The Orc

The headache always came first.

The pain was so incredible that I thought it would kill me. It was the pain wrought from two minds fighting for control. When it finally began to subside, only minutes had passed. The other mind was defiant, but then it became weak, and finally, scared. It knew it was becoming nothing. I began to make out colors and shapes. Someone was holding me down, calling out to me, but in a tongue with which I was unfamiliar.

I don't know what you're saying, I thought.

Until I did.

They were calling my name. And they looked so concerned.

Rook--no, Ruhk.

And I heard something else: a deep, guttural roar; the battle cry of a monster.

It belonged to me. I had been flailing around in pain and confusion. The person was holding me down to prevent me from injuring myself. I breathed, slowly, slowly. There was no need to be scared anymore. I was me again. Me.

I calmed. And for the first time I surveyed my surroundings. It looked like I was in a forest. It was nighttime. A campfire was nearby, though it provided little warmth. My eyes turned to who was holding me down.

What stared back at me was a hard, flat face. They had red, curly hair that curtained their face and provided a beautiful contrast to their light, green skin. But, what really stuck out to me was their eyes. I had never seen a female orc with such intelligent, blue eyes. She was straddling me and had my wrists pinned above my head.

"Ruhk, are you okay? What is happening?" She asked, her features pinched in worry.

"I'm fine," I said, "I just had a nightmare. I'm sorry if I worried you," and I groped for a name, found it, "Myev."

It didn’t seem like she believed me but perhaps she knew from experience that it was pointless to press further. As she got off me, I was surprised to find myself missing the weight of her ass on my crotch.

She had a cloth wrapped around her breasts, which pressed against it in defiance. She wore a leather skirt that covered her front and back. I knew from my studies that orcs didn’t wear underwear, and now I knew this from experience. She had a strong, athletic build. It was the build of a warrior, through and through. Because orcs were naturally polygamous, roles like husband and wife were senseless to the orcish culture. But, Myev and Ruhk--or, Myev and I, rather--had been with each other for a very long time. Of the rare times we were intimate with each other, it was like the world melted away.

Myev offered a hand. The hand that reached out to her was like a large, green glove. It enveloped hers easily.

"We should keep moving. Your nightmare may have alerted the humans," she said.

I was about to ask why we were running away from humans, but then I remembered. After I had murdered a human close to one of their villages, a party of Templars had left the capital city to hunt us down. Myev and I had been on the run for about a week now. Our plan was to cross the borders into Dunnsdale, a kingdom of monsters that had no alliances with the humans. We would stay low there for a couple of months before making the trek back to our village.

Two iron greatswords stood against a tree. We grabbed these along with our other belongings. I was surprised that I could lift the weapon with one hand. It was about as tall as a human and must have weighed at least seventy pounds. When I slung the sword on my back, I barely registered its weight.

I was thankful that Myev didn’t pull me into conversation as we made our way through the forest. The silence gave me an opportunity to think. By now, it was clear that I had been reincarnated into a male orc. I was well over eight feet tall, strong, with dark green skin and black hair.

But I wasn’t just any orc; I had been reincarnated into the orc that had killed me in my previous life.

Which meant one thing: under specific conditions, I could control whose host body I entered after I died.

I rolled this thought in my head as I recalled the words I had said right before ****.

I wasn’t sure of the language but supposedly they were the words that a god had said right before his disciples had murdered him.

Voices broke me out of my reverie. Myev heard them first. They sounded like humans. We stopped and listened. We could hear at least three different voices. All men. The voices were singing out of tune. They sounded drunk. I marvelled at the sensitivity of my orc hearing.

My first thought was to make a large breadth around them but then I smelled it. Food. Coming from the same direction as the imbibed voices.

Myev and I slowly made our way to the human camp. We were close enough now to see that there were five humans, all in different stages of inebriation. It looked like only three of them were adventurers.

Two of the men who wore armour were singing with one man who wore simple clothes. They were boisterous, clearly unfazed by the thought that monsters may be lurking nearby. Sitting on the ground on the other side of the campfire they’d established was a man and a woman. The man was the third adventurer. The woman also wore simple clothes. For some reason, she looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember why.

Besides, my attention was on their food. They had a large pot of what was likely stew just a couple of feet from the campfire. The amount was shocking. For people who wore such simple clothes they sure could afford a lot of food. And I could smell more food in their bags. Chicken, mainly, but some pork, too.

They hadn’t noticed us yet. And it looked like only three of them were fighters. The other two had likely paid the three adventurers to escort them through the forest.

Myev grabbed the hilt of her greatsword. I instinctively reached for mine but stopped myself.

Was I really about to attack a group of humans? I had murdered humans before, but never for food. It seemed wrong, somehow. Then again, Myev and I hadn’t eaten for weeks. If we didn’t eat something soon, we’d die before we reached Dunnsdale. Stealing food from humans would be a lot easier than hunting for our own food.

As I turned this in my head, one of the drunk adventurers started walking towards us. At first, I thought we had been detected but from his eyes it was obvious he didn’t know he was in danger. But, he would see us soon. I had to make a choice.