Deus Necros

For anyone watching, it looked useless, especially for the Prince, he couldn’t understand Ludwig’s logic. Why was he beating down on something like that? She didn’t feel the pain and even if she did, she didn’t register it. She couldn’t even be killed or harmed.

But he’s still attacking without pause or break, like beating on a drum. Alex’s fingers had curled into the railing bone of his own ribs without noticing, knuckles whitening against his tunic. The mind that liked clean lines found none here. It scraped against the sight like a dull blade on stone. Unable to understand Ludwig’s ceaseless assault, its reason, or ultimate goal.

For the Envious Death, she too began realizing something, that this man was probably able to do something like this forever. The recognition walked across her face in a faint tightening of the mouth. Eternity had always been a toy to her, something to be lent and reclaimed. He was treating it like a hammer handle. That offended her in places she did not have names for.

She wasn’t built for battle, she never needed to. If someone strong opposed her, she would take away his strength. If someone weak tried to defy her, she would trample them. Even demons who are inherently loyal to their king bent the knee before her.

Yet this brutish man, weaker than her clearly, couldn’t be bothered to bow down, in fact he is attacking her with all his might giving the feeling that he would be satisfied with them being stuck in this situation even during all eternity if need be. The thought bloomed and curdled. Eternity, but with him. Eternity, but noisy.

Anger welled up inside her, little that she would realize she wasn’t someone who ever got angry. It was the heart of wrath affecting her judgement. It amplified and augmented the feelings of anger. Not even a Usurper was able to supress that feeling. For even the Wrathful Death fell to his madness due to this ’mere’ anger.

And right now she wasn’t thinking straight. Her nostrils thinned, the delicate muscles feathering tight. A faint tremor ran through her fingertips, not fear, but insult.

“With that invulnerable body! How long would you last before you go insane from the hammering?!” Ludwig asked. The question should have been cruel. It sounded hopeful.

Ludwig howled as he slammed again. The answer was in the motion. Insanity assumes you stop. He did not. And will not, which made her question if the man in front of her was ever sane to begin with.

He stole a glance forward, noticing that both Redd and Tull were doing a great job neutralizing the demons attacking them. He didn’t need to worry about them anymore. Redd moved like bad weather, low and sudden, ripping claws through tendons, snapping crescent blades in the same motion he broke wrists. Tull anchored himself in a square of ground and made a clean ruin of anything that entered it, aura humming green at the edge of his blade, cuts clean and disciplined. Hooves skidded, tails lashed and fell still, black mane clumped with dust and blood.

“GET OFF ME!” The demand came ragged, dragged over the grit of her own pride.

” I’LL NEVER LET GO! NOT UNTILL DEATH DO US PART!!” Ludwig howled as this time he added [Graviol] onto the end of his mace. Increasing its weight multiple times over that it slammed down with the power of a mountain. The haft bent in a slow, satisfied bow beneath his grip, the head dropping as if gravity had remembered an old debt. The air thickened, the ground hunched, and for a heartbeat it felt like the sky had settled a little lower.

The very earth around them bulged in pain and agony as a shockwave of pure grime dirt and mud rose up from around them. Clods leapt and collapsed, the river skinned itself in ripples and then in wrinkles, and the souls beneath it boiled in silent panic, stretching pale hands toward a surface that did not accept them.

This blow was the deciding factor.

[-1hp]

For the first time, in all those blows, the damage connected. The number was tiny and royal, a single coin flung against a palace gate. It rang anyway. And it rang loud

!

Her eyes widened as a small droplet of what looked like blood dipped right from under her nose staying hung on her upper lip. It trembled there, perfect, red as a lesson.

Ludwig fangs showed up, perhaps it was his current demonic appearance that added to ’allure’. “Ah, you bleed…” The words came out soft and pleased, a butcher admiring marbling. A sigh of realization, of purpose confirmed of a goal soon to be achieved.

She wiped her lips with her hand, and her eyes widened some more. Never in her life had she ever seen her own blood. Yet this scoundrel dares? The red smeared on her knuckles seemed to burn her, not with pain but with idea. The cracks on her face did not widen with it. The insult did.

“If it bleeds!” Ludwig raised his hand up, “IT DIES!” The declaration slammed into the air like a nail, simple and ugly and entirely true. Nightbreaker lifted, spikes dark and hungry.

“ENOUGH!” SHE HOWLED. The world flinched. A shockwave of pure energy released out of her body and let loose everywhere. It rippled the river into standing rings, sent grit pattering off armor, flattened Redd’s fur for a heartbeat and made Tull’s aura gutter like a candle hit by breath.

When Ludwig’s hammer fell down this time she raised on hand and simply stopped it. causing the force of the blow to rush back through Ludwig’s arms up to his shoulder where they simply burst out with blood as they were dislocated from his own power. The stop was obscene. Momentum turned traitor in an instant, ramming his joints from the inside. Something popped in each shoulder with a wet, bright snap. Heat flared down to his elbows and then out through his fingers, which briefly forgot they belonged to him.

“Fine, it seems that this body had enough of a beating…” she said as she noticed Ludwig’s body which healed itself in moments. Flesh crawled and seated, sockets drank bone, sinew braided neat as rope. The blood on his biceps blackened and flaked, more annoyed than concerned. He rolled each shoulder once, a quiet click settling something true.

“I guess you’re right,” she said as she stood up, pushing Ludwig’s mace away from him. The casual shove sent a cold lightning through the haft, his palms buzzing. She rose with a dancer’s grace out of the pit he had hammered, dust slipping from her hair, the fractures on her face sketching and then smoothing under that stolen skin.

Her nose began bleeding more, “This body was too rigid. invulnerablity is great and all… But it’s too limiting…” her eyes locked with Ludwig’s “I’m already an immortal being without this body’s sturdiness… I seem to have realized what I was missing…” The words tasted like revelation to her, corners sweetened by vindication. The blood on her lip drew a neat line down to her chin, then fell in a fat drop onto the back of her hand.

“Can’t hear you,” Ludwig smiled. The grin was quick and unpleasant, a little flash of teeth that said he liked her epiphanies when they hurt.

“You won’t need to, this one doesn’t need you to hear it to work… Your body… you’re underserving of it… it should be mine, Should have always been mine…and mine alone! It is Mine!” The shape of the sentence was possession, the cadence a prayer to herself. Her pupils dilated until her irises were a thin ring, and the air around her cooled, a little exhale from an open crypt.

[You have lost your {Living Vessel}]

[You Died]