Deus Necros

“It’s working, keep the pressure,” Ludwig ordered as the small battalion was raining down boulders and arrows, slowing the enemy down as much as possible.

His voice came out harsher than he intended, scraped raw by smoke and exertion, but it carried. It had to.

The slope had turned into a grinding machine, stone rolling, bodies tumbling, thorns dragging at ankles, and anything that wasn’t shouted with conviction got swallowed by the noise.

Above them, trolls heaved and launched more boulders with brutal rhythm, their muscles bunching like cables as they treated the hillside like a siege wall.

Between impacts, goblin darts and scavenged arrows hissed down into the red mass, not enough to stop it, but enough to keep it uneven, enough to keep it angry instead of organized.

They needed to get one thing done, slow the enemy and make them bleed. Once the mountain fully wakes up, then the whole fight will change.

Ludwig didn’t kid himself into thinking they were winning. They were delaying. They were buying seconds the way you bought life with blood.

The Red Orcs had too much weight, too much momentum, and too many bodies to be cleanly stopped by anything that wasn’t a wall, or a miracle.

The mountain was the closest thing they had to both, and Ludwig could already feel its mood shifting underfoot: that faint tug in the soil, the subtle wrongness in the air, like something waking up and remembering it hated everything that moved.

The thorns kept climbing up the corpses, which thankfully served a small purpose, to further slow down the arrival of the Red Orcs. The mass of bodies that was clustered together became a wall, and it forced the Orcs to change path. That small detour bought precious seconds.

It was ugly efficiency. The vines didn’t just sprout and stab, they claimed. They threaded into meat, wrapped around ribs, dragged corpses into awkward angles that turned the dead into obstacles.

Red Orcs trying to keep their charge found themselves suddenly stepping on slick human-sized traps made of their own fallen, only for thorns to hook their calves and yank.

A few went down hard enough to break joints; others went down and didn’t get back up at all, swallowed by the living bramble before their comrades could haul them free.

The detour wasn’t wide, but it forced the wave to split and funnel, and Ludwig counted those heartbeats like currency.

Yet, that was only a small part of the battlefield.

The real problem wasn’t the ones stuck behind the thorn-wall. It was the ones who slipped through the gaps, those who climbed over broken bodies and jagged stone with the stubbornness of things that had forgotten pain, then hit Ludwig’s line where the slope narrowed and the room to maneuver died. That was where the fight stopped being “delay” and started being “don’t get surrounded.”

Many of the Red Orcs had managed to climb to where allied forces were stationed.

They came in bursts, not a single clean front.

One would crest and swing, another would crawl up behind him, another would shove past, and suddenly there were too many red shoulders in too tight a space.

The air filled with hot breath and wet snarls, the smell of blood thickening until it tasted metallic on the tongue.

Ludwig saw allied orcs forced into ugly footwork, slipping in mud and gore, forced to fight uphill with their lungs already burning.

Gale began working his sword like it owed him money. Oathcarver carved bodies and paths, sliced through, crushed and destroyed the Red Orcs that were vehemently insistent on slaughter.

Gale didn’t posture. He didn’t waste movement. Oathcarver’s edge didn’t have to be sharp to be final; its mass turned every swing into an execution. One wide cut opened a corridor; one hook dragged a red orc off-balance and into the next killing arc; one downward slam crushed a shoulder and then the skull behind it. Gale’s leather armor was spattered and torn, his cape tearing further with each close scrape, but he moved like a machine built for this, like the only thing he remembered from being alive was how to put beasts down.

Ogres rushed in in quick successive waves, cutting ankles from behind red orcs, and severing tendons. While two normal orcs held one red orc.

It wasn’t glorious, but it worked. An ogre would crash in from the side, axes flashing low, and suddenly a red orc’s stride turned into a stumble. Two allied orcs would clamp onto the bigger body like dogs on a boar, holding it just long enough for the ogre to take what mattered, hamstring, Achilles, a knee ruined with one brutal chop.

The slope helped them; gravity punished anyone who lost footing, and a red orc going down rarely got back up before another boulder, another dart, another blade found him.

At first it was manageable. But then the more the Red Orcs climbed the more the pressure on the allied forces increased.

The trick with holding a line wasn’t bravery. It was spacing. And spacing was the first thing to die when you were outnumbered three-to-one. Ludwig watched their formation compress under the weight of bodies.

He saw it in small signs: an allied orc forced to step backward into another’s space, an ogre unable to swing fully without clipping a comrade, goblins losing lanes because red torsos blocked sightlines. Every second the enemy stayed alive and climbing, the slope got narrower, and the fight got uglier.

At one point, the death toll began climbing on Ludwig’s own side.

Not in one dramatic collapse, but in the quiet, stupid way most soldiers died, wrong angle, wrong time, one heartbeat too slow. A normal orc took a club meant for someone else and went down with his jaw cracked sideways.

Another got hooked by a blade he didn’t see because his eyes were on Gale’s slaughter and not on the red orc slipping behind a boulder.

Ludwig heard the crunches and wet impacts even when he didn’t look. He kept moving because looking too long got you killed, too.

There was no time to mourn, and no time to regret. All the time they had left was time meant to be spent surviving and waiting.