Chapter 128: Survival & Betrayal

When he saw the clearing ahead, Sol unconsciously channeled his Ash Gray energy into his legs.

Speed.

He burst forward, blurring into the shadows, diving into a thick cluster of thorny bushes just as he reached the edge of the ridge overlooking Vurok’s party, pulling the Cobra hood tight, engaging his camouflage, and holding his breath.

Below, Vurok was laughing wildly, stabbing the exhausted boarling. "Hold it down, Drogg!"

"... the ground!" suddenly the lackey named Drogg yelled, looking around in panic. "Boss! The ground is shaking!"

"Shut up and hold it!"

RUMBLE.

Just as he was raising his club to strike the exhausted boarling again, the pebbles in the ravine started to dance.

"Die, you fi—"

RRROOOOOAAAAR!

Vurok paused, looking up. "What the...?"

CRASH!

The entire tree line at the top of the ravine exploded. It wasn’t one tree. It was the whole wall of the forest.

The ground shook violently. Vurok spun around, his eyes going wide as saucers.

Bursting through the brush was a nightmare train of muscle and bone. The Mama Grath led the charge, a juggernaut of destruction, followed by nineteen other enraged adults.

After breaking through the trees, it stopped, and saw the humans surrounding its kin, and more importantly it saw red.

It roared madly.

RRROOOOOAAAAAAR!

Vurok and his party were shocked still, a thick silence enveloped them, lasting only for a tiny fraction of second, before their survival instincts kicked in, jolting them awake.

"H-herd..." Drogg whispered, his eyes bulging.

"Run!" someone screamed.

Vurok’s spear clattered to the stones. "Oh... fuck."

SQUEEEEEEEEE!

The roar from the Matriarch shattered the air.

"RUN!" Vurok screamed, his voice reaching a pitch of pure terror. "EVERYONE RUN!"

But there was nowhere to run. The ravine was a funnel, and the cork had just been popped.

The herd slammed into the ravine floor.

CRUNCH. SPLAT!

The sound was sickeningly wet, the noise of a heavy stone dropped into deep mud, mixed with the snap of dry kindling. Toren, the boy farthest to the flank, didn’t have time to turn around or gasp. He didn’t even have time to feel fear. One moment he was a living, breathing human; the next, he was a smear of crimson pulp and shattered white bone beneath the Matriarch’s massive, dirt-caked hooves.

The three-thousand-pound beast didn’t even slow down. She simply flattened him, her momentum carrying her forward as Toren’s remains were sprayed across the rocky walls of the ravine.

"Toren! No! Aaaagh!"

Drogg, another of the lackeys, screamed in a mixture of horror and desperate adrenaline. He stepped forward, his knuckles white around his obsidian-tipped spear. "Vurok! Go! Run! I’ll try to distract it and follow right behind you!"

But Vurok wasn’t listening. Vurok wasn’t playing the leader anymore.

He was scrambling backward, his face pale with terror, his eyes bulging as he stared up at the Mama Garth.

Mama Garth had locked onto him since the beginning. It pawed the ground, her massive front hoof carving a trench in the bedrock.

Then, she unhinged her jaw.

HUMMMMMMM—

The

Bone-Rattle

erupted. It wasn’t just a sound anymore; it was akin to a physical assault. The high-frequency vibration tore through the air, hitting Vurok in the chest like a physical blow. It rattled his teeth in their sockets and turned his muscles to jelly. He was frozen stiff, his nervous system short-circuiting under the primal weight of the Matriarch’s wrath.

’I’m going to die,’

the thought flickered in his mind, cold and stinging.

’I’m going to die in the mud like a piece of trash.’

Disbelief surged through him, hotter than the fear. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was Vurok. He was the one who was promised everything.

His mind raced, a frantic haze of greed and ambition. He had seen it all so clearly: he would pass this Rite with the highest honors. He would become the youngest elite Warrior in the tribe’s history. He would challenge the old Chief, crack his skull open, and take the throne. He would make all the tribe women’s his slave, especially that cold beauty Seluna, he would fuck her into a mindless animal, existing just to service his cock.

After that, he would be the one to lead the tribe out of these woods to conquer the neighboring tribes, enslaving all the women and killing all the men. He was meant to be a Supreme Ruler... a god among men, standing atop a mountain of his enemies’ corpses.

The idea that his grand destiny could be ended by a filthy, over-sized pig was an insult he couldn’t stomach.

’No... No! Not me! There’s no way I’m gonna die here!.’

He looked at the rest of the herd as they swarmed into the ravine, their tusks glowing with that eerie earth-light. He saw the tusks closing in, the sheer wall of muscle and stone-bristles. He knew that if things continued just like this... if he stayed in this spot for even three more seconds... he wasn’t going to make it.

His hunger for survival flared up, a dark, oily flame in his chest. It wasn’t just the desire to live; it was the absolute, shark-like refusal to let his ambitions go unfulfilled.

Vurok’s lungs burned, his brain going into overdrive, he could feel his heart thumping wildly against his chest, fueling his brain to think, his body to do something to survive. The Matriarch was a wall of muscle and hate, her hooves pounding a death march that shook the very marrow of his bones. He knew that, if he wanted to survive, he needed a buffer. He needed a...sacrifice.

"Drogg!" Vurok barked, his voice cracking with a frantic, lethal edge.

Drogg turned, a look of heroic sacrifice in his eyes. "I’m here, Vurok! Get out of—"

Vurok didn’t wait for him to finish. His eyes were frantic, almost animalistic.

His hand shot out, grabbing Drogg—a loyal boy named Drogg, who had followed him since childhood, by the shoulder. With a roar of desperate, adrenaline-fueled strength, he didn’t pull Drogg back to safety.

Instead...He shoved him.

"Buy me time, you useless shit!" Vurok screamed.

With a guttural grunt of exertion, Vurok hurled his most loyal follower directly into the path of the charging angry Mama Grath.

Drogg stumbled forward, off-balance, his arms flailing as he tried to catch himself.

He turned his head with extreme difficulty, his neck craning back, his eyes meeting Vurok’s for one final, agonizing second.

There was no anger in those wide, watering eyes. Not yet. There was only a paralyzing, soul-crushing confusion. A heartbreaking realization of exactly what his life was worth in the scales of Vurok’s ambition.

’Why?’

His widened eyes seemed to be screaming,

Why?

Even though, Varuk was complete bastard and did all sort of stuff, from raping to killing, but... they had been childhood buddies. They had crawled through the same dirt as toddlers, shared the same thin blankets during the frost-moons.

They had been through thick and thin together—they had made their first kills together, celebrated their first rapes together, and shared the same terrified girls in the dark of the long-houses. When Vurok had raped the widow’s daughter, he had held the door. When Vurok had killed the old man for scolding him, he had helped bury the body.

’I would have died for you anyway,’

Drogg thought, his eyes widening as the shadow of the Matriarch fell over him.

’Why did you have to throw me like trash?’

Why?

"Boss...?" Drogg finally managed to utter, one last time, a small, pathetic sound, extremely fragile against the roar of the stampede.

SHLLUNK.

The sound was heavy, like a spear driving into a wet bale of hay.

SQUELCH.

The Matriarch’s tusk... a jagged, mineral-encrusted beam of death... pierced Drogg’s chest.

The sound was visceral...and disgustingly loud. The tusk erupted through Drogg’s back, snapping his spine like a dry twig. Drogg’s mouth opened in a silent ’O’, a fountain of dark blood erupting from his lips, painting the Matriarch’s snout in a fresh, steaming coat.

But...even until the end, he didn’t get any response from him, only cold calculative eyes and a hunger for escape.

She didn’t stop. She tossed her head, hurling Drogg’s broken, impaled body twenty feet into the air. He hit the rocky wall with a wet

thud

and slid down, leaving a broad, glistening streak of gore.

The Mama Grath stopped, thrashing its head to dislodge remaining intestines from its tusks, momentarily distracted by the kill.

Vurok didn’t look back. He used the seconds he had bought with his friend’s life to scramble up the side of the ravine, abandoning the others to the slaughter.

Below, the remaining two boys... Kael and Radek... were paralyzed by the horror of what they had just seen.

"He... he threw him," Radek whispered, his voice trembling. "Vurok threw Drogg..."

SQUEEEEEEEEE!

The rest of the herd arrived.

"FIGHT!" Kael screamed, a high-pitched, hysterical sound. "WE HAVE TO FIGHT!"

But even if they gave their all, they were no match. Heck, even a seasoned hunter would have a hard time fighting against a single one of them let alone the whole herd. The smaller boars... adults, but half the size of the Matriarch... instantly swarmed them.

Radek tried to jab his spear at a charging boar’s eye.

CLANG.

The obsidian tip sparked against the stone-bristles on the boar’s shoulder. The beast didn’t even flinch. It slammed its head upward, its tusks catching Radek under the jaw.

CRACK.

Radek’s head was snapped back with such force his neck simply gave way. He was tossed aside, his body jerking in the mud.

Kael was the last. He backed into a corner of the ravine, his spear held out with shaking hands. "Get back! Get away from me! AAAGH!"

Two boars hit him at once from opposite sides.

SQUISH.

It was like a grape being squeezed between two stones. His ribs shattered, the shards driven deep into his heart and lungs. He let out a long, bubbling wheeze, blood foaming at his mouth as the boars began to tear at his soft underbelly.

In less than a minute, the ravine was silent, save for the wet sounds of the herd feasting on the remains of the boys who had thought they were the masters of the forest.