"Screeeak..."
With a sound barely loud enough to hear, four faintly glowing red cracks appeared in the firelit cavern wall. They soon widened into four passages-the main gates of Orc Town.
Even Allen considered the mechanism ingenious, and it was the work of Half-orcs. They excelled at crafts that made killing easier.
Or rather, Half-orcs had their own distinctive understanding of forging and mechanisms. Everything they made was ugly, but it was ingenious enough. If they truly applied themselves, they fell only a little short of the Dwarves.
The greatest problem Half-orcs faced was their volatile temper. They could never settle down to such painstaking work. They preferred to explain their ideas to others and leave the work to them.
Those others usually meant the slaves imprisoned by the Half-orcs. They had to work endlessly under their captors' orders until they died from lack of sunlight, hunger, exhaustion, or even lack of fresh air.
Those slaves included Elves, humans, and Dwarves of Durin's Folk. Why single out the Dwarves of Durin's Folk?
Perhaps it was because of a war in the distant past. Back then, the Dwarves of Durin's Folk still lived in Moria, though it had not yet borne that name. It was called Khazad-dûm, meaning the city of the Dwarves.
During the fall of Eregion in the Second Age, Durin III, then ruler of Khazad-dûm, sent a great Dwarven army to aid the Elves. After attacking Sauron's Half-orc army, they withdrew into the mountains and sealed Khazad-dûm, leaving the Half-orcs helpless.
From then on, Sauron ordered all Half-orcs to treat the Dwarves as enemies, reserving particular hatred for Durin's Folk. That enmity had endured for thousands of years, right up to the present.
Now, after festering for so long, the hatred between them had reached the point where