Deus Necros

The retreat was slightly chaotic. Some scrambled, some managed to run up, some fell and stood up, but they all withdrew.

It wasn’t a clean pullback, not with the slope slick from blood and churned dirt, not with adrenaline turning legs into uncoordinated hammers. Orcs shoved past each other, ogres barked orders that came out as snarls, goblins vanished into anything that looked like cover, and a few lizardmen skidded on their own tails before catching themselves.

A wounded troll nearly toppled as it tried to move backward with a boulder still in its grip, then dropped it with a grunt and lumbered after the rest. Ludwig kept his position just long enough to make sure no one got left in the kill zone, then moved with the pack, fast, controlled, eyes flicking over shoulders to count bodies and gaps like a miser counting coins.

Then they watched what was happening after disengaging from the Red Orcs.

The moment they reached a safer pocket, the sound shifted. Less of the clean, close clanging of steel-on-steel right in their faces, more of a distant, ragged uproar, shouts that didn’t match, impacts that came in clusters, and the wet, awful noise of bodies colliding with bodies. Ludwig turned his head and saw it clearly through the broken tree line and the jagged slope: the Red Orc tide had lost its shape.

Blood seeped as Red Orcs fought. And what did they fight?

Themselves.

Not in sparring, not in an “orcish honor” challenge, but in the blind, rabid way of animals locked in a pen with fire under their feet. One red orc tackled another and tore at its throat like it was trying to eat the rage out of it. Another swung a club into the back of its own kin because its eyes couldn’t sort friend from foe anymore. A pair hacked at each other with axes until both were too weak to stand, then kept biting anyway, teeth grinding on meat and bone. The slope became a pit where the strongest didn’t necessarily win, only the most mindless.

It was the sort of chaos that one would be impressed about but at the same time feel worry to see. Even if it happened among enemies.

Ludwig didn’t feel sympathy. He felt unease. This wasn’t just confusion; it was a proof of how fragile the Red King’s control really was once something interfered. If a few wards could turn an army into cannibals, then whatever kept those troops moving wasn’t discipline, it was compulsion. Compulsion broke in ugly ways. Compulsion also came back with vengeance once it snapped into place again.

Blinded with whatever disruption the wards had they saw each other as their enemies. They fought, battled, killed and ate their own.

Some didn’t even use weapons anymore. They shoved faces into wounds and drank like thirst had become a command. Others battered each other with fists, then crawled over the fallen to chew at warm flesh. Vines near the lower dead began twitching as if the mountain itself was pleased, thorns stirring in the churned mud where blood had soaked deep.

Ludwig watched one red orc on its knees, mouth full of soil, chewing pebbles like they were marrow, eyes rolled white. A second red orc limped up behind it, swung an axe, and split its spine. The first didn’t even scream, just kept chewing until its jaw slackened and it collapsed. The ward didn’t just confuse them. It broke something in them.

“That ward… is too effective,” Damra said.

Damra’s tone was half awe, half horror, like he’d just watched a feast turn into a massacre inside the same mouth. His hands tightened around his axes without him realizing it, knuckles going pale under green skin.

“Yeah, unfortunately,” Ludwig said, “It’ll only last for a few minutes. The Core was too damaged, and whatever is in the mountain that’s sapping away death, is also affecting it. There is a parasite here under this mountain, I don’t know who placed it here, but so far it’s been protecting you guys, but also is the reason why no one is allowed to return to the cycle of the tower if they die here. It holds them on the mountain’s grounds, so don’t die.” Ludwig looked ahead at the rapidly diminishing numbers of Red Orcs.

He spoke fast, clipped, like he was forcing the explanation through his teeth before the next problem arrived. He didn’t like admitting uncertainty, but this wasn’t a normal magical formation. Something else was hooked into the mountain, something that drank at the same channels the tower used, something greedy enough to starve the ward and still keep the dead from leaving. Ludwig could feel it in the way the thorns behaved: not merely defensive, but possessive.

“So, you mean, that these Red Orcs that die here… won’t return in the next cycle.”

Damra’s eyes stayed on the slope as he said it, like he was trying to picture the weight of that statement. Killing in this place had always been cheap, temporary. Ludwig had just made it expensive.

“A small blessing for those who died earlier, they won’t have to face this carnage again.” Ludwig said.

The thought didn’t comfort Ludwig as much as it should have. If the dead didn’t return, it meant the tower’s rules were being rewritten under their feet. Necros had already sniffed at it. Whatever hid in this mountain wasn’t merely a defense, it was a theft.

Damra nodded as he too watched with interest at what was going on.

His expression tightened, then steadied. Ogres understood simple truths best: if death here was permanent, then every mistake mattered more. It sharpened the mood of the survivors around them, even those who hadn’t heard the full explanation.

You could see it in the way the allied orcs stopped laughing, the way the trolls adjusted grips on boulders, the way goblins tucked closer to cover instead of strutting.

Suddenly, a loud roar echoed from the bottom of the mountain.