Deus Necros

It wasn’t one sound. It was an accumulation, wood splitting, roots snapping, a groan like the mountain itself was being forced to yield. Ludwig turned just enough to see it without losing his footing.

The trees that were locking anyone with hostile intentions from going in held for a brief moment.

For that heartbeat, the ward did what it was built to do. Branches bent inward like bars. Trunks tightened. The air shimmered faintly with that disorienting pressure Damra had described. It almost looked like the mountain was about to spit the Red Orcs back out.

Then soon, the trees were ripped, uprooted, and broken apart by the following charge of the Red Orcs.

Mass beat magic. Muscle beat subtlety. A wall of red bodies hit the perimeter and simply tore it open, hands grabbing trunks, shoulders slamming, axes hacking, feet trampling roots until the barrier became splinters and gaps. The wall didn’t fail gracefully. It failed violently, shredded into debris and dragged downhill under the stampede.

The howl of the Red King echoed like a lion’s roar in the open plains.

Not terrifying, not scary, more like a creepy and disgusting roar. Guttural, wet, and gnarly to boots.

The sound crawled over Ludwig’s skin in a way he didn’t like. It wasn’t a battle cry. It was ownership. It said mine, mine to break, mine to burn, mine to feed into spells. Ludwig’s grip tightened on Durandal until his knuckles ached.

The collapsed tree line spilled Orcs in droves. Red like a blood tide that rushed against gravity and went up the slope with almost the same speed as running on an open field.

They shouldn’t have moved that fast uphill. Their bodies were too big, too heavy, too packed with muscle to climb like that without losing pace. But they did anyway, feet digging into dirt, pushing off like beasts that didn’t feel fatigue the way normal flesh did. Ludwig saw it and felt it click into place: this wasn’t just discipline. It was alteration. It was flesh forced into a new shape of efficiency.

“Slow them down!” Ludwig said.

He didn’t say stop them. He wasn’t delusional. There was no stopping that mass of bodies, not even an ancient wall of trees could do that. They wanted only to slow them. And that would be almost a victory in itself if it were to happen.

Troll arms bulged like knotted ropes. Stone rose overhead with ugly steadiness, then dropped forward in a throw that looked almost casual for creatures built like siege engines. The first boulder hit dirt and didn’t just roll, it launched, bouncing once, then spinning, momentum multiplying with every impact.

That gave the rocks far more speed than normal, allowing the first rock that once hit the ground the first time to jump and spin like a top as it continued going down.

The boulder became a moving disaster, an unstoppable wheel of mass and velocity. Ludwig watched it carve a path and felt a grim satisfaction in the simplicity of it. No spell. No clever trick. Just physics weaponized by monsters with more strength than sense.

There was no stopping that boulder, no breaking that boulder; there was either move away or be moved away.

And several orcs were far too slow, too beefy, and too packed together to try either.

They hit it like a wall hits a crowd. Bodies crumpled. Bones snapped with dull sounds that got lost under the larger roar of rock grinding through flesh. A red orc tried to brace, actually tried to catch it, hands outstretched. The boulder took his arms, took his chest, took the orc behind him, and didn’t even slow.

The boulder came down and tore through them like a grinder through meat.

The rock didn’t stop; it continued spinning, jumping, and coming down, culling even more orcs until it left the perimeter.

And that was only one boulder.

Ludwig had a dozen trolls.

The rest of the boulders immediately came down following after, breaking apart the formation of the Red Orcs. Forcing them to spread apart and position themselves in a worse way.

The slope turned into a slaughter chute. Boulders overlapped paths, some smashing through the same cluster, others clipping the edge of the charge and forcing red orcs to scatter sideways into worse footing. The wave didn’t collapse entirely; there were too many, but it lost cohesion. It stopped being a single hammer and became a swarm of smaller hammers, each easier to bleed.

But no matter how many boulders that were thrown at them, the kill count was still far too little to matter when they were facing six hundred angry Red Orcs.

Even if the boulders had killed a hundred Orcs and injured another hundred, they were still outnumbered.

Ludwig didn’t let the math discourage him; he let it inform him. This wasn’t about wiping them out here. This was about buying the one resource they couldn’t regenerate: time. The mountain’s defenses were the real blade. They just needed to survive long enough to bring that blade down.

“Keep backing away! The formation should activate soon! Ludwig said as he noticed that the ground began acting.

The soil under the retreating line twitched like something alive. Ludwig felt it through his boots first, tiny pulls, little snags at the edge of balance. Then he saw it: thin dark points pushing up through dirt as if the mountain was growing teeth.

Thorns began emerging from the ground and pulling at knees and ankles.

They didn’t just stab. They gripped. They hooked into flesh and armor straps, snagged at calves, wrapped around shins, and yanked at joints like hands trying to drag prey down. Red orcs stumbled, cursed, hacked at the vines, only for more to rise beneath them.

The thorns that ate corpses and bodies. The thorns that made effigies from those who died.

Ludwig had seen what happened up here, bodies turned into frozen horror, vines threaded through ribs and throats, faces locked mid-scream. The mountain didn’t kill cleanly. It kept what it killed.

The mountain had begun to wake.