Deus Necros

The Mountains of Solania never knew peace for five consecutive years.

If anyone were to come and see them, they’d notice the peaks have been torn down, a great deal of the snow completely melted off and corrupted, rocks and boulders mixed with mana and magic. And craters and pathways made of nothing but destruction were carved from the bottom of the highest mountain to its peak and back. The white crowns had been chewed to a gray slush of soot and old ice; ridges once sharp as blades lay slumped like broken backs, and the airs that used to ring thin and clean now carried a scorched smell, coppery and bitter, as though something had been smelted in the sky itself. Wind pushed through ruined gullies with a long, hoarse note, carrying flecks of ash that did not belong to any fire, and the sun, when it managed to peek through the mountain haze, laid a sickly sheen on fields of churned snow where footprints and impact scars had piled upon one another until the land looked like hammered metal.

“Damn this is getting boring…” Ludwig said as he finally threw away Oathcarver. The sword had only half the material left as it had broken down to bits and pieces from the constant fighting. The hilt felt warm from endless grips, nicked and pitted under his gloves; the core of the blade still hummed with that faint old obstinacy, but each swing had shaved it, and each return by death had set him back to the same weary calculus. He watched the remnant arc out and skid across frost-bitten gravel, leaving a thin blue scratch that hissed as the steel still bled heat. The sound it made at the end, a tired tap, felt almost like a sigh. He rolled his shoulders and the familiar weight that should have been there wasn’t, and for a heartbeat he missed the balance of it the way a man might miss a phantom limb.

The hardest part of this five-year fight was the first year. As Ludwig had an incredibly hard time to even ’see’ the Wrathful Death’s attacks, dying each and every single time he was attacked. But after some time, though at the cost of what felt like hundreds of thousands of souls, Ludwig managed to learn many things. Those early months were a blur of black iron and the shock of impact, returns that felt like surfacing in the same freezing river again and again; the mind learns to read the water, the undertow, the rock where the current turns. He learned that the mace sang a breath before it struck, that the air thickened along the gauntlet’s path, that the first step of the juggernaut ate its own echo. He learned the taste of his own ash when the world went dark, and the exact grain of silence that preceded it. Patience, he found, was its own sharp weapon; you could hone it so thin it cut patterns into a monster’s rhythm.

The most important and most crucial was the fact that he could extract as much souls from the Soul Items as he needed. So instead of wasting the Soul items he had on him by breaking them every time, he can draw one or two souls to have the minimum needed to put in his lantern. Even he thought that is a bit like cheating as he can revive a hundred times from a two hundred souls item. But seeing that Necros never intervened or stopped him, he abused it to the limit. He would kneel among shards of blizzard and broken mail, fingertips above the Lantern’s cold glass, and will a thread at a time, like teasing water from a stone. A steady siphon. A miser’s drip. He came to admire the discipline of taking less than he coveted; it stretched time. It stretched nerve. It stretched the margin between despair and craft.

The second thing was, necromancy was a terrible thing to use against the Wrathful Death. Not only were the corpses in the mountain range incredibly powerful and refused to bow down to Ludwig’s low Charm stat, they were easily influenced by the Wrathful Death’s aura. Gaining his Wrath and rampaging against Ludwig. The dead here were not the meek kind; they wore the Dark Continent’s muscle in their bones and its hunger in their teeth. When he called, their jaws answered with hate that wasn’t his, and their eyes turned to the red rim of the horizon where wrath breathed. They came up snarling with that thin laugh of ice cracking, then tore away from his command like reins snapped by a bolting horse. The magic tasted wrong in his mouth afterwards, iron shavings and old smoke. Utter futility and waste of time.

Without the ability to Level Up, Ludwig was unable to increase his charm to control them. After all, the monsters that revived were creatures that came invading from the Dark Continent which lay right behind the Solania mountain range. He knew the arithmetic well enough: no points, no polish; no polish, no leash. Even when he forced a handful to kneel, the Wrathful pressure peeled them away, like bark from a frozen tree. The few that stayed were not worth the cost, sluggish in thought, swift to betray, and quick to shatter beneath the mace’s shadow.

The Wrathful Death was acting as an unwilling guardian, its mere presence was halting any and all monsters from crossing and that’s why the empire didn’t do anything to stop it. Its patrol was a circle etched in stamp and crater, a sentry’s path carved out of rage. Every time the tide from beyond pressed, it broke on black iron and that steady grind of boots that left the snow glazed and gritty. From a distance, if anyone dared such a view, it might have looked like order: the kind born from terror’s routine. The empire could live with a monster so long as it chained other monsters to the far side of the world. ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ novel(ꜰ)ire.net

At some point, even Ludwig tried to escape the range, but finding that whenever he went past a certain area he would find himself back right in front of the Wrathful Death. The whole mountain range was a massive trap built to hold whatever entered it inside. He ran in a straight line for three days through gullies of shadow and glass-scabbed ice, found the same scarred ridge waiting like a patient door. He climbed a black chimney of rock until his fingers powdered into gravel, fell into the same bowl of snow where the mace had once buried his ribs. He laughed the third time it happened, a short flat sound that went nowhere in the thin air. The boundary had no wall but its law was perfect.

And finding shelter or a hiding place was out of the question since the Wrathful Death simply just followed after Ludwig and tore at him. Caves collapsed on cue. Ice bridges cracked at the lightest footfall. Even the low places where wind piled snow into quiet humps betrayed him; the juggernaut’s wake found him as a lodestone finds iron filings. He had no time to rest, nor need of it, so it was nothing but battle after battle, an endless song of metal.

The only saving grace of this five year period was the fact that the Wrathful Death was healing at an incredibly low rate. The cracks he made were reluctant to close; the light seeping through them dulled like embers under ash. The horn he had broken never grew true, just a jagged stump that whistled when the wind struck it from the north. Fingers did not sprout anew so much as reshape into blunt plates, and the knee, well, the knee kept a hitch, a stutter in motion he could draw like a map.

And so it took Ludwig all the five years to both Learn every pattern, every move, every attack and every way to dodge and avoid it. He timed the world to that cadence: the square breath before the hammer-sweep, the long inhale of red light before the shock, the lazy feint the Death had taught itself when the ground underfoot sloped to the right. He coaxed small anisotropies from the terrain, scuffed footholds, half-buried shards, that particular slide of scree where one pebble would always whisper down before the rest. A bad dance, the pair of them, but he knew the steps in his bones.

“Quite unfortunate, for Oathcarver to break like that, but it was a worthy life it had, for breaking against such a grand foe.” The Knight King’s voice came dry, the way old wood sometimes sounds when it splits. Ludwig glanced down at his empty right, then at the pitted horizon that had been their arena, and thought of the sword as one more thing the mountain had eaten and not returned.

Ludwig moved his hand forward and collected every bit of Oathcarver’s shards back into his inventory. The pieces clicked against his palm like teeth. He scooped them as a miser might gather the last coins of a dynasty, each chip a memory of pressure and heat, each razor sliver a lesson paid for in pounding bone. The inventory swallowed them with that dull blue flicker, a small comfort, keeping the dead close.

Right there, right in front of him, the creature that haunted his days and night stood. Battered, beaten, and half destroyed, but still standing, still willing to battle.

And for the Undead Ludwig, it was but another day, but another fight.