Deus Necros

It was the wrong reaction for a commander watching three hundred of his own get shredded in the reeds and stone teeth. Ludwig expected a horn, a counter-charge, some ugly tactic meant to punish overextension.

Ludwig, for a small second, was distracted by that laughter and took note of where it came from amidst the blood and gore he was covered in and was within.

Ludwig’s face was slick with other people’s blood, warm splatter drying into tacky patches on his cheekbones and brow.

Once he noticed it was the Red King, he failed to see a club coming toward his face.

Ludwig caught the movement too late, an arc of wood and metal, crude and heavy, coming in from his blind side.

The moment he realized it, he was too late in ducking or raising his sword to block.

However, the club snapped in half and barely grazed his ear. Looking to the side, Gale had just flashed by, for the first time in this fight, a swing of his sword didn’t take out a life, but saved one.

Gale’s movement was a blur of black steel and pale aura, his blade’s path so clean it looked like reality had simply decided the club wasn’t allowed to exist intact. Gale didn’t stop. He never stopped. He just adjusted one angle of death long enough to keep Ludwig alive, then continued moving through the enemy line as if saving people was just another kind of killing.

It didn’t sound like admonishment, more like a reminder. But Ludwig still felt a form of guilt, having disappointed Gale. Even if Ludwig was his master, he still treated Gale like his mentor.

A single lapse here didn’t just risk him; it risked the entire line. Gale had stepped in because Ludwig had slipped. Ludwig hated needing saving. Not because of pride, because it was inefficient.

He pushed into the pockets where red bodies still clustered, where their momentum had been broken but their rage hadn’t. Spear tips flashed past his ribs, close enough that he felt the wind of them. One scraped his shoulder guard and skittered off, another punched into the mud where his foot had been a heartbeat earlier. Ludwig didn’t slow. He used the stone teeth as cover, vaulted a low boulder, and slipped between two red orcs mid-swing, letting their own weapons collide behind him with a crack of wood and metal.

Twenty wasn’t a brag. It was a measure, proof that even suppressed, even nerfed, he was still Ludwig. He could feel the toll in his forearms and shoulders, the way repeated strikes made muscle burn, the way the orc body demanded breath and oxygen and didn’t simply ignore fatigue the way his undead shell used to. But he was still carving through them. Still choosing angles. Still surviving.

Wrath had taught him the cost of waste. It had taught him that strength without control was just noise. Here, control mattered even more because this body cared. It cared when his lungs pulled too fast. It cared when his legs started to tremble after a sprint. It cared when he swung too wide and had to recover.

Once Ludwig reached the hottest point of contact, where most Red Orcs were gathered, he raised a foot up and stomped down.

“Bone Spears!”

He could almost taste that wine just thinking about it, the way it would flood his veins with power. He could also imagine what it would do to a living gut: the cramping, the tearing, the kind of pain that would drop him in the mud while red orcs finished the job. Not an option. Not today.