Deus Necros

Not long after, the fight subsided as the last straggler was culled down.

The garden settled into a sickening quiet broken only by the small noises of settling debris and distant city sounds that still refused to come near this place. Blood soaked into gravel and dirt. Scraps of cloth and armor lay scattered like discarded costumes. Ludwig’s timer awareness stayed sharp in the back of his mind, counting down without mercy.

“We wasted a bit of time,” Ludwig said.

“I apologize for taking my pleasure in this battle, let us make haste,” the Knight King said as he bounded toward the main door of the villa.

Even that apology carried no real softness, just acknowledgment. Gale’s strides made the ground feel weaker, each step a heavy impact that dared the villa to prove it was sturdy enough to pretend it was a home.

The door that was adorned with old wood and steel tore apart as if it were made of brittle glass when the Knight King struck at it.

The shield hit once, and the door ceased to exist as a barrier. Wood splintered outward in a blast of shards, steel fittings popping free and spinning through the air. The impact sounded like a tree being shattered by lightning, and the opening it created revealed darkness and stench beyond.

The corridor looked like a slaughterhouse dressed in noble architecture. The walls were once polished, now smeared. The floor was a slick ruin of gore and broken limbs, and the smell was immediate, thick enough to cling to thought.

Maids, servants, guards, and more were all on the ground, their chests torn open, their limbs twisted like rope, and their organs gone.

It wasn’t random killing. It was harvesting. Ludwig’s gaze moved over the bodies with cold efficiency, identifying patterns: the same kind of incision points, the same emptied cavities, the same purposeful absence. Whoever did this didn’t just want them dead. Whoever did this wanted what was inside them.

Ludwig, who followed after Gal,e took note and immediately remembered his days back at the academy.

“This house is still as horrid as I remember,” Ludwig muttered as he looked at the bodies.

The memory didn’t come with nostalgia. It came with the dull annoyance of a problem returning, unchanged and unrepentant, as if time had passed only for everyone else.

“They have been robbed of their own organs; this is the same as what happened back then, five years ago,” Gale said.

“I’m surprised you remember that,” Ludwig said as he walked next to the Knight King.

He wasn’t mocking. Gale had been present in those years. Byt never said a word to Ludwig until he was at the Bastos Estate.

“I was there too, I was simply not vocal. Though this looks far worse than back then.” The Knight King said.

“This is [Graft]. The People of this house take organs and limbs from others, plant them in their own bodies to improve themselves. Hoyo did that. And I doubt his uncle isn’t doing that either. Let’s find them. We have less than ten minutes left.”

Ludwig’s words came faster now, because the timer pressure sharpened everything. Graft wasn’t just an imperial crime punishable by beheadings.

It was a method. It hardly explained why the villa felt wrong, why the people outside were puppets, why the duke’s capital looked like it had been hollowed out from the inside. But it was still a good enough reason to eradicate this house that failed to proper its ways.

“There is no need to search far,” Gale Said, “I can already sense a vile energy at the end of this corridor.”

“Then let’s hurry,” Ludwig said as he pulled out [Nightbreaker].

Nightbreaker appeared heavy and eager, the kind of weapon that felt impatient in a place like this, as if it had been made to break corruption and hated waiting for permission.

Ludwig brought it into position and moved without wasting time on careful steps. The floor was slick, but his footing stayed controlled.

The two of them ran up; Gale’s stomps felt like they would make the villa collapse, while Ludwig followed suit with [Nightbreaker] over one shoulder. The massive weapon was even larger than Ludwig himself, but with his current strength, it felt like it weighed nothing. The mace seemed to be willing to break skulls and have some blood, as it had yet to enjoy a feast similar to the one the Knight King had greedily enjoyed.

They moved as a pair built for ruin: Gale forcing the environment to accept him, Ludwig cutting a line behind.

Unfortunate souls… No, unfortunate bodies, stragglers, and puppets, the same as the ones that tried desperately to stop Gale spawned from dark corridors and corners. They were there, hiding, or waiting, or simply didn’t announce themselves until they were spotted.

They charged at the two, and that was the last action they ever took.

Blood splatter, bones destroyed, and flesh torn and crushed to patty were all that remained as the two moved past the halls.

The hallway’s walls shook with each of Gale’s steps, dust falling from corners, and Ludwig’s grip stayed steady on Nightbreaker. Having drunk a bit of blood would make one think it would be doused, but it was merely fuel to the fire.

The weapon’s presence was feeding into his irritation and sharpening it into focus.

Just as they reached the other side of the villa’s hall, their location simply seemed to change.

There was no warning. No gradual distortion. One moment, the corridor was there, the next it wasn’t, as if a hand had grabbed the world and flipped a page.

Ludwig felt it before; this was the same as what the Witch of the Mares had done. Transposition.

The sensation wasn’t physical. It was a shift in space that made logic stumble.

Ludwig’s stance adjusted immediately, weapon angled, eyes scanning, because the first second after transposition was always when traps liked to bite.

They found themselves in a different room where the Knight King was forced to hunch a bit as his head reached the ceiling.

The ceiling was low enough to insult Gale’s size, forcing him into a constrained posture that would have crippled a normal fighter. Furniture sat at odd angles, like the room was half assembled from different places. The air smelled slightly different, too, as if the villa couldn’t decide what kind of decay it wanted in each section.

“Hmm, we’ve been displaced.” The Knight King said as he turned to Ludwig.

“The cube. The cube that’s affecting this place. It transformed it into a dungeon. I was wondering how that could happen. But if it keeps changing our locations, never mind ten minutes, it’ll take us an eternity to find where Teresia is.”

Ludwig’s irritation sharpened into something closer to anger, not wild, but focused. A changing layout turned speed into waste. It turned competence into a coin toss. Whoever held that cube controlled distance itself, and that meant every second they spent running could be made meaningless with a single shift.

“I can still sense the vile energy they are using,” Gale said as his vizors pointed down.

“Break the floor,” he said.

Without hesitation, Ludwig raised and brought down Nightbreaker. For the weapon broke night itself into bloodied mornings. It didn’t feel any resistance when it was met with stone.

The impact was immediate. Stone didn’t resist. It failed. Nightbreaker drove through the floor like it had been waiting for the excuse, and cracks spidered outward before the entire section gave in. The sound was a violent collapse that swallowed the room’s stale air and replaced it with dust and the deeper stink of whatever lay beneath.

The whole floor collapsed, and the two fell back down to the first floor.

The drop was short enough to be controlled, long enough to make the villa feel layered like a creature with too many organs. They landed amid debris and broken stone, Ludwig’s stance steady the moment his boots hit, Nightbreaker already raised again as if the weapon wanted to continue breaking without being asked twice.

“This wall,” The Knight King pointed, and Ludwig obliged.

The wall didn’t just crack, it exploded. Behind it, the space was hidden like a secret kept in meat and glass. A vat dominated the room, and Teresia’s body inside it was too still, too arranged, blindfold still in place like a mockery of her title. While the rest of her body was bare.

The liquid around her caught dim light, and the whole scene screamed preparation rather than imprisonment, like this was a recovery chamber built to return her to function.

A man was next to her wearing black drabs over his shoulders that covered him entirely but for his face. He had six sets of eyes, missing a nose, and his teeth were not those of a human but more that of a creature of nightmares. As his face seemed to have knits of skin that were making it.

Ludwig’s first thought wasn’t horror. It was recognition of method.

This wasn’t a creature born like that. This was a body made like that. The eyes didn’t belong together. The skin didn’t lie naturally across bone. The teeth looked chosen. The stitching was too deliberate. The room’s smell had a faint copper and old disinfectant layer under the rot, the smell of someone trying to keep their work clean while doing vile things.

The creature’s eyes widened. Not together, but in a slow, stuttering sequence, like lights flickering on in a dead building.

It hadn’t expected them.

In its hand, the black cube trembled. Not violently. Not visibly, at first. Just enough to hum against the bones of its fingers.

The cube was small enough to fit in a hand, but it felt heavier than its size suggested, not in weight, but in presence. It vibrated like a heart that wasn’t meant to beat, and Ludwig immediately understood the relationship between that vibration and the villa’s shifting rooms. This was the lever. This was the reason the dungeon existed.

Under his robes, two other sets of hands moved. Six arms in total, and many of these arms had different skin color to them. Attached in needlework more than natural organs of one’s body.

The hands all clasped the cube and began changing its structure rapidly.

There was no elegance to the movement. It was frantic craft, fingers working angles and edges like a lock being turned mid-fight. The cube’s surface shifted, corners reconfiguring, lines bending into shapes that hurt to follow, and Ludwig felt space tighten in response, like the villa was listening to commands spoken through geometry.

“BEGONE!” the man or creature howled.

And immediately, both Ludwig and the Knight King found themselves in a different room.

The displacement hit hard. Not in pain, but in insult, like being shoved out of a room you’d already broken into. The air changed. The smell changed. The lighting changed. Ludwig’s eyes snapped to corners, to entrances, to possible lines of sight, because the cube’s owner could do it again and again until the timer ran out.

“That one…” Ludwig said, “That’s the current Duke…”

“Did you inspect him?” The Knight King asked.

“Didn’t have the time to, but he had the same ring that Drak used to wear. And he was [Grafted].” Ludwig said.

He didn’t need more than that to be sure. Rings like that weren’t common. And the grafting was obvious to anyone who had seen the academy’s disappearances. The duke wasn’t just mad. He was constructed, modified, and whatever spoke to him at night might have been the least of the city’s problems.

“Then we must make haste, he is buying her time to wake.”

Horns of pure red and crystalline emerged from Ludwig’s head. Mana, Aura, and something close to one of humanity’s most powerful emotions, Wrath was mixed in there.

It all coalesced and gathered around the head of the pentagonal-tipped mace. Spikes of crystalline began manifesting on the mace as it was impatiently wanting to be let loose.

Nightbreaker looked even less like a tool and more like an accusation now, the head gathering power in dense layers, crystalline spikes forming with impatient intent as if the weapon itself had grown tired of being held back. Ludwig’s grip stayed controlled, but the air around the mace felt ready to rupture, and the timer in his head felt louder.

“Where are they?”

“They are in that general direction!” the Knight King said as he pointed at an angle form the room they were in.

“Roger, removing that general direction!”