In the past few months, Zeke had gotten into the habit of charging his enemies – a strategy which would be entirely counterproductive in this setting. He was no tactical genius – far from it, in fact. But he couldn’t discount the advantages of limiting how many of the trolls could come at him at one time. So, he stood his ground, waiting on them to attack. And they didn’t disappoint, the lead troll warrior bellowing in rage as it launched itself forward, swinging a rock-bladed axe.

Parrying with his new mace, Zeke knocked the axe aside before shoulder-checking the behemoth of a troll. He didn’t put all his strength into it, but it still stopped the monster’s momentum cold, even pushing it back a few inches. That didn’t mean Zeke was safe, however, because the creature lived up to the ferocity Zeke had come to know and loathe, its jaws snapping as it tried to bite him. Zeke wasn’t afraid of its teeth, though. The things had powerful jaws, but they weren’t nearly enough to break through his durable skin. It did still hurt, though.

With a growl, Zeke headbutted the troll in the chest, the blow hard enough to crack the thing’s sternum, eliciting a howl of agony. Then, with every ounce of strength he could muster, Zeke punched the troll in the ribs. He’d intended the blow to further stun the creature; broken ribs often had that effect. However, he was more than a little surprised when his hand crashed through the troll’s scaly skin, sinking deep into its torso. Adapting to the new development, Zeke immediately grabbed whatever he could and pulled with considerable might, yanking the things innards out of its body. A few feet worth of intestines came out, held fast by a gory hand. Zeke kicked the troll’s knee, buckling it with incredible force before raising his club high above his head. It descended with enough force that the troll didn’t even have a chance to look surprised before its entire head exploded, ending its life immediately.

If there was one thing Zeke had learned, it was how to kill trolls. No matter how much damage he managed to do, their insane vitality would eventually heal them. He’d found that out the hard way on enough occasions that he knew that the only way to ensure their deaths was to go for the head. It made the fights a little repetitive, and he feared getting into a rut – after all, he wouldn’t always be fighting trolls, and he knew he’d have to expand his fighting style when he escaped the caves – but there wasn’t much else he could do.

Over the next few minutes, Zeke made quick work of the other six trolls, felling them by various means. Some, he treated like the first, quickly smashing their heads in with his new mace, Voromir. But he was also forced to whittle a few of them down before dispatching them with a blow to the head. Soon, he was alone, surrounded only by the corpses of his enemies.

Zeke panted, the head of his mace falling to the ground. His new weapon had performed beautifully – better than he ever could have hoped, in fact – but even so, the trolls had put up an impressive fight. Despite their crude appearance, those axes had proven extremely sharp, cutting into his flesh with relative ease. The wounds didn’t go too deep, but outnumbered as he was, they’d started to add up towards the end. The spears were a little easier to deal with, but even so, he’d acquired more than two-dozen new wounds by the time he crushed the skull of the last troll warrior.

As he shook the mace to rid it of the accumulated gore, Zeke couldn’t help but wonder how powerful he really was. His instincts told him that he was far stronger than he should be, but considering that he had no context aside from the hundreds of trolls he had killed, he couldn’t be sure. Certainly, he’d nearly died so often that he couldn’t imagine many others doing the same. He wasn’t so arrogant that he thought his survival could be chalked up to talent or skill. Not entirely, at least. He knew he’d gotten lucky on more than one occasion; the few times he’d gotten the vitality boost associated with gaining a level when he desperately needed it came to mind, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. However, he also knew that he was built very differently than most people.

It really wasn’t so different from playing sports. Tens of millions of kids dreamed of being the next professional athlete. Whether it was baseball or one of the other major sports, they all think they can make it. Some are weeded out when they realize they just don’t have the requisite natural ability to succeed, but even more fall by the wayside because they don’t have the work ethic required to reach that lofty goal. Talent can take an athlete a long way, but nobody reaches the top without a significant offering of blood, sweat, and tears – an offering Zeke had paid many times over.

So, while Zeke was sure that there would be others who’d had similar fortuitous encounters, he knew there couldn’t be that many like him. Just like there weren’t many who had the combination of talent, luck, and stubborn refusal to quit it took to succeed in athletics.

Pushing those thoughts to the back of his mind, Zeke inspected his fallen enemies’ weapons. He suspected that the axes would shatter the moment he used even half his strength, so he left those behind. However, one of the spears appeared to be better quality than the one he carried, so he quickly swapped them out. The trolls carried nothing else of value, so he left their corpses where they’d fallen.

Thus armed, Zeke went through the second door, finding himself in a long hall that appeared to have been carved by the trolls. The walls were far too even to be natural, and the hall itself didn’t wind or curve like most of the tunnels he’d seen. But that wasn’t so surprising. If they could create the stone huts that had become increasingly prevalent in the villages, carving out a tunnel wasn’t out of the question.

He pushed through the hall, keeping his eyes trained ahead at a smooth wall that appeared to be a dead end. As Zeke drew closer, he saw gaps in the stone, and when he saw a huge iron ring hanging halfway down and to the outer edge of the rock slab, he figured out what he was looking at. It was a huge, stone door, big enough that the enormous trolls could walk through the resultant entryway without ducking. If it weighed less than a thousand pounds, Zeke would’ve been incredibly surprised.

But if the trolls could open it, so could he. Despite the disparity in size, he’d long since proven that his strength exceeded theirs, and not by a small amount.

So, he planted his feet, grasped the iron ring, and pulled. For a short moment, the door groaned, protesting its opening, but it soon started to inch open. To get better leverage, Zeke put his foot on the wall and exerted the entirety of his strength. With a loud creak, it finally swung open on hidden hinges, eventually crashing against the wall. As he turned to inspect what he hoped would be a treasure trove, Zeke couldn’t help but feel a sense of overwhelming excitement.

It all came crashing to the ground a second later when he saw the next room’s contents.

Human bodies. Appendages. Torsos. Skin. Everywhere he looked, he saw dead human beings. Bile climbed into his throat as he took in the view, and he fell to his knees, vomiting onto the floor.

By this point, Zeke had killed hundreds of trolls, so he thought his heart had hardened to the concept of death. He hadn’t even flinched when his mace had crushed that last troll’s skull. Or when he executed the Brood Mother. He’d been doing what he had to do to survive. And while he’d initially wrestled with the morality of killing the troll larvae, he had rarely revisited the debate since. What he was doing was necessary, wasn’t it? He hadn’t been given a choice. And besides – they attacked him first. It was practically self-defense at this point.

But what about all those trolls he’d killed in their sleep? What about the ones he’d ambushed? The Brood Mother who’d been minding her own business as she hatched her disgusting children? The moment they knew he was there, they’d attacked. But he had instigated quite a few of those encounters. So, given that they’d proven themselves to be sapient by creating a society, tools, and communal villages, it wasn’t out of the question that he’d feel a little guilt over his actions. They were monsters, but wasn’t that a matter of perspective? Wouldn’t they see him the same way?

What he had just seen put the lie to any sense of ambiguity. Cold air wafted out of the body-filled cavern, giving him a hint at the room’s nature. It was a larder, and it was filled with human corpses. It didn’t take Zeke long to pull himself together, and when he looked again, he saw the similarities between the room before him and the meat lockers he’d seen in movies. They even had crude meat hooks hanging from the rocky ceiling, upon which were skinned corpses.

Zeke’s fingers grazed the satchel at his side, and he nearly vomited again. The leather it was made of looked quite a bit like the skins he saw in a corner. They were being stretched, so they were very misshapen, but Zeke couldn’t fail to recognize them for what they were. Unbeknownst to him, he had been carrying a satchel made of human skin.

Beneath the horror of seeing hundreds of human corpses that had been stored like so much meat, Zeke’s thoughts churned. Whatever guilt he’d managed to cultivate fled in an instant, replaced by unrepentant rage. Suddenly, he wished there was an army of trolls in front of him so he could take out his anger upon them. Sure – he’d probably die in the attempt, but seeing your race being treated as food was enough to push any sense of rationality aside.

Bur more than that, it opened a door in his mind, behind which was the real, unadulterated truth of his new world.

Kill or be killed. Predator and prey. The strong dictated the rules. Perhaps things would change when he escaped the caves, but then again, each and every person who made it to the surface had been through a baptism of blood. The Framework, whatever it really was, wanted to forge them into weapons. Oberon had said as much, so long ago. And it very obviously did so by putting the reborn humans through a trial of life and death.

Never was that more evident than when Zeke stared at a larder full of human corpses that were probably intended to feed the Brood Mother and her horde of children.

Zeke sat there outside that room, leaning against one of the walls and staring ahead without seeing a thing. He had no idea how long he sat there, but with so many corpses looking down on him, it felt like an eternity as he tried to make sense of it all. Idle questions like how the trolls got so many bodies into the larder were left unanswered because, at the end of the day, he just didn’t care. How didn’t seem very important in the face of the simple fact that they had killed so many human beings and intended to eat them.

Eventually, though, Zeke’s mind turned to revenge. There was a small part of him that knew he couldn’t really blame the trolls for acting according to their nature. To them, humans were food. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hold them accountable.

Hours later, Zeke rose. Gripping the huge, stone door, he pushed it shut before turning and walking away. There was nothing else to do. No one to save. In the end, there was only one thing on his mind. Vengeance swirled in his heart, mingling with righteous anger as he set out to make things right.

From here on out, there would be no quarter. If he saw a troll, he would kill it. Not for the experience. Not so he could escape. No – he would murder every last one of the hateful monsters so that they wouldn’t kill any more of his people.

Or maybe it was to feed the raging fire within him.

Either way, he’d found his path, and it led straight through the trolls.