He leveled a mocking gaze on Asha’s prone form, only for that expression to immediately freeze.

As if time slowed down, Asha watched as Carborgs body went limp, falling face first to the ground, pulling her brother with him, who was still gripping the axe that was stuck at the base of his neck.