Gasps erupted around .
People were turning, shifting, whispering frantically.
So even stood, wavering on unsteady legs, hope clashing hard with hunger and doubt.
I could hear it in their voices, murmurs and rising chatter like dry leaves caught in a storm.
I didn’t even need to listen closely to know what they were saying.
"He escaped..."
"The portal worked..."
"Maybe we can too..."
I, on the other hand, kept my eyes on him.
Tharnok.
The Fifth Orc Lord.
He hadn’t flinched.
He didn’t glance back.
Didn’t turn his head.
His heavy armored steps echoed through the cavern like rolling thunder.
His presence still bore down on everything around him like gravity itself obeyed his will, and yet...
He did nothing.
Not a growl.
Not a snarl.
Not even a raised hand.
A portal appeared, a man fled through it, and Tharnok... just kept walking.
And that was what scared the most.
I could understand rage.
I could understand a violent reaction, orders shouted, weapons drawn.
But silence?
Stillness?
That wasn’t rcy.
That was control.
Unshaken.
Calculated.
Deliberate.
Ori stirred beside , letting out a soft clicking sound as he peeked from behind my leg, clearly unnerved by the rising volu of captives now speculating in hopeful tones.
So were looking at at where the spot the man used portal on.
Others clenched their fists, considering their chances.
"Why didn’t he do anything?" I heard soone whisper.
"Maybe he doesn’t care?"
"Or maybe he can’t stop us."
That last voice was followed by a few low, bitter laughs.
Hope had a way of making fools out of people.
Especially in here.
But ?
I wasn’t laughing.
Because deep down, I knew.
Tharnok wasn’t powerless.
He was planning.
He let that man go.
Whether it was a test, a trap, or sothing far more terrifying, I couldn’t say.
But one thing was certain.
He let the prey run.
And that was always worse than a clean kill.
I didn’t buy it.
No matter how much the people around whispered, no matter how many wide eyes filled with naïve hope turned toward the space where the portal had vanished, I didn’t believe for a second that the Fifth Orc Lord had let that man escape.
Tharnok... wasn’t soone who would allow sothing like that without reason.
He wasn’t the type to be caught off guard, or to look the other way out of rcy.
No, he was too thodical, too precise, too dangerous.
He was silence forged into flesh and tal, not because he lacked wrath, but because he knew exactly when and where to direct it.
So him doing nothing?
That terrified more than if he’d crushed the man beneath his armored boots.
There was sothing wrong here.
That man, who’d just vanished through the portal, he wasn’t so random nobody.
I’d seen his eyes.
The sharp focus.
The barely restrained power in his movents.
He didn’t move like the rest of us, weak and broken and hoping for scraps.
He moved like a predator that had been playing prey.
He was calm when everyone else panicked.
A Rank 1 Awakened.
Just like Edward.
And if I rembered anything from the novel, it was that Rank 1 Awakened weren’t just strong.
They were terrifying.
The kind of people entire battlefields shifted around.
The kind that could bend anything with their presence alone.
So no, that portal wasn’t so random escape tool.
It wasn’t a lucky glitch in the dungeon’s defense.
That portal was his, a high-functioning, multi-cosmology transport gate.
Not just a door to another city.
Not even a door to another fruit of narrative.
It was a breach across cosmic boundaries.
The kind of portal that let soone walk out of one reality and into another.
And now... he was gone.
Not to a neighboring country.
Not to another continent.
To a different cosmology altogether.
Which only made the silence in Tharnok’s wake more suffocating.
I kept my gaze on the Orc Lord’s back.
Every footstep of his still echoed in my ears.
Not just because of the sound... but because of the absence of reaction.
He didn’t lift a finger.
Not even a glance.
And that ant one of two things.
Either he knew he couldn’t stop that man from leaving.
Or, more likely, he didn’t care.
Which was worse.
Because if he didn’t care, it ant he had bigger plans.
That the escape wasn’t an escape at all, but part of sothing larger, sothing already accounted for.
My throat tightened.
Ori gave a small chirp beside , as if sensing the tension in my body.
I reached out without thinking and placed a hand on his head, grounding myself with the familiar warmth of him.
I didn’t even realize I was gripping his fur too tightly until he squird under my touch.
"Sorry," I whispered.
He blinked up at , big eyes shining with concern.
Then he curled closer to my side, silent and still.
I took a slow breath.
That man... wherever he was now, he wasn’t here.
And I doubted he ever intended to co back.
Not with the kind of portal he used.
That kind of power wasn’t normal, not even in this world, where nothing ever truly was.
People here didn’t awaken with standard abilities.
They didn’t have basic elents or simple tricks.
Their powers always bent the rules, warped the logic of what should be possible.
And the man who left?
He didn’t just leave.
He disappeared beyond the borders of our reality.
Which ant that if Tharnok didn’t stop him... it was because there was no longer any point.
He was already gone.
Out of reach.
Out of sight.
Out of this cosmology.
But that wasn’t what made uneasy.
What made truly nervous... was the fact that Tharnok still hadn’t looked back.
Like everything that just happened was part of a design only he could see.
Like we were all still playing a ga...
And only he knew the rules.
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