I staggered back, my vision swimming, the world a dizzying blur. My head was ringing like a struck bell. I tasted blood. I tried to regain my footing, to raise my fists, to dosomething.
But the blow had done more than just daze me.
I felt a sudden, shocking cold on my scalp as the breeze brushed against it. The dirty, tangled, sweat-matted weight of my hair. A cascade of red, falling around my face and brushing against my neck.
The proof. The lie. Undone.
I froze, my blood turning to ice water in my veins. My eyes, wide with horror, snapped up to meet his. I was exposed. Utterly, completely exposed. I braced myself for the final, killing blow. For the cruel laugh. For the end.
But he just stood there.
The massive Orc General was completely still. His axe, which had been rising to finish me, halted mid-swing. The raw, brutal fire in his eyes didn't just die; it was choked out, replaced by an expression of profound, utter shock. His gaze was fixed on my hair, on my face, on the damning, undeniable truth of me.
He froze.
The fighting around us faltered as his warriors saw their leader's stillness. A pocket of impossible silence spread outwards from us.
I stood there, trembling, disarmed, unmasked.
I waited for the killing blow.
It did not come.
Chapter 3
Korvak
The blow was one of contempt. A swat, not a strike, meant to finally quell the pointless, buzzing fury of the small human soldier who refused to accept their defeat. My gauntlet connected with their helmet with a hollow clang that was satisfyingly final. The helmet strap snapped, and the steel pot went spinning across the bloody cobblestones.
I was already turning away, my mind moving on to the larger strategic concerns of occupying a city, when a shift in the air stopped me cold. A subtle change in the currents eddying around us. A change in the very scent of the battlefield.
I turned back. And my world, for a single, silent heartbeat, stopped.
The soldier I had struck was staggering, trying to regain their balance. But the soldier was gone. In their place stood… something that did not make sense.
A shock of vibrant, copper-red hair was revealed, plastered to a pale scalp with sweat and grime. It was cut short, brutally so, barely long enough to tickle the nape of a slender neck. There was a softness to it, a fineness that was utterly out of place in this world of iron and mud. It was a flame in the grey ruin of the square.
My mind stalled. This didn’t make sense.
Then the wind shifted again, a weak puff of air carrying the stench of the slaughter, and with it, a scent that hit me like a physical blow.
It cut through the battlefield’s iron-and-offal stink like a lightning strike in a smoke-filled room. It was a scent of rain-soaked earth, of spilled blood, yes… but under it was something primal and potent, a note my very bones recognized on a level deeper than thought. It was not the cloying perfume of a pampered city-dweller. It was something wild, elemental. Like honey and iron. Like crushed heather after a storm.
It was the scent of a female.
The impossible became a horrifying, undeniable reality.
This was not a boy. This was a woman.
My hand, which had been rising to finish the fight, froze mid-air. My entire being locked up. A wave of profound revulsion washed over me, so strong it was nauseating. It was not revulsion for her. It was for her species. For the cowards who had sent her here.
What kind of honorless, broken filth sends their females to the slaughter?
In my world, the female is the sacred heart of the clan, the future of our dying race. We would sooner march into the sea than allow one to stand on a battle line. To see one here, clad in the armor of a common grunt, her body used as fodder… it was a sacrilege. A sign of a people so morally rotted they deserved to be erased.
And she still stood before me, her body trembling not with the weakness of fear—I knew that scent intimately—but with a defiant, bone-deep rage. Her wide eyes were fixed on me, pupils blown, waiting for the killing blow she felt was her due. She thought I was going to kill her. The notion was so grotesque, so profoundlywrong, it made my gorge rise.
I stood there, rendered utterly inert by a shock of red hair and a scent that was currently rewriting every instinct in my body. My axe felt obscene in my hand.The blood on it, the blood of her male soldiers, suddenly felt… unclean.
