Deus Necros

Redd’s jaws snapped shut where Gallows’s face had been a heartbeat earlier.

She bent backward with unnatural ease, the tips of his fangs cutting through the air close enough to graze the bridge of her nose. Her body folded almost flat, robes brushing the glowing blood script beneath her feet, then snapped upright with one chakram already moving. The circular blade caught Redd across the side of the neck before he could fully recover, carving through fur, flesh, and muscle in a deep crescent that would have opened any ordinary man from throat to spine.

Redd did not fall.

He twisted with the strike instead, one clawed hand slamming down to catch his weight while the other reached for her stomach. Gallows hopped back just enough for his claws to miss, then kicked him under the jaw with enough force to send his head snapping upward. The follow-up chakram came from below, cutting across his chest and shoulder, slicing deep enough that blood sprayed across the polished floor and over the nearest glowing line feeding the core.

The blood script drank none of it.

That, Ludwig noticed.

Redd snarled and lunged again.

He was not graceful anymore. The clean line of Imperial swordsmanship from his first strike had vanished, swallowed beneath something older, lower, and far more honest. He came at Gallows on all fours, then rose halfway through the movement, claws tearing up sparks from the floor as he changed angle mid-rush. His body shifted with him, bones cracking and muscle reorganizing beneath fur, a monstrous frame trying to find whatever shape would let him reach the woman in front of him.

Gallows met him with laughter.

Her chakrams spun around her wrists like halos made for butchery. One blade caught his left hand and tore away two fingers. Redd’s claws clattered across the floor, still twitching. Before the pain could slow him, the flesh at the stumps bubbled, split, and forced out new bone. The fingers regrew in seconds, rougher and more clawed than before. Red fur crept farther along his forearm, deeper in color now, the shade darkening toward fresh blood.

”Oh?” Gallows said, eyes brightening with cruel amusement. ”Still carrying my gift, little mutt?”

Redd answered by crashing into her.

For the first time, he forced her back. His shoulder struck her ribs, and his claws dug into the priest robe she wore, shredding white cloth and revealing the armor-like black wrappings beneath that extenuated her figure. He drove her across the chamber floor, jaws opening for her throat. Gallows let herself be carried for a few steps, then hooked one chakram behind his elbow and pulled.

The arm came off at the joint.

Redd’s momentum broke. Blood burst from the torn socket as his severed arm spun across the floor, bouncing once before sliding near the floating core. Gallows planted a foot against his chest and kicked him away, sending him skidding backward through the scattered unconscious bodies of the paladins Kaiser had dropped. Redd rolled, struck the base of a pillar, and stopped there for one short, ugly second.

His shoulder convulsed.

Flesh burst from the stump, red and wet, followed by bone growing too fast to be natural. Muscle wrapped around it in thick cords. Fur spread after, longer than before, a deeper crimson spreading up his neck and down his spine. When his new arm struck the ground, the claws were larger, curved like hooks meant for climbing inside a body rather than tearing across it. His back hunched further, and his face lengthened, less like a simple wolf now and more like something that had started with a wolf and decided that nature had been too restrained.

Gallows tilted her head, smiling wider. ”I gave you that power, and you dare use it against me?”

Redd’s answer came as a roar.

He rushed her again, faster despite the damage, his regenerated arm leading. Gallows spun the chakrams once, twice, then met him in the center of the chamber. The first blade cut across his thigh. The second opened his side. Redd’s claws scraped across her shoulder in return, tearing through cloth and skin. For a moment the wound looked deep, black-red blood spilling down her arm, then the flesh simply knitted itself shut as though the injury had been an insult too small to acknowledge.

Redd saw it and attacked harder.

He gave up protecting himself completely. Every time Gallows cut him, he answered with claws or teeth. Every slice she carved into him closed, slower than hers but still faster than anything human should manage. A cut across his ribs pulled shut. A torn ear regrew jagged and longer. When one chakram sliced through part of his cheek and exposed teeth beneath, the ruined flesh crawled back into place, and the new jaw came in broader, uglier, more suited to crushing bone.

Ludwig watched from beside the floating core, his expression unreadable.

He wanted to step in. Not because Redd was weak, but because time was not on their side. The core behind them pulsed steadily, the glowing blood lines spreading into the walls like veins pumping poison through the Sacrosanctum. Whatever Gallows was doing here, she was not merely guarding the mechanism. She was waiting for something. Every second they spent indulging revenge was a second the formation continued its work.

But Redd needed this.

At least for a little longer.

Kaiser stood beside Ludwig, eyes moving between the core and the fight. To anyone else, he still appeared as a pale young noble watching violence with faint distaste. Ludwig could see the sharper attention beneath that mask, the way Kaiser studied Gallows’s movements, her wounds, her regeneration, and the way the core reacted whenever blood splashed too close to its inscriptions.

”She is not pressing the kill,” Kaiser said quietly.

”I noticed,” Ludwig replied.

”She could have aimed for the head several times.”

”Also noticed.”

”She is stalling.”

Ludwig’s gaze shifted to the floating sphere. ”Yes.”

Redd changed again.

Gallows cut low, aiming to take one of his legs out from under him, and Redd’s body responded before thought could interfere. His torso twisted too far for human anatomy, his neck bulging as his face reshaped with a wet crack. The wolf muzzle shortened, flattened, then stretched sideways as a wide frill tore out from behind his jaw and neck. In the space of a breath, his head had become something reptilian, a frilled lizard’s cruel silhouette attached to a body that was still mostly wolf-beast and man.

Gallows’s eyes narrowed.

Redd opened his mouth.

A violent spray of poison erupted from him in a wide fan, hissing through the air with enough force to coat the space between them. Gallows crossed both chakrams in front of her and spun them around her wrists so quickly that the blades became a shining shield. The poison struck the spinning circles and scattered away in every direction, droplets spraying across the chamber floor, pillars, and fallen bodies. Wherever it landed, stone smoked and melted, leaving black pits in the polished surface.

One unconscious paladin’s shoulder armor dissolved completely, and the flesh beneath began bubbling before Kaiser flicked a finger and dragged the man’s body out of the worst of it with a brief pull of unseen force.

It wasn’t mercy; he worried that the paladine might have a death alert ward in him.

Gallows laughed through the fading hiss. ”That only worked last time because Titania was helping you,” she said, her voice sharp with contempt. ”Don’t you dare think you’re stronger than me, little mutt.”

The words hit Redd harder than the last blade.

His frilled face twisted with rage, and for a moment the ghostly figure behind him flared into view. His sister’s shape, faint and wounded, hovered just behind his shoulder as if dragged closer by the memory Gallows had deliberately struck. Redd lunged again, but the motion was too angry, too direct.

Gallows saw it.

She stepped aside, spun once, and launched one chakram toward his exposed neck.

The blade screamed through the air.

”That’s enough,” Ludwig said.

He raised one hand.

A flat black screen opened in front of Redd, thin as a sheet of paper and darker than any shadow in the room. The chakram vanished into it without slowing. Gallows’s eyes flicked toward the mirror only after it had swallowed the weapon, and by then the second mirror had already opened behind her back.

The chakram shot out from the black surface and cut through her spine.

It split her from shoulder to hip, separating her upper body from her lower body in one clean, brutal arc. Her torso slid forward while her legs remained standing for half a second longer, then both halves hit the floor in different directions. Redd stumbled to a stop, breathing hard, blood running down his fur and poison still dripping from the edges of his changed mouth.

For one brief moment, the room was quiet except for the pulse of the core.

Then Gallows laughed.

Her upper body twisted on the floor, arms reaching backward with grotesque familiarity. Threads of flesh snapped out from her severed torso and latched onto her lower half, pulling it toward her as if she were reeling in a rope. The two halves slammed together wetly. Bone reconnected. Spine reformed. Skin crawled over the wound, sealing the damage with obscene speed. In seconds, she was kneeling, then standing, rolling her shoulders as if Ludwig had merely inconvenienced her.

”Oh, got me good there,” Gallows said, retrieving the returning chakram as it curved back toward her hand. ”Must feel nice. But unfortunately for you, I’m not something that can die.”

Ludwig began walking forward.

”Unfortunately for you,” he said, ”everything eventually dies.”

Redd stepped in front of him, one regenerated arm shaking, his body still half-shifted and bleeding from wounds that were closing slower now. ”I’m not done yet.”

”I’m sorry, Redd,” Ludwig said, not stopping. ”But you’re taking too long. We’re in hostile territory, the Pope is above us, and she has been stalling this whole time for something else to finish.”

Gallows clicked her tongue. ”Figured that much out already?”

”Yes,” Ludwig replied. ”You were not trying to kill him quickly because you couldn’t afford to leave this room or stop guarding that thing. Which means whatever this core is doing, it is almost ready.”

Kaiser moved closer to the floating sphere, careful not to step on the glowing blood lines. His eyes followed the four channels extending into the walls, then narrowed at a smaller ring of inscriptions rotating beneath the larger holy wards. ”This is not merely sealing Titania and the dead,” he said. ”That function is only one layer. The sphere is supporting another ritual beneath the main sanctum, something folded inside the holy wards so thoroughly that attacking the surface layer would only strengthen it.”

Ludwig looked at the core, then at Gallows. ”You are planning to summon the Demon King here,” he said. ”Under the damned Sacrosanctum.”

Gallows smiled.

Kaiser’s expression darkened. ”The seals conceal the preparation, the trapped souls stabilize the boundary, and the mass above provides enough faith, fear, and authority to keep the structure from collapsing under its own contradiction. Summoning a demon under a holy church. Vulgar, but efficient.”

”I always knew you had a good brain there, old bag of bones,” Gallows said. ”Unfortunately for all of you, you can’t stop it. The ward protecting the summoning core is eighth-tier. None of you can break it. Not even you, Kaiser. Not while I’m here.”

She slapped both chakrams together.

The sound was deafening.

It did not travel through the ears alone. It went straight into the head, a crushing ring of metal and madness that carried a command folded inside the noise. The unconscious priests twitched on the ground. Redd staggered as if struck in the skull, his claws scraping across the floor while he fought to keep himself upright. His ghostly companion flickered, nearly vanishing under the pressure.

A notification appeared before Ludwig.

[You are immune to mental attacks.]

Ludwig smiled.

Kaiser remained standing beside him, faintly amused, completely unaffected.

Gallows’s smile faltered.

For the first time since entering the chamber, her confidence shifted in a way Ludwig could see plainly. She looked from Ludwig to Kaiser, then to Redd, who had buckled but not fallen, and the faintest trace of irritation entered her eyes.

”It almost sounds,” Ludwig said, still walking toward her, ”like you have hope.”

Gallows frowned. ”What?”

”Hope that we will fail,” Ludwig continued. ”Hope that your little eighth-tier ward holds. Hope that your plan finishes before we reach the core. Hope that you can keep regenerating long enough for the Demon King to rise.”

”I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gallows said, raising both chakrams again. ”There is no need for hope. This is factual. You cannot stop it. You are not strong enough to break the ward, you are not strong enough to halt me, and I will not die.”

Ludwig stopped a few steps away from her.

The chamber pulsed around them. The holy wards spun. The glowing blood lines brightened. Redd dragged himself upright behind Ludwig, still breathing hard, still furious, still not satisfied. Kaiser watched the core with narrowed eyes, already calculating how long they had before the ritual crossed whatever line would make stopping it difficult.

Ludwig’s smile widened.

”But,” he said, ”I am strong.”

[You have activated Self Evident Truth.]

[I AM STRONG.]