They’d had mean looks, the orcs that came for Ensharia.

She’d gotten good at recognising orcish expressions over her captivity. Garutan had spoken with her every day, and though he was far friendlier than most of his kind, Ensharia was beginning to learn that it was not at all uncommon for them to take a liking to her. Orcs seemed to like conversation, with humans above all else. They found her jokes hilarious, found her stories captivating, and she had grown to find them…Yes, companions. Almost friends. There was really no other way to describe it. Her old trainers would have wept.

But there’d not been a scrap of friendliness in the orcs that came for her. They weren’t the chained ones, the ones driven to rebel against General Venka’s cruel demands by empathy, decency or morals. They were his elites, which meant they possessed three terrible qualities. The first was their strength, the second their fearlessness, and the third their savage brutality.

It was the size of them that struck her before anything else, however. Ensharia had grown quite accustomed to being towered over, surrounded by orcs as she was, but Venka’s elites loomed a full head over their chained kin. They moved with the concentrated grace of lions, as if their dirt-compacting weights were slight enough to be balanced upon the tip of a toe. Their bodies were bound in great sheets of plate, but theirs was steel rather than the shoddier, easier iron, and she felt an uncanny power in their grip as the first of them seized her arm.

Ensharia had to resist the urge to shake the hand off and strike its wielder, knowing that to do so would be unproductive. She stifled her indignity, watching as the orcs undid the lock about her, preparing to bind her to a new chain.

And then she shook the hand off and struck its wielder.

Hands still bound, Ensharia could not properly punch. Instead she simply bunched her fingers and caught the orc with a pair of horizontal hammer-fists. All her weight was behind the strike, and all her strength, but she knew at the moment of connection she’d made a mistake.

The orc was probably twice the average weight for its species, and far, far more than twice the average strength. Ensharia had hit trees less sturdy than its cheek. She sent it stumbling, but not to the ground, and caught movement in the corner of her eye before she could follow up the blow. She dove, rolling from the path of danger and bouncing back up to her feet, kicking out without thinking. Her heel connected with a sternum, knocked an orc over and her hopping yards in the opposite direction.

Both the remaining elites closed, now wielding thick, iron cudgels which might have been excessively heavy even for beating down a castle gate.

She flitted right, then darted left. Luring the orcs’ guards one way so that her kick would land clean from the other, and it did well enough in sending another into the dirt. The opening was too wide for the last to miss, however, and fatigued as she was Ensharia didn’t quite manage to escape the cudgel as it found her ribs and squeezed the air out of her.

Lights, dancing, washing in her vision. Gravity, apparently taking a day off. Heels high and well over her head, head feeling like it was caught between four different times at once, not one of which contained the orcs responsible for beating her. Ensharia realised she was face down only in time to find the orcs pressing down on her again, their strength and weights all used to hold her in place now as she was shackled rather more forcibly than before.

Ensharia was limp as a ragdoll as they dragged her up to her feet, head almost lolling on its shoulders. There’d not been much fight in her, all things considered, not after so many days of labour and degradation. It wouldn't have taken a hammer as big as she’d caught to beat it all out.

Pitifully, she didn’t move against them a second time as they hauled her off across the camp. The orcs left bound together did more to resist with their hateful jeering, but that seemed of no consequence to her captors.

The camp rumbled past her as Ensharia was forced ever onwards, her head clearing as she moved. By the time she’d reached her destination, she’d regained enough mental coherence to realise that it would be her final destination.

General Venka stood nearby, watching. Around him were yet more Elites, each of them nearly half again as tall as the fencer. She was forced down to her knees, and stared one way and the other, quickly confirming her fears. That she was fully encircled by grey meat and hostility.

Anger. Ensharia surprised herself with it, felt the tears brimming, and nursed the embers of her fury as a means of keeping them from spilling over. She forced her head back round to glare at the General, spitting at the ground.

“This it, then?” She snarled. “This how I fucking die, hacked apart by your attack dogs? Or do you have the stones to do it yourself?”

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General Venka looked at her as he might a map of some battlefield, eyes drilling through the emotion, the humanity, and perceiving only the practical facts beneath.

“It is unbecoming of a Paladin to swear.” He replied, calmly. “You ought to take more pride in your order, unless you’d sooner spend your last minute of life killing my respect for you.”

It was utterly ridiculous that Ensharia found herself concerned most with the fact that he was right. Swearing was unbecoming of a Paladin, they’d all been taught as much, and she’d not even kept to that much of her order’s tenets. Her face burned with humiliation as the circle parted, revealing a newcomer.

Swick the Swift.

He’d done well for himself since they’d last spoken, black skin mostly obscuring the flush of alcoholic indulgence, adrenaline sharpening his eyes into a focus that pierced the clouds amid them. He wasn’t so much as two thirds the height of any orc there, yet each of them parted before him as he strode on. Evidently, they were clever and controlled enough to treat a Hero the way anyone else did.

Perhaps a few weeks ago, Ensharia would have been as well.

“Traitor.” She snarled, knowing full well that a glare could not actually impale a man, but doing her best to manage it regardless. “Oh, it had to be you, didn’t it. A test of your loyalty, right? A showing of how trustworthy you are?”

Swick said nothing, looking suddenly ill as he just turned away from Ensharia and held his hands out. The bonds were removed from them. Somehow it made things worse, to her, that he was so meek about it all. Better to be killed by a real man, better to be killed with a pair of eyes to glare the last of her hatred into before death came knocking.

“That’s it?” She continued, watching as his chains fell and a great, grizzly sword was handed to him. “Got nothing to say, nothing at all? Oh, I suppose you aren’t being paid to talk, are you? Just to kill.”

He turned. Swick could have insulted Ensharia, laughed at her. He could have proclaimed the righteousness of the Dark Lord’s cause or declared the Paladins an order of baby-eating Demons, said or done a thousand things, and none would have punched the breath from her half so fast as his expression.

In his eyes, she saw regret. Weak, trembling, agonised regret. The sort felt so keenly as to turn itself into pain. The sort felt so keenly, indeed, as to turn itself into the very order of pain a man might be so inclined as to try drowning in wine. By the unsteady nausea upon Swick’s face, he had failed.

He closed in, one foot in front of the other, each stride made swiftly, dexterously. There wasn’t anything of a drunkard about him, it seemed. As if the very role of an imminent murderer had sobered him. Ensharia supposed it rather had, if anything ought to have managed that feat, it was hardly an unfitting thing.

Swick stopped only when he was within two yards of her, beyond the range of any lashing limb she might throw out, but so very within the reach of that sword. She could see its edge close from their new distance, make out the numerous tiny teeth along its blade. Almost as much a saw as a weapon. Made, no doubt, to remove limbs from a target of preternatural toughness. A target like her.

“Swick, please.”

It was pathetic, revolting. It degraded her, achieving nothing and costing what little pride Ensharia had left, but she begged regardless. In her position, there was simply no way not to.

“Please, you can still turn around, you can still escape…You don’t have to do this, please just…Don’t kill me. Please, I don’t want to die.”

She didn’t. There was nothing practical or selfless motivating her, Ensharia felt no great duty calling her or unfinished business preserving her. She just didn’t want to die. Her tears fell openly now, with all the volume and weight of a dying stormcloud.

“I’m sorry.” Swick whispered, seeming to take just as much humiliation in his own pathetic words as Ensharia had hers. He was sorry. Spectacular. She was dead.

His sword came up high, glinting in the light, and it remained there for a moment, quivering. Ensharia’s heart was in her throat, beating so hard she almost felt it rattle the teeth. A weapon that size, and an arm able to hold it so steadily so high, meant there’d be little chance of her surviving the first stroke. Not with Swick’s accuracy.

Somehow that only made her more scared. Better to withstand the first blow and live a few more precious moments than be obliterated into the underworld all at once.

“I’m sorry.” Swick repeated, arm tensing, sword shaking, weapon remaining in place. Ensharia couldn’t take it any more.

“JUST DO IT!” She screamed, looking away as she did, just barely too slow to keep from catching the blade starting its descent.

Ensharia was wincing and looking away for long, agonising moments before she finally realised that the blow was not going to fall. It felt like a remarkably long time, thanks to her enhanced reflexes, but could not have been far from a second. She looked back around at last, still expecting to see Swick’s sword hovering in place. Instead she saw only empty air, a ring of gaping orcs, and a General with a face like wrathful lightning.

“AFTER HIM!” Venka roared, his composure truly shattered.

It was rather humbling to see. Ensharia had swung a weapon at that face hard enough to send a head flying five hundred yards from the shoulders it sat on, and failed to so much as raise an eyebrow. Clearly Venka was not a man accustomed to surprises or betrayal, for his emotions were about as restrained as a kicked hornet’s nest.

“HE CAN’T HAVE GONE FAR, HIS TRANSLOCATION IS LIMITED TO A QUARTER-MILE IF EVEN THAT, NOW HUNT! HUNT, YOU DAMNED ANIMALS, HUNT HIM DOWN, AND I SHALL GIVE WHOEVER FINDS HIM FIRST A HUNDRED DAYS AND NIGHTS WITH WHATEVER WOMEN THEY CHOOSE!”

The orcs were quick to obey their barbaric orders, taking off in a storm of grunting, whooping howls. Ensharia did not see animals, as Venka did, watching them take off across the camp. Through her shock-shattered wits and fear-clenched vision, she still recalled her long conversations with their smaller brethren.

Chasing Swick, now, were men. Large men, grey of skin and with mouths split by tusks and fangs, but men nonetheless.

It was something to inspire more pity for the pirate, not less. Ensharia touched her neck where the sword might have fallen and swallowed.

Good luck, Captain. Good luck, and thank you.