Sol stood on the ridge, his body draped in the matte-black scales of the Cobra. His face was a mask of cold stone. He watched the betrayal. He watched the final twitches of Kael’s body. He watched the Matriarch nudge her boarling, her maternal rage replaced by a terrifying, satisfied calm.
He didn’t feel pity for Drogg. If you follow a wolf, you can’t be surprised when it eats you. But the sheer efficiency of Vurok’s cowardice... it was impressive, in a disgusting way.
But still seeing those grath eating the human bodies, his stomach did a slow, nauseating flip.
Ugh... A hot, bitter surge of bile climbed his throat, and he swallowed hard to keep from retching. His hands, usually so steady now, trembled against the rough bark of the iron-bark tree.
’I did this.’
The thought didn’t just whisper to him, it slammed into him with the crushing weight of a falling mountain. The "Modern him"... the one who still remembered the hum of air conditioning, the safety of paved streets, and the ingrained morality of "do no harm"... recoiled in absolute horror.
No matter who degenerate he was in his past life, in the end, he was still a law-abiding normal citizen, a man who avoided conflict, who looked the other way, who followed the rules of a civilized society.
Now, looking down at the red massacre below, that entire world-view came crashing down. He knew that he had ringed the bell. He had led the herd. He had known, with a cold certainty, that the boys in that ravine wouldn’t survive a full-scale stampede, but he still did that.
"Haa... haa..."
it wouldn’t be wrong to say that he had effectively killed the four people.
’Toren. Drogg. Radek. Kael...’
He whispered their names. He had seen them in the village every day. He had seen them laughing, seen them bullying, they were the same ones who had beaten him that night with vurok, their faces twisted in mocking glee as they kicked him. There’s no way he could ever forget them. Just like Vurok, he had hated them all to his core.
But ...still seeing them as mere pieces of broken flesh and bones. A wave of complicated, suffocating guilt washed over him. His heart hammered against his ribs—thump-thump, thump-thump—and a frantic, irrational urge seized him. He wanted to climb down. He wanted to check if anyone was still breathing, to try and mend the shattered bodies, to somehow undo the carnage he had orchestrated.
"I have to... I should..." he started to move, his boot slipping on a loose stone.
But then, his eyes locked on Vurok.
Vurok was at the top of the opposite ridge now, panting, his face splattered with the blood of the friends he had just sacrificed. He looked back at the ravine for a split second before sprinting away. There was no grief on Vurok’s face. No horror. Only the frantic, starving hunger of a man who would burn the world down just to stay warm for one night.
He didn’t care. To him, they were just shields, sacrifices to buy him some time.
Sol’s eyes hardened, the softness of his old world dying in that very instant. The Ash Gray energy in his chest... now leaning toward a darker, heavier Charcoal
"If I had played fair," Sol whispered to the empty air, his voice a low, jagged rasp, "Vurok would have killed me. He would have killed my cousins. He would have walked back to the village as a hero, and the world would have kept turning for him."
He remembered the look on Drogg’s face. The confusion.
He remembered the look on Drogg’s face. That final, gut-wrenching moment of confusion. Drogg had been a scumbag, yes. He had helped Vurok ruin lives and he had enjoyed every second of it. But even a dog like Drogg didn’t deserve to be thrown to the beasts by the man he called "brother."
"This is the world I live in now," Sol said, his voice becoming steady, and ice-cold.
He gripped his bone dagger, feeling the rough texture of the hilt. This wasn’t the "peaceful" world of his past life.
"Heck... even that world was a lie," he muttered, his grip tightening.
He realized now that the "peace" he had enjoyed before was nothing but a comfortable illusion... a sanitized layer of paint over a rotting wall. In that world, violence wasn’t absent; it was just hidden. It was tucked away behind mountains of paperwork, obscured by the crisp fabric of uniforms, and kept at a safe, digestible distance by the glow of a screen.
In that "civilized" world, thousands of people still died every single day in the dark. Thousands more were abused, exploited, and made to disappear for eternity, their screams muffled by the bureaucracy of a system that pretended to be kind. It was a world of indirect slaughter, where people ate meat but couldn’t stand the sight of blood.
It was the same in this world too, it’s just that, this world was honest. It was raw. It was the survival of the fittest. There was no room for mercy, no room for "fair play." Mercy was a luxury for those who could afford to die. And Sol?
He wasn’t going to die meaninglessly.
Not again.
"I won’t be the ’nice guy’ who gets trampled ever again," he resolved, his eyes turning a flat, reptilian grey.
"I wouldn’t be the background character in someone else’s epic anymore. If I had to be the monster to survive the monsters, then so be it. I would be the most terrifying thing this world had ever seen."
"They were all scum, anyway, no use to feel so sentimental." He muttered, his gaze turning away from the bloody ravine and onto the trail Vurok had left. "Every one of them would have laughed while Vurok cut my throat. They made their choice the moment they followed that bastard."
He resolved himself. The guilt didn’t vanish... there’s no way it could... he knew it would haunt his dreams... but he tucked it away into a dark, locked corner of his mind. It was the price of his new life. He wouldn’t just survive; he would live to the absolute fullest. He would hunt. He would grow. He would become the apex predator in this cruel primitive world.