Deus Necros

Inside the deepest part of the Black Tower one could hear the faint echoes of explosive magic and the hum of mana whirling underneath it.

“Again!” Van Dijk said as he stood over Ludwig’s fallen form.

The command rang off the warded walls and came back thinner, like sound pressed through glass. The training chamber under the tower smelled of hot metal and old spell-smoke; the lamps along the ceiling burned without flame, casting a pale, artificial daylight that never shifted. Ludwig lay on his back for half a breath, chest dragging at the air that he didn’t need, the stone under him leeching heat as if the floor itself disapproved. Van Dijk’s shadow fell across his ribs, precise, patient, unpitying, until Ludwig blinked and the shape resolved into the man himself, coat unrumpled, eyes keen with the miser’s focus of a collector examining a rare fault.

“Right,” Ludwig picked himself up, with the lich’s staff in hand “What was it… yes, Dark Tide!” Ludwig slammed the butt of the staff on the ground.

He rose in a single, practiced roll, fingers finding the familiar balance of the black wood. The staff’s grain was cold and faintly oily under his palm; power thrummed along its length like a low, sour note in the bones. He set his feet, drew breath through his teeth, and felt the pattern of the spell begin to lace together in his chest, pressure gathering, edges aligning, then he drove the butt against stone. The impact clicked the lattice of runes awake.

“Too slow!” Van Dijk’s reply came as several bone spears with blunted tips struck at Ludwig’s arm throwing away his staff and canceling his spell.

The interruption cut clean. White shafts hissed out of nowhere with a dry, cartilage crack, blunted to bruise but fired with enough force to numb. They hammered Ludwig’s forearm before the shaping could crest; pain flared, the grip spasmed, and the staff skittered wide, clattering into a warded panel that swallowed sound. The spell unraveled with an audible snap, like cloth torn along a bias. Van Dijk did not move from where he stood; only his fingers had twitched.

But Ludwig didn’t hesitate to use his other hand, “Dark Bullet!”

He pivoted into the next pattern without thought, left hand carving the sigil in the air as his right shook off sensation. This one was small, mean, efficient, compression and release. The chamber’s air seemed to dip, then a dart of night condensed at his palm and shot forward with a wasp’s whine, arrowing at the exact center of Van Dijk’s chest.

The bullet shot out of his arm like a javelin and went straight for Van Dijk’s chest, only to splash against what looked like an invisible barrier.

It hit something that wasn’t there; black force flattened and broke like ink thrown onto glass, ripples racing out in a tight circle before the darkness winked away. The ward did not flash or flare; it rejected the assault with professional disdain. Van Dijk’s coat did not so much as stir.

“Better, always be ready for when you lose your main casting weapon or you’re disrupted. Now, let’s go over movement under pressure and heavy barrage.” Van Dijk pointed his finger up and then pointed it down.

His tone remained almost conversational, but the change in the air was immediate. A faint prickle walked Ludwig’s scalp as the chamber’s sigils reoriented. Van Dijk’s hand made two small, almost lazy gestures, upward to gather, downward to decide.

A hail of bullets rained down on Ludwig, it was similar to the Dark Bullet Ludwig shot earlier, only the density of each bullet was several times his own, and the number was so much it blotted the artificial light of the training chamber.

Sound arrived first: a rising hiss, then the hard, grainy roar of sleet turned to iron. The ceiling darkened under a cloud of compressed night, then fractured into a storm. Projectiles, each the size of a fist, heavy as a hammer, came down in sheets. The chamber’s white light vanished behind the falling black, and the wards hummed as if bracing their ribs. Shadows strobed, staccato and vicious.

Moving through these and avoiding them? was that even possible?

Ludwig’s legs tensed on instinct. He saw paths and then saw them close, lines of escape collapsing under the sheer arithmetic of mass. For a heartbeat he tasted copper and realized he’d bitten his own tongue. His mind clawed for a pattern, angles, cadence, a timing pocket, but the first wave was already on him.

Ludwig’s hesitation cost him the little time he had before the bullet rain smacked into him like an angry goblin squad with sledgehammers.

Impact drove the breath out of him. The first strikes hammered shoulder and hip, the second volley chewed ribs and thigh, and then there was no counting. He threw his forearms up to shield his face and rode the storm, boots skidding, knees buckling. Each blunt round struck like a mallet, the bruising force stacking in ugly layers. When it ended, it ended all at once, sound falling off a cliff, leaving his ears ringing and his muscles trembling with borrowed thunder.

On the ground and wheezing, Ludwig noticed that his health bar had dipped to the decimals, he could have died there, but it seems that Van Dijk knew exactly how many hits he needed to take before he bit the dust.

He lay curled around the aftershocks, eyes swimming, the invisible numerals hovering in the corner of his vision like a physician’s handwriting: perilously low, embarrassingly precise. Van Dijk had skimmed the floor of death with a surgeon’s cool, no more, no less. Mercy by measurement.

“Drink up, and we’ll try again. You need to know how to use your abilities more… Quite disappointing that the feeling of pain you gained from your new heart is making you… hesitant.”

The vial clinked against the stone near Ludwig’s hand. He fumbled the stopper free and swallowed. Heat ran down his throat and burst in his chest like a small, ignited sun; breath eased, edges sharpened, the fog lifting as the tonic stitched him back together a thread at a time.

“But I don’t have movement abilities, not with magic only and definitely not enough to bypass this barrage…”

He pushed up to sitting, voice rasping. Frustration roughened the words. In the sword, in the body, there were answers; with magic alone his instincts scraped and slipped. He stared at the ceiling as if it might volunteer a path between impossible lines.

“You’d think I’ll give you a test that I know you’d fail in? that won’t be proper teaching now would it. Think about it, heal up first we’ll continue later…” Van Dijk said as he walked out of the room leaving Ludwig to ponder alone.

The master’s shoes made no sound crossing the floor. He spoke without looking back, the assurance neither gentle nor cruel, merely true. The door sealed with a sigh, and the chamber’s hum reasserted itself. Ludwig let his head drop back against the cool stone and listened to his pulse settle into something like order. If Van Dijk said there was a doorway, there was one; the trick would be learning where to put his feet.