Deus Necros

“When did you learn this one?” Thomas asked as he appeared in his spectral form, his faint light flickering against the splintered bark and shadowed grotto wall.

“Got it as a reward,” Ludwig replied, his voice dry, the edge of mental exhaustion curling behind the humor in his words. His eyes, however, didn’t share in the joke. They remained fixed, cold and calculating, on the Queen. His undead breath steamed faintly in the humid air, and as he spoke, the tip of his sword lowered until it pointed directly at her warped form, where she still writhed with a body half ruptured, half mending.

There was a pause, and in that moment the very earth answered. A sharp tremor surged beneath Ludwig’s boots, and then bones erupted. Not just a few, but scores, then dozens, then hundreds more, all rising in uneven bursts, clawing free from beneath the soil as if something beneath had been rotting and waiting. They twisted out from the cave floor, from the torn corpses of fallen undead, from shattered husks strewn about like husks of fruit long devoured.

And then they flew, like jagged arrows flung upward without mercy. They pierced toward the Queen’s monstrous frame and struck yet each impact brought only a hollow whisper of damage. The numbers floated mockingly in the air.

-12

-18

-14

Thomas tilted his head. “That looks rather sad,” he remarked after a moment, the dry tone of his voice barely veiling his confusion. “Especially after all that display.”

Ludwig exhaled uselessly through his teeth. His grip on the hilt of Oathcarver didn’t waver, but his jaw tightened. “Even a constant dripping can break through stone,” he muttered. His gaze didn’t lift, didn’t shift, but somewhere deep within his tone was a kernel of something else, foresight.

And then he howled.

“Bone Shatter!”

It was like a silent word spoken into a glass cathedral. Everything trembled, and in the blink of an eye, the previously pathetic shards embedded in the Queen’s form ignited with sudden violence. They detonated, not with flame, but with splinters and force, erupting outward from within her flesh like a thousand knives driven from inside out. Bark peeled back like skin, twisted knots of thorn and sinew tearing open as though gutted by invisible hands. Black ichor sprayed in wide arcs, thick and foul like diseased sap. The shriek that tore from the Queen’s faceless maw was no longer something a thinking thing could produce, it was the primal wail of wounded rot, of a blight fighting to remain whole.

The damage values this time weren’t small.

Hundreds of digits shimmered in rapid succession, bright and stacking, each an echo of another tiny death. Alongside with a score of debilitating debuff. From bleed to shatter, to breaks tears and incisions.

Her body, already riddled with injury, began to rupture like overripe fruit. She staggered, and a steaming gout of ichor belched from one of her flanks, hissing as it hit the stone.

“That,” Thomas said, voice low now, “I didn’t expect that much damage.”

“You haven’t seen it all,” Ludwig murmured back, his voice sharper now, focused like the point of a drawn blade. His hand rose again, fingers curling as if pulling at invisible strings. “Rise Undead!”

The words struck the cavern like a bell tolling deep underground.

“Did you not already summon all the dead before?” This time it was the Knight King’s voice, stately and calm but tinged with the faintest edge of something more, concern, or perhaps curiosity.

“No,” Ludwig answered, placing his palm against the earth. The contact was almost reverent. “I purposefully tried not to reach too far deep.”

From the ground beneath him, a cold pulse responded. The chains that held Celine, still limp and unconscious, adjusted slightly as if to make room. Ludwig’s other hand lifted and stayed still, hovering like a priest giving benediction. He drew in breath, deep and cold, and then whispered the pact under his breath.

“Awaken!”

A contract of echoes.

A promise to the forgotten.

A summoning of those not yet given peace.

The ground cracked with deeper fury than before, as though some cavernous maw below had exhaled. Dust and broken stone churned around his feet. Notifications flared before his vision in rapid sequence.

[You have reached as far as you can get into the ground in terms of range.]

[Your mana pool isn’t enough to allow you to summon all the undead you have covered.]

[32 Undead Have been summoned to your service!]

18 Skeletons

10 Zombies

4 Captain Skeletons

They came like wraiths through stone. First the fingers clawing loose, then arms, torsos, skulls. Leather armor crumbled from some, rusted plates hung from others, and some bore nothing but rags, all of them groaning as they were drawn from ages past to answer one more call. Some bore signs of foreign lands, ancient garbs, others the tribal markings of long-dead warriors. Each one brought with them the scent of old rot and forgotten time.

The Queen was stirring again, though sluggish. Her wounds were deep and jagged, and while her natural resilience was formidable, she was slowing. Her massive limbs shifted awkwardly, stuttering with weakness she had not shown earlier.

“Charge her!” Ludwig commanded, and his voice echoed like a drumbeat.

Without hesitation, the undead obeyed. There was no strategy in their minds, no cowardice to hold them back. They moved as one mass, a flood of bones and teeth and claw, crashing against the Queen’s body like waves against a sea cliff. One by one they fell upon her. Skeletons struck with swords that snapped on impact, then swung the broken hilts with as much fury as before. Zombies wrapped their bloated arms around her roots and bit into bark, even as teeth shattered. The Captain Skeletons moved differently. They were precise, agile, weaving between roots and slamming curved blades into joints and knots, finding weak spots in ways the lesser undead could not.

The Queen thrashed, her arms crushing several of the risen dead in a single motion. Bones shattered beneath her limbs like kindling. Ichor and sludge burst across the earth, soaking the floor in noxious gore. Yet they did not stop.

Ludwig stood back from the tide, watching with eyes narrowed in thought. His spellcasting hand twitched, conjuring another bolt of flame, then sending it arcing toward one of her root clusters.

Thomas drifted beside him. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Wittling her down,” Ludwig said, though the tension behind his voice made it sound more like a grim ritual than a plan.

He reached into his satchel and pulled a vial. The liquid inside shimmered a pale blue, thick with floating flecks of silver. He unstoppered it and drank. The taste burned. Van Dijk’s mana reserves. He was dipping into his master’s cache again, and for a heartbeat guilt flickered across his face.

He hoped Van Dijk would forgive him. It was, after all, for his sister.

Thomas wasn’t wrong, though. Even with all this, they were only barely putting a dent into her. Her health bar, still massive, had only now begun to inch below the halfway mark. Most of that had come from the werewolf’s strike, and some perhaps from the Church before their retreat. Ludwig’s own damage, while considerable, was not the lion’s share.

His thoughts were simple, perhaps he’ll lose out on some form of reward if he wasn’t the one doing the most damage, so he needed to break her down, and he had just the way to do it, but perhaps not enough time. After all, the Queen was still standing and her true body was not what Ludwig was fighting.

Just as his thoughts tightened, the ground answered back.

This time the quake was sharper, more violent.

The stone beneath his boots rattled. Dust fell from the grotto ceiling in thick clumps. And then a voice, half growl, half irritation, drifted down from the highest perch.

“Tsk.”

It came from the werewolf.

“These fools. When will they realize I spared them their lives…”

Ludwig stiffened he understood immediately what the Werewolf meant. The Order was the cause of this earthquake.

He did not need a map or magic to know what was coming. The Order was stirring something above. He felt it in his spine. The tremors. The weight. The return of the enemy he did not want at his back.

“You don’t have much time, I suppose,” the werewolf continued, this time with a lazy smirk curling at the corners of his mouth. He was watching Ludwig now, directly. “Looking like that…”

Thomas appeared again with a quick flicker of spectral light, alarm in his tone. “I think he means, if the Order comes and you’re looking like an Undead…”

“I know what he meant,” Ludwig snapped back, already calculating.

The problem was obvious. Remaining in his undead form would expose him to the Order, who would not hesitate. But shifting back to his human disguise, now of all times, with Celine just beginning to stir,

It would be suicide.

“Fucking perfect,” Ludwig growled. He hurled his command into the air. “All undead, climb!”

Without pause, the risen dead obeyed once more, scrabbling over roots and thorns, clambering onto the Queen’s towering form. It was chaos, blind and furious.

Ludwig flicked his wrist again, and his chains wrapped around Celine’s limp body, binding her tightly. It was a desperate hope. Perhaps the binding would buy him the seconds he needed.

He slapped his lantern. The light flared.

Human once more, the slime crawling over his body reshaping itself to hide the pale decay, to smooth out the rot and ruin of the creature he had become.

Just in time.

He turned and drove his heel into the ground.

“Stone Wall!” he roared. The spell surged, a slab of rock exploding upward right in front of him like a protective wall. Separating him and the queen.

“What are you planning?” Thomas asked, his voice strained.

Ludwig said nothing for a second, then repositioned his arms over Celine’s still body, curling around her like a shield.

“Planning?” he muttered under his breath. “I don’t plan. I execute.”

His voice rose.

“Detonate Dead.”

And then, with a flick of a finger and a whisper like a dagger drawn in silence,

“Death Echo.”

The grotto filled with white.