The Author's Draft

Chapter 103 - 22: 1hr Earlier

One hour earlier.

Valdris. The Orcish Dominion. Northern Wastes.

The pit was exactly three hundred meters across and twice as deep, carved from bedrock through weeks of slave labor that had killed dozens of goblins in the process. The walls were smooth, polished to a mirror finish by earth-shapers working under threat of execution. Runes covered every surface, burned into the stone with techniques that required blood and pain in equal measure.

Shaman Grukthar stood at the pit’s edge, his massive frame casting a long shadow across the assembled warriors below. He was old for an orc, nearly seventy winters, his green skin marked with scars from a lifetime of conquest and ritual sacrifice. The bone fetishes hanging from his neck rattled as he moved, each one a trophy from a different campaign.

Behind him, the Warlord watched. Silent. Waiting.

Grukthar raised one clawed hand, and the drumming stopped.

The silence that followed was absolute. Five hundred orc warriors stood at attention around the pit’s perimeter, their weapons grounded, their eyes fixed on their Shaman. Not a single one spoke. Not a single one moved.

In the center of the pit, one hundred goblins stood in perfect rows.

They were small things, barely reaching an orc’s waist, with yellow-green skin and eyes that reflected torchlight like animals. Most goblins were cowards, skulking creatures that fled from any real danger. But these were different. These had been touched by the ritual.

Their eyes were vacant. Empty. Whatever intelligence or survival instinct they’d once possessed had been burned away, replaced by something else. Pure obedience. Perfect surrender.

Each one held a jagged dagger pressed against their own chest. The blades were crude, barely more than sharpened metal, but they didn’t need to be elegant. They just needed to pierce flesh.

Grukthar began the chant.

The words were ancient, predating the Dominion by centuries. They came from the Old Language, the tongue spoken by the first shamans who’d learned to bend reality through sacrifice and suffering. Each syllable made the air itself vibrate, made the runes carved into the pit walls pulse with dark red light.

The goblins stood perfectly still. Listening. Waiting.

Grukthar’s voice rose, the chant building toward its crescendo. The runes blazed brighter, the light bleeding from red to black-red, and the temperature in the pit dropped until frost began forming on the polished walls.

Then he spoke the final word.

The goblins moved as one.

One hundred daggers plunged into one hundred hearts. There was no hesitation, no flinching, no survival instinct kicking in at the last moment. Just mechanical precision as each goblin drove the blade home, twisting slightly to ensure the cut was fatal.

They didn’t scream. Didn’t cry out. Just fell, their bodies hitting the pit floor with soft thuds that echoed in the sudden silence.

Blood flowed.

It didn’t pool naturally. Didn’t spread across the floor the way normal blood would. Instead it moved with purpose, flowing upward along invisible channels carved into the stone by the runes. The streams converged at the pit’s center, where the largest rune pulsed with black-red light.

The Rune of Void.

Grukthar’s chant changed. Different words now, harsher, more demanding. He was no longer preparing the ritual. He was commanding it. Forcing the energy to obey.

The blood from one hundred hearts poured into the Rune of Void, and the rune drank it eagerly. The black-red light intensified until it was painful to look at directly, and the air above the pit began to distort.

Reality bent.

The distortion spread upward in a column, a pillar of twisted space that climbed toward the sky with impossible speed. The orc warriors around the pit stepped back instinctively, their hands moving to their weapons even though there was nothing physical to fight.

Grukthar threw his arms wide and screamed the final command.

The column of distorted space exploded into a massive beam of sacrificial energy.

It was red. Not the red of blood or fire or sunset. This was the red of pain given physical form, of lives ended before their time, of existence itself crying out against the violation being performed.

The beam punched upward through the atmosphere, burning a hole through the sky itself. It climbed higher and higher, past the clouds, past the limits of normal sight, heading toward something the orcs below couldn’t see but knew was there.

The ceiling of their world. The dimensional barrier that separated Valdris from the other realm. The barrier that had been weakening for weeks, thinning as the planetary alignment shifted and the Stage 3 evolution progressed.

The beam hit.

The sound came three seconds later.

It wasn’t thunder. Wasn’t an explosion. It was worse than either. It was the sound of the universe itself cracking, reality splitting along a fault line that should never have existed.

Every orc within a hundred kilometers heard it. The deep, resonant crack that echoed through their bones and made their teeth rattle. The sound of something fundamental breaking.

Grukthar staggered backward from the pit’s edge, his face split by a grin that showed all his tusks.

"It is done," he rasped, his voice hoarse from the chanting. "The barrier weakens. The path opens."

Behind him, the Warlord stepped forward. He was massive even for an orc, nearly three meters tall, his armor forged from the bones of enemies and decorated with trophies from a dozen conquered worlds.

"How long?" the Warlord demanded. His voice was like grinding stone.

Grukthar consulted the readings he could sense through his connection to the ritual. The barrier’s integrity, the rate of collapse, the energy flowing through the hole they’d just punched in reality.

"One hour," he said, his voice tight with anticipation. "The barrier will collapse in one hour. The acceleration is catastrophic."

He paused, feeling the energy surge again through the dimensional fabric, and his eyes widened as the numbers became clear.

"Perhaps less," he added. "The hole is spreading faster than anticipated. Thirty minutes to full collapse."

The Warlord’s eyes gleamed with savage anticipation. "One hour?"

"The sacrifices were too pure. The ritual too perfect." Grukthar’s grin widened despite the madness of what he was saying. "We tore the barrier open, Warlord. It cannot hold. Thirty minutes at most before total collapse."

The Warlord nodded once, then turned to face his assembled warriors.

"Sound the war drums," he commanded. "Mobilize the vanguard legions. We march now."

The drums began immediately, their deep booming rhythm—BOOM, BOOM, BOOM—carrying across the Northern Wastes. One by one, other drums answered from distant camps, the sound spreading outward like ripples in water.

The invasion timeline had just been obliterated.

Earth’s grace period hadn’t just been cut short.

It had been annihilated entirely.

And the armies of Valdris were already marching toward the dimensional rifts, ready to pour through the moment the barriers collapsed completely.

In the pit below, the Rune of Void continued to pulse with black-red light, fed by the blood of one hundred sacrifices. The hole it had punched in the dimensional barrier widened slowly, inexorably, eating away at the remaining structural integrity.

Above Valdris, the sky began to crack.

And far away, across the dimensional divide, bruised-red mist rolled across Earth’s sky as the consequences of the ritual began to manifest.

Thirty minutes until invasion.

Thirty minutes until war.

Deep within the Orcish palace, a lean, scarred figure rose from a throne built entirely of bones—each one harvested from a different conquered world—and the pressure radiating from him made even the Warlord’s elite guard take an involuntary step backward.

The Red Goblin King had been waiting long enough.