Deus Necros

Ludwig turned sharply toward the priests and paladins clustered behind the line and did not bother hiding the contempt in his voice.

”Don’t use your holy magic anymore,” he howled. ”Only use it if anything gets past the Necropolitis and into the city. The dead got this.”

The reprimand struck harder than most blows. A few of the priests looked offended. A few more looked ashamed. The ones with enough sense in their skulls understood immediately why he was saying it. The paladin who had nearly ruined everything by bathing himself in sanctified radiance could not even lift his head. The breach in the Necropolitis was still there, still ugly, still wounded by the aftertaste of holy power, and every creature trying to force itself through that crack was proof enough that Ludwig was right.

Mot stepped closer, staff in hand, the hem of his robes untouched by the churned filth and death around him. His expression remained as calm as ever, almost detached, as though the field before them were merely another unfortunate event that had interrupted a quiet morning.

”I suppose I can assist,” he said.

Ludwig glanced at him once. ”As long as you don’t wake that thing up, I’m fine with you helping.”

Mot’s lips curved into the faintest of smiles, one that always felt a little too knowing for Ludwig’s comfort. ”Then we understand one another.”

Ludwig no longer paid him much mind. Noctivex had already begun responding to his will. He felt it first as pressure beneath the skin, then as a living hunger spreading over his frame. The black metal came alive, pouring out from him like a thing released from restraint, wrapping his body in overlapping plates that were thicker than shields and crueler than siege armor. Red crystalline protrusions grew where the living metal thickened, not decorative, but brutal, as if the armor itself believed spikes were a more honest language than curves. His body began to expand under the transformation, enlarging with the same monstrous inevitability it had shown in the battle against Pride. His shoulders broadened. His limbs thickened. His frame rose until he matched Gale’s size closely enough that the two of them looked like twin calamities shaped by different flavors of death.

In Ludwig’s hands, Nightbreaker grew as well.

The mace lengthened, the shaft thickening to support the monstrous head at its end, while the pentagonal mass of its striking face extended vicious crystalline protrusions that shivered with restrained violence. The weapon hummed, then vibrated, as if it recognized the battlefield and approved of what it was about to do there. Wrathful aura bled from Ludwig in waves, red and jagged, coating his armor from head to toe until he no longer resembled a man in a suit of black metal, but the memory of a catastrophe made flesh.

The reaction from Solania’s walls was immediate.

People pointed. Guards who had once stood shivering on the battlements stared with wide eyes and faces gone pale. Some of the older soldiers, the ones who had known these peaks in worse days, looked as if they had seen a ghost rise out of nightmare.

”The Guardian!” someone cried from the walls.

Another voice took it up, louder.

”The Guardian! He’s the new Guardian!”

The name spread stupidly fast, not because it was true, but because frightened people would rather believe in a lie that protected them than a truth that demanded they think. For years they had mistaken Morde’Xander for a guardian, a watcher, a monstrous protector left upon the mountain range to keep the Dark Continent from swallowing the Empire whole. They had never understood that he had been no guardian at all, but a vessel of wrath so violent that even other horrors kept their distance. Yet now, seeing Ludwig clad in the same living armor, bearing the same mace, wreathed in that same murderous aura, their minds did what frightened minds always did.

They turned terror into faith.

Ludwig did not care enough to correct them.

He stomped forward, and the frozen battlefield answered him with cracking ice and spreading veins of red pressure. Every step sent wrathful energy pulsing through the ground. The monsters swarming the broken section of the Necropolitis began to hesitate. That was the first amusing thing Ludwig noticed. Up until now, those twisted servants of Sloth had surged forward with mindless persistence, more tide than army, more infestation than force. But the moment Nightbreaker came into view and Ludwig’s transformed shape loomed fully into their sight, something old and instinctive stirred within them.

Recognition.

And beneath recognition, fear.

The Red Tower Master tilted his head as he watched Ludwig advance. ”What interesting armor.”

The Blue Tower Master’s gaze narrowed with far more curiosity than alarm. ”I’m more interested in the man who is actually still sane within that armor.”

The Red Tower Master barked a laugh. ”I never thought you were into young kids.”

”I am not,” she said without looking away from Ludwig. ”But that armor feels almost alive.”

Van Dijk said nothing at first. He merely smiled, the sort of smile that suggested he knew more than he would bother explaining and was enjoying himself far too much while others struggled to keep up.

Ludwig reached the opening in the Necropolitis, where Gale was still holding the line with his shield and Oathcarver. The Death Knight had crushed the first surge through the breach, but the pressure remained constant. More monsters kept throwing themselves at the damaged section, eager to exploit the one weakness forced into the dead city by human stupidity.

Ludwig rolled one massive shoulder and rested Nightbreaker for half a heartbeat against it. ”Time for me to get some work done.”

Gale did not answer. He merely shifted half a step to the side, making room.

That was enough.

Ludwig raised Nightbreaker high above his head, and at last the creatures truly noticed him.

The mace was too familiar to them. The armor was too familiar. The pressure was too familiar. Whatever twisted remnants of instinct remained in those malformed minds brought something bubbling to the surface, something they could not suppress and could not understand beyond the fact that it made them want to flee.

Fear.

Not the simple fear of prey before a predator. Something deeper. Something older. Fear of wrath itself. Fear of the being that had once culled their kind in these lands so thoroughly that memory had settled into blood and passed down even through corruption.

The first ranks of the creatures began to recoil.

It did not help them.

Nightbreaker came down, and the world was painted in red.

The impact was not a strike so much as a verdict. The mace hit the ground in front of the breach, and wrathful power exploded outward in a crescent wave that ripped across the battlefield. Ice burst apart. Blackened bodies flew backward. The front several ranks of Sloth’s servants were not merely crushed, but obliterated, their forms reduced to torn glassy flesh and red-smeared fragments under the force of the blow. The cracked section of the Necropolitis shuddered, but this time the dead city responded with hunger rather than injury, swallowing the remains of the shattered creatures into its streets and walls.

The shockwave rolled farther than that.

It carved a path outward from the breach, slamming into the incoming horde and knocking whole clusters of them off their feet. Those with weaker bodies broke apart on impact, while others were simply hurled back into the ranks behind them, tangling the advance and buying the defenders a moment of precious imbalance in the enemy formation.

Ludwig did not let that moment go to waste.

He charged.

The sight of a giant black-armored figure rushing out of a dead city with a mace the size of a siege ram should have been absurd. Instead, it was horrifyingly efficient. Ludwig moved faster than his size had any right to allow. He crossed the open ground before the creatures could properly regroup and swung Nightbreaker sideways into a dense knot of them. The mace tore through the first bodies like they were made of wet cloth, then carried the rest of its force onward, flattening and rupturing a whole line until only a slurry of dark remains was left across the ice.

One larger abomination, broader than the rest and carrying too many arms for any sane anatomy, lunged at him from the side. Ludwig caught one claw on his forearm, let Noctivex harden with a metallic shriek, then headbutted the thing so hard its skull caved inward. Before the corpse had even fallen, he kicked it into two more monsters, then brought Nightbreaker around in a backhand swing that reduced them all to ruin.

Behind him, Gale advanced through the breach and into the opening Ludwig had created. Oathcarver rose and fell in merciless rhythm while the Death Knight’s shield smashed aside anything that tried to circle back toward the damaged wall. The undead soldiers swarmed after him, pouring through the now-reclaimed gap and reinforcing the line. With Ludwig pressing outward and Gale securing the wound, the Necropolitis began to heal around them, its dead architecture knitting itself back into a more stable shape as the pressure at that section lessened.

Mot chose that moment to act.

He planted his staff into the ground just behind the breach and spoke no grand incantation, no thunderous declaration. Purple energy spread out quietly from the point of contact, threading itself along the black stone and broken seams like silk poured into cracks. The holy contamination left by the paladin’s mistake did not vanish, but it dulled, separated, and lost its authority over the structure.

”You’re patching it?” Van Dijk called from behind, genuinely surprised.

”In my own way,” Mot replied simply.

The Red Tower Master snorted. ”You priests are always more useful when you stop preaching.”

Meanwhile Ludwig continued his work without sparing them a glance. He was deep enough into the horde now that the field ahead of the Necropolitis had turned into a knot of red violence centered entirely around him. Every blow of Nightbreaker caved in bodies, shattered brittle monster flesh, and sprayed wrathful energy across nearby targets. Several of the creatures tried to leap onto him together, clambering over one another to bring him down by sheer mass. Ludwig answered by slamming the butt of Nightbreaker into the ground and releasing a pulse of force through Noctivex that shook them all off, then crushed the nearest three under one descending strike.

The more he fought, the louder the people of Solania became.

At first it had been frightened cheering, the kind born from relief and ignorance. Then it became genuine. The guards on the walls saw clearly now that the breach was being contained, that the tide which had nearly spilled into the dead city was being shoved back, and that the monstrous figure they had mistaken for a guardian was doing more for their survival than most of their clergy had managed all day. Even the citizens who had recoiled in horror at the Necropolitis found themselves shouting now, not for the dead city, but for the black giant standing in front of it.

Ludwig ignored them all.

He struck again, and again, and again, until the ground before the breach became a churned field of shattered servants and black-red sludge. The creatures were still coming, but not with the same confidence. Their front ranks now hesitated every time Ludwig’s mace lifted. Their momentum had been poisoned. They had tasted that ancient fear and could not purge it quickly enough to act like mindless beasts.

That alone made them easier to kill.

At Ludwig’s back, the opening in the Necropolitis finally stabilized enough that the dead city’s own walls stopped cracking. The soul flames along that section burned stronger once more. Undead archers reoccupied the nearby battlements and resumed firing into the enemy masses. Lesser mages in the towers raised their staffs and sent more deathly bolts into the knot of creatures trying to rally outside. Gale planted his shield at the repaired line and resumed his terrible work as if he had never been interrupted.

Kaiser let out a long breath from where he stood farther back, staff still in hand. ”Good,” he muttered. ”Now try not to let another shining idiot help.”

One of the paladins who overheard him looked offended, but wisely chose silence.

Ludwig rolled Nightbreaker once in his grip, then looked out over the still-seething field of monsters pressing in from the slopes beyond. The breach had been contained. The city was not about to fall through that opening anymore. But this was only one wound among many, and the tide ahead was still immense.

He bared his teeth beneath the monstrous helm.

Then he stepped forward again, red aura surging around him, and the battlefield answered with more death.