Deus Necros

The people who charged at Gale were nothing but mindless, soulless husks of what was once human. A far too frightening a comparison with the kingdom of Tibari, where the Knight King once ruled for a thousand years.

They came in a staggered surge through the ruined gate and broken garden line, bodies moving with the ugly persistence of something that had been told to advance and had no other thought left to interrupt it.

Their faces were still human enough to make the sight uncomfortable, not skulls or stitched corpses, but people with slack mouths, glassy eyes, and limbs that didn’t quite move in coordination with intent.

If Ludwig let himself look too long, he could almost imagine they were merely sick, merely starving, merely desperate, until the first one took a hit that should have dropped a man and kept walking as if the impact had been a suggestion.

And that was the part that dragged Tibari into the front of his mind like a blade tip under a nail. The shape was different, the source felt different, but the result scratched at the same instincts.

Their bodies were different, but their actions were similar.

Unlike the people of Tibari, the kingdom trapped in time.

This was very much current and happening right now.

Unlike the people who had nothing but endless hunger, cursed by the touch of the Glutenous Death.

These ones had no thin bodies, nor ravenous appetite. They were guided and ordered.

That guidance showed in their spacing and rhythm, in the way the front line didn’t break into individual panic, in the way bodies filled gaps with mechanical obedience.

Tibari’s curse had been driven by hunger so pure it erased tactics. These were something else: puppets with enough coordination to be used.

The villa’s air felt wrong around them, as if the garden itself had been trained to accept slaughter as routine, and Ludwig could feel the dungeon rules pressing on the space, turning violence into an objective rather than an emergency.

Yet they all fell to the cleaver that charged at them.

Gale did not meet them like a man meeting a threat. He met them like a wall meeting a flood, not moved by numbers, not impressed by momentum. Oathcarver’s mass looked absurd in any other pair of hands, but in his, it became simple, Like the blade had finally stopped pretending to be a sword and accepted being an instrument.

Knight King, Gale, the Ruler once, and the fighter today, tore down their waves with endless ease. His sword would come down, and it would eradicate life itself, though they had nor shown any of such.

Each downward strike was a decision executed cleanly. The blade dropped with calm inevitability, and bodies vanished from the front line in chunks, not just cut but removed from the problem.

Ludwig watched the angles. Gale didn’t swing where the nearest target happened to be. He swung where the most bodies would be, where the horde’s movement would compress, where forward momentum turned into vulnerability.

He would swing sideways and cut, break and destroy anyone foolish enough to charge him, though not even a fool would come willingly to a slaughterhouse.

The sideways arcs carried a different cruelty, not from emotion, but from geometry. The blade traveled low enough to take legs and torsos in the same sweep, high enough to clip shoulders and helmets and whatever passed for armor. It wasn’t elegant, and it wasn’t meant to be. It was efficient, the way a guillotine was efficient.

Yet these people didn’t fear.

These things had long since lost reason.

That lack of reason was visible in the way they didn’t try to retreat even when the first rank became mangled meat. They stepped over their own fallen, climbed on them, pushed through them, hands clawing at Gale’s shield, at his cape, at the empty space between his strikes, as if any contact at all counted as progress.

These people didn’t groan from pain, didn’t agonize, nor feel the creeping of death; they simply moved forward.

Ludwig saw arms bend wrong and keep reaching. He saw a man’s jaw dislocate on impact, and the body still stumble forward, teeth bared in a pointless snarl. If anything remained behind their eyes, it was buried under the compulsion that drove them. It made the fight feel less like battle and more like extermination, and Ludwig didn’t know whether that was a mercy or an insult.

They were simply adamant in their hunt.

Far too similar to the Undead.

But unlike the undead, these ones have lost all sense. They were alive in body, but dead in soul.

Undead still had purpose. Even the simplest skeleton had an anchor, a directive, a thread that connected it to will. These didn’t feel anchored the same way. Their bodies were warm enough to steam faintly in the cold, blood still present enough to paint the gravel, but their presence was hollow. Ludwig could sense it like a missing note in a familiar chord, and it made his brow furrow with irritation that had nowhere clean to go.

Someone had done this to them. Not by accident, not as a side effect, but deliberately.

The Knight King would bash a bunch of them with his tower shield, the closest would splatter against the shield, and those behind would be blasted away. His sword would come down at an angle, cleaving through three or four, then rise up the other angle, cleaving even more.

Ludwig watched and felt something deep inside him. He wasn’t watching a massacre happening; he was watching something far crueler.

It was art. As much as he hated to admit it. Gale’s every move seemed to have a reason and purpose behind it.

The shield work was as brutal as the sword. Gale didn’t just block, he struck with the shield like it was a battering ram, turning bodies into wet impacts that left streaks across metal. The ones behind didn’t get to slow down. They were shoved forward by the crowd, and the moment they were in range, the blade met them. The motion looped without waste, a cycle designed to convert numbers into silence.

Grouping up against him proved futile. His worn cape took hands with it, threads tearing, scraps left behind like trophies that meant nothing. Anyone who clung long enough to feel proud about it got corrected. Gale’s turn was always late by exactly the amount needed to lure more bodies in, and then the correction came: a short swing, a brutal shove, a strike that launched a head at an angle no living neck was built to travel. Ludwig noted the timing. Gale wasn’t reacting. He was leading.

Gale would strike, break, cut, and cull, without tire nor exhaustion, without glee nor pride.

A knight of effort and labor. Without burden, since these small fries proved nothing like a challenge. But without ego or cruelty, since they didn’t choose this themselves. Each attack of Gale proved to Ludwig how incredible the true mastery of the Tyrant Blade was.

That was what made it unnerving to watch. There was no rage in Gale’s posture, no joy in the slaughter, no indulgence in brutality for its own sake. It looked like work. The kind of work done by someone who had accepted that bodies were an obstacle, not a triumph.

One strike, one kill. Whenever his weapon swung, nothing lived to tell the tale.

“Do you see it, Ludwig?” the Knight King up ahead spoke directly in Ludwig’s mind.

The question cut through the noise of impact and tearing flesh like a cold thread pulled tight. Ludwig’s attention narrowed even further, focusing past the gore and numbers to the technique itself, to the small adjustments that made the difference between strength and mastery.

“Do you see how the Tyrant Blade is properly used?” He said as he leaped forward.

The leap was the kind of movement that should have been impossible with Gale’s size, armor, and the weight of Oathcarver, yet he did it without strain, as if gravity had been negotiated with rather than obeyed. Ludwig tracked the line of the jump, the point of rotation, the way Gale’s center stayed controlled. It wasn’t acrobatics for show. It was positioning for maximum effect.

The giant came down in a spin, especially with that much armor on him; it felt impossible, too incredelous yet he did so anyway.

The spin turned him into a moving boundary. When the blade hit, it was like the ground rejected the impact and threw it outward. The cutting waves didn’t just shove bodies back, they sliced through them as they traveled, carving space around Gale in a widening circle. Gravel and blood lifted in the same burst. The horde’s front line disappeared, and the ones behind stumbled into the empty space before they understood it had been made by death.

He stepped forward, slammed his shield sideways, blasting more enemie,s and his right arm came down to cull those that remained. Rinse, and repeat, every action, every move, every effort put in killed something. Nothing wasted, nothing lost, not a single motion used without proper purpose.

That was the Tyrant Blade in its honest form: not a flashy sequence, not a single grand strike, but a chain of decisions with no dead motion between them.

Every movement had intent and outcome, and the horde’s numbers were reduced into pieces without ever forcing Gale to reposition in panic.

Ludwig found himself mapping the pattern onto his own stance without meaning to, seeing where his own habits wasted fractions of a second.

[Your understanding of the Tyrant Blade Technique had increased significantly]

The notification hit like a weight settling into place, not praise, not reward, but confirmation that the system recognized what Ludwig was doing: learning by observation, consuming skill the way it wanted him to, because it was faster than suffering through failure a thousand times.

Just by watching, Ludwig learned more than he did while even fighting the Wrathful Death.

He hated that it was true, but it was. Combat forced reaction. Watching allowed analysis. Against the Wrathful Death, survival had demanded immediate choices. Here, Gale was doing the surviving for him, and that gave Ludwig the luxury of studying every angle, every transition, every moment where power was held back until it needed to be released.

To see the technique in practice is far more efficient than trying it yourself a thousand times.

Ludwig superimposed his own image onto Gale and thought about how to use such a technique by himself.

Almost entranced.

He pictured his own grip on Oathcarver, his own posture, the points where his movement tended to overcommit. He ran the pattern through himself like a rehearsal, feeling the technique as a sequence of constraints rather than a list of strikes.

Control your center. Kill with the smallest movement that produces the outcome. Do not admire your work. Move to the next problem.

“Howl for me, Oathcarver! For we have sworn to cull down those that harm our people!” the Knight King roared out as he struck his shield twice and then a third time with the side of his giant weapon.

The roar wasn’t a speech for the horde. It was an old oath forced back into the world, and the strikes on the shield were not theatrics; they were a declaration that carried through the air like a bell meant for war.

The sound made the villa’s garden feel even smaller, as if the place itself had to accommodate the presence of a ruler who refused to stay buried.

Just that mere action seemed to give the Knight King a presence that could make the mountains bow.

The people, no monsters in the shape of people, feared. For the first time, they hesitated; no longer was there a mindless horde of enemies charging, but a semblance of humanity’s truest and most honest emotion revealed itself in these puppets.

Fear.

Fear of death thought they didn’t live anymore.

And the Knight King served them that dish with blade, blood, and battle.