With a thunderous roar, the orc's muscles swelled to bursting, veins standing out like cords beneath his hide. Berserk fury ignited his blood as his strength surged to the level of a grand knight. He swung his warhammer with all his might. The air shuddered, and the skull of a weaker orc before him was crushed so completely that its head sank into its own chest, leaving only a mangled ruin of blood and bone.

A dagger pierced flesh. Even as his skull caved in, the dying orc showed no fear. His beast-fang blade, carved from the teeth of an armored drake and etched with shamanic runes, sank deep into his killer's side.

The sigils flared crimson, greedily draining the victim's life force. By the time the orc wrenched the dagger free, its edge slick with his own flesh and blood, his chest had already withered inward, his vitality bleeding away like air from a punctured lung.

There was no place for the wounded upon this battlefield. Before his final bellow could fade, a massive orc, emerging from nowhere, had cleaved him in two with a rust-spotted greatsword.

Blood fountained forth, but the ground had long since drunk its fill; it could no longer absorb even a drop. The crimson flow instead spread outward, guided by gravity into pooling rivulets that formed a dark, rippling pond.

Tiny bubbles broke the surface of that bloody mire. Amid the clash of steel and the roar of beasts, the faint sound went unnoticed by all save the chanting shamans, muttering guttural words that crawled through the air like insects.

The bubbling was a sign, a portent, of what was to come. The blood of the fallen began to stir. It seeped from the sodden earth, rising in defiance of gravity, vaporizing into a fine mist that drifted upward and merged with the crimson haze already blanketing the field.

"Aghu-gess uthil'ag... mu'er lu'en zebi'u..."

The shamans' voices rose in unison, their cadence wild and ancient. With senses rooted in blood and spirit, they reached into that fog of gore—into the countless fragments of life lingering within—and bound it to the will of their tribe's ancestral spirits.

And the spirits answered. The blood-mist gathered, drawn toward the shamans' circles, coiling and condensing in the air until it formed whirling crimson vortices. From within the storm of chants, new shapes began to take form, bodies molded for the descent of the ancestral dead.

A pair of massive hooves struck the ground, shaking the plain. What emerged was a towering monster, a stag-skulled abomination walking upright like a man, its limbs ending in clawed talons. No bestiary had ever recorded such a creature, yet every orc knew it by instinct. It was a totem come alive: the ancient spirit of a tribe.

Fed by blood, flesh, and souls, the ancestral totem returned to the mortal world. Not to bless or guide its tribe, no. It returned to hunt, to slaughter.

The stag-skull behemoth surged into the fray, discerning friend from foe by some primal intuition. It trampled through orcs without hesitation, yet its fury spared those of its own tribe.

Its claws swept wide. An armored orc before it was cleaved into shards—armor, weapon, and body all sheared apart in a single stroke.

Then the monster lunged forward, jaws unhinging to their limit. It swallowed another orc whole, bones crunching as it tore the prey to pulp. Thick blood and shredded flesh spattered its body. It drank in the essence, its frame swelling stronger, its movements growing faster, madder.

It shrieked in a high, piercing sound that had nothing of a stag left in it. The noise curdled the air, chilling all who heard it. But none of the berserk orcs still alive could feel fear anymore. And among them, something else, something equally ancient, had taken interest.

A wolf's howl cut through the chaos.

Before the stag-spirit could turn, a massive white wolf leapt from the ranks, bounding and twisting through the melee like a ghost. Its fangs closed upon the stag's neck with bone-splintering force.

The stag-spirit shrieked in fury and panic, thrashing to shake the wolf loose, but the white beast clung on. Though smaller in size, it was faster and denser, its body honed for the kill.

The stag's claws came crashing down again and again, but struck only empty air or glanced off thick hide, leaving shallow, harmless cuts.

With a final wrench of the wolf's jaws, the stag's neck snapped. Its carcass collapsed with a thunderous crash, toppling onto the heaps of dead orcs beneath it.

The white wolf tore into the fallen spirit's flesh, devouring it greedily. This distilled essence was far richer than mortal blood. Each bite made the wolf swell with renewed might. Sensing movement behind it, the beast lashed its tail once. A dozen orcs were hurled aside, their bones shattering from the blow.

Then, suddenly, the wolf froze. Something stirred beneath the earth. A strange aura crept upward, accompanied by a deep rumbling that made the ground quake. Every hair on the wolf's body bristled. It crouched low, growling a long, warning note that rolled across the field.

The warning went unheeded. With a deafening crash, the ground split open. A vast chasm yawned, swallowing orcs, corpses, and the white wolf itself.

From the darkness below, two crimson lights glimmered. A moment later, a colossal serpent burst through the surface, its maw gaping wide enough to engulf houses.

The serpent's jaws snapped shut, devouring the wolf-spirit, the stag's remains, and scores of orcs in a single gulp. Its eyes, gleaming with predatory hunger, swept across the battlefield, searching and seeking.

Then it found what it was looking for. Across from it, eight cold eyes blinked in answer. A spider, vast as the serpent itself, rose from the blood-mist. In that instant, each monster chose the other as its prey.

Chitinous limbs smashed into the earth as the colossal spider leapt skyward, crashing down toward the ancestral python spirit. Even before it descended, streams of virulent green venom sprayed from its fanged maw. Silken threads lashed out to ensnare its foe.

But the python wasted no time. It burrowed back underground through the fissure it had just emerged from, vanishing an instant before the spider struck. The ground quaked beneath the spider's landing. A heartbeat later, it split open again as the python burst forth, its muscular body coiling around the spider's massive frame. Taut muscles flexed as scales scraped against barbed chitin. The python's intent to crush the arachnid was plain in every movement.

Yet this spider spirit was far stronger than the two lesser ones the python had devoured earlier. The two titans locked together in a struggle of raw might and primal rage, neither able to overwhelm the other.

Across the battlefield, similar clashes raged. The ancestral spirits summoned by the orcish tribes dwarfed the strength of any ordinary warrior, but when every tribe called forth its own guardian beast, a hierarchy of power quickly emerged. The greater spirits devoured the weaker, tore them apart, and fell wounded in turn. The field descended into an even deeper chaos as the death toll among the orcs on both sides soared.

By now, the war was starting to come to an end. Both orc armies had gone wholly mad. Every adult capable of bearing arms, male or female, had joined the slaughter. Even the shamans had stepped into the fray, hurling their incantations across the blood-drenched plain.

As the ancestral spirits tore through their enemies and the killing reached new heights, the monstrous meat grinder of the battlefield was about to reduce one side entirely to ruin. Amid the mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, no one could tell whether the rebels or the suppressors would have the last breath.

As the slaughter continued, an orc climbed out of a mound of corpses. The newcomer's build was leaner than most of his kin, filled with compact, well-proportioned muscle rather than the usual hulking mass.

A white-haired youth watched him, smiling. "So, Barsaka, are you satisfied with this body? It can't compare with your original, but we don't have any other choice."

The orc's face, too, was closer to human, though it bore intricate tattoos curling across his skin, marks so elaborate they seemed to carry hidden meaning.

"It'll do," Barsaka replied evenly. "It was never possible to reclaim the strength I once had. But for a body reforged in the midst of this battlefield, drawn from the blood and life of a legendary fallen, it's more than enough."

He ignored the youth's offered hand and rose on his own. Though he looked as if he had just clawed his way out of the grave, his body was anything but frail. It was woven from the essence of a third of the dead and packed with their stolen vitality, a strength exceeding even that of most legends.

"Only ‘enough'? You do remember the plan has... shifted a little," the youth said, snapping his fingers. Glyphs of spatial magic flared to life around them, pulsing like living veins of light as they began to form a vast teleportation array.

"This orcish war was meant to be an epic upheaval that would sweep across kingdoms. If it had gone as intended, the shamans' blood from such a grand conflict might've restored your body to its former glory."

Barsaka flexed his limbs, joints cracking under the pressure of his dense new muscles. "Power isn't the point," he said. "What matters is stirring the tide, turning it so that those who resist it are swept away. That's how we'll bring about what we've both long awaited."

The white-haired youth's grin widened. "Still as clear-headed as ever. I was afraid centuries of slumber might've dulled your logic. You're ready, then? This time, our task is simple—kill the king of the Bloodfang Empire. No other race but the orcs would demand a move this drastic."

The teleportation circle formed in full, its energy rippling through the air until even distant onlookers would have seen the landscape warp around it. Yet in the chaos of the battle, not a single orc spared them a glance.

"Heh. I only hope so," Barsaka muttered with a bitter laugh. Veins bulged across his neck and arms, his skin flushing crimson as the battlefield's bloodlust began to seep into him. "Let's make it quick. I'm using everything I have just to keep from losing myself to this madness."

"Understood."

The youth nodded once. The final sigil fell into place, the spell reached its peak, and space itself tore open. With a thunderous hum, the two figures vanished from the blood-soaked plain, carried through the rift in the world toward their distant destination.