The raging orc warrior roared, swinging his battleaxe in a wide arc toward the lone enemy before him. Around him, the once-frenzied battlefield where countless orcs had clashed in savage slaughter was now strewn with corpses, the ground soaked red with blood.

The ancestral spirits, too, had fallen in droves during their own mutual carnage. Only a few remained, scattered across the wasteland like dying embers of a great fire. The war had reached its endgame. When the last foe within sight was slain, the orc warriors would awaken from their frenzy, their bloodlust ebbing away to make room for triumph.

Yet before victory could come, the orc warrior's descending axe, meant to split his foe in two, met nothing but air. The blade passed clean through the figure before him, as if through a mirage, and struck the ground with a thunderous crash, shattering a shield clutched by a fallen corpse.

At the same instant, the enemy's sword pierced his chest—but the orc felt no pain. Just as his axe had cleaved through a seeming illusion, so too did his opponent's blade pass through his flesh like nothing more than an evanescent dream.

A confused groan escaped his lips. His knees buckled, and he sank to the blood-soaked earth. The frenzy had ended. Exhaustion and agony, once drowned beneath the tide of madness, came surging back all at once. Deprived of their suppression, his senses and mind were overwhelmed.

The end of the frenzy meant there were no enemies left in his perception. Whatever phantom he had just struck at truly no longer existed. When he raised his head again, his expression softened into bewilderment.

Before him, where his enemy had stood, the ground had turned fluid like water. From its depths, spires rose upward, breaking through the surface as though emerging from a dark sea.

Just two or three steps away, a faint, invisible boundary shimmered in the air, separating the orc from his foe. The warriors each stood in their own world, unable to reach across to the other.

"Who... won?"

The orc warrior muttered to himself. He didn't understand what had just happened, but he knew what he was fighting for: victory, a place for his tribe in defiance of the Bloodfang Empire, a means of resistance and of building something new. It might not be perfect, but this was the utopia he dreamed of.

"We..."

On the far side of the boundary, the orc who had been his enemy moved his lips, as if responding. The sound did not cross the divide, but from the shape of his lips—"we"—the warrior grasped its first syllable by instinct.

"What?"

The warrior's eyes narrowed. He could not comprehend what was happening, but one thing was certain: whatever inhabited that body now was not the same foe he had faced moments ago. The presence within was different.

A pair of hands rested gently on his shoulders. The orc flinched, his muscles tensing, his battle instincts rising up to the fore once more. He tried to twist, to rise—but the weakness that was the aftermath of the frenzy left him kneeling, able only to turn his head.

"We've won," said the voice behind him, calm and certain. "Look upon what stands before you. Be at ease. This will be our utopia. Those who once opposed us will no longer be our enemies."

The orc recognized the figure now: a shaman. Not one from his own small tribe, but rather the rebel clans at large. Still, there was no hostility in the shaman's tone.

"Utopia...?"

He mouthed the word that had been so often repeated by warriors and shamans alike before the battle. It was etched deep into his memory. Was it truly so simple? Had the battle been won and their dream realized?

"It will take some time," the shaman said softly, "but not much longer now."

His tone was serene, filled with conviction. Yet something about him was off. Orc shamans rarely spoke so calmly, with such alien poise. The warrior realized, uneasily, that the mind within this shaman's body was not the one that had been there before.

"Who are you?"

The question slipped out naturally.

"Someone who fights for the same utopia as you," came the reply. "Good. It's here. The final step can begin. The first anchor is about to descend."

The shaman's voice was faint but resolute. Far away, the earth began to quake. Something vast was charging toward them, something colossal enough to shake the land itself. Its white, skeletal frame loomed into view, unmistakable in its grim majesty.

"The battlefield was large enough. The death toll has reached the threshold. The Ossuary has arrived."

Outside the royal walls of the Bloodfang Empire's capital, a white-haired youth stood, gazing into the distance. He could feel it: the surge from the earth below, the rising spires that had pierced the illusionary veil. They were all linked to him, part of a network of perception shared through his will.

The scale of those spires was astonishing. Across the Bloodfang Empire, over hills and plains, basins and mountains, countless spires broke through the ground like the teeth of a giant beast, piercing the shimmering surface of that spectral "water."

They rose skyward, standing sentinel across the empire's blood-soaked land, each fulfilling its destined purpose.

Those spires, of course, could not have truly lain buried beneath the earth. To conceal such immense structures underground would have been impossible. Even for the Orcish Empire, there was no chance it would have gone unnoticed.

No. Only the oldest few had ever truly stood beneath the soil, relics of a forgotten age. The rest, the countless spires now emerging across the land, came from elsewhere: from the void itself.

Using the ancient towers as anchor points, unseen power had reached out and dragged into the material realm that which had always existed in the depths of the void. Those towers were given form, their outlines hardening against the laws of the physical world. Yet to make them truly real, to bridge the gulf between illusion and matter, one final step was needed.

"To shatter the barrier born of that divide... I still don't fully grasp what the Ossuary truly is," murmured the white-haired youth, "but it can do this, and that's all that matters."

He stood still, watching as the vast creature of bone in the distance advanced. It bore upon its shoulders an enormous skull—taken, perhaps, from some ancient, godlike being—and moved like a serpent or a train of death, grinding everything before it to dust. Drawn by the endless deaths upon the battlefield, it came thundering ever closer.

The titan reached the battlefield at last. Its skeletal arms stretched outward, plucking up heaps of orcish corpses, stripping them of flesh and blood, and adding their bones to its own mountainous frame.

With each step it consumed, it grew, an ever-moving train of bone, rolling forward without end.

Then it arrived at a particular place: the boundary where the newly manifested spires divided this realm from the rest of the world.

The barrier could not halt the Ossuary's march. When the Ossuary collided with it, the unseen wall that had kept these voidborn towers from fully merging with the physical plane shattered under the impact.

In an instant, the divide vanished. The towers, once half-real projections, now solidified completely, emerging as tangible monuments of stone and metal, no longer phantoms from another world.

Meanwhile, as the Ossuary continued its grim harvest, the spires began to hum with power. Each activated according to its ancient design.

From their peaks radiated a network of energy. Some strands spreading across the breadth of the Bloodfang Empire. Others plunged downward, not into the earth but into the same place from which the towers had risen: the void. Like ships casting anchor into unseen depths, they fixed their positions firmly in reality.

"Good," said the white-haired youth, turning to the orc beside him, the one wearing the form of the Bloodfang Emperor, Barsaka. "Can you feel the change?"

"Mm."

Barsaka's gaze swept across the land. Though nothing seemed altered to the naked eye, his mind and sharpened mental senses could perceive the shift. The empire's very space had changed.

"The first node is complete," said the youth with a satisfied smile. "Time to contact our old friends. I imagine their work is going well. Those who stand in the way of our utopia will fall, one by one. Such is the tide of fate."

He spread his arms wide, beaming openly toward the heavens, a sky now veiled beneath the unseen lattice of power projected by the spires.

The breath of the void began to seep into the Bloodfang Empire, but not as a rift that tore at reality. It was a gentle blending, a soft interweaving of two worlds.

"Welcome back," he whispered, voice bright with quiet joy. "This age still needs our involvement. For now, let's make sure our new companions understand what comes next."

He turned toward the orcs who had followed the "Bloodfang Emperor" here. But those orcs were no longer who they had been. Their bodies remained those of orcs, but their souls had been replaced by the "old friends" the youth had just welcomed.

Meanwhile, through the Prayer Network, Elliot, one of the chief stewards of the Church of Nightfall's largest merchant guild, spoke rapidly with his associates. His voice was taut with worry.

"Emmon's gone dark? The Prayer Network can't reach him either? Damn it all, why won't that fool ever listen? I told him not to charge into the Bloodfang Empire while it was tearing itself apart! Now look what's happened. Is there any way in? I can't just sit here and do nothing. What's going on over there? Something's off, seriously off."

Emmon, once a loyal employee and a trusted friend, had suddenly vanished from all contact while deep within the Bloodfang Empire. The news unsettled Elliot, but the pattern that followed made it worse.

This was no isolated incident. Every major nation had intelligence agents scattered abroad, and the Bloodfang Empire was no exception. Many were monitoring the orcish rebellion with keen interest. But just moments ago, every agent stationed within the empire had gone silent—without warning, without reason. Even their emergency recording devices failed to transmit a single message.

The suddenness of it all was like a declaration: something vast had begun to move. It was an unstoppable process, accelerating beyond all control. And the unrest spreading across the continent was about to engulf everyone.