Li was like a wraith, a specter of unbridled lethality that whirled through the woods at speeds the mortal eye could barely perceive. He was still in his human form, but he had cast [Heart of the Forest], an A-ranked spell that temporarily massively boosted his physical stats. At his chest where his heart was, tendrils of green glowed brightly, pulsating and pumping power into his body.
Li weaved through the trees around him with expert precision even as he moved at breakneck speeds, knowing by secondhand nature where they were. He quickly dawned upon one of the orcs.
"One," said Li. Before the orc could turn around, Li's arm had torn straight through the orc's back and out its chest, a discolored black heart wrapped in his fingers. The heart was infested with little white eggs, and it did not beat, already having long expired.
Li grimaced. These orcs were all dead, and they likely had been for quite a while. They were being reanimated by some eldritch entity's power, and one that did not fit the bill for any spell he knew of in the game.
Li crushed the heart in his hand, and it did not so much burst as it popped with a disgusting squelching sound. He transformed his hand once more into the gray tendril using [Root of the Devouring One], and he began to absorb the contaminated orc's corpse before it could spread its eggs and pestilent insects everywhere.
The heart desiccated, drying up before absorbing right into the tendril. Soon enough, the rest of the orc's corpse followed suit, crumpling away and condensing into the tendril as if being crammed into a black hole.
Li tracked footsteps not far away. He was upon them in an instant. Another orc. He crushed this one's head this time, the tendril absorbing the creature from the neck down.
"Two," he said.
By orc number thirty-two, Li realized that there was a pattern to where these orcs were traveling. They were all beginning to converge upon his shrine at the heart of the Winterwoods. He had yet to encounter the warchief, and it was likely because it was the fastest and strongest of its kind even as a reanimated abomination.
Likely the main body too, given that it was the only one that spoke. Li smiled ever so faintly as he slowed down his pace of extermination, giving the warchief time to near the shrine.
Li stepped into the familiar grove where his shrine stood tall and imposing in the night. Its massive wooden ribcage curled around the heart of the shrine, which, at this point, could now be called the heart of the Winterwoods itself. A faint red light twinged and pulsated as the heart of vines, leaves, flowers, and roots beat, and beside that heart stood the orc warchief.
Li looked at the creature. It was illuminated in the heart's light. Stony gray skin, cracked in some areas and protruding with hardened spikes like stalactites, was wrapped around limbs bulging with muscle. Its arm was stretched outwards, towards the heart, and its fingers were splayed out, stubby claws extended from each finger.
Its face was triumphant, but there was something off about the expression. The orc's eyes were glazed over and motionless, unable to follow the smile gracing its lips, and the smile itself was crooked, with one half of its mouth able to curve up and the other twitching uncontrollably.
"That makes forty-six orcs eliminated," said Li as he wrapped his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. "You're going to be forty-seven, the very last, but not after I'm done getting answers from you."
"Ah, but it is already far too late," said the orc. It noticed Li taking a step forward and it hovered its hand closer to the shrine's heart. "If you value your existence, you will halt your steps. Now that I am at your heart, with but a mere touch, I may infest your being, your spirit, every little facet of existence that builds you up.
But know that it is a mercy, a blessing to be filled with the enlightenment of the Burning One."
Li stopped. "Burning One? Then you're here on behalf of the demons? You've finally started the invasion?"
"Demons? No, we have surpassed such primitive forms. We are far more than demonkind now. We are ascended, enlightened. And soon, you will join us in the great calm of the Abyss, aiding us not in mere, primitive, feral invasion, but in great unification of all into higher purpose."
Li took a step forward.
The orc stuck its hand forward even closer to the heart, this time its claws grazing the pulsating mass. "Oh, oh, still so confident? So sure of your might, even when it is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Even when compared to the vastness of the deep and dark and unfathomable, you and I and all else are but specks even smaller than the little twinkling stars above so swallowed by the vastness of the shadows of the cosmos."
Li took another step forward.
The warchief shook its head in utter disappointment. "Still, hostility oozes from you. You do not understand the great mercy of the Abyss. Then, I shall let you experience firsthand."
The orc struck its hand forwards, sinking it into the fleshy mass of plant matter that made up the shrine's heart.
"I would appreciate if you withdrew your filthy hand from my shrine," said Li as he began walking forwards,
The warchief stepped back in surprise, but found that its arm had been entangled into the heart, the vines comprising the organ holding him tightly.
"The enlightenment should have come upon you," said the warchief. Insects began to crawl out from all its orifices. Little skittering black masses pouring from its eyes and nose and cracks in its skin. "Why? Why do you not see our higher purpose? Why are you unaffected by the truth of the abyss?"
Li smiled for a split second before his face began to crack and split apart. His body shuddered and twisted before growing taller, the flesh turning to bark and his skull baring as he entered into his true form.
"You think merely dabbling in eldritch forces makes you great? Somehow enlightened?" Li approached, and as he did so, he began to manifest all of his equipment.
First, the Black Beauty manifested in his hand, the eldritch orphan letting out a deathly rattle as its many arms curled around the stake upon which it was impaled.
Then, the Thousand Echo Eyes, the two eye-riddled armbands that held within them the imprisoned entity Sho'Gath.
Finally, the Old Godskin Shendyt, the loincloth fashioned from the skin of an Old One wrapping around Li's waist.
As those items of unfathomable power and terror manifested, the weather changed. A howling gale rose up from around Li, spreading outwards around him, bending the trees around the grove backwards with their intense force. Dark clouds gathered and rumbled, lightning flashing through their bulbous black forms.
The earth itself began to rumble, not in the fierce manner that earthquakes did, but in a shudder, as if the land itself were showing fear.
"What…is…this?" said the warchief, dead eyes somehow even managing to widen.
Li put a branched hand on the warchief's face almost in a gentle manner, as if he was closing the eyes of a child. "Something you should never have interfered with."