{WARNING. Anomalous energy pattern detected. Host's Hollowed state is acting as a resonance chamber. Drawing from primal archetype…}
{ERROR. Pattern matches no known Skill Tree. Accessing restricted archives…}
{…Match found. Mythic Archetype: [Wild Beast Berserker]. Status: LOST/FORBIDDEN. Last recorded use: Pre-Cataclysm, by the War-God Kael'Thax during the Sundering of Realms. Description: Not a skill, but a state of reversion. The user sheds the veneer of civilization and reason, becoming a force of nature incarnate—predation, rage, and survival stripped to its absolute, amoral essence. It does not enhance the user; it replaces them with the Beast.}
{INTEGRATION CANNOT BE STOPPED. HOLLOW VESSEL IS IDEAL RECEPTOR. INITIATING…}
Lu screamed.
It was not a sound of pain, but of something being torn out. His humanity, his fear, his caution, his lingering shock—all of it was violently evicted. The red mist wasn't just in him; it was him. It erupted from his pores, forming a shimmering, crimson aura that distorted the air around him with heat haze. His muscles didn't bulge; they re-knit themselves in real time, fibers aligning into denser, harder configurations, his frame coiling with the terrifying potential of a loaded spring. His bones hummed with pressure. His senses didn't heighten; they changed. The world bled of color except for shades of threat and warmth. The screaming battlefield became a map of hot, pulsing life-signs. The silver-armored soldiers were cool blues and whites. The furred creatures were warm ambers. The robed figures flickering with magic were dangerous, sparking violets.
And RED. The army to his right, the one the berserker Garroth had belonged to—their tabards, their banners, the face-paint on some, the glint of magic on their weapons—all burned in his vision with the most urgent, compelling, and hateful color. It was the color of the blood on his hands. It was the color of the rage that now filled his hollow core. It was the target.
The Beast had a target.
The Gloomwater Spear was no longer a tool. In his grip, the crystal, now permanently blood-crimson, fused with his hand, the haft elongating, sprouting cruel, jagged bone-like spurs along its length. It was no longer a spear. It was a fang.
He moved.
The first Red soldier, a burly axeman turning to face this new disturbance, didn't even perceive an attack. One moment Lu was fifteen feet away, crouched. The next, there was a sonic boom of displaced air and a spray of crimson that had nothing to do with tabards. Lu didn't thrust; he appeared beside the man, and the fang-spear was simply through him, the exit wound the size of a dinner plate. Lu didn't pause to retrieve it. He let the body fall, ripping the man's own axe from his dead hands.
What followed was not battle. It was a natural disaster given a localized form.
Lu carved a trench through the Red army's flank. He didn't fight soldiers; he dismantled organisms. The axe in his hand was a blur, shearing through armor, flesh, and bone with indistinguishable ease. A swordsman lunged; Lu caught the blade on the axehead, snapped it, and drove the broken shard back into the man's throat with a backhand flick. A pikeman braced his weapon; Lu leaped, not over, but onto the pike shaft, running its length like a tightrope and decapitating the holder before landing amidst three others. He used their bodies as shields, as weapons, as projectiles.
He acquired a sword in his other hand. Now he was a whirlwind of butchering steel. The Wild Beast Berserker had no technique. It had efficiency. Every movement was the shortest possible line between a living enemy and a dead one. He ducked under swings without looking, his body moving on a pre-conscious instinct that saw the attack in the tension of a shoulder muscle. He parried blows by shattering the weapons that carried them. His crimson aura burned, and weapons that touched it came away notched and blunted, their wielder's hands seared.
He was hit. A warhammer connected with his ribs. The sound was like a stone hitting hard leather. A bone cracked, but not his. The shockwave of pain was instantly consumed as fuel, converted into a burst of retaliatory speed that saw the hammer-wielder dismembered in four precise strikes. Arrows peppered his back. They stuck for a moment in his hardened flesh, then were expelled by pulsing muscle, the wounds closing in seconds, healed by the boundless, stolen vitality of the dying.
He was a plague. He was a wildfire in the shape of a man. He tore through a Red cavalry charge, not by dodging, but by leaping onto the lead horse, killing the rider, and using the panicked animal as a living ram to break the formation. He shattered siege ladders by tearing out their foundational spikes with his bare hands. He found a cluster of Red mages, their hands weaving a great spell of fiery annihilation. They didn't finish it. He was among them, and the fang-spear drank their magical energies, the crimson crystal flashing as it drained their life-force before the axe silenced their chants forever.
The battlefield, once a chaotic melee of two sides, began to warp around him. The Red army's advance on this flank didn't just stall; it collapsed inward on the point of his rage. They threw everything at him. Veterans, shock troops, summoned creatures of flame and shadow. He killed them all. He killed until the mud was no longer mud but a thick paste of blood and viscera. He killed until the air was more iron than oxygen. He killed until the Red soldiers no longer charged with rage, but stumbled back with a terror so profound it paralyzed them.
He was no longer on the ground. He was standing on a mound. A hill. A mountain of the slain. Bodies in red tabards were piled ten, twenty deep, a grotesque slope of his making. At the summit, Lu Yan, the Beast, stood silhouetted against the smoky sky. His body, bare to the waist, was not a human body. It was a sculpture of corded muscle, vein, and cracked, dried blood, painted a uniform glossy crimson from head to toe. The crimson aura had condensed into a visible, flickering mantle around him, like a cloak of heated blood. In one hand, the axe, now just a jagged piece of metal from the violence of its use. In the other, the fang-spear, pulsing like an angry heart.
He threw back his head and roared.
It was not a human sound. It was the sound of a collapsing star, of a continent tearing itself apart. It carried across the silent battlefield, a wave of pure, psychic dread that struck friend and foe alike with physical force. Men clutched their ears, blood trickling between their fingers. Horses reared and bolted in mindless panic.
The roar echoed away.
And then, there was Silence.
Not the quiet of peace, but the silence of absolute, breathless shock. The din of war had been cut off as if by a giant's blade. No one screamed. No one fought. Every soldier—the surviving Reds broken and fleeing, the silver-clad elves of the other side, the furred brutes, the scaled humanoids—all stood frozen, their weapons hanging limp, their eyes wide with a terror that transcended the fear of death. This was the fear of witnessing a god of slaughter descend, not to take sides, but to partake in a feast of carnage.