Deus Necros

“Right side! They’re flanking!” Damra howled as he headed to the right side of the battle, a group of red orcs were rushing in to collapse on Ludwig’s army, and pinch them from the fight. Damra took several ogres with him while Ludwig’s allied orcs held the dazed ones in place.

The field had stopped looking like a field a while ago. It was churned into a slick, uneven mess, mud mixed with blood, trampled reeds, broken darts, snapped spear shafts, and bodies that still twitched because the tower loved making death feel like a negotiation.

The Red King’s bulk sat in the distance like a malignant landmark, chewing and swallowing with obscene patience, and every second he did it the air seemed to thicken, as if the world resented having to make room for more of him.

Damra moved like a blade finally given permission. He didn’t posture, he didn’t shout for glory, he just went, dragging six ogres with him in a wedge that aimed for the incoming flank before it could become a pinch.

Ludwig saw the move as it happened: the red orcs weren’t charging the front to win, they were trying to fold the edges inward and trap Ludwig’s line against the mountain’s mouth. Smart, in a brutal way. If the flank hit, the smaller army would become meat in a grinder, and the Red King could keep eating without ever having to stand.

Gale tried his best to reach the Red King, a mean to stop him from further consuming more corpses, yet the red orcs began spending their lives to stop Gale sword from reaching their king.

They’d block it with their faces if need be. They had no intention of self-preservation or protection; all they wanted was to buy the Red King time as he ate his own troops and their own brethren.

Ludwig watched it with a kind of sick clarity. These weren’t soldiers. They were sandbags made of meat.

Any red orc that noticed Gale’s line of approach didn’t dodge, didn’t counter, didn’t even swing properly, they simply occupied space, slamming themselves into Oathcarver’s path with their bodies, their skulls, their shoulders.

The sound of it was wrong: not the clean ring of blade on steel, but wet impacts, bone cracking like brittle wood, teeth snapping, and the dull thud of heavy flesh hitting dirt.

Gale’s technique still murdered everything it touched, but it was being forced into the one thing even mastery hated, waste. A perfect strike that should have been aimed at a neck had to be spent on a torso thrown into the way. A step that should have closed distance was stolen by another body. They weren’t trying to defeat Gale. They were trying to slow him down by turning themselves into obstacles, and the Red King rewarded that sacrifice by swallowing faster, louder, greedier.

Ludwig was debating between rushing further in using the Heart of Wrath or keep his sanity and fight a losing battle in terms of time.

He could feel the Heart like a second pulse beneath his ribs, not his own, something hot and impatient, hammering against the inside of his chest as if it wanted out.

Even suppressed, even muffled, it leaked into his muscles as tremors, into his vision as a faint red edge, into his thoughts as a simple, ugly suggestion: break everything until the problem stops moving. In his undead body, he could treat that voice like background noise. In this living orc flesh, the voice had teeth. It didn’t ask politely anymore. It leaned.

The risk was too much.

’If I give in to wrath in this living body…’ he couldn’t help but expect the obscene damage he’ll cause his own allies if he were blinded by rage.

He pictured it too easily: his arm swinging wide, the force meant for red flesh splattering allied orcs that were holding the line; an ogre turning at the wrong time and taking Durandal through the ribs; goblins caught under a careless stomp because he stopped seeing small bodies as allies and started seeing them as debris.

Wrath didn’t discriminate. It only consumed. Ludwig could survive losing control. The people following him could not.

He grit his teeth until his jaw ached, forcing his breathing to stay measured even while his body screamed for faster. Every time he cut a red orc down, he tried to make it efficient, one kill, one step, one breath.

He couldn’t afford indulgence. The Red King was indulging enough for the entire battlefield.

“We’re approaching fast! Hold on for a few seconds!” Kaiser’s words echoed from Ludwig’s chest as he felt the rumble of the ground.

The vibration wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t the scattered tremble of a few feet running; it was a sustained, rhythmic pounding, like an approaching storm decided to travel through the earth instead of the sky. Ludwig’s boots felt it first through the soles, then his bones did, then the air around him started to shiver as if it couldn’t decide whether to be still or flee.

A quick turn of his head and he finally saw it. A scene that makes the bones shudder from its might.

The horizon behind the tree line wasn’t empty anymore. It was moving. Dust boiled upward in a thick wall, and within it were silhouettes, too many to count in a glance, layered like waves. For a heartbeat, Ludwig’s mind tried to label them as another red surge, and his gut tightened, but then the shapes resolved. They weren’t swollen and red. They weren’t hulking with Pride-touched muscle. They were thin, pale, wrong in a familiar way.

Thousands of allied forces were rushing forward.

They came without breath, without hesitation, without the small stutters living troops showed when fear caught in the throat. Their movement was relentless, synchronized in its lack of fatigue. They ran like they had nothing to lose because they didn’t. The dust that had seemed threatening a second ago became something else entirely: a herald, a banner made of dirt.

They weren’t lizardmen, goblins, orcs or ogres…

They were much worse.

Undead.

Thousands of undead skeletons were running on the planes without pause or break.

Bone limbs pumped, joints clicking, ribcages rattling like dry cages full of old laughter. Some carried rusted blades and splintered spears.

Others ran empty-handed and still looked eager, because an undead didn’t need steel to be a problem, numbers were enough. Their skulls were expressionless, yet the way they moved made them look hungry anyway, as if the concept of momentum had replaced appetite.

What Ludwig saw before was merely the dust they created in their wake; now that they were closer, he saw it.

Kaiser was riding on what looked like a mount? Which was strange since there were no beasts of mount in this place. It had six legs and the head of a lizardman.

It galloped with a spider-like cadence, too many limbs hitting the ground out of sequence, too stable to be natural.

The lizardman skull at its front gaped permanently, jaw hanging as if mid-scream. Bits of bone plating had been fused onto the body like armor, not crafted, grown. Kaiser sat on it as if he’d always belonged there, robes snapping in the wind, one hand steadying himself and the other already lifting like a conductor about to cue an orchestra.

The same for many other ’living’ partners, mostly lizardmen that Ludwig recognized from the brand on their chests.

The brands were unmistakable even from a distance, dark seals stamped on bone and dried flesh, the same mark Kaiser had pressed into living bodies when slavery was the only language Ludwig had to keep them from turning on him.

Now those brands moved with him again, but in a new form, a grim parody of loyalty: lizardmen skeletons running alongside the rest, some riding stitched mounts, some simply sprinting like arrows made of bone.

These were the people he had dealt with on his first day of arriving here.

The same lizardmen that he had poisoned, imprisoned, and then promised them freedom if they fought for him.

And from the looks of it, they’re about to earn their freedom this very battle.

Ludwig felt a flash of something like satisfaction that wasn’t pride. It was leverage. The kind you could actually use.

The Red King’s feast had looked unstoppable because it was fed by time. Kaiser was bringing Ludwig something that devoured time: a wave that didn’t tire, hunger, or fear.

“How the hell did you get that many undead?” Ludwig asked through the crystal.

He didn’t mean it as admiration, but it came out with an edge anyway, shock sharpened into urgency.

His eyes kept tracking the undead wave as it closed, calculating impact angles, imagining how the red orcs would react when their backs were suddenly threatened by an army that didn’t care about fear.

“I’m a Lich, I’d be shamming my entire ancestry if I didn’t have an Undead Army under me!” Kaiser said, and you could hear the pride in his words.