184 Orcs II (1/2)
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.
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.