Mr Gorzug – Substitute Teacher

The portal opened above the staff car park at 7:43 a.m., which was unfortunate for everyone involved.

It tore the air apart with a noise like wet canvas being dragged across the teeth of the world. A green-white wound split open six feet above the tarmac behind the science block, spat out a mountain of iron, leather, scars, and muscle, and then snapped shut again with the rude finality of a slammed door.

The figure hit the ground in a crouch.

He stayed there.

One hand pressed to the tarmac.

The other was gripping an enormous axe that looked less like a weapon and more like a long-term commitment.

He was huge.

Not merely tall. Huge in the old heroic sense. Thick-necked. Broad as an industrial fridge. Layered in piecemeal armour made from hammered black plates, beast-hide, chain links, and trophies taken from things with too many teeth. His skin was deep green, his lower tusks curved over his lip, and a ragged red cloak hung from one shoulder like a banner that had survived the death of several civilizations and was still slightly annoyed about it.

Gorzug, son of Makar, Breaker of Ash Fort, Shield of the Red Vale, Twice-Blooded Champion of the Southern Tribes, lifted his head and sniffed the air.

Smoke.

Oil.

Rain.

Burned food.

Fear.

Weak walls.

No battlefield.

No war-chant.

No blood-mist.

He looked up.

Grey sky. Brick building. Painted lines. A metal bin with the word RECYCLING on it.

Gorzug narrowed his eyes.

“This,” he rumbled, voice like rocks grinding together, “is not the Doom Plain.”

No one answered.

Across the car park, a small silver hatchback rolled to a stop. Behind the wheel, Mrs. Denise Wren, assistant headteacher and owner of a blood pressure that had long since ceased to surprise her doctor, stared through the windscreen in total silence.

Gorzug slowly stood to his full height.

Mrs. Wren lowered her window by two inches.

There are moments in a career in education when training leaves the body entirely and some older force takes over. Not instinct, exactly. More a professionalized dissociation. The kind that lets a person deal calmly with a Year Nine setting fire to a glue stick while asking whether fire is alive.

Mrs. Wren had that force in abundance.

She took in the giant axe.

The armour.

The enormous tusks.

The way he looked like he had personally strangled history.

Then her eyes moved to the laminated lanyard tangled awkwardly around one of his shoulder spikes.

A rectangle of plastic hung there, half melted around the edges, as if reality itself had generated it in a hurry.

VISITOR

G. ORZUG

SUPPLY

Mrs. Wren blinked once.

“Right,” she said faintly. “Of course you are.”

Gorzug stared at her.

She stared back.

“Are you,” she said, because some terrible part of her had committed fully to this now, “here for Year Ten history?”

Gorzug did not know what a Year Ten history was.

He did know the tone of a battlefield officer trying not to collapse.

He slung the axe across his back.

“I go where I am sent,” he said.

Mrs. Wren closed her eyes for one second.

When she opened them again, she had made a decision. Possibly a bad one. Schools were built on those.

“Excellent,” she said, voice tightening with administrative courage. “Lovely. We’re very grateful. The agency normally gives a bit more notice, but frankly at this stage if you’ve got a DBS and a pulse you’re ahead of the curve.”

Gorzug listened politely.

He understood perhaps four of those words.

But she had relaxed slightly when he put away the axe.

This was clearly some local ritual of non-hostility.

He could respect that.

Mrs. Wren parked the car, got out, straightened her blazer, and marched toward him with the grim resolve of a woman who had once chaired a budget meeting during a ceiling leak.

Up close, she had to tip her head back to meet his eyes.

“Mr... Orzug?”

“Gorzug.”

“Wonderful. I’m Denise Wren. Assistant head. If you could avoid mentioning weapons, blood feuds, or disembowelment before first break, that would help us enormously.”

Gorzug considered.

“I can do this.”

“Excellent.”

Her gaze shifted to the axe again.

“And perhaps we leave that... in reception?”

Gorzug looked over one shoulder at the weapon. Its blade was black star-iron etched with clan marks, notches, blessings, and the dried memory of enemies.

“No.”

Mrs. Wren nodded like she had expected that.

“Fair enough. Long day already.”

She led him through the back entrance.

The corridors smelled of bleach, paper, old radiator heat, and adolescent uncertainty. Strange banners hung from the walls. STUDY SMARTER. ATTENDANCE MATTERS. BE YOUR BEST SELF. Somewhere nearby, a bell rang with the thin desperate authority of something nobody respected but everyone obeyed anyway.

Children flooded the corridor.

They stopped.

A silence rolled outward in a widening ring.

Teenagers looked up from phones. Mid-argument. Mid-laugh. Mid-existence. They stared at the towering green warrior in fur and plate mail striding beside Mrs. Wren like the world had developed a head injury.

One boy whispered, “What the hell?”

Another said, “Is this a safeguarding thing?”

A girl in a blazer with one sleeve rolled up nudged her friend. “No way. New supply teacher.”

“Supply for what? Advanced murder?”

Gorzug’s gaze swept the corridor.

Small humans. Poorly armed. Malnourished posture. Eyes too tired for their age. Some already carrying themselves like veterans of invisible wars.

He knew that look.

Not soldiers.

But survivors of some ongoing attrition.

His expression changed slightly.

Not softer. Gorzug did not really do soft. But something in him shifted from threat assessment to guardianship.

A smaller boy near the lockers flinched as an older one cuffed him hard on the back of the head.

Without breaking stride, Gorzug reached out, caught the older boy by the blazer collar, and lifted him six inches off the floor.

The corridor went dead silent.

The boy kicked once in stunned disbelief.

Gorzug held him easily.

“No striking of the smaller ones,” he said.

The boy’s face drained of colour. “I—what—put me down—”

Gorzug leaned in.

“Strength is for protection. If you misuse it, I will remember your face.”

Then he set him back on his feet with surprising care, straightened the boy’s tie, and gave him a single firm nod.

“Do better.”

The older boy, who had never before in his life been corrected by what appeared to be an honour-bound siege engine, nodded automatically.

“Yes, sir.”

The smaller boy stared up at Gorzug like he had just watched a dragon explain ethics.

Mrs. Wren stared too.

Then, because there was no training manual for any of this and the school day was moving regardless, she cleared her throat and kept walking.

By the time they reached reception, three students had filmed him, one had already made a social post captioned NEW HISTORY SIR BUILT LIKE A BOSS FIGHT, and the rumour that Ofsted had finally snapped had spread all the way to maths.

Receptionist Sandra Pike looked up.

Sandra had worked school reception for nineteen years and had therefore lost the ability to be startled by normal standards. She took one look at Gorzug and merely said, “Sign in, please.”

A clipboard was placed before him.

Gorzug looked down at the tiny pen in his hand as if he had been asked to perform surgery with an insect.

He wrote his name carefully.

GORZUG

The pen snapped.

Sandra glanced at it. “I’ll get another.”

Mrs. Wren leaned over the desk. “Can you print him a temporary timetable?”

Sandra looked at Gorzug again. “Department?”

Mrs. Wren hesitated.

Gorzug rumbled, “War.”

Mrs. Wren said, at the exact same moment, “History.”

Sandra typed. “Same thing, in some schools.”

A printer coughed into life.

A few minutes later, Gorzug stood outside Room H14 with a sheet of paper in one massive hand.

YEAR 10 — THE NORMAN CONQUEST.