Having his aura covered the village, the young man, with a broken heart, understood what vile lie he had told himself. From the moment he obtained it and made use of it, his aura hadn't been his own.

I see. I understand it now. There's no need to keep using it... The aura of the Fifth. Such a thing is... Way above my own strength.

He bit on his lip as a knot formed on his throat. Twisting his hand, every strand of broken presence escaping his body recoiled into his chest. The giant orc fell down, making the earth tremble with his landing. He looked up in distress, but quickly bowed in front of Thom and uttered, in orcish, some words.

"Great one, I ask you once again! Spare my village, refrain your anger from touching the ones behind me!" He yelled. "If my life is not enough, I will hunt whatever beast you desire, and bring it in front of your feet!"

Thom looked at Erina for a second, who simply smiled and shrugged. A sigh was his sign of defeat and exhaustion, although he was still physically fresh.

If they had not tampered with the stones at the edge of the village, the orcs probably wouldn't have taken their presence as a reason to worry. Quickly, Thom's idea of introducing himself peacefully amounted to nothing, and his spirit had been quickly crushed. Now, in front of him, a giant wad bowing his head in fear. What bothered Thom the most, in reality, was that the fear such orc was feeling stemmed from a power that he did not have— the illusion created by his inherited aura.

With his heart thumping rapidly, he neared the giant on the ground. "I'm not here to kill anyone." He forcibly estated, making the giant's eyes sparkle with hope.

"This one is grateful." The orc banged his head on the dirt. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

"For now, just stand up. I don't like looking down when I'm talking to someone."

"Yes!"

With a big thump and with quick movements that didn't seem to belong to him, the orc raised to his feet. Thom's neck moved upward as he followed the movements of the giant, who ended up covering the light above his head. The human, with a reason, could only take a step back and look at the brawny giant from below.

"Well..." Thom bitterly smiled. "You can kneel."

"Of course."

With the massive monster now kneeling in front of him, the black-haired man felt a little more confident. With a straightened back, and Erina mocking him on the side, Thom spoke up.

"My name is Thom Arburson. I am not a spirit, but I am, in fact, the inheritor of the divine skill created by the fifth heart of the forest. If that's too hard to understand, since I myself don't know what the fuck am I talking about, let's just say that I'm the sixth heart of the forest. Is that also confusing? Well, then let's say I'm a guy that is somehow vaguely related to the forest in a way."

"Hm..." The orc frowned and growled lowly with a worried face.

"I have a divine skill or whatever that lets me learn shit fast, and that aura you saw from before was the one coming from my heritage. If you want proof that it's not actually mine, you can see that, even when I stopped the sword, my wrist is totally broken."

He raised his left hand, which was dangling and cracking as it rejoined itself. Erina flinched and the orc apologetically lowered his head, but Thom simply sighed. It had been so sudden that he hadn't even noticed that his bones had been crushed. He was lacking not only physical power but also mental agility, in other words.

"So, it's complicated, but I figure it out somehow." He lifted his eyebrows. "I went through some crap and now I'm trying to fix my ways so things don't go as badly, but I made the wrong choice again and it resulted in you attacking me. My bad. You're an excellent hunter. I wanted to talk to you because— are you even following what I'm saying?"

Thom was ranting slightly about something, when he noticed several question marks appearing in the orc's pupils. He looked back to Erina, equally as confused, and sighed silently to show how disheartened he was. It seemed, somehow, that telling the truth was harder than lying.

With a deep sigh, he let go of his aura and yelled.

"You fool!" The earth trembled as his crimson presence extended around the forest. "I demand you to take me with your leader! Take this great sage of the forest to your wisest, so I can make the proper punishment into reality!"

"Y-Yes! Right away!"

With fear covering his body, the gigantic orc frantically nodded and stood up, signaling for them to enter the village. Erina snickered as she looked towards Thom. What could she tell him? She was equally as lost. Everything about what Thom was saying was also somewhat new to her, even if she had more or less heard about it from him before.

They were guided through the settlement, dozens of eyes trailing their every move, until they arrived at a bigger hut where an orcish woman stood. She glanced at them with confusion, but the giant orc was quick to explain. After an apology with gritted teeth, they entered and saw the shaman sitting on her chair, eyes weary of the two strangers in her hut.

Big Hunt was about to explain once again, but Thom stopped him and showed a smile to the shaman. Desperate to show some sign of authority in this place full of giants, he sat in front of the shaman without asking, without an invitation. Erina nervously reached for him, but the shaman, seeing the girl's intentions, also stopped her hand.

Thom showed a confident smile, but his interior was burning with anxiety. He had to show some sort of authority to demonstrate he was in equal ground with the matriarch, but he couldn't go overboard and look cocky or insensitive. If his intentions were to negotiate, the conversation had to be fluid. As an experienced swindler, he was sure of his acting skills, but he could still act in a way that did not benefit him, albeit doing it perfectly.

He carefully inspected the words inside his head and sought for a way to begin, but since he didn't know about the orcish culture, he could only begin with a generic introduction.

"I'm honored to meet you. I have been looking forward to meeting with your tribe, so I would like it if our conversation was on the friendlier side. My name is Thom Arburson, and I come, in all honesty, to negotiate peace between your tribe and the goblin horde south from here."

As his words fell, Big Hunt grew restless. Erina noticed and glanced at him. The giant had begun to nervously look around the room and press his hands together even tighter, nervous about something. Mistakenly, the girl thought he was afraid of being lied and used, when in reality the orc had quickly visualized the possibility of not being able to hunt down the goblins, and that made him quite uneasy.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Erina apologized inside her head, innocent to the darker thoughts inside the orc's mind.

After a long silence, the shaman responded.

"I abide by no name... But you can call me shaman." The older orc articulated as her hands traced a path to the bottom of her book, tardily sweeping the page with her long but thick fingers. "It is not usual for me to deal with dhelvs—with humans— much less if they come in the name of the... Goblins. You may understand my reason to be nervous, wary of you even, kar Thom."

"It is fine if you feel that way." Thom smiled. "I am nervous, too. Against so many, I would hardly last half minute."

"I'm glad you understand that part." The shaman scoffed. "But my children seem to think of you highly, even though they don't know you. Was that your aura from before, kar Thom?"

"It was." Thom honestly replied, although only because it was convenient to do so. "It was my way to say hello, to demonstrate somehow that I did not come to harm you. If you received any other message, then I apologize and ask of you to reinterpret my intentions. I came here to talk, in peace, about something that benefits all of us."

The shaman clicked her tongue and looked back at Thom. "You must understand that peace between my tribe and the small demons is not possible. They have plundered our cattle and our grain, and killed my children with petty tactics that do not know of the hunters' way. Beasts that are disgraceful to our gods and disgraceful to themselves do not deserve a piece of our hearts."

Slamming shut the cover, the shaman threw the book to a side and rested her hand on her knee, holding with the other a bone-crafted cane. Thom smiled and eyed Erina, who had a displeased and uncomfortable expression, and then returned to face the orc.

"But isn't that the same you do with human carriages and campers that near your territory?"

"We obey the laws of the hunt." She sneered. "The killing of humans is for their meat and their bones, or to defend the tribe from harm. Sporting hunt is rare, since it brings no training or benefits higher tan hunting a boar. We hunt alone, and we never kill the ones that haven't matured. We make their deaths as quick as possible, always striking for the neck. We pray their souls find rest, their blood is drained before consuming and we never leave waste. Tell me, human, do the small demons do this? Do they leave any mercy or grace for the ones they murder and tarnish?"

Unaltered and calm, the shaman explained her point to the human on the other side of the chair. With eyes closed, Big Hunt nodded slowly as he thought of massacring the demons he despised so dearly. Thom couldn't have known, back then, that such a thing had been crossing his mind for a long time.

"I've seen the remnants of battles with the goblins." Thom crossed his arms. "They're not pretty."

"I am talking about honoring the hunt, human. The gods will not look down on butcher if it's for the sake of saving our own." The shaman tightly gripped her cane and frowned as she spoke, looking directly at Thom.

"How convenient..." He smirked.

"Don't you think you can irrupt in my village and tell me how we should all act. This doesn't concern you. Don't try to act as if the demons were your problem to begin with." She angrily placed her closed fist on the table, beginning to raise her voice.

"I'm just saying, if you cooperated a little instead of fighting, you'd be better off for the winter."

"They were the ones to attack first!"

She slammed her fist on the table, alerting everyone's senses in the room. Thom smoldered the burning flame of anxiety in his heart as he breathed through his smile, trying to remain unbothered.

"Would have you not attacked them first if they had not tried to steal from your reserves?"

He raised an eyebrow. The elderly woman clicked her tongue and laid back, placing her hand on her stomach as she tried to relax as well. She noticed she was being rather temperamental, which was what Thom wanted, and decided to calm down a little before engaging once again in conversation.

"We wouldn't have attacked." She closed her eyes. "There was no reason. My people's only goal is to live a fulfilling life and end it accordingly. We have enough food, grain and meat alike. We have shelter and we have ourselves. Even winters are no problem, not the coldest or the whitest."

"Then is your only problem the goblins? Is such a dream-like thing actually possible?" Thom opened his hands and raised his shoulders. "I'm not convinced of you being completely self-sufficient, lady shaman."

"Why do I need you to think that way?" She shook her head. "All I need you is to stop bothering me. If you're done, you can exit my village."

"But I'm not done." Thom opened his mouth, and, certainly, he wasn't done.

He continued to explain, although in terms that the orcs could hardly follow, that the food they could produce in their territory was hardly enough to feed the massive orcs that lived in the village. He had only taken a glance, but the average body mass seemed to be at least six times a regular human's. Accounting not only for their increased height but also width and depth, they should be close to being six times the average human's volume.

To his best knowledge, a regular human who ate one or one-and-a-half kilo per day should be eating six to nine kilograms of food. That would be if they ate only twice a day as a normal human would do.

However, the size of their fields couldn't be nearly as big, since Thom had barely seen anything the like ever since he had arrived. That meant that they either survived from meat and a small portion of grain, or that their main source of food was not actually self-grown.

The shaman got noticeably angry at this, but Thom continued speaking. He suggested that, most probably, they were surviving from assaulting human caravans every now and then. Gritting her teeth, the shaman didn't answer. Thom sighed through his nose as if he had won a small battle, but it was actually just a small piece of information he had confirmed.

"It's not that we don't have fields." The shaman said. "We have them. They're on the other side of the hills. That way the sun hits them all day, shadow doesn't intervene. What do you really want by figuring out this information?"

"It's simple. I'll help you with your harvest, and you will form a peaceful union with the goblins. You'll work together."

"Hmph." She smiled with contempt at his proposition. "How would a human help my tribe in its harvest? During winter, too? We were planning to harvest in a quarter moon and leave the fields alone for the season. Are you saying that you can harvest during winter and harvest for our people to survive?"

"I thought beforehand that you'd doubt me."

He waved his hand at Erina. The girl retrieved from her bag a small clay pot filled with dirt and a seed, handing it over to Thom as she smiled. He showed it to the shaman, both the dirt pot and the seed, and asked:

"Do you know what this is?"

"A redglint seed?" She made a displeased expression. "They grow fast and grow everywhere, but they're as nutritious as dirt."

"A perfect example. Do you know how long they take to grow?"

Thom plucked it inside the dirt before she could say anything. He heard a frustrated sigh escape the orc's nose, but he didn't mind. The pot was placed on the table between the two of them. After a minute of silence, the seed sprouted. After two more minutes, the roots to extend. The shaman observed with fascination as the small stem sprouted out of the dirt and begun to rotate in place, slowly extending itself upward.

"A normal redglint will take one week to mature, two weeks to reproduce and give several more seeds and leaves. With my divine influence, which I am granted by the spirits of the forest, because I adore and worship them, everything will take twenty-five times less to grow. If you give me a few weeks, I'm sure I'll strengthen my link with them even further. That twenty-five will become fifty. And next time, it'll be seventy-five. Does that sound good to you?"

"Kek..." She smiled. "It is certainly a wonderful gift. But that does not suffice. How do we know that the small demons will uphold their part of the bargain if we make peace?"

"I'll make sure that they do." Thom said. "If they don't fear me yet, I'll make sure they do."

"Again, how will you do that exactly? Isn't their army in the realm of the thousands?"

"But if you cooperate with me, I can threaten them into working peacefully. How many are you? Two hundred? That's enough."

"Even if a war were to break out, kar Thom, I wouldn't sacrifice all two hundred of my people with the vain intention of submitting the demons. You do understand that the survival of my children is what is most important to me, correct? If we need to slowly eliminate them, I'll take that over a failed peace and a war."

"That won't happen, shaman..."

Thom closed his eyes, and slowly irradiated his aura. The air in the room became heavy as the red gas filled the entire hut, lingering in the ceiling and making the walls become bushes of roses instead. The orca became restless at this demonstration of power, before a smile appeared on Thom's face, and he spoke.

"Goblins won't be enough to face you. In the case that our accord breaks down and you need to defend yourselves, you will not lose or die. If you ask me why, that is because I will be linking all of your souls with mine. I, with this useless aura of mine, will name each and every one of you."