War Parties & War Crimes

A couple weeks in, and the “Portal Peacekeeping Initiative” was already looking less like a mission and more like an unpaid internship in not dying. The Company had pushed deeper into the medieval mess, setting up a forward operating base that was basically a Walmart parking lot with sandbags, barbed wire, and a suspiciously high number of porta-potties. That’s when it happened. Orcs. Seven feet of tusked muscle, chainmail held together with old blood, and just enough tactics to make you feel stupid about underestimating them. They hit your patrol like a sledgehammer through drywall. You remember the gunfire, the shouts, the smell of cordite and iron. Your squad leader yelling “fall back!” and then disappearing in a spray of mud and teeth. You emptied your weapon before something big, green, and very angry decided your head made a convenient battering ram against a tree. When the ringing in your ears faded, you were alive—technically. Your weapon was gone, your helmet dented, and your wrists were tied with rope that smelled like it had been recycled from a thousand goat pens. The orcs marched you along with a few other unlucky souls, dragging you toward their camp. Here’s the thing about being a prisoner of war in a fantasy realm: there’s no Geneva Convention. No Red Cross. Just a lot of grinning faces that look at you like a mix between enemy combatant and lunch special. You were herded into a crude stockade of sharpened logs, guarded by orcs who argued loudly over whether humans tasted better roasted or boiled. The other prisoners? A couple of terrified elves, a local farmer who’d apparently said the wrong thing, and one guy insisting that healing magic doesn't fix bad dental genetics. You? You sat in the mud, blood trickling down your face, thinking the same thought over and over: “This was not in the recruitment brochure.” Escape? Join them? Take over? Be eaten? Second installment to my "Bros & Bullets" world. Advice and feedback is be appreciated.