Deus Necros

Her [Envy Made Manifest] is an absurd ability that simply renders other’s skills and effects useless. He did not waste emotion on the unfairness. Monsters are unfair. The river did not rise to be kind to those who fell in. The only thing to do with absurdity is to stand where it cannot reach you.

Unlike other creatures he faced, she wasn’t one with abilities of damage and carnage, but she was simply concepts upon concepts. A palace built out of words that became instructions, instructions that became laws. He had learned to break laws with a blade, but this was the sort of law that smiled while it rewrote your bones.

A battle against an enemy that simply changes reality to fit it is suicide in blood letters. Still, there are shapes that even reality prefers not to touch.

“Seems like I’ll need to bring out the big guns,” Ludwig said as he looked at Tull and gestured to him with his head to simply back away. He kept the gesture small, a nod that belonged to men moving furniture through narrow doors.

Tull hesitated, but his hands were bleeding from the mere fact of him clashing weapon with her. The sword hilt was slick now, the grooves filled with his red. He flexed his fingers once, found he could keep hold, and then stepped a half pace back, the compromise a soldier makes when ordered to live.

“See here, Envy… I can see you stole the Witch’s Skin,” Ludwig said. He let his eyes return to her face, steady and unimpressed. Naming a theft is not a cure, but thieves dislike mirrors.

“And what of it? I was more deserving,” she smiled. The words wore innocence like perfume. For a moment she looked young, almost sweet, and the river made a sound like laughter that had choked on a bone.

“Well, there is one thing you should know about immortality,” Ludwig placed Durandal back in his ring. The blade slid away with the silence of a secret being kept. His hands came up empty, then bare, and the air around his wrists grew heavy. “It isn’t omnipotence.” He said it as a lesson, the way a teacher raps a desk.

The Envious Death simply squinted her eyes, Ludwig didn’t even need to read her lips or her to speak to understand that she was confused. Her head canted the slightest bit, a cat deciding if a leaf was worth killing.

Instead of Durandal, something that made the souls in the river squirm manifested in his arm. It arrived like a bad memory, all at once and already inside the room. The yellow water recoiled in a soft swell, and the bank shuddered as if remembering earthquakes.

[NightBreaker]

The pentagonal-faced Mace that belonged to Morde’Xander, the most powerful of the Usurpers. The weight of it settled into Ludwig’s bones the way a title settles into a tyrant’s voice. The spikes glinted without light, a matte promise of ruin. Grip worn by hands that had ended cities. Balance that felt like gravity had agreed to help.

“You can wield that, how env-” her words didn’t finish before the mace made direct contact with her head. Ludwig did not announce it. He did not chamber it like a showman. He simply let the arm drop with purpose, shoulder and hip lending their steady vote. The head of the mace met her face with a noise like a cathedral being corrected.

Instead of the sound of impact, steel on steel, the Envious Death was simply thrown like a ragdoll smashed with a sledgehammer. She left the ground as if insulted by it. The distance she traveled was not dramatic so much as decisive, dozens of meters eaten in a single, ugly breath.

[-0 HP]

She bounced and crashed and tumbled several dozen meters into the ground before stopping. The ground accepted her like a body accepts a knife, reluctantly and then all at once. Dirt belched up in halos. A line of the river’s edge collapsed with a sigh.

Gasping for breath when she woke up, her impervious skin which should have been more than capable of surviving any blade or weapon was cracked and fractured. Fine fissures spidered from cheekbone to temple, hairline faults through borrowed perfection. It was not damage so much as the memory of damage daring to exist.

“YOU LITTE-” her words didn’t even finish as Ludwig holding the mace with both arms came crashing down on her, slamming the spiked mace into her face. He did not give her time to be eloquent. Rhythm mattered here, not conversation. He put his foot near her shoulder and drove the weight in like a stake into a vampire’s misunderstanding.

The ground rumbled and the river shook. The banks slumped, then held. The yellow current rose in a soft dome, then flattened, angry and obedient. A flock of souls beneath the surface scattered like fish.

The standing Tull fell on his ass while he was so far away. Pride slammed down with him, a little oof forced out, the sort of sound a man makes instead of swearing in front of a prince.

“Bloody hell,” Tull muttered. The words were small and reverent. He wiped blood from his palm onto his tabard and did not try to stand yet.

Red and the prince who were even further away were only able to stare at Ludwig who came down with the mace once more. Redd’s eyes were wide in a way that belonged to hunters when mountains move. Alex’s jaw had locked, the neat certainty of his face hairline cracked by awe. And the hidden presence of fear.

Blow, after terrifying blow, no hesitation, no stop and no faltering. Ludwig’s horns flared out with crystalline energy. As if for the first time since the Death of Morde’Xander the Heart of Wrath was finally and truly let loose. Each strike carried that red thunder, the kind that rolls low across a plain and decides that villages are suggestions.

Another seismic blow came down, and with it aura of pure red and rage tore through the skies, mere aftereffect of [Nightbreaker] falling down on its enemy. The air around the mace’s head thinned, heated, then snapped back in with a clap that rearranged dust. Pebbles hopped, then skittered away like frightened insects.

Then a second, and a third. The cadence set itself, a drum that had remembered an old song. Ludwig’s breath matched it, steady and controlled, no triumph, no fancy. Work.

[-0]

[-0]

[-0]

The Envious Death’s expression of anger couldn’t be shifted or changed even when Ludwig smashed her face in directly with the mace. Rage does not bruise. Her eyes did not water. Her cheek did not swell. Only those slight cracks grew, slow as winter.

“HOW FUTILE!” she howled only to receive another blow to the face. The howl arrived thin and distant to Ludwig, as if it happened in the next room. He watched her mouth make the word, the vowels stretching like something being put on that did not fit.

[-0]

More fracturing. The web spread finer, mapped over the borrowed perfection like the first lines on a once-perfect mirror. There was a terrible beauty to it, the honesty of damage insisting on itself.

“I CANNOT DIE!” She howled. The statement had the pathetic grandeur of a spoiled queen. The river flinched at the volume anyway.

Another blow another explosion and the ground caved some more. Chunks lifted and fell back, a slow heave that threatened to become a sink. The smell of hot stone rose, gritty and sour, mixed with that yellow reek of old souls.

[-0]

“YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME!” She hollered, yet he struck down agai,n further pinning her to the ground. The mace head kissed earth and punched deeper, edges taking little bites out of reality as if it were stale bread. Ludwig’s forearms burned, the good burn of effort meeting purpose.

[-0]

“SNIVELING CUB!” she grit her teeth as she shoved her arm right up Ludwig’s abdomen, piercing right through. Her hand was a piston that did not believe in ribs. The entry was clean and obscene, a hot slide that pushed air out of him in a grunt.

[-12,888 HP]

Yet Ludwig didn’t even have a change of expression to the pain, as he grabbed her arm with one hand, his face showed teeth no human should ever be able to “THAT TICKLES!” he smiled as he raised the man sized mace with the other hand and slammed it down on her. The grin was all enamel and bad news. His grip on her forearm tightened, bone groaning under his fingers, pinning that pretty cruelty where it could do less good.

[-0]

More fractures appeared on her face. The hairline breaks complicated, reached for each other, tried to become a map. She remained flawless even as flaw collected upon flaw. Perfection is stubborn. So was the breaking.

“You cannot do this forever!” she howled. The words were meant to be prophecy. To Ludwig they were an item on a list.

“Believe me!” Ludwig smiled once again, “I truly can!” and the mace fell once again. He let the truth of it carry, simple and savage. Endurance was a language he spoke better than kings.

[-0]