Deus Necros

The core felt heavier in Damra’s hands than it looked, like it carried its own gravity. Damra braced instinctively, both arms tightening as the sphere pulsed once, then calmed, as if it recognized it was being returned to its rightful perch.

“Consider it done, also, the Red Orc tribe…”

Damra’s tone shifted mid-sentence. The smile stayed, but it tightened at the edges. That was never a good sign.

Ludwig frowned, “What about them?”

His stomach dropped before the answer came. That was the problem with being right: dread arrived early.

“They’ve stopped nearby, seem like doing constant days of waging war was too taxing on their bodies. They’re up by the river.”

Relief and urgency hit Ludwig at the same time. They’re resting. Good. They’re at the river. Bad. The river was supposed to be their leverage. If the enemy drank clean water now, they’d hit the mountain harder later.

“Shit, I needed to set up poison.”

The words came out sharper than he intended, and his orc body responded with that familiar irritation, Wrath’s whisper stirring at the edges, eager for anything that felt like “late” and “threat.”

“We still have time; they’ll probably rest for a few hours.”

Damra said it like a reassurance, but Ludwig heard the hidden knife: probably

. Nothing about the Red King’s army was predictable anymore.

“Kaiser, you heard that?”

“Loud and clear, get a corpse, any corpse or carcass would do, and follow my instructions fast,” Kaiser said through the crystal.

Kaiser didn’t waste a word on sympathy. The solution arrived immediately, cold and efficient. Ludwig could almost picture Kaiser in his lab, watching the world through undead eyes like it was a board game.

“You heard the man,” Ludwig said.

He didn’t have to raise his voice. The urgency carried itself. People moved faster when they heard “now” in his tone.

“Would a soothsayer’s corpse work?” Damra asked.

Damra’s face wrinkled slightly as if the question tasted unpleasant. Handling soothsayers remains felt wrong even to ogres. Too close to the mountain’s curse.

“Might as well try,” Kaiser said. “But you must hurry. There isn’t enough time.”

The words “isn’t enough time” landed like a hammer. Ludwig’s hands clenched once on reflex.

“On it,” Dedal’s words echoed from outside the hut.

Dedal moved before anyone else did, fast, eager, like action was the only way to quiet his grief. Ludwig didn’t stop him. Better Dedal do something useful than stand still and let his mind loop around his brother.

Some short time later, he brought the corpse of a Soothsayer, a small one, fully mutilated and missing a couple of arms.

Dedal dropped it on the floor with a wet, heavy sound. The body was twisted in a way that made Ludwig’s eyes want to look away, even though he’d seen worse. It smelled like damp earth and old blood and something sweetly rotten beneath it, like decay had been mixed with perfume.

The orc’s body reacted immediately, nose flaring, throat tightening. Ludwig felt bile flicker at the base of his tongue, a living body’s instinctive rejection of rot. As undead, he’d been spared this. As an orc, he had to endure it.

“Good, now follow my lead when writing this ritual, first things first, we need fresh blood…” Kaiser’s instructions followed, and Ludwig began further mutilating and changing the corpse.

Ludwig knelt. The wooden floor creaked under his weight. He forced his breathing into something steady and set his mind into the same place he used for surgery and slaughter, clinical, practical, merciless. Kaiser’s voice guided him step by step, and Ludwig’s hands obeyed, even when the work turned his stomach.

Blood writing, mangling of the body, stuffing it with its own organs, and some more atrocities.

The ritual wasn’t elegant. It was brutal geometry drawn in wet lines, symbols carved into flesh that had already suffered enough. Ludwig’s fingers came away slick. He wiped them on nothing. There was no “clean” here. Only completion.

And finally, Kaiser asked him to further infuse it with mana.

Ludwig pushed mana into the ruined thing and felt it take, felt the corpse become a vessel, a poisoned anchor waiting to infect what touched it. The body twitched once, not alive, just reacting like a sack being filled.

“Now it’s ready.” Kaiser said, “Anchor it with a rock, rope, and throw it down the river. The water that will come in contact with it will be extremely lethal to anything with lungs.” Kaiser said.

The phrasing was neat, almost polite. Extremely lethal. Ludwig snorted faintly despite himself. Kaiser always spoke like murder was a measurement.

“Lungs? Why that?” Ludwig asked.

He wasn’t questioning the cruelty. He was questioning the specificity.

“Wouldn’t want to kill the life in the river, that’s just cruel.”

For a second, Ludwig wasn’t sure if Kaiser was joking. The idea of Kaiser drawing a moral line at fish was absurd enough to feel like humor. Then again, Kaiser’s morality had always been… alien. Maybe he truly meant it. Maybe he simply needed the river alive for future utility. Either way, Ludwig’s mouth twitched, the closest thing to a laugh he could afford right now.

Ludwig could almost laugh at that. Maybe it was a joke, maybe it wasn’t, but for Kaiser to ’worry’ about life, that was new.

“Good, now with this, all preparations are done. What about our forces now?”

The shift back to practicality was immediate. Poison was one piece. It didn’t win wars by itself. They needed bodies. They needed positions. They needed something to hit with when the Red King came knocking.

“Come out and see them,” Damra said, “We’re ready.”

Damra’s voice carried the kind of readiness that wasn’t loud. It was the readiness of a man who had stopped drinking and started counting blades.

Outside, the settlement’s murmurs had changed tone, less celebration, more movement. The sound of armor being strapped, weapons being lifted, feet shuffling into formation.

Ludwig rose, wiped his hands once on his clothing without caring about the stain, and stepped toward the door with Durandal’s weight at his side.

The mountain was waking. The Red King was coming. And if their preparations held, the first mouthful of water the enemy took would taste like death.