The scene before me was chaos. About a dozen townspeople had formed around the shadowed form of Beltane, and nearly twenty orcs surrounded them. As I watched, an orc swung at the shadow, but the sword passed through harmlessly. I knew this spell, it was called [Shadow Form]. It was a commonly used defensive illusion spell that allowed the caster to surround himself in illusory shadow. Any caster that used [Shadow Form] would seem to be much larger than he really was, making it particularly difficult to hit him.
While Beltane’s cloak of shadows caught my attention, the creatures he was fighting also drew my gaze. That was my first time seeing a monster in person, and the experience was uncanny. There was something about the almost-human appearance of the orcs that created a deep sense of unease within me.
To describe the orcs in a sentence, they were green pig-like humanoids. They were bipedal, but their legs were reverse-jointed. It was as if they had only recently evolved the ability to walk on two legs. Their movement was unnatural due to their strange legs. They seemed to canter rather than walk, and their locomotion was much more vertical than a human’s.
The most uncanny aspect of the orcs was the long pig snout that sprouted out of an otherwise-human face. Two thick tusks jutted out from beneath their bottom lips, and their skin was an unhealthy dark green color. They were, quite frankly, disgusting.
Though their lower appendages had hooves on their end, their upper appendages had human-like hands. Evolution would not naturally create a beast like this. The only explanation for the appearance of these creatures was that some wicked medial interfered in their natural evolutionary process.
The orcs wore ragged slipshod armor on their body. Some wore leather armor, and some wore chainmail. Most of the orcs wore a haphazard mixture of whatever armor they could scavenge off humans they had killed. In their jagged, humanoid hands, they held poorly made weapons of all kinds. Most of them carried clubs or maces, but one or two had brought rusted swords.
Beltane’s wand glowed silver for a moment, and the orc that had just swung at him was struck by some unseen force. Carried by its momentum, the orc twirled through the air, spewing bright crimson blood from a huge horizontal gash that had just appeared on its chest.
That spell was probably [Wind Knife], a sorcery that just about all war mages knew. As one could probably guess, [Wind Knife] produced a thin blade of compressed air and shot it at the target. The spell was incredibly close range, as the wind could not maintain such compression for more than five meters. The attack was invisible, however. With an arcane focus, one could hit an unsuspecting warrior with [Wind Knife] before he even knew what hit him. At close range, one could expect a war mage to use this spell.
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“Step back!” Count Armond shouted at the people fighting against the orcs. As he spoke, he raised one outstretched palm toward the fight.
With the moment of peace bought by Beltane’s spell, the townspeople were able to take a few steps back. As he stepped backward, Beltane dropped his [Shadow Form] spell, allowing for Armond to get a better shot.
Some of the orcs turned their heads toward the newcomer. A few managed to take a step toward us, and some raised their swords, but they were able to do no more. In that instant, Count Armond Feldrast prevented them from ever moving again.
Four streaks of flame shot forward at the speed of a crossbow bolt. Each streak of Hellfire reached an orc and detonated with the force of a frag grenade. More than half of the orcs were killed instantly by Armond’s fusillade, and the rest were burned severely as the four sparks of Hellfire flared into a single gargantuan fireball that instantly vaporized everything within a ten-meter radius.
I was terrified for a moment that Armond’s flames could not be contained. The size of the explosion was such that I was certain it would spread to the townspeople. I was wrong, however, and the excess flames coiled unnaturally upward rather than outward. Armond must have redirected the flames after the blast. A massive, blazing pillar of fire briefly lit up the center of Sableton. The pillar spread far above the Guild Hall. I was certain that people thirty miles away could see it.
Suddenly, I understood what Beltane meant when he said that [Hellfire] was the best offensive Talent in the world.
The pillar of fire disappeared after a few seconds, replaced by a thin haze of smoke that covered my vision and filled most of central Sableton. I coughed slightly and waved the smoke away from my mouth as I looked at my father.
A sadistic look had filled Armond’s eyes as he looked out at the destruction he had wrought. A delighted smile graced his lips, and sparks of Hellfire made his eyes shine like rubies. As large, smoldering cinders began to fall from the sky like rain, Armond laughed a bit louder than was proper for a count before saying, “I’ve still got it!”
I was reminded of my father’s title: the King’s Executioner. It was only natural that a man with such a blood-soaked title would be capable of such violence.
The display made it clear to me that I was nowhere near Armond’s level when it came to control of Hellfire. I had started to think that, since I could control three sparks simultaneously, I was approaching him in skill level. This was not the case. The idea of controlling so much flame simultaneously seemed insane.