Chapter 155 :

Chapter 155 - The Leader and the Dimwit (1)

As the leader climbed down the rock wall, he tried hard to hide that he was short of breath.

It was not as if he was climbing up, and he did not want to reveal that even this much was difficult for him.

Compared to that, the dimwit’s steps were completely unhesitating.

The leader found it terribly awkward to follow behind the dimwit, so he kept glancing at the back of his guide’s head.

And at the same time, the leader was flustered by his own behavior.

‘Why am I watching his mood?’

The other party was the dimwit.

A simple and stupid fool who could do nothing on his own.

A fellow who had been more deficient than the others from birth.

To the point that as soon as he was born, he could not control his body and rolled down the cliff.

At the sensation of lapping water touching his toes, the leader came back to his senses.

It seemed they had already reached the place where the rock wall and the water met.

The leader shifted his gaze to follow the dimwit, who had arrived first and was staring down at the ground.

A lot of water had drained away, but the bottom had not yet been revealed.

‘I do not really like the idea of hanging here and waiting.’

Splash.

The moment he swallowed his complaint inwardly, ripples spread across the surface of the water along with the sound of splashing.

The startled leader turned his head, but the dimwit who had been hanging on the wall had already disappeared.

“Kweek!! What the hell?!! Kweek!! Are you mad enough to want to die?!!”

The leader shouted while whipping his head around, searching for the dimwit who had vanished into the water.

“Kweek!! Come back up right now! Kweek, otherwise...!”

Otherwise?

The leader asked himself.

The answer had already been proven by the dimwit himself.

The dimwit would be fine.

There was no reason for a fellow who had jumped from the top of the cliff and returned alive and well to die just because he had jumped into water of this depth.

As reason belatedly began to work in the leader’s head, other questions followed one after another.

How is a fellow who fell from that height still alive?

Does he know how to swim?

How?

….Since when?

While he was thinking over questions he could not answer on his own, the dimwit finally appeared from within the water.

“Kweek...!”

Whether he knew the suspicion inside the leader or not, the dimwit stretched out his hand.

At the clear intention that he should hurry and take that hand and jump down, the leader hesitated.

It was partly because of the doubts he had toward him.

If he, who could not even swim, took that hand and jumped down now, it would be no different from entrusting his life completely to the dimwit.

But if he had to name one more reason for his hesitation, there was a fragment of memory overlapping with this situation.

The memory of the day he had gone down to watch the deficient fellow who had rolled down below as soon as he was born.

The leader recalled the memory of that day, which was becoming increasingly vivid, and took the hand the dimwit held out.

‘As long as I win no matter who attacks me, it does not matter.’

The leader, who was still ignorant of the concept of aging, thought comfortably.

But as with all living things, strength could not last forever.

The birth of a new orc was both welcome and unwelcome.

Because it meant that while one’s subordinates increased, another fellow who would watch closely for the leader to grow weaker had also increased.

The ironic thing was that his role was to watch the birth of such enemies and guard the place where they were born.

The leader did not think much about such an unreasonable system.

This was simply the fixed order.

Just as all orcs hated humans from birth, orcs were made to move according to a certain yoke from birth.

Besides, in any case, he was the strongest.

Recently, his body had grown heavy.

It felt like his movements had slowed, and for some reason, it felt as if various parts of his body hurt.

‘Why is my body like this?’

As days continued where his body felt unwell despite not being injured, the leader began to feel uneasy.

For his body to grow heavy meant it had become harder to fight.

Among them, the quick-witted ones had surely noticed that his condition was strange.

He could feel the gazes directed at him changing day by day.

Each time he felt obedience turn into wariness, and wariness turn into fighting spirit, the leader’s nerves only grew sharper.

To avoid revealing that his body had grown weaker than before, he shouted louder, puffed up his body more, and stayed alert around him until later.

On the day the leader’s sensitivity reached its peak, the dimwit was born.

* * *

That day, the day the waterfall in the cave suddenly dried up, the leader was furious to the top of his head.

The group was unsettled by the anxiety that some great change had occurred.

Even with the leader’s order to shut up and do only what they always did, the tension spreading through the group did not settle easily.

On top of that, when it was revealed that some had gone out hunting in the evening and had not returned, the leader’s temper stretched all the way to the sky.

Not obeying his orders was no different from refusing to acknowledge him as the leader.

If such fellows appeared, then it was obvious that before long, there would be ones who challenged him too.

The leader had an outstanding ability to find things that threatened his position.

This time too, making full use of that talent, the leader stepped outside the cave for the first time in a very long while.

Normally, leaving the central position was something unthinkable, but that day, the leader had almost lost his reason.

All he could think about was somehow killing the ones who had disobeyed his order and making an example of them.

Thinking back on it now, that day was a truly strange day, one where nothing was not strange.

But he had no time to feel any sense of incongruity about himself.

Because the sight that greeted the leader the moment he stepped outside the cave was shocking enough to make him forget all such things.

The river water had completely dried up.

While the leader blankly looked around at a sight he had never even imagined, what caught his eye was several footprints.

The footprints, chaotically stamped across the wet mud, led all the way to a small box in the distance.

It was not difficult to infer what had happened.

Because a thick scent of blood was flowing out through the holes in the box.

Without thinking deeply, the leader began to run toward the box.

How dare they eat the prey inside without bringing it back?

Rage toward the orcs who had not obeyed his order made the leader’s eyes roll back.

He intended to catch them and make them pay the price no matter what.

What greeted the leader, who jumped into the small box in one bound, were two orcs in the middle of feeding.

And one more thing.

No, saying one was not appropriate.

Because one human, half-eaten by those two, was rolling on the floor.

The leader recognized what it was at once.

A human. It was a human.

Though he had never seen one up close before, he knew.

At the same time as an instinctive disgust crawled up the back of his neck, he understood how the situation had unfolded.

Just like him, those fellows must have lost their minds after seeing a human and failed to suppress their appetite and anger right there.

Flames rose in the leader’s eyes.

“Kweek, you stupid bastards! Kweek, if you caught prey, you should have brought it to me!!”

The leader flew into a rage at the two who had flinched at his sudden appearance.

The leader, who had been striding forward to punish the two of them, stopped.

In the air, faint though it was, there were scents of other humans besides the dead human.

These idiots had even been so distracted eating one that they seemed to have let the other two escape.

The fact that these creatures, who did not even know the basics of hunting, had dared to disobey his order only made the leader even angrier for no reason.

The leader flared his nostrils and stuck his head outside the box where the humans had lived.

Perhaps they had not fled far yet, because the lingering scent of the humans remained.

Thanks to the river having dried up, their scent was clear.

He could not simply let them go.

Since they had encountered those two idiots, if they brought another group of humans after learning that orcs lived here, things would become even more troublesome then.

“Kweek, damn it.”

The leader, who had been about to immediately chase after the humans, remembered something he had forgotten and turned his body back.

The two, with blood smeared all over their mouths, were standing foolishly as if waiting for his order.

The leader drew his sword just like that and swung it at them.

In an instant, the head of the one standing on the right rolled across the floor.

“Kweeeek!!!”

The remaining one, terrified by the sudden attack, screamed, but the leader only silently prepared his next strike.

“Kweek, you have to pay the price for disobeying my order.”

And it would serve as an example to the others after a long time.

* * *

With the heads the two orcs had offered as the price for disobedience in one hand, and a sword in the other, the leader walked leisurely.

He had not known humans lived inside a box.

Even when he wandered around at night, he had never seen anything like a human.

Could humans originally not move around after the sun set?

The leader could not walk under sunlight.

Because even walking for a short while brought pain as if his skin were being seared.

Then did human skin melt under moonlight or something?

Thinking that he should see them writhing in pain at least once, the leader leisurely moved his feet, following the scent of the humans.

Human hunting was far too easy compared to hunting other animals.

They could not hide their scent, they could not fly in the sky, and it was not as if their legs were fast either.

There was no prey easier than this.

The place the leader arrived at, led by the scent, was beneath a tree a little distance away from the box.

Realizing they could not flee far, the choice they had desperately made was to climb up a tree.

A sneer hung on the leader’s face, excited by the hunt after a long time.

It would not be bad to wait below until they grew tired, but he had no time for that now.

Without delaying any further, the leader swung the sword in his hand toward the trunk.

Bang!

The thick trunk of the tree shook greatly, and from above, a deep scream and a thin scream mixed together and rang out.

The leader raised his head and confirmed the two humans.

The large human was holding the small human tightly in her arms and desperately clinging to the tree.

Truly, humans were both weak and stupid beyond measure.

To think the place they fled to after running away was only somewhere like this.

“Kyaaaah!!!”

When the leader kicked the thick tree trunk, a high scream fell from above the tree.

A faint sobbing sound was mixed into the scream.

When he raised his head toward the top of the tree, just as the leader had expected, the two humans were trembling while embracing each other.

No, were there really two?

Since there was one long-haired, small-framed human and one human absurdly tiny compared to her, it seemed more accurate to call them one and a half.

The leader narrowed his eyes and looked upward, and soon realized that it was one human and a human child.

It seemed humans had young just like other animals.

Well, it would be harder to find an animal that did not.

While accepting that, the leader’s temper began to flare again.

What? Then those bastards let the child go and ate the big one first?

Idiots.

If they were going to kill them, naturally they should have killed the small one first.

Thinking that fellows who did not even know something so basic had dared to disobey his order angered him even more, so he kicked the two heads he had been holding in his hand.

“Kyaaaaaah!!!”

Then another scream came from above.

“Kweek, noisy!!”

At the high-pitched sound piercing his ears, the leader kicked the tree once again.

It only had the opposite effect.

The high scream rang out once more.

“I-it’s talking...!”

The human who appeared to be female muttered in shock.

Yes, I talk too.

Though I am the only one who knows how to speak.

Even so, he had no intention of leisurely conversing with humans.

Because he intended to catch those two as quickly as possible and return to the cave.

Since he could not wait until they came down, the leader raised his sword high with the thought of cutting down the tree entirely.

It was at that moment.

When the terrified human tightly embraced the tree trunk with both arms, the small human appeared from within her loosened embrace.

The leader’s eyes met the human child’s.

Eyes full of tears, looking foolish.