Lone tightly held the grip of his swordspear and glanced over at the two slaves – perhaps former slaves now – before looking at Sophie and saying, "Keep them safe."

"What about keeping you safe?" Sophie asked.

Lone smirked through his rage-filled expression. "I'm not the one who'll need saving between me and him."

Sophie wore a worried look on her face but nodded, nonetheless. "Very well. Do not let your anger at the hero disturb you, however. The time to deal with him will come."

"I know... Trust me, I know." And with that, Lone kicked his feet off the ground and lunged toward the Blue Orc Chieftain that was no more than a few dozen metres away from the four of them.

The monster, while as enraged as him if not more so, clearly saw him as no threat. Lone guessed it saw him as akin to a bug that now needed squashed.

Lifting its six-foot-long axe, the chieftain made a casual swipe at Lone with no skill nor finesse at all, although, for all of its inelegance, that single swing had every last ounce of the Blue Orc Chieftain’s strength behind it.

These people had invaded his land, set fire to his homes, butchered his people, and mercilessly killed his men, his lovers, and his children. Just like they had done to its people, it would offer no less savage brutality back to them.

Lone raised his swordspear to block the attack but he was too late to realise his crucial mistake. While full of power, the swing was slow enough for him to have dodged while only maybe losing a tail or two.

Sadly, his inexperience was on full display here. Even a B-ranker might struggle to effectively block such a weighty strike.

The steel axe head that was easily the same size as Lone's entire torso met the blade of his swordspear with more than enough force to topple a single-story building.

Lone's muscles bulged, and his face morphed in pain as he tried to keep his footing, but less than a second later, the top half of his swordspear shattered.

He quickly and instinctually created his bone armour around the area the axe was mere inches away from hitting. It was his hope to not lose his arms in the exchange.

Better they be broken and useless than severed and gone. The less Basic Regeneration had to work here, the better.

The weapon smashed into Lone’s guarded right wrist and instantly shattered every bone in the limb.

It went so far it almost cut the arm clean off before the sheer momentum and force of the swing drove the crushed, nearly severed arm, and the massive weapon itself, into Lone's side, breaking his ribs and crushing his organs.

He was lifted off his feet and flew like a rocket into a burning hovel.

"Ha!" the Blue Orc Chieftain laughed disdainfully. "Puny. Weak. Unsatisfying. Dead already."

Its bloodshot eyes then focused on the fully armoured Sophie who was standing in front of the two motionless slaves with her swords drawn.

Sophie was panicking. Soph, meanwhile, was wailing and sobbing her soul out within their shared mind.

They had both just watched the man they loved dearly be overwhelmingly outclassed by this brutish freak of a monster.

If it had, indeed, killed her lover as it claimed, Sophie swore to herself that she would perform genocide on all orcs, blue or not, then… then she didn’t know.

Both she and Soph were far too reliant on the foolish man, physically and emotionally.

'We will die if we are hit with that much force...’ Sophie surmised as she carefully watched the wrath-consumed beast stalk its way towards her.

‘Lone can’t be dead! He can’t!’ Soph screamed.

Sophie frowned but ignored her softer side. ‘Will it die if we grab it somewhere and teleport as high as we can then let go? It worked with the goblins easily enough, but this thing is far stronger and far taller… Even if it only cripples its legs, we can then teleport it into the fire and watch in glee at it is bathed in the flames that now consume the corpses of its disgusting ilk…’

Several more similar and just as brutal forms of death-by-torture popped up in her mind, and the moment she was about to enact upon these thoughts, a voice roared through the destroyed camp.

"Who the fuck do you think you're looking at, you ugly cunt?!" Lone yelled as he burst through the hovel's wall fully clad in his white bone plate armour. As a result, the burning building collapsed in on itself.

Sophie’s heart unclenched but she kept her eyes trained on the orc very carefully. ‘We’ll let you finish this fight, prideful fool. One more scare like that, however, and we are going to make what the Templars did to us seem like a blessing when compared to what we’ll put that lumbering freak through.’

Lone’s arm was fully healed, and every crushed organ and shattered bone had been completely restored, the sound of it happening was only masked by the sounds of the roaring inferno surrounding them.

Of course, this had left no small dent in Lone's MP reserves.

The Blue Orc Chieftain looked over at Lone in confusion. "Not dead? How? No matter. These females. They matter to you? Me kills them then. Revenge." A vicious snarl escaped the monster's tusked mouth before it raised its axe once more.

"Like fuckin' hell you will!" Lone shouted then began running towards the chieftain. He raised his palm and cast his tried-and-true spell, "Lightning Bolt!"

With a powerful-sounding crack, a thick beam of blue energy arched out of Lone's hand and hit the Blue Orc Chieftain's right arm, resulting in its muscles tensing up and a few blood vessels bursting.

Annoyance surfaced on the orc's face. "Fine. You want die first? You die first then!"

It yelled a bellowing war cry and used its uninjured arm to throw the massive axe right at Lone.

'He fucking threw it?!' Of course, that had shocked Lone immensely.

He barely avoided the weapon by putting every fibre of his being into focusing his eyes to follow the spinning of the weapon.

Being hit by its shaft could knock him out while being hit by its blade would undoubtedly cut him clean in half. He was already moving too fast to realistically evade to the side and dodge the axe, so his only option was to time the weapon's movements and rely on his Evasion Mastery and his Agility to either powerfully jump over the thing or slide under it.

'Fuck! It's so hard to track... Slide it is!' Lone made his choice.

The axe's blade came within mere millimetres of Lone’s nose as his entire body scraped along the dirt underneath him.

It was as if time had come to a crawl when Lone heard the sound of the metal cutting through the air and as he felt the wind pressure blasting onto his face as a result of the axe tearing the space where he, himself, once was mere milliseconds ago.

Before long Lone perception of time returned to normal when sweat immediately flooded his entire body.

His muscles and tails contracted and tensed up, and he used them to push himself back up onto his feet and resume his running.

All of this had happened in a little over three seconds.

"You swift, Fox. You swift, but you swift enough to dodge this?" the chieftain asked mockingly as he clenched his fingers together and seemingly made to punch Lone's entire chest with his hulking fist.

"Lightning B-"

"Dodge!" Sophie yelled.

"Huh?" Lone had no idea what Sophie was going on about.

Why had she suddenly yelled at him to dodge? Why had she distracted him and stopped him from casting his spell? Now, he was almost certainly going to be hit by this behemoth's attack.

Whether through his own or through Sophie's Luck or by pure chance, his body moved on its own and ever so slightly inclined itself to the left.

The next moment, his right arm, leg, and three of his tails were severed as the chieftain's axe soared through the air until it returned to the orc's hand.

"You like magic, Fox, yes? Then you like my axe, yes?" the monster taunted. "You die soon. Me leave you to die slow. Watch me kill your females."

Lone tried to push himself up but he couldn't muster any strength at all. Blood was gushing out of the entire right side of his body, and he didn't have even close to enough MP to forcefully seal his wounds after having already healed his previous injuries.

Coughing up even more of the sticky red liquid that was vital to his survival, Lone fought through the paid and said, "Like hell you will, you overgrown fuck! Mental Destruction!"

The Blue Orc Chieftain's raised arm stopped mid-swing towards Sophie who was preparing to teleport out of the way and undoubtedly fight the creature herself.

Blood leaked from the monster’s eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, before its massive frame toppled to the ground.

"Sophie..." Lone called.

After quickly confirming that the monster was dead, the girl sheathed her swords and rushed to Lone's side. "Are you okay? Can you heal before you bleed to death?"

Worry and fear painted the girl's usually stoic expression but Lone saw the emotions lingering beneath. Dark, evil thoughts were hidden just under the surface of her obvious feelings.

He ignored that and instead chuckled. "Maybe. I really didn't expect the axe to fuckin' fly... Didn't you- Keh! Didn't you sense the magic in it?"

Sophie shook her head. "Everything has magic in it, the question is just the quantity. We have never encountered a magic weapon before, so we had no idea... We... We are sorry."

Lone smiled weakly. "It's fine. What's done is done. Keh!" Another mouthful of blood escaped his lips.

He turned his head to look at the Blue Orc Chieftain’s corpse. “Bring me its axe. I... keh… I want it before someone else nabs it.”

Sophie scowled but instantly disappeared then reappeared. She then, upon feeling the sheet weight of the weapon, teleported again to a position that left the tool in Lone’s only remaining hand.

“Thanks, love,” Lone managed with a disturbing smile as he directly stored the magical weapon. "Now, what I need you to do may sound stupid- keh!” Another mouthful of blood was ejected from his lungs before he continued, “but I will probably be fine, so just do it, 'kay?"

"We shall do whatever you require," Sophie answered immediately and without hesitation as she cradled Lone's head in her arms.

"I remember that you can overcharge things with MP, right?" Lone asked.

He could already feel his consciousness slipping away, and if he allowed it to, he wasn't certain if his Basic Regeneration would keep him alive or not. This was his first experience of losing this much blood so quickly, after all.

"Of course. It was how Soph maintained your illusion around the fort when you were almost burnt to death by that Goblin Mage's Crude Fireball." Sophie had just realised Lone's plan. "You cannot be serious, can you? That is not a technique that we have a skill for nor have we practised it. We could make your entire body explode. We believe your chances are far greater if you simply sit still. We will find something to clot your bleedi-"

"As if anything can clot the entirety of the right side of my body!” Him raising his voice triggered another fit of bloody coughing.

When that settled down a few painful moments later, he said, “Hell, for a start, would you- Keh! Would you teleport us out of here? Those two'll die if they inhale much more of this smoke," Lone said with a smile on his face.

Sophie felt her eyes tearing up out of frustration. "Why are you worrying about some useless slaves when you are mere moments away from death yourself?!"

Lone closed his eyes and chuckled through his coughing. "They're only kids."

Just as he was certain she would complain once more, what was left of his body suddenly felt weightless.

Lone struggled to force his eyes open only to see that he, Sophie, and the pair of abandoned slaves, began floating in the air.

Lone's eyes followed the movements of Sophie’s head and he saw Guildmaster Gilbert looking down at the burning orc fortress with a down-right furious scowl on his face as he stood in the air above them.

Lone watched in silence as the powerful dragonkin mage used his magic to move them all a few 100 metres away from the fort, and then he walked right up to Lone's body.

"Please, save him!” Sophie begged. “Whatever the cost, we shall repay you 50-fold. If you can just stop his bleeding, that will be enough!"

Gilbert didn't respond and simply used one of his hands to rip off the breastplate section of Lone's Bone Armour before he placed a palm on his chest. "Root of Life."

Tree roots suddenly sprung up out of the ground and encapsulated Lone. They glowed with a bright green hue. The last thing Lone saw before he was wholly encapsulated was Sophie closing her eyes with a wince of pain on her face.

‘Magic was too bright, I’d bet,’ he chuckled mentally.

A few moments passed before the roots retreated into the grass beneath them and Lone's body was revealed.

All his injuries had been miraculously healed. He was half-naked, of course, but his three missing tails, his severed arm and leg, well… they had all simply returned to normal as if they hadn’t been separated from his body only a minute or two ago.

Lone slowly sat up and cancelled the rest of his Bone Armour, making the white bones recede back into his flesh before he suspiciously touched his newly regrown limbs. "How...?"

That frown of Gilbert's never left his lips as he held his hands behind his back and stared at the raging fires that threatened to raze the entire surrounding grasslands and nearby forest to ashes.

"I am a master of both gravity magic and nature magic with some middling success in enchantment magic. What I just used on you is a spell called 'Root of Life' of the nature school of magic. So long as you are not dead, I can use the energy of the land, Altros its very self, and have it stimulate your natural healing powers. It can only be used once every three months, and it should have taken you over a month to completely heal from such grave injuries," the centuries of dragonkin explained dryly.

"... I see..." Lone said, feeling a bit shell-shocked.

Gilbert sighed as he raised his hand and pointed his open palm towards the ever-burning fortress. "Gravital Compression."

The entire orc stronghold as well as everything within 50 metres of it began violently shaking. Not a second later, it all slowly pulled together into a single spot no larger than a single foot wide. The earth, the wood, the bodies, the fire, everything. It all just... compressed into a little cube.

Gilbert nodded then brought his hand down to his side.

With a thunderous boom, the cube plummeted right through the soft ground beneath it and disappeared. "Now, we have some talking to do, you and I, Lone. Specifically, about a certain 'hero'."