FREE USE in Primitive World

But... what followed was not the brutal, earth-shattering battle the Veynar had fully prepared for.

Sol stood calmly in the open gateway, the massive ironwood doors still swinging wide behind him. The Dreadwing Blade rested loosely in one hand, its sapphire edge dark with the blood of the captains. He did not advance or retreat. Instead he calmly stood there without any fear.

From the switchback below, the Veynar vanguard was already surging upward in a roaring tide of shields and spears, fully committed to the charge.

From the open stone flats ahead, the remaining Gray Marauders were doing the same.

Hundreds of massive, ten-foot-tall giants had recovered from the first shock of the captains’ deaths and were now thundering toward the gate with stone clubs, bone javelins, and axes raised.

Their guttural war cries rolled across the whole settlement. Even though they knew that without their strongest warriors and protection of the gate, only death lay ahead, they still did not hesitate.

In their culture, death was not an end... it was just a return to the ancestors. They were ready to die in a sacrificial clash if that was what the moment demanded.

Even though both sides were only heartbeats away from colliding in the open ground just inside the gate, Sol still didn’t not move, as looking at the chaos around him, he suddenly got a strange idea.

He didn’t hesitate and immediately tried it out.

Suddenly, the invisible golden-silver radiance of Free Use flared around him like a silent detonation.

An invisible, absolute wave of mental authority swept outward across the entire Marauder settlement in a single pulse.

At the same time, Sol fully released the killing intent he had condensed through the slaughter of thousands... Layer 4 chieftains, elite vanguards, traitors, and entire ranks of warriors across the recent battles.

That intent had been held in check until now.

The moment it was set free, the world around the Marauders seemed to blacken.

The open sky above the ridge darkened as if thick smoke had swallowed the morning light. The mud domes, the dry stone under their feet, the distant edges of the settlement... everything lost color and depth, pulled into a suffocating, edge-less nightmare.

There was no horizon left. No clear path of retreat. No solid ground that felt real.

Only a crushing, formless blackness that pressed in from every direction at once.

In that suffocating blackness, every Marauder felt the same presence: a black-armored reaper standing at the heart of the gate, invincible, inescapable, and already stained with the deaths of everyone stronger than them.

The fear it radiated was not ordinary battlefield dread, not the sharp spike of panic that came before a charge or the cold tension of facing a superior foe.

It was something far more primal: the absolute, bone-deep certainty that resistance was meaningless... that this figure could walk through their entire tribe and slaughter them all, the same way he had walked through their captains, and nothing... no club, no numbers, no sacrificial courage... would change the outcome.

Some of the giants tried to resist.

A few of the larger warriors snarled and forced their legs forward, trying to push through the pressure by sheer physical will.

Others raised their stone clubs with trembling arms, roaring challenges that sounded thin and hollow inside the nightmare.

A handful even attempted to turn and run toward the far edges of the shelf, seeking any escape from the blackened world that had closed around them.

But none of it worked.

The harder they struggled, the tighter the nightmare seemed to coil.

Every step forward felt like wading through mud.

Every attempt to lift a weapon made their limbs heavier, as if the darkness itself had grown hands and was dragging them down.

Those who tried to flee found the blackness stretching endlessly in front of them... no matter how far they ran in their minds, the reaper at the gate remained exactly the same distance away, waiting.

The sensation of being hunted without any possible refuge bored straight into the oldest, most instinctive parts of their minds.

And without any suspense, mental cracks spread quickly.

Roars of defiance turned into broken, uneven breathing.

Raised clubs lowered without their owners fully realizing they had given the order.

Some of the younger warriors dropped to one knee simply to stop the spinning, suffocating pressure in their heads.

Others stared blankly at their own hands as if no longer certain the limbs belonged to them.

The sacrificial readiness that had filled them only heartbeats earlier... the belief that dying here would simply return them to the ancestors... began to collapse

It was not some shouted command or a forceful domination that tried to overwrite their will in a single blow.

Instead it slipped in beneath their already broken minds filled with terror... it was cool, clear, and relentless.... like water finding every crack in stone.

Fighting is useless.

The thought settled first among the older warriors, the ones who had already seen countless wars, and rational realization that even their Layer 4 chieftain failed to return and their last Layer 3 captains died in the span of heartbeats, without any resistance.

In the blackness of the nightmare, the words felt like a truth they had been trying not to look at.

Your strongest are already dead.

Images rose unbidden: Bruga’s absence, the empty place where the elite warriors should have stood, the two captains whose blood still stained the gate platform.

Every Marauder who still held a club felt the weight of those missing pillars. The tribe’s spine had been broken before this morning even began.

Throwing your lives away here will not bring them back.

The sacrificial readiness that had filled so many of them only moments earlier began to curdle.

Dying to meet the ancestors had always been an honorable path... but only when the death meant something. Standing in this edge-less darkness, with the black-armored reaper watching from the gate, the idea of charging forward and simply being cut down felt suddenly hollow. Empty. Pointless.

Think of the bloodline.

The suggestion sank deeper.

Think of the ancestors who built this tribe from nothing.

Think of the young still hiding in the huts.

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