Article X: On the Sanctity of Captive Minds and Bodies

Per the covenant of honor and sapient dignity, any Pathbearer who willingly surrenders or is lawfully captured during legal combat will be granted sanctuary from physical torture and any psionic art that seeks to mutilate their sovereign mind for information.

Failure to abide by these rules will result in the marking of the transgressing parties, deeming them acceptable targets for those bearing the Path of the Paladin.

-Article X, Treaty of Leopore

145 (I)

Ethics

Adam and Shiv stared on wordlessly as the orcs tossed the last few surviving inquisitors upon the still-alive pile. Beside the still-alive pile was another mound of recovered equipment. Armor, weapons, accessories, and more were piled high and contained within a force bubble to ensure nothing fell loose during the transportation process. Those two piles occupied one side of the surface gateway.

The other side was characterized by three piles.

The first pile was unofficially titled “still usable corpses.” These were the bodies that were still intact and therefore quite suitable for Necromancy. It spared the orcs the additional effort of reattaching limbs or adding new parts to make up for missing bits. Beside the still intact corpses were in fact a few hundred different limbs. This pile was set up at the special request of several Heroic-Tier orcs under the auspices of monetary trade. Shiv didn’t know if the orcs were pulling his legs or not when they claimed that their main form of currency was the severed limbs of their enemies. He’d seen them trade mithril before, so he guessed that they were probably bullshitting him.

But on some twisted level, he found it funny too, mainly because it kept making Adam do those constipated facial expressions.

The third pile was the smallest pile of all. There were only ten items on that pile. If one could consider a misshapen infant born from a male’s body an item. Right in front of the gate, Shiv and Adam continued glaring at the orcs. A violently ill Uva heaved behind them, still struggling with her surface sickness.

“Does something displease you, Insul?” Bonk asked with the sweetest voice he could muster. That just made Shiv clench his teeth tighter. He reached out with his hand as he brushed Uva’s back, and she shuddered violently and continued spewing sour strands all over the ground. Nearby, Valor told her this was normal, that there was an acclimation process for an Abyssal leaving the depths. Can Hu stared distastefully at the writhing inquisitors as well. Something about the automaton’s body language very much resembled Adam’s.

“So,” Shiv began, letting out a long, frustrated sigh. “I mean, what the fuck, guys?” He gestured at the horrific dead baby pile. “You told me that you got rid of Male Pregnancy!”

Some 20,000 orcs briefly eyed the dead babies. A few of them shuffled; most of them just shrugged.

“How do we know he did it?” Mortar asked. He rubbed at his chin slowly, as if there was a genuine mystery to solve here. “In fact, how do we know that these infants came from the bodies of men?”

“Because I found them inside male Inquisitors,” Shiv snapped. These orcs were trying to piss him off. And it was working. “In fact, the only people who gave birth during this battle were male Inquisitors.” Google seaʀᴄh N0velFire.ɴet

“What a terrible coincidence!” Mortar mournfully sighed. He barely held back a snort.

Another orc smacked him on the back of the head. “Keep your face straight, asshole. We need to keep the gag going.”

Mortar turned away before he could break completely, and Shiv just scowled at the horrible gray-skinned monsters. “Listen, I know you have itches to scratch. I know that you’re a bunch of felling cruel bastards. But godsdamn it, we have one standard here. Just one.”

And Adam couldn’t take it anymore. “We have a lot more than one standard,” the Gate Lord hissed. “I can’t even look at this!” He pointed at the dead baby mound. “I can’t look at that either!” He gestured at both the mutilated corpses and the severed limbs. “What in the hells is wrong with all of you?”

A few of the orcs looked at each other. Bonk picked his nose. “We’re enthusiastic. Besides, I don’t understand why you’re getting so worked up. Everything turned out pretty well. You caught your Master-Inquisitor. We have about…” Bonk looked behind himself and stared at the living pile. “…I don’t know, a hundred inquisitors and then some left. That’s pretty good.”

And from the living pile came a loud and piercing shriek. “I want to die. I want to die. Somebody slit my throat. Let there be an end…”

“Just tell the orcs to finish these poor fools off,” Uva groaned, wiping spittle from her face. “This is pointless torture.”

“What? Finish them? You—what?” The Gate Lord took a few moments to compose his words as his eyelid twitched. “Listen to me. I… I…” He failed. He turned to Shiv and gritted his teeth. “You talk to them. They’ve been standing before my Righteous Dawn, losing their bloody skill levels, for the past ten minutes, and I still see those damn smirks on their faces. Do they think this is funny? Do they find this amusing?”

Shiv winced. “Adam.” he leaned over. “I don’t think that’s the right thing to say. Getting frustrated will just get the orcs amused.”

And it most definitely was, as several of the orcs finally broke, all bursting out into laughter.

“No,” an orc called from the back. “But we think you are. You are funny.”

“We like your expressions,” another orc said.

Tequila nodded in agreement. “They’re pretty funny. You look like a human who hasn’t taken a shit in three months.”

Adam went still and quiet, but his face contorted more and more with every passing second. Behind him, his azure sun grew brighter as well, and more than a few of the orcs were entirely bathed in its baleful radiance, their bodies simmering as if judged by the flames of perdition. None of this was funny to Adam, not even a little, and Shiv could see his last thread of patience was fraying.

He cast a telepathic message at Adam. “Hey, take Uva back through the gate. I’ll see if I can get things out here settled properly.”

The Gatelord glared at Shiv from the corner of his eye. “Settled properly? How? Look around you, Shiv. We stand surrounded by atrocity.”

“I mean, yeah, I can’t argue about that. However, they did absolutely destroy that expeditionary force with less than a hundred losses, and we’re going to be throwing these orcs at the Necrotech soon.”

As he finished that sentence, a woman from the still-living pile began to shriek bloody murder, howling for her mother. Adam’s teeth started grinding. Shiv held his expression in place. The orcs were watching them intently.

“I want to kill them,” Adam hissed mentally.

“Yeah, I know, Adam,” Shiv said. “However, if we start a fight with these orcs, or if we continue feeding their amusement, this is only going to get worse.” The Deathless met Adam’s stare as he tried to convey his own seriousness. “You understand why I was so hesitant to summon the orcs before? Why I was so worried? Well, this is why. We have an army, Adam, but I want you to keep this in mind, and I don’t want you to ever forget this: they are not our army. We are using them just like they’re using us. Every time we set these monsters loose on people, someone’s going to suffer. Someone’s going to bleed. Someone must!”

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from NovelBin. Support the author by reading it there.

A flood of absolute discomfort spilled over from Adam’s mind. “These Inquisitors—”

“Are dead,” Shiv interrupted him. “They’re torture food by this point. They’re probably going to be used to satisfy whatever itch the orcs have. Going by my gut, less than half of them will probably be used for whatever false flag the orcs might come up with. The others will be kept alive by the Biomancers for as long as they can keep them alive, but I suspect that we probably don’t want to find out what will happen to these people.”

“I think we should just kill them then,” Adam said quietly. The very thought was rancid to the Gate Lord, but what soured his stomach even worse was the prospect of just letting the orcs indulge in brutality and torture. “We should just give them whatever mercy we can.”

“I thought about that too,” Shiv said quietly, “but I also thought about another problem right after that.”

“And what is it?” Adam asked, challenging Shiv with a cold gaze.

“You’re gonna want to have Uva summon the New-Dreamt, because if we start trying to take the orcs’ food away from them, they’re going to scratch that cruel hunger inside of them some other way. If not with these Inquisitors, then each other, or more likely you and me, or the people in the gate if they can make it in somehow. But you especially, since they want me around for other shit.”

And despite Adam’s Awareness, he only just then realized Shiv’s true worry. He turned his eyes away from Shiv, and he noticed just how many orcs were staring at him, studying him. They weren’t just watching him because they enjoyed his miserable expressions. No. This was a dominance play on their part, a test of their ability to inflict discomfort on the Gate Lord.

Shiv continued. “They’re deliberately trying to push you because it might just start a fight. And more than a few of them want that. If we escalate, maybe they’ll just turn on us. The Blood Rites only allow me to recruit more orcs from those we’ve killed. We’ve killed plenty of inquisitors today. Nothing about the Blood Rites gives me absolute control over their behavior. I am their commander just because they’re amused by it, but I think they’ll also be amused by fighting me, or fighting you, or hurting you just to provoke me. Either we try to accommodate them, or they become a much more direct problem. That’s the price of leading an army of monsters. They’re going to do monster shit.”

Adam looked down, and he regarded the still-living pile of Inquisitors one last time. “What if we ordered them to attack right now to continue raiding the Necrotechs? They don’t need to go back. Maybe that can help them scratch their itch instead of doing… this.”

“That’s not going to work easily,” Shiv noted. “It’s not just these twenty thousand orcs. We still have over two million more that we need to feed. You wanna let them out too? Because they’re going to want out. They’re going to need to indulge sooner. Not later.”

“Then bring them out, cut them loose, let them maraud against the Necrotechs, instead of letting them do whatever grotesqueness this is.”

“Are you two talking about us, Insul?” Whisper asked. His voice was a barely veiled taunt, but Shiv gave him no satisfaction.

“Yeah,” the Deathless said honestly. “I’ll be with you in a second.” Shiv frowned as he considered Adam’s suggestion. “Didn’t you say that you were worried the orcs might spread across the surface, burn villages, butcher people?”

“I am still bloody worried,” Adam snapped. His posture was tense with frustration. “But I don’t know if I can accept this; the casual torture and mutilation and brutality they’re going to inflict on the inquisitors. I know they’re the enemy, but this is beyond the pale. What about you, Shiv? Can you take this?”

Shiv considered that for a moment. “Well, I mean, they’re inquisitors, though.”

Adam regarded him incredulously. “What do you mean, ‘well, I mean they’re Inquisitors’? They’re people, Shiv. They might be traitors to the Republic, but they’re still people. And we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than them. We do this, it will stain us.”

“They’re enemies to me,” Shiv said simply. But something about Adam’s higher standards stuck with him. Somewhere along the line of being a Pathbearer, all the blood and carnage became routine for Shiv. Now that he thought about it, compared to a few weeks ago, his morals were getting looser… “Listen, my first encounter with these bastards was them torturing the living shit out of Tran and Heather. I haven’t met a single inquisitor that didn’t try to kill me or wasn’t a piece of shit. I suspect my feelings will probably not change when we have a little talk with Inquisitor Sijik in a while.”

Before Adam could reply, Shiv continued, “But I know, I know that you’re probably more aware of this whole morality thing and ethics thing than I am. And I think you’re probably right.”

Adam blinked. “You do?”

“Yeah, I just… I don’t… I don’t know how to put this, Adam. I don’t really care about the Inquisitors that much because they’re my enemies, but I don’t know. Torture seems like messed-up behavior. I really don’t want to get a taste for it. I certainly don’t want someone to do it to me. But personally, it’s something I’m willing to put up with if it means keeping the orcs under control and keeping their attention away from you or Uva or anyone else in the gate.”

Adam looked like he had a lot to say, but he let Shiv talk. “Now, if you want to set them free and let them play their own game on the surface or in the abyss, fine. But I’m going to tell you this: There is no getting away from what these orcs are. So long as they’re with us, they’re going to be hurting our enemies. Frankly, they’re going to be hurting anyone who they find interesting enough to hurt. These inquisitors are dead meat, and they’re not going to be the only ones. Not by a long shot.”

Adam took in Shiv’s words as one would drink down a bucket of piss and shit. Misery and disgust played across his face, but ultimately, he still let out a breath. “From what I could observe of their behavior, they can be focused, especially if there’s a fight to be found, even more so against proper enemies. Let’s set them loose on our main targets. They’re not an army that listens to me anyway, and your control over them is tenuous at best.”

“Is what?” Shiv asked.

“Tenuous. Means weak.”

“Maybe,” Shiv said. “Maybe not. They still want to be System-favored. They still want to fight by my side. We have that, if nothing else. Look, take Uva and the others back into the gate. I’ll talk to the orcs. See if I can get them to pretend to have some basic ethics.”

“You think you can do that?” Adam asked, doubtful.

Shiv snorted a humorless laugh. “No, but I’m a Pathbearer, so I’m going to try anyway. If shit goes wrong, maybe they kill me, and I get some Rhetoric levels.”

Adam nodded in appreciation. “Give me Sijik. I’ll take him back with me. Uva might be able to dig out some useful information from his mind.”

“Oh, before I forget.” Shiv looked off to the side where an unmoving time dragon lay. “Take Choki there with you.”

“Choki?” Adam said, confused for a moment. Then he followed Shiv’s gaze and saw that he was staring at the dragon. “Choki,” Adam repeated. “You named the dragon Choki.”

“Yeah, because I choked it out, you know.” Shiv laughed.

Adam’s jaw fell open. “And I’m going to let you try to become the moral heart of the orcs.”

“Yeah,” Shiv said, without any sense of irony whatsoever.

The Gate Lord inhaled a long and deep breath through his nostrils. “The things I do for Blackedge’s safety.”

“Oh, before you go, that arrow earlier…”

“That arrow,” Adam began, his voice tense, “is charged by killing a hundred terrible people. And Shiv, I can feel you right now. My sun feels you. And its glow on you is getting darker.”

“What does that mean?” Shiv asked.

“Please don’t become one of the hundred people I can kill to charge that arrow.”

Shiv thought about that for a beat. “Wait, if I turn into a horrible bastard, could you charge the arrow by killing me a hundred times?”

“Shiv…”

“Alright. Relax. It’s a joke. I’ll stay good, Adam. Now let me talk to the orcs before they finally give you an aneurysm.”

“Thank you. Just… have them end the Inquisitors’ suffering and tell them to enjoy their time on the surface. Let them be a nightmare for the Necrotechs instead.”

The Deathless regarded Adam for a moment. “Hey, Adam. How do you know the Necrotechs have it coming? That they deserve to die ugly deaths at the hands of the orcs?”

“They were going to—” The Gate Lord froze.

“The Inquisitors were coming for Blackedge too. But I guess they’re of the Republic, huh?”

Adam flinched.

“Forget about it, Adam. I’ll deal with it. You handle the other stuff.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep