Deus Necros

For a limited third circle magic, modifying the core’s function was not an easy task. Especially with the sluggish and large hands of an Orc.

The formation core sat on the table like a beating organ ripped out of the mountain and forced to behave under a roof of wood and smoke. Every time Ludwig put a palm near it, he felt the pressure of raw mana pushing back, hot, restless, and unfriendly, like it didn’t appreciate being handled by anyone it hadn’t chosen.

His fingers felt too thick for this kind of work. Orc hands were meant to crush skulls, not coax magic pathways into alignment. He kept having to slow down, re-check, re-trace the same invisible “lines” in the core’s structure because one clumsy movement could turn “modification” into “explosion.”

If Kaiser was here, he’d have had a better time and a faster time modifying it.

Kaiser would’ve treated it like surgery, precise cuts, clean intent, no wasted motion. Ludwig had to do it like a blacksmith doing fine jewelry with a sledgehammer: careful, angry, and constantly aware that one mistake would blow the hut apart and announce to the whole mountain that their king was incompetent.

Sighs of frustration came out of Ludwig’s mouth as the first hour went by. He kept looking up at the sky, and back at the door, waiting for the worst news.

The morning light beyond the window grew brighter by the minute, turning fog into pale ribbons that slid between trees. Ludwig kept catching himself listening for footsteps, for a horn, for distant howls, anything that meant the Red Tusk army had already arrived and they’d wasted their last safe hour watching him wrestle with a sphere.

Every time the door creaked from a gust of wind, his shoulders tensed as if expecting the message: they’re here.

The Red Orc army is here.

The thought sat in the room like another presence, louder than the bonfire outside, louder than the quiet hum of the core’s leaking mana.

“Ludwig, you stress too much,” Gale said.

Gale’s voice was steady, almost amused. He stood nearby with the patience of a man who’d waited through sieges and winters, the kind of patience that came from knowing panic wasted more lives than swords.

“I know, kinda funny, I never stressed. But this is taking just a bit longer than I wanted; it’s bleeding energy, but not from the core itself. Something in the mountain is making the core inefficient.” Ludwig said.

He rubbed the heel of his palm against his brow, smearing sweat he didn’t want to acknowledge. The core’s pulse wasn’t stable. It wasn’t simply “leaking”, it was being drained, like the mountain had a mouth somewhere, and this was just a straw stuck into the core’s veins. Ludwig could feel it in the feedback: every time he patched one pathway, the pressure dropped again, not because his patch failed, but because something beyond the hut kept pulling.

“So, it is hopeless?”

Gale asked it calmly, but Ludwig heard the real question underneath: Are we about to lose our only defense before the war even begins?

“Not really,” Ludwig slapped the side of the core as he injected it with a bit of mana, then stood up.

The slap wasn’t anger at the core. It was Ludwig reminding himself he still had control over something. The core flared briefly under his touch, brightening like a wounded animal flinching, then settled, begrudgingly accepting the mana the way a thirsty throat accepted water.

“I had to fully modify the function; it will no longer invite, it’ll cause confusion now. A bit of dark magic added to the mix. Might be helpful now.”

He straightened his back, flexed his fingers once, and felt that small satisfaction of making a system obey. The invitation feature had been too gentle anyway, good for luring strays into safety, useless when an army was coming. Confusion, on the other hand, didn’t care about intention. Confusion was cruel to everyone who didn’t know the path.

“What about its leakage?” Gale asked.

Gale’s eyes didn’t leave the core. He’d seen too many plans fail because someone celebrated the first fix and ignored the second problem.

“Well, if a bucket is leaking, you can just keep filling it with more water than what it’s losing. I modified it so it’ll absorb more energy from unwanted visitors. It was a pain in the ass, though, to find a way to set up unwanted visitors, though.”

Ludwig spoke like he was explaining a simple trick, but his shoulders still held tension from the work. “Unwanted visitors” was the hard part; the wards were picky. They needed rules. Rules meant definitions. Definitions meant loopholes. And loopholes were how you ended up confusing your own people right into an ambush.

“How did you manage that?” Gale was impressed that Ludwig even thought of the first solution, not to mention the second.

It wasn’t praise so much as recognition: this was the sort of ugly, practical thinking a king needed.

“Well, if it’s red, big, and heavy, then it can absorb. Should be good now, Damra!” Ludwig called, and Damra immediately arrived.

He didn’t bother being elegant about it. The ward didn’t need poetry. It needed a crude filter that would catch the Red Tusks and ignore everyone else. “Red” was obvious. “Big and heavy” covered the transformed goblin-orcs, too. Ludwig was relying on the enemy’s obsession with size and mass to make the ward discriminate.

“Yes, chieftain,” Damra had a wide smile on his face as he realized that Ludwig had probably succeeded in whatever he wanted.

Damra’s face was still marked by the morning’s earlier fight, scratches, dried blood at the edge of a cut, but the smile made him look younger, like he’d been waiting for someone to give him a reason to hope that the mountain could be more than a refuge.

“Here, get this back to where you first found it. It should now be good to go.” Ludwig said as he stood up and handed over the core.