Deus Necros

[You are in a hostile environment]

The message popped off in front of Ludwig, confirming his suspicions. It hung there for a heartbeat like frost along glass, then faded, leaving a cold taste on the back of his tongue. Without wasting a second, Ludwig walked out from between the trees, Durandal drawn. The blade cleared his shoulder with a quiet, decisive whisper, the kind of sound that suggested a room had grown smaller without the walls moving. Leaf-shadow slid over the flat of the weapon in tattered strips; the forest air pressed closer, testing the edge as if it were another living thing entering its law.

“Look at what the cat brought in,” Ludwig said. He stepped into the thin wedge of firelight as though it were a stage someone else had built for this exact moment, letting the glow strike the line of his cheek and not his eyes. His stance did not announce, it occupied, weight forward, heel set, the lantern at his belt bright just enough that its small flame watched the ground and not the men.

“I guess the empire are simply too stupid for sending someone so young to the frontlines.” One of the three people said as he drew his weapon, licking the side of it as if it was a ritual.

The blade came out curved and eager, the edge catching a low orange along its belly. His tongue left a wet streak on steel that steamed in the cool of the clearing. He smiled to show teeth that had seen too much grit and too little water. Smoke leaned around his shoulder and streamed past Ludwig’s boots, as if the fire itself preferred to step aside.

Ludwig crumpled his nose, “That’s pretty bad hygiene.” He said.

No heat, only a dry distaste, as if noting mud on a noble’s stair. The scimitar sang once with a small metallic glee in reply, like a utensil at a poor table banged for courage.

“Grab him,” the man who stood right next to the captured boy shouted.

His foot shifted for balance without thinking, knee bracing against the boy’s bound back as if he were a post to push off from. The boy’s breath clenched and held. The web-mark at the man’s throat jumped twice with command and the taste of opportunity.

And immediately the other two jumped on Ludwig. Sword drawn high and fell fast.

They came not like duelists but like men used to crowded alleys, one to occupy, one to end. Their soles bit dirt with a hiss. A thin lattice of sparks fell from the nearest sword as it clipped stone; the other blade whistled through fern-fronds and shaved them to ribbons.

Durandal met the first curve with a flat, contemptuous parry that turned steel aside and threw it into empty air; his shoulder rolled with the movement, and the second strike went past his coat by the width of a breath, biting a dead log and lodging there with a sulky growl. The campfire spat sap at the same instant, as if applauding someone else’s timing.

“No room for talk I suppose?” He asked it for form’s sake, already moving, already measuring the next three places his feet might need to stand.

“Nothing to say to a dead man!” The line came out practiced, a strip of facts used too often to not be true. He tightened his grip to make the lie hold.

“Funny you say it like that!”. His heel drove forward like a door-stop hammered under a swinging door. Air left the man’s lungs with a flat bark; his back hit leafmold and skidded, raising a smear of damp earth. His scimitar wobbled in his hand and clattered elsewhere, sulking in the ferns.

The first assailant recovered and went for a piercing blow. He came in low, desperate speed in the wrists, the curve of his blade made to argue against such use but forced into service by habit and panicked fear. His mouth was a line; his eyes were two little furnaces of wrong calculation.

“These blades weren’t meant for thrusts,” Ludwig said as he swung his left hand against the sword’s haft. He did not so much strike as place force. The comment rode the blow, conversational, almost bored, the way a teacher notes form even while knocking it aside. His shoulder and hip spoke together through the arm, and the air gave a little grunt where his knuckles passed.

The steel in his bracelet that harbored the Soul Chains connected with the scimitar. It went like brittle ice under a hot blade, one clean shiver and then a hundred sharp decisions. Slivers nicked bark. A longer shard stitched itself into a trunk with an ugly, final sound. The man’s hands opened by reflex, empty before he knew they had let go. The scent of singed oil spread thinly over the clearing and died.

The wide eye expression on the man’s face was enough to indicate that they realized they were in deep trouble. Understanding washed him pale. The web-mark on his neck seemed to darken, a net drawing tight.

The weaponless man immediately withdrew back, took a large pull from his waterskin. The water was not water, thick, heavy, sour on the air even from here. The pouch collapsed in his fist; his throat stretched like a bellows, veins standing like cords. Heat rolled out before the flame itself showed, a foretaste, and then the fire came, fat, roiling, a slab of heat slung like a door at its hinge.

“Fascinating,” Ludwig said with the humor of a cat playing with a dead mouse’s corpse. As he himself pointed a finger forward “[Tenebris]”

His hand drew a straight line through greasy light, and his voice, quiet as a pin drawn from a hinge, named the spell. The little sphere that leapt from his finger did not look like power; it looked like refusal, compact and denser than the air should allow.

Immediately a small yet powerful projectile of dark magic shot forward, a ball the size of a fist went right into the flaming wall surging toward Ludwig. While the wall of flames was rapidly expanding toward Ludwig, something seemed to happen to it from the center, it began morphing, and instead of spreading out, collapsed onto itself.

The fire folded, as cloth does when a belt is pulled tight. Color went wrong, orange bruised to wine, yellow to bruised violet. The sound that should have been roar turned to a wet inhalation, like lungs deciding they belonged to something else. Heat broke across Ludwig’s coat and slid away, stolen.

The whole wall of flames was immediately consumed by the inconspicuous spell.

Ash drifted where an inferno ought to have lived. The man’s mouth hung open around an oath that forgot itself halfway to being born.

“[Ricio]” Ludwig muttered and immediately, what he had taken, he gave back, multiplied, disciplined into a single direction. Purple rode the fire like a stain no light could clean.

There was a sound, half vowel, half breath, and then no more man, only the clean collapse of form to powder, a soft sighing as heat licked the shape away. Soil vitrified and cracked where his feet had stood. The taste in the air changed again, from oil to something bitter and faintly sweet, like burned herbs.

“Sword mage!” one of the remaining two shouted. “USE IT NOW!” he howled.

The title came out like a curse, like a prayer. His voice broke, not on fear, but on urgency drilled into him by a higher voice he feared more than death.

Immediately both of the assailants pulled out a red spherical pill sized object and consumed it.

The shine on the spheres was waxy, wrong; their red was not berry, not wine, but heart-blood kept too long in the sun. They bit down hard. The crunch was soft and final. They swallowed like men who had done this in rehearsals and never believed they would need to.

Without skipping a beat, the sound of a unanimous heartbeat echoed from both of them. and then immediately their skins turned red as they began morphing.

The beat did not come from chests. It came from everywhere, tree, stone, air, once, twice, again, setting bone to a new rhythm. Color crawled under their skin like dye poured into milk. The flesh obeyed orders not given by nature.

Ludwig didn’t hesitate to jump on the first man, before he could even finish his transformation, he lobbed his head off. The redness of skin, and what looked like a protruding horn shot up from underneath his headscarf was something that caught Ludwig by surprise.

“That was not nice, he was mid transformation,” Thomas’s comment sounded awfully wrong for the current situation, but there was an ironic humor in it that Ludwig caught on immediately.

“Only a fool would wait for their enemy to full power up, now, where’s the other little shit?”

His words were a clear testament, that the night was going to see red.