Deus Necros

“What took you so long,” Hiro wrenched himself free from Ludwig’s grip, though it was Ludwig who relaxed his grip. Mot was a far more dangerous person than Hiro could ever amount to be.

Hiro staggered back a step on the slick ice, his breath pluming in quick, angry bursts. The cold gnawed at the exposed edges of armor; the sky above was a dull iron lid, pressing sound flat against the frozen plateau. Ludwig’s fingers opened, deliberate and unhurried, as if releasing something far more troublesome than the man in front of him. He watched Hiro with the same wary patience one affords to a blade left rattling on a table, dangerous, yes, but not the most dangerous thing in the room.

He then pointed his sword at Ludwig, “CATCH THIS BLASPHEMER! I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

The shout snapped against the stone and snow, and the paladins around them stiffened as one. Boots scraped, mail chimed, and a half-circle of steel tilted forward with dutiful resolve. The command was absurd in its timing, yet the discipline of rank moved men even when wisdom would not. With Mot on their side, some of them dared to believe the impossible had narrowed to a manageable risk. Fresh chapters posted on ⓝovelFire.net

The slightest tremor went through their line, anticipation, not fear. A leather gauntlet tightened on a spear. Someone whispered a half-prayer and swallowed it when the wind threw his breath back in his face.

Steel hissed from Joana’s scabbard with a clean, practiced sound; her stance folded into place like an old ritual. Kassandra’s fingers spread, the hovering orb over her palm answering with a soft hum that made the hairs rise along the wrist. Runes, faint as frost-breath, stirred inside the crystal’s core, building toward release.

“No, there will be no catching,” Mot said.

His voice did not rise, yet it cut more cleanly than any shouted order. The words fell cold and final. Even the wind seemed to hold for them.

“What? Why are you stopping us!” Hiro said. “If you’re not here to help, ”

“SHUT UP!” Mot howled, for the first time ever, the young appearance of the young man who was blessed by a god turned sour. “Do you have any idea the level of the opponent you’re fighting with? Even at your current ability, you wouldn’t be able to beat the Davon of five years ago. What makes you think you can even stand a chance against the one in front of you?”

The rebuke struck with the weight of a verdict. Mot’s eyes, too old for the face that housed them, burned, divinity’s residue, ill-tempered and precise. Hiro’s mouth snapped closed; the sword tip wavered. The paladins, their confidence suddenly unmoored, shifted their feet and tried not to meet one another’s gaze.

“But… we have the Saint with us, you’re my companion! A hero’s companion!”

“You do realize, that you’re dispensable? Any other hero would do, I’m A hero’s companion, not yours.” Mot said.

The words landed colder than the ice beneath their boots. Hiro’s jaw bunched; color fought the winter in his cheeks. The title that had buoyed him thinned, cheapened by a single correction.

With rage seething through his face and body, Hiro went to raise his own sword to strike at Ludwig.

The motion was raw, reflex rather than reason. He surged, and the ground betrayed him.

Black, slick coils punched through snow with a wet crack, clay-blood and frost scattering. Hiro’s curse throttled into a muffled cry; the sword clanged and slid away in a bright arc. The tentacles cinched with expert cruelty, wrists, ankles, chest, mouth, fast and final. Steam rose where living heat met the cold.

“Good, one less yapper in this gathering… though I have a feeling that he’s swearing that he’ll kill you first, from how he’s mumbling.”

Mot’s glance was disinterested, a scholar noting a specimen that insisted on making noise. Hiro writhed, eyes burning with humiliation, and the ice answered with small, helpless squeaks under his armor.

“Ants can swear and curse all they want, they’ll never defeat a dragon, he’s but a fool… though,” Mot said as he tapped Ludwig’s chest with a single finger.

The tap was almost playful. Ludwig felt it like a knuckle knocking on a sealed door inside him. Heat stirred beneath skin that had known too much cold.

“This is some interesting thing you have here,” Mot said.

Almost immediately Ludiwg’s aura flared around his body.

It rose unbidden, a red wash like furnace-glow under flesh, the air around him tightening with the scorching heat of Wrath. Snow at his boots hissed and glazed.

“And now you can use Aura, you removed the parasite?”

“Yeah, I now know how to stop you from spawning those tentacles straight out of my own body…”

“Good, you grew strong… but I have to tell you something,” Mot said as he pulled his own staff out of nowhere and tapped the ice with it.

The staff appeared like a thought that had always been there. Its end kissed the ice with a sound too soft for the violence that followed. The speed of the draw, the precision of the strike, Ludwig’s muscles tensed on instinct, the delayed recognition prickling along his spine. If it had been an attack, his head would have rolled before his fear arrived to meet it.

This further confirmed the true power behind Mot.

A dome of purple magic appeared all around them, sealing them from the outside world.

Light rose from the staff’s touch and climbed the air in smooth, curving lines, knitting into a translucent sphere. The dome’s hue was deep wine at the edges, thin as stained glass where it bowed overhead. Sound dulled; the wind shrank to a murmur. The plateau outside became a painting.

“This dome will keep outsiders from learning what I’m about to tell you.”

Though Mot wasn’t being aggressive, that didn’t mean Ludwig was letting his guard down.

“Sounds serious,” Ludwig said.

“As serious as a heart attack…” Mot said.