Deus Necros

Chapter 555: One Down…Many to Go

“No. Ludwig.” Misty howled as she tried to stop him from stepping deeper into the dark. The old rules woke up in her. The Sacrosanctum’s paper laws unfolded themselves behind her eyes and read themselves aloud the way they do when no one is listening. She tasted incense and ash at the back of her tongue.

But the sight of his Undead form made the rest of her words die in her throat. The first syllable found no breath behind it. She saw, and then she didn’t speak. She served light, and he was born in the darkest pits. Her hands knew how to bless a wound. They did not know how to bless a man who did not bleed right. Nor had anything left in him to be blessed.

Every ounce of Misty’s body urged her to run. Rip Titania and maybe the Hero from the wall and trust that what broke on the way down could be grown back in a week. Arms and legs can be made again at the temple. An injury can be healed. But she couldn’t reverse death and if Ludwig decided to kill everything here, no one could stop him. But at the same time, there was something tugging at her to remain, watch and see where things would go. She had seen the line of Ludwig’s power and it did not end in this room. So she stayed. She locked her knees and made herself a witness rather than a flight.

The spell finally came to life, or Undeath rather.

Hands emerged out of the ground and grasped the flailing former servant. Fingers gray and long, pushing through sand that hardened into firm earth under their insistence. The grip was cold where cold means nothing to arms that remember the tightness of coffins.

“So.” Ludwig said as he approached. “This is your immortality. A flimsy rethreading of life. I think the Shrike’s one was far better than this.” He watched the arms of the dead take their places across chest and throat and wrists. “At least that one had the decency to frighten me properly.”

“Now, remember when you said to give up all hope. And I said that it was my line.” Ludwig crouched next to him. His shadow lay across the hood like a hood.

He knew the hands holding the man were not enough. They would not stop a body that wanted to move as badly as this one wanted to. But the man’s mind was the true rope around his ankles. The Undead face. The quiet patience. The absence of human heat. The spells that gnawed at confidence. It all stacked until action had to ask permission from fear.

Ludwig pressed a finger in front of the man’s face. “This is something I have yet to master. It would be nice to see if it works.” Ludwig said. “Dark Bullet.” he summoned but didn’t shoot. A small orb of black magic emerged out of Ludwig’s finger. A neat little night. “The first thing my master ever showed me, his own Tier Eight magic. I’m far from that level, but I can create something close to it. If it means using a cheat of mine.”

His heart, the crystalline heart, the heart of Wrath, gave a small shudder. Not a beat. A memory of one. It sent a wave of energy up his arm as if trying the old rhythm on for size. The wave was pure rage and hatred, red and unbridled. It slid into the black bullet and deepened it to violet. The color sat in the air like a bruise blooming fast.

“As an Undead, right now my emotions are completely muffled.” Ludwig explained. “I feel no hate, no love, no joy, or anger. But when I was half alive I felt them, and I remember them.” He fed those memories into the spell the way you feed a fire scraps of dry cloth. It caught with a soft sound.

The man squirmed and the hands answered. Palms pressed across his mouth. Fingers found cheekbone, eye hollow, shoulder hinge. The body that had broken so many people to fit his art found itself shaped in turn.

Ludwig placed the spell on the man’s forehead. The skin there tried to be arrogant. It wrinkled instead.

“How does it feel?” Ludwig said. “That fleeting hope of yours? When you thought you won, only to die soon after. Tell me, for it brings me great joy to see one’s hope fade from their own eyes. Though you seem to have no eyes.” He laughed once at the last thought, small and rude, as the spell finally connected.

It spread the way frost spreads across a window, except the window was flesh and the frost was burning wrath incarnate. The flame was black and ravenous. It burned with hate and rage, and turned the sand under the man to glass. Air cracked around it. The first sound of pain the man had prepared for himself never got out. The heat stole it and ate it on the way up.

Threads failed. They tugged once or twice like tired spiders trying to claim a housefire. They had nothing to sew. The flame ate edges and middles alike. It ate flesh and bone, vines and skin. It ate everything that made a person who they are. It just ate, and ate, and ate some more. Endlessly feasting, endlessly wanting, and never going out.

Ludwig’s mana began dropping at a rate that would have frightened his living self. He watched the numbers fall on an inner tally and did the neat arithmetic of limits. Ten seconds before empty. Nine. Eight. The ache that comes with that kind of drain reached for his mind with small teeth, but the Undead dullness filed them down to nothing. The pain was a curtain in another room.

He stood and watched the body become less than ash and the ash become less than a stain. When the work finished, there was nothing left on the stone except the shade of where heat had been and a small lantern. It sat there with the clean audacity of a kept ledger in a butcher’s shop.

[You have Slain, The Faceless Blade]

[You have obtained 1 Soul Letting Lantern]

[Your Soul Letting Lantern Has upgraded.]

[You can now Absorb all Souls that weren’t offered to Necros in a former apostle’s lantern.]

[Current Unused Souls in the Faceless Blade’s lantern 168,441]

Ludwig’s eyes widened. A simple, human reflex from a face that presently was not. He had wanted to level for so long. Steadily, properly, the way a soldier builds a wall. Killing monsters one by one meant decades before level two hundred. Decades he did not have to spend. But here, all those squandered souls tucked away by a man rejected by Necros. A hoard without a dragon. A well without a rope.

Enough. More than enough to reach the place he needed to stand before he looked up again.

The thought passed. He filed it next to a door labeled now and a door labeled later. He turned to Misty.

“Now then,” he said, voice level in the cold air that had not yet remembered how to be warm, “how should we deal with this.” He meant the nailed people on the wall. He meant the room where his dark side was revealed. He meant the truth she saw with her eyes. He meant all of it. And his gaze was locked onto the terrified Misty.