"I hope that's the only piece of bad news. What's the situation here? No other obstacles, I trust? We need to prepare to seize the next node. Eliminating that outsider who lies beyond the void's direct interference through purely material means will require the combined force of at least three nodes operating in unison."

The white-haired youth said nothing more. His tone was calm and businesslike as he sought to confirm the progress of Barsaka's operations.

"No problems," the orc rumbled. "The joint investigation corps sent by the elves, dwarves, and several human kingdoms will arrive only after we've consumed the circle of orc nations surrounding the Bloodfang Empire. When that happens, they'll understand what it means for the nodes to fuse—and what it means when even berserk orcs retain their reason."

"Good," the youth said with a faint nod. "Continue your work. I'm going to visit some old friends, those who began weaving their influence across the continent before us. I need to see which of their lies still stand unbroken."

With that, he opened a Gate of Phases with a flick of his hand and stepped through, vanishing into the shimmering distortion.

"Our efforts have brought us to this point. All that was sacrificed will not be in vain."

Barsaka set aside the youth's cryptic words and turned his attention fully to his own task. The division of labor was clear; anything beyond the plan would be handled by his superior.

Closing his eyes, Barsaka extended his mental energy outward from the depths of his soul, linking himself to the Psychic Network that now spanned the entirety of the Bloodfang Empire, a collective consciousness forged from the thoughts of countless orcs and those of other races ensnared in their wake. Through that vast mental lattice, he guided numerous minds into their material vessels, directing them to join the campaign against the neighboring orc kingdoms.

A deep hum resounded. Void energy surged, tearing open a rift wide enough for armies to pass through. From within, Bloodfang orcs surged forward. On the other side of the rift, their forces gathered to strike at the capital of a neighboring orc kingdom.

The crude walls and the handful of magical defenses, purchased in recent years from friendly races, meant little before the invading might of the Bloodfang legions.

With a thunderous crash, a section of the wall exploded: not from the attackers' assault, but from within. The defenders themselves, the orcs of the Steelbristle Kingdom, had shattered their own wall.

From the breach erupted a colossal boar over thirty meters tall, its body armored in gleaming silver bristles like a forest of spears. It bellowed toward the heavens and charged straight into the disciplined ranks of the Bloodfang army.

By then, every Bloodfang orc had entered their berserker state, their muscles swollen, their skin flushed crimson, their physical power raised to its peak. Yet their faces were not twisted with the mindless fury that typically accompanied the transformation. Instead, their gazes remained calm, cold, and deliberate.

There was no need for words. Their minds were one. The great "node" of the Bloodfang Empire unified every consciousness within its reach, so that a single thought could ripple through the entire host like breath through a single body.

A wave of mana flared. A heartbeat later, a teleportation spell unfolded, cast not by a single magician but by the entire formation. In an instant, the five-hundred-strong army vanished in a burst of radiant light and reappeared a kilometer away. The storm of razor-sharp bristles that followed the boar's stomp tore through empty ground.

Ordinarily, a teleportation array of that scale would demand at least thirty seconds of joint incantation from trained spellcasters. But these orcs had completed it in less than one. The ancestral spirit of the Steelbristle Kingdom, the mighty boar, had launched its ambush for nothing.

That orcs were capable of spellcasting at all was an absurdity. The magical and alchemical sciences barely existed in many orc kingdoms, and the only common spellcasters were shamans. Magicians were vanishingly rare.

Yet here, in this formation, more than a hundred orcs had performed a coordinated casting. Closer scrutiny revealed the impossible: these spellcasters were not magicians at all. They were warriors—knights, every one of them—with raw physical prowess far beyond the human norm.

Under their collective guidance, mana ebbed and flowed, fitting seamlessly together like pieces of a vast puzzle. The final link completed the army-wide teleportation spell.

These orc knights possessed no mana spirals unique to trained magicians. Their method of spellcasting was brutally simple: they borrowed the node's power, bending the material world through void energy, and forced the spell into being.

Their method resembled that of wizards, but their knowledge was undeniably that of true spellcraft. Channeling void energy itself required fundamental principles of magic theory—knowledge that orc warriors, lacking even formal combat manuals, should never have possessed.

And yet, by reducing spellcasting to its most formulaic, mechanized form, they achieved the impossible.

Linked by a single consciousness, each orc completed a component of the array with absolute precision. The whole array was assembled perfectly in less than a breath's span. No human army could hope to replicate such unity.

Even so, the Steelbristle ancestral spirit did not relent. Raising its iron mane, it charged again, destructive force radiating from its enormous mass.

But as it thundered forward, a rift yawned open behind it. From within poured another wave of Bloodfang orcs, surging through the very breach the spirit had made. They flooded into the capital to continue their assault upon the Steelbristle Kingdom.

Every invading orc carried with them not only their bodies but the node's coordinates, expanding the reach of the Mind Network wherever they marched. With each advance, the node's influence grew, allowing reinforcements to descend at any moment through the riven corridors of the void.

The defenders stood no chance. The Steelbristle orcs had unleashed their ancestral spirit as a desperate vanguard, hoping its immense strength would shatter the invaders' formation before they regrouped in the capital for a final stand.

Yet as the boar charged forward, more enemies poured through the gaping rift that followed in its wake. In an instant, the ranks the Steelbristle Kingdom had so painstakingly formed for their counterattack were thrown into chaos. Confusion, coupled with their inferior strength, crushed the defenders.

The orcs of the Bloodfang Empire, though bolstered by fury, had retained their capacity to think. Connected as they were through their shared network, they moved with uncanny precision and cooperation. Using the maze of streets for cover, they fought in pairs—one to lure, the other to strike—drawing the frenzied Steelbristle orcs into traps of their own making.

It was a grotesque reversal of what orcish battle once meant. Ordinarily, when orcs succumbed to their rage, they abandoned all restraint and reason, fighting only by instinct until one of them lay dead. No retreat, no hesitation, only a blind will to kill.

But berserk though these Bloodfang warriors were, they fought with eerie calm. They refused to clash head-on with the mindless Steelbristle berserkers. One orc baited the foe down a narrow street while his partner followed in silence, waiting for an opening during which to strike.

The maddened Steelbristle orc, his senses fully focused on the prey before him, never once glanced behind.

When his quarry turned a corner and vanished behind an illusion, he stumbled a heartbeat too long in confusion. By the time he saw through the spell, it was too late.

A blade had already pierced his heart from behind. His own fury made the wound fatal. Blood gushed forth, and the Steelbristle warrior collapsed lifeless to the ground.

Pitting rational berserkers against mindless ones was sure to lead to a slaughter. That simple tactic of paired attackers, one to distract and the other to kill, spread like wildfire through the city, allowing the invaders to cut down the defenders at terrifying speed.

Even the legendary Steelbristle warriors were not immune. Two grand knights working in tandem, aided by a squad of spellcasters to harry and reposition their enemies with teleportation magic, could wear a legend down without suffering a single loss.

The tactic was flawless. The paired knights baited the enemy's blows while dozens of orcish magicians bent space itself to relocate them, keeping them alive and allowing them to strike back with precision.

Linked through the Psychic Network, their coordination bordered on perfection, every thought, every movement, every spell cast in unison. The maddened legendary orc, his body now riven with wounds, was doomed to fall. It was only a matter of time.

A thunderous crash tore through the battlefield. The colossal boar burst once more through the city wall, but this time, its tusks did not turn toward the Bloodfang invaders. Instead, it hurled itself into the ranks of its own kind, the Steelbristle orcs.

"...Is my kingdom fated to perish after all?"

The Steelbristle King stood upon the ramparts of his keep, gazing down at the chaos below. His eyes trembled as he watched the very spirit his people had worshipped and nourished for generations betray them without hesitation. Sorrow welled in his heart. Was even this last desperate struggle meaningless? Why had the Bloodfang Empire turned on them so suddenly?

"...So be it," he murmured at last. "Then let us fight to the bitter end."

He drew in a breath and prepared to embrace his own berserker fury until his failing body gave out.

"Please, wait. I only attacked as a last resort. Please listen to me."

The voice behind him froze his motion mid-breath. He turned, expecting another assassin, only to see a face he could scarcely believe. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

"...You?"

"It's me."

The newcomer, Barsaka, the orc general of the Bloodfang Kingdom, met his gaze. In the span of a heartbeat, Barsaka's message reached the Steelbristle King through the psychic network conferred by the node.

"...So that's how it is," the king murmured at last. "No wonder your warriors remain lucid even in rage. I understand now. I only hope your path proves the right one. You have my strength."

Barsaka inclined his head. "I'm glad you understand."