Deus Necros

The canyon answered.

Hands punched through the ground. Some were human, while others ended in claws, talons, or broken hooves. Skeletal fingers scraped against stone as rotting arms pulled long-buried bodies toward the surface.

Heads emerged next, bearing empty eye sockets, broken jaws, and animal skulls with cracked horns.

The dead had accumulated beneath the canyon for longer than any living creature could remember. Tribesmen devoured by hidden monsters. Beasts killed by Sloth’s black army. Amalgamations crushed in territorial battles. Travelers who had crossed the lifeless wastes and never reached the palace. Or ancient beings before time was a thing.

Kaiser’s mana reached them all.

The ground split open as undead crawled into the light by the hundreds. Most were weak, pitiful even. Some possessed only one arm, while others dragged shattered legs behind them. Several animal corpses had so little flesh remaining that their skeletons barely held together beneath strips of dried hide.

None hesitated.

They turned toward Sloth and charged.

Sloth raised his remaining arm as the first undead reached him. His hand passed through its skull and reduced the bone to powder. He kicked another apart at the spine, then swung his arm through a group of skeletal warriors and shattered their bodies across the canyon.

More replaced them.

They climbed over the remains. Sloth destroyed ten, and twenty arrived. He broke twenty, only for fifty to press in behind them.

The dead did not tire. His Authority offered them rest, but an undead body possessed no exhaustion from which to seek relief. They did not hunger, so the palace’s food meant nothing. They did not fear, so the presence of a being close to a demigod could not make them retreat.

They had already died. Why would they fear death?

The dead rushed toward their own destruction with a courage no living army could imitate. They wrapped themselves around Sloth’s legs, climbed across his back, and hung from his remaining arm.

Sloth crushed them constantly. Bones snapped beneath his grip, and skulls burst under his feet. Every movement destroyed several bodies, but the swarm continued thickening until even his immense frame disappeared beneath it.

A mound of undead formed around him. Every corpse he broke became another obstacle beneath those still climbing. The dead scratched, pulled, and dragged themselves forward with no concern for whether they possessed enough of a body to survive the effort.

Soon, Sloth could no longer be seen.

Kaiser raised his staff, his expression brightening with vicious delight. ”Close your ears.”

Thomas stared at the pile. ”Why?”

”This is going to rock your world.”

Kaiser slammed the staff into the ground. ”DETONATE DEAD!”

The corpses swelled, though not gradually. Hundreds of dead bodies expanded at once, skin stretching over bone as magical pressure filled every cavity. Rib cages widened. Stomachs inflated. Cracks of dark orange light appeared beneath rotting flesh.

They resembled carcasses left beneath the sun for weeks, bloated to the edge of rupture.

Then the first one exploded, and the rest followed.

The canyon vanished beneath fire.

Detonate Dead was not an explosion of flesh alone. Every corpse had been filled with magic, a mixture of flame and compressed concussive force waiting to be released. Hundreds erupted around Sloth at the same instant.

Bones became shrapnel. Skulls fragmented into jagged projectiles, and burning limbs flew in every direction as the overlapping explosions merged into a single violent detonation.

The ground collapsed beneath Sloth. A crater expanded across the canyon floor, swallowing corpses, shattered stone, and the remains of the undead still trying to climb over one another.

The blast had no target. Kaiser had not attacked Sloth. He had detonated his own servants, and whatever happened to be standing inside the resulting catastrophe was irrelevant.

A barrier rose around Kaiser before the shockwave reached them. Layer after layer of magic curved outward, forming a protective shell between the detonation and everyone behind him. Ludwig, Celine, Cain, Redd, Thomas, and the tribesmen disappeared behind the shield.

The concussion struck, cracking the first layers. Fire washed across the barrier, and bone fragments embedded themselves in the magical surface before being vaporized by the heat. The canyon walls shuddered as several sections collapsed over the black creatures still hiding within them.

Tull remained outside the barrier, but his earlier flight had left him far enough away that the worst of the explosion passed before reaching him. Even then, he drove his sword into the stone and hid behind his aura as burning debris rained across the canyon.

The explosions finally ended, allowing Kaiser to lower his staff. His barrier dissolved to reveal a vast crater occupying the center of the battlefield.

Flames moved across the remains of the dead. Thick black smoke rose from the ruin, carrying the smell of scorched meat, shattered bone, and old decay. The creatures watching from the canyon walls had retreated deeper into their fissures.

Thomas stared into the smoke. ”I’m not going to ask it.”

Ludwig clicked his tongue. ”You just thought about it.”

”What?”

”If he’s dead.”

”I specifically said I wasn’t asking.”

”Thinking it counts. You jinxed it, man. Should’ve kept quiet.”

Something moved inside the smoke, and Thomas’s flame dimmed.

A foot stepped onto the edge of the crater.

Sloth emerged, or what remained of him.

Nearly all his flesh had been stripped away. The pale skin that once covered his enormous body hung in a few burned sections across his ribs, shoulders, and face. Most of him had been reduced to a towering skeletal frame. White bones moved beneath charred remnants of muscle, held together by something far beyond ordinary anatomy.

Half of his severed arm remained gone. The other had been stripped to bone almost to the shoulder.

His face was little more than a skull with several stubborn sections of flesh clinging around his crimson eyes. Blue blood ran through exposed channels and dripped from the gaps between his ribs.

He walked through the burning corpses, each step coming slowly. The pace did not come from injury, but from resentment toward the act of moving at all.

The skeletal giant reached the edge of the crater and stopped before them.

Ludwig rested Nightbreaker across his shoulder. ”Damn. For someone so slothful, you really don’t want to just die and be done with this.”

Sloth’s exposed jaw moved, but the voice that emerged sounded unchanged. It remained calm, heavy, and tired.

”I have grown weary of this.”

The remaining flesh around his eyes tightened.

”Let us finish it.”