"Enough!"
The chief's voice lashed through the chaos, heavy and cold as an iron whip. He strode toward Crokard, beaten bloody, lips split and eyes swelling shut, his body shuddering with each threadbare breath.
"There are plenty of Hibakujumoku leaves, Crokard," the chief hissed, his tone as smooth and as lethal as a tusk gleaming in firelight. "What you've done isn't disaster. It's just a little delay."
He leaned down, eyes glinting sharp. "Easily replaced," he spat. "Just like the leaves. And you… you're no different, Crokard. Easy to find. Easier to discard."
"Burn him." The chief's command was final.
"C-c-chief!"
A pig goblin youth, chunky and slime-green, breathless as he stumbled, came barreling through the throng.
"Must you shriek like that?" the chief snapped, irritation flaring in his eyes.
"It's not that... it's—" The young goblin gulped air, eyes bulging in panic. "Someone's climbed onto the altar! The queen! she's being freed!" He jabbed a trembling finger toward the altar.
The chief's eyes went wide, a bolt of fury carving through the darkness in his gaze. He whirled, rage igniting as he locked on the throne, where Gelemia, their captive queen, was now half-untethered. Crokard's chaos had bought me the moment I needed: I'd slipped to the base of the altar, working frantically at her bonds. Just one knot left…
"Fools!" the chief thundered, his voice rending the air. "If you saw it, why didn't you act at once?!"
"We—we didn't dare, chief! Not without your say-so! We feared the consequences…" came the stumbling reply. Tails curled around trembling ankles, too afraid to meet his gaze.
Veins throbbed across the chief's brow; his fury boiled over as his staff crashed into the mud, spattering filth at his feet. "Move! Seal off every path from the altar! Whoever is up there, do not let them escape!"
Pig goblins flooded the base, teeth bared, spears whistling through the air. Some bore broad, pitted faces, noses pierced with claws, twisted tusk curling from their greasy mouth; others wore blood-spattered leather, cheeks daubed with rings of flaking red mud.
My exit route vanished, trapped, the ascent now choked with pig goblin warriors brandishing their weapons and scrambling up, their muscles honed by lifetimes of hunting flexing like iron beneath oily hide.
"Damn it—just one more step," I hissed, my voice strangled between the roars of chaos closing in. My fingers clenched around empty air. Suddenly, the Black Sphere formed, hovering above the back of my right hand.
A hulking goblin, hair bristling like thorns, fresh scars slashed across his nose, lunged at me with a guttural war cry. "How dare you steal our queen!" he bellowed, his voice both booming and shrill, a single crooked fang dangling menacingly from his twisted lips.
He charged, wild-eyed, driving his spear at my gut, once, twice, three times in brutal succession. But I twisted aside, letting my anger fuel every fiber, turning fear into lightning-cord muscle. From behind, another pig goblin leapt to ambush me, but the Black Sphere at my back spun like a living storm, hammering him away in a visceral, explosive burst.
"Eyes forward," Erin's voice echoed through my mind, cold and undeniable. "Leave the rear to me."
My breath hitched. Snapping my fingers, I conjured a second Black Sphere, this one floating above my left hand, an orb of seething void, meeting the surge of pig goblins bounding toward me, tusks flashing, eyes burning with ravenous hunger.
Again, Erin cut across my panic: "Focus! Take what's in front, don't get distracted."
Before I could answer, a spear sliced through the air, a blur of steel and intent. I ducked, letting the weapon tear past, just grazing my cheek. With no time to think, I shrouded my left fist in the Black Sphere's.
My punch landed with bone-crunching force. The first pig goblin sailed backward, crumpling with a strangled cry, as if I'd flung a sack of butchered meat off a cliff.
Across the clearing, the chief watched, his face unreadable, a brief glance flicked to Crokard, now slumped and broken, blood streaming from his nose. "Take him," the chief commanded, voice sharp as a frozen chain. A handful of goblins dragged Crokard away, rough and unsparing. The chief turned, intent on bringing order back to the altar.
But he'd barely taken a few steps before the ground trembled beneath his feet.
At first, just a whisper, a mild ripple. Yet with every footfall, the shiver deepened, a wild rhythm like a heart thrashing out of time. Birds exploded into flight, carving frantic shapes through the sky, while leaves thrashed and ancient trees danced, whipped by winds gone mad.
The tremor swelled, no mere quirk of the earth, but an earthquake rattling the marrow of bone, shattering silence with a thunderous omen.
The chief froze, swallowing hard, throat working as dread sank in. He knew exactly what this meant.
In a frenzy, the chief dashed to the cart, clawing through smoldering piles of Hibakujumoku ash. Buried there, half-buried beneath soot and ruin, a single branch stood out, different, unmistakable.
The Hibakujumoku sacred wood he'd known all his life, jutting from the cinders like a sinner's confession. His eyes went wide; panic choked the air from his lungs. He flung the branch away as if casting off a curse, whirling to charge after Crokard.
"You wretched fool—how dare you!" he screamed, breath catching on a thousand thorns of rage. "How could you burn the sacred tree's wood? Are you trying to turn this village to dust?!"
All around, the other pig goblins gaped at their chief, horror etched deep into every greasy face. Pallor overtook them, waxen and ashen, terrified to their cores.
Crokard only answered with a ragged, bitter laugh, his lips split, blood trailing from the corner of his mouth in a crooked smile. "Of course I knew. If it were only smoke, I'd be caught, beaten, killed, same as ever." His eyes glittered with a wild, broken light. "But I thought, if I'm going to die, why not drag all your idiocy down to the grave with me?"
The chief stared, speechless, revulsion and terror warring across his face.
"Get out! Leave—run!" the chief bellowed, howling with every scrap of authority he had left. "The god's wrath is here!"
But the earth only heaved harder, wild tremors splitting the ground like festering wounds. Corpses erupted from the very soil, bone, rot, and sloughing flesh clawing up through mud and roots, rising in a grotesque dance of the damned. Pig goblins froze… and then scattered in blind panic as blood seeped from their ears, wept from their streaming eyes, and their screm tear up the sky.
"My head… dizzy…" I muttered. Blood seeped from the corner of my mouth, dripped hot and sticky from my ears as the quake went berserk.
Erin's voice slipped into my mind, ice-cold and cutting, "Cover your ears. This vibration strikes through your whole body, wrecks your balance, shreds your inner ear. Blood seeps out, and if you fall down, you're finished on this altar."
I pressed my hands over my ears, pouring every scrap of strength into holding myself upright, fighting the sense the world was spinning out, out, out—caught in the god's wrath and the world's final heave.
"Too late… it's over. Everything's finished," the chief whispered, his voice spent, broken.
The village was a ruin. Pig goblins scattered like terrified vermin, mindless with panic, as corpses clawed up from every corner, even beyond the shattered borders of the village. The gate stood distant, impossibly far and from that distant direction… we saw it coming.
The monster lumbered forth, a hulking terror sculpted from the flesh of nightmares. Its body looked like a bulk of blood-red bricks, fused together and slick with a mucous sheen, as if the very clay of hell had been mashed into its hide. Its massive head was fused to its shoulders like a mallet, no visible neck, its coal-black eyes burning with feral malice. It towered almost as tall as the eldest trees.
Each footprint cratered the earth, enough to flatten a house with a single careless step. Its titanic hands, vast, slab-like could crush anything unfortunate enough to cross its path. The creature was like a salamander, bipedal, jaw stretching as wide as its gruesome, featureless face, gnashing hungrily.
With lurching, ground-devouring strides, the monster shambled to the corpses erupting from the earth, scooping them up and devouring them in chunks, jaws working in a pitiless, churning rhythm. The air itself seemed to recoil; the pig goblins froze, horror plastered across every face, what courage they once had trampled to muck beneath the god-beast's advance.
"You fools! Bow before it, beg forgiveness for the unfinished offering!" the chief shrieked, panic rising to a fever pitch. Some pig goblins, desperate as lost chicks, scrambled toward the giant salamander, chanting frantic prayers as they flung themselves at its feet, prostrate in blind hope.
But the god paid them no heed, if it even possessed ears. Its eyes considered its worshippers with a cold, distant serenity. Then, without a pause, its arm swung down, a brute's hammer falling. Where it struck, pig goblins vanished instantly, flesh and bone absorbed into the muddy ground, each blow erasing two, three lives at once.
Blood sprayed. The monster raised its fist to its mouth, licking the remnants of its feast from its palm. The would-be survivors dashed for escape, but the monster was quick, shockingly nimble for its size. It hurled itself into the fleeing goblins, flattening them like beetles beneath its wrath.
The chief vanished.
Gone without a trace amidst toppled shrines and the dying agony of his people. I stared, hollow, at the carnage. The once-crowded square was nothing but a ruin now, the hundred-strong tribe reduced to a smear of bones and meat split between the monster's belly or crushed to paste beneath its tread.
My mind started to falter, the world spinning out of joint, consciousness drifting like a torn leaf on the currents of disaster. Suddenly, from the crown of the altar, that pig battered, barely standing yet stubbornly alive, hauled himself into view, dragging what little resolve he had left.
"Take this!" he wheezed, hurling an object in my direction.
No time for doubt, I snatched it from the air and shoved it into my ear. Instantly, the dizzying vertigo and bone-grinding agony receded, the hurricane in my skull dwindling to a dull echo. I dragged in a breath, clarity burning its way back through the fog.
My vision sharpened. The village before me was obliterated.
A candle snuffed out by a hurricane, nothing left but splinters and the echo of regret. In the span of a few fractured heartbeats, everything had vanished. Only ruins and the memory of screams marked what once was.