Deus Necros

“You, come over.” Kaiser spoke via the crystal.

The words came out with Kaiser’s usual bluntness, but there was something else under it this time, an urgency that wasn’t panic, just the tone of a man who had found a lever and wanted it pulled before the moment passed.

Ludwig held the communication crystal close, thumb braced on its edge, and the projection sharpened in front of him like a window cut into the air.

The night around Ludwig was quiet except for river sounds and distant insects, but Kaiser’s side of the world bled through the crystal in pale light: the captured settlement, the half-cleaned bloodstains, the enslaved lizardmen moving with wary obedience, and Kaiser standing among them like he belonged there.

Ludwig could see what was happening thanks to the close-range projection.

One of the lizardmen approached Kaiser and stood next to him. The only difference was that this lizardman was a skeleton lizardman. It moved with a stiffness that wasn’t just bone, it was unfamiliarity, like something walking in a body that didn’t fully match its memory of itself. Its rib cage showed clearly where scales once would have been, and the skull’s shape still carried the lizardman’s jawline and crest ridges, but without flesh the creature looked wrong in a different way than sickness.

Not disgusting, unsettling. The kind of unsettling that came from seeing proof that death was not an ending here, only a reassignment.

For everyone else in the settlement, that was how they felt when they saw one of their own turned to that.

For Ludwig, Kaiser, and Gale… it was but another brother.

“This is one of the former climbers, as he said, tell Ludwig what you told me, don’t miss a detail.”

Ludwig snorted, and for a split second, he thought that it would be a human. Another man or woman, for even other races, but not a lizardman. The thought was instinctive; humans imagined other humans first, even after years of monsters and magic.

He soon shook away the thought; after all, no matter what you were before you entered the tower, you’ll get assigned a race that belongs to the tower. The Tower didn’t care what you were in your own world. It cared what role it needed you to fit.

“Tell me then, all you know,” Ludwig said.

“I was once… human,” the Lizardman said.

That confirmed Ludwig’s suspicion. Even through bone and hollow eye sockets, the cadence of speech didn’t feel like a native lizardman’s hiss. It was too measured, too “human” in how it tried to structure thought. The creature’s posture held a faint trace of human shame, too, as if saying it out loud made it more real.

“And then came here, and was forced onto this body. My abilities were degraded severely. And was given a task.”

The skeleton’s jaw moved with a faint clicking sound as it spoke, teeth knocking lightly in places where saliva used to cushion speech. Ludwig could almost feel the memory of that degradation, stats suppressed, familiar abilities stripped, strength turned into molasses. It was the Tower’s favorite cruelty: not killing you, but making you small.

“Don’t pause, keep recounting,” Ludwig said.

He didn’t want drama. He wanted information before the story drifted into emotion. Stories were cheap. Details were currency.

“I was tasked to aid in finding a suitable king for the Lizardman race. But I failed after spending thirty days without progressing much, and then I was fully separated from my body. I felt it, like my soul would no longer be that of a human anymore… my memories began warping and changing, I kept records before I fully succumbed to such effects of the tower.”

The skeleton’s words came faster toward the end, like recounting the warping still made something inside it panic, even now. Ludwig’s fingers tightened around his crystal

Thirty days. A time limit. A cycle. And “fully separated” sounded like a punishment worse than death, a stripping of identity, not just life.

“You mean the tower simply changed your race? Just like that?” Ludwig asked.

He had seen forced bodies already; he was wearing one. But the idea of the Tower changing your soul’s sense of self, rewriting memory until you accepted being something else, made Ludwig’s stomach tighten in a way hunger never could.

That was not a trial. That was erasure.

“The divine don’t have a lot of sway inside the tower…”

Ludwig thought for a moment. This place stops even divinities from heavily interfering, but Ludwig didn’t feel like Necros’s powers grew any weaker here. Maybe because Necros was different. Or maybe because Ludwig wasn’t receiving help, he was a tool Necros had already forged, and the Tower couldn’t undo what was already embedded in him. Either way, it didn’t sit right. Restrictions didn’t apply evenly here. They never did.

“How come you remember now?” Ludwig asked.

“Necromancy, it detached me from what I was. I was a puppet, but now… a puppet under a different master.” The Skeleton’s voice trailed as he looked at Kaiser for a second, then back at the crystal.

“Don’t make me sound like the bad guy here,” Kaiser sighed.

Kaiser’s complaint was mild, almost petulant, but it didn’t change the reality. Necromancy pulled the skeleton out of whatever script the Tower had written into it and tied it to a new leash. The leash might be kinder, but it was still a leash.

“What else do you remember?” Ludwig interjected.

He cut through Kaiser’s sensitivity without hesitation. Ludwig didn’t care about moral framing right now. He cared about patterns. Cycles. Threats. Pride.

“The wars, battles, fights. Until death. More humans came… no, more potential climbers came. And I could only watch or follow. We conquered, and got conquered… we raised kings, and we slew kings, and it kept repeating. Every thirty days…”

The repetition tasted like ash. Thirty days, over and over, a grinding loop where tribes rose and fell and the Tower harvested progress like it was farming despair.

Ludwig pictured it clearly: new climbers arriving with fresh arrogance, being ground down, building something, losing it, dying, and being recycled into the scenario until their identity blurred. It wasn’t just a tower floor. It was a machine.

Ludwig frowned. If it takes thirty days for each cycle. Then he didn’t have a lot of time to become a king or be forced to work for the tower. That urgency sharpened everything. A month sounded long until you remembered how fast a day vanished when you were marching, fighting, rebuilding, negotiating, and bleeding.

“Did you see anyone climb above this floor?” Ludwig asked.

“Not personally, but a few Lizardmen would disappear here and there; they don’t die, they simply get transported away.”

Ludwig’s eyes narrowed. Disappearances without death meant progression. Or selection. The Tower wasn’t letting everyone climb. It was filtering them through individual conditions and quietly removing the ones who met them.

“Seems like each one has their own mission. What about the strange Orcs?” Ludwig asked.

“The Red tusks, I suppose is what you mean since you too are an orc, are they amassing soldiers?” the skeleton said.

“They’ve already conquered the yellow tribe.”

“It’s much faster this cycle…” he replied.

The skeleton’s voice carried something close to dread again, because “faster” in a repeating scenario meant escalation. The Tower was adjusting. Or Pride was. Or both. Either way, the rate of disaster was increasing.

“Does that happen every cycle?”

“This just started happening the last…I can’t remember…” the skeleton said.

The pause wasn’t a dramatic beat. It was a genuine failure. Memory holes punched clean through time. Ludwig could almost see it, years blurred into loops, faces forgotten, details lost, only the pattern remaining because the pattern was what hurt.

“What year did you enter the tower?” Ludwig asked.

“The year two hundred and twenty-second of the Lufondal Empire.”

“That’s… almost five centuries ago…”

The skeleton didn’t say much; the silence was enough. Five centuries trapped in a loop, identity eroded until even your own timeline became questionable. Ludwig felt the despair in the skeleton’s silence. But he couldn’t help it. It was the skeleton’s fate to die here. Away from home.

“You said you don’t remember anything, but the cycles of the orcs changed, right?”

“Yes. They, like every other race, simply existed to allow climbers to go up based on the climber’s quest. But the orcs have been acting strangely every cycle lately. More killing, faster killing, but… they always failed for some reason… What is your quest? It may be related…” the skeleton asked.

“To be King,” Ludwig replied.

“That… is difficult.” The Skeleton said.

“Is that so…”

“Just finding a suitable King prospect was already difficult enough for me that I spent a month without any progress… but to become king…”

The skeleton’s words weren’t meant to discourage him. They were a warning from experience: the Tower didn’t reward effort. It rewarded the right lever pulled at the right moment. And becoming king in a scenario designed to sabotage kingship was the kind of objective that ate months whole.

“It’s fine, I can handle it,” Ludwig didn’t want to stay on depressing topics. “Now tell me, what do you know about Pride?”