Deus Necros

With Gale at the front, the battle changed in a way that even the most frightened people on Solania’s walls could understand.

Until that moment, the horde from the peaks had looked endless. Even under the rain of dark bullets, the spreading swamp of Van Dijk’s devouring magic, and the suppressive pressure of the Necropolitis, the black tide had still carried that awful quality of inevitability. It had looked like something that could be slowed, thinned, or delayed, but not truly opposed. The moment the dead city’s army began to move, that certainty cracked.

Gale led the charge like a titan of war.

He did not roar. He did not bellow. He did not need to. The mere sight of that armored giant marching down the blackened streets of the Necropolitis with Oathcarver in one hand and a tower shield in the other was enough to make the field feel claimed. Behind him came the dead in their thousands, ancient soldiers, nameless skeletons, broken men dragged back into purpose, and lesser undead stitched together by old death and fresh command. There was no beauty in their formation. Necromancy did not care for elegance. It brought back the farmer and the soldier alike, the veteran and the conscript, the proud and the forgotten. What rose answered not to glory, but to function.

The servants of Sloth met them head on.

The first collision was brutal.

The monsters were numerous, far more numerous than the undead ranks surging through the Necropolitis. Even now, the best among the dead was Gale himself, a true Death Knight whose presence bent the battlefield around him. A few others among the risen dead possessed enough lingering strength to resemble officers or ancient champions, but the vast majority were lesser things. Skeletons with cracked spears. Hollow corpses in rotting armor. Old dead soldiers dragged up from frozen graves. Against an ordinary army, they would have been fodder.

Against Sloth’s creatures, they became a wall of ruin.

When an undead was struck, it did not care. When a skeleton lost one arm, it stabbed with the other. When a corpse had its jaw torn off, it kept clawing. When a servant of Sloth bit into dead flesh or shattered bone, the deathly aura coating the undead body spread into it like poison through dry glass. That was the true terror of the clash. The creatures pouring down from the peaks looked monstrous and powerful, but the moment they were properly harmed by the dead, they began to fail catastrophically. Their bodies turned brittle. Their flesh took on that same ugly glasslike weakness Ludwig had recognized before. Some shattered outright under the next strike. Others split apart explosively, spraying blackened matter that only fed the swamp or gave the undead more room to advance.

With black magic pouring from above and the dead charging below, the tide shifted.

Gale brought Oathcarver down once, and an entire knot of enemies vanished beneath the impact as if they had been made of paper and dust. He swung again, the hooked edge catching a larger abomination and flinging it sideways hard enough to break apart three more. Whenever he advanced, the dead advanced with him, pressing forward through the grave streets and shattered battlements of the Necropolitis until the city itself no longer looked like a passive bastion, but a living war machine. Undead archers appeared atop the walls, loosing black-fletched arrows into the horde. Low level mages, little more than skeletons in tattered robes, stood in broken towers and cast weak curses or shards of deathly energy downward. Alone, their efforts would have been insignificant. Together, within the dominion of the Necropolitis, they became relentless.

For the first time since the monsters had appeared, the front line was pushed back.

The sight of that was enough to poison weaker minds with the worst thing possible in the middle of such a battle.

Courage.

Or more accurately, the false kind.

A few paladins standing near the outskirts of Solania’s defense line watched Gale and the undead hold, watched Van Dijk’s swamp swallow rows of enemies, watched the Tower Masters bombard the field with dark magic, and mistook survival for control. In their minds, the monsters were weakening. The dead were handling the worst of it. The city still stood. The clergy had not yet been slaughtered. To men like that, it began to feel as if glory were suddenly available, hanging low enough to be plucked.

One of the paladins stepped forward.

His armor was bright, polished, and adorned with the sunburst insignia of the Holy Order. He raised his sword and began chanting a prayer beneath his breath, drawing upon one of the empowering blessings his order loved so dearly. Holy power gathered around him quickly, too quickly for a man who knew nothing of the field he was stepping onto. Light blossomed around his body until he seemed to shine, radiant and fierce, a golden figure walking out from Solania’s edge as though he were about to become the spearpoint of salvation itself.

Kaiser saw him first.

His expression changed instantly.

”STOP!” he howled.

But it was already too late.

The paladin surged forward, wrapped in brilliance, and the effect on the Necropolitis was immediate.

The moment that light entered the dead city’s dominion, it pushed outward like oil poured over water. A few undead nearest to him turned to dust on contact, their bodies unable to withstand the sudden burst of sanctified radiance. The soul flames along one nearby wall guttered violently. Black stone cracked and hissed. The very structure of the Necropolitis recoiled from the holy interference, not collapsing, but splitting open in one small, vicious section where the paladin’s glow carved a fissure through the necromantic weave.

It was not a large breach.

Not by the standards of the battlefield.

But against a horde like this, a small breach was all that was needed.

The monsters nearest that corrupted section reacted immediately. Several of the weakening servants of Sloth, creatures that had been half broken by death aura and dark magic, suddenly regained ground the moment the suppressive influence of the Necropolitis thinned around them. They surged toward the opening with an ugly animal intelligence, climbing over the remains of both undead and their own dead alike. The fissure in the wall split wider as more of them slammed into it, and within seconds a handful of the creatures had punched through and spilled into the dead city’s outer streets.

Kaiser’s face went black with fury.

”You idiot,” he spat, and there was more venom in those two words than in any shout. ”You glowing imbecile.”

The paladin faltered only then, too late realizing that his holy blessing had not aided the defense, but undermined it. He turned back in confusion just as the first creature that had slipped through the breach lunged at him from the side. The thing had once resembled a twisted hound, though now its body was warped with too many joints and too much blackened muscle. It hit him hard enough to send him staggering. He brought his sword down and cut it apart with a scream that sounded more offended than brave, but two more were already through the gap behind it, followed by another, then another.

The breach had given them a foothold.

And footholds became floods.

”Seal that section!” the Gray Tower Master barked.

Van Dijk’s eyes narrowed as he swung one hand toward the broken part of the Necropolitis. The swamp of darkness beneath the battlefield shifted and rose in tendrils, trying to bind the incoming creatures before they could spread deeper into the city. At the same time, Gale turned.

That single turn was enough to remind everyone present that he was not merely a summoned wall.

He was a commander of death.

The giant Death Knight changed direction and charged toward the breach with earthshaking force. Every step he took made the black streets tremble. A cluster of undead soldiers peeled away from the front line and followed him at once, not because they had been explicitly ordered, but because something in the Necropolitis itself bent their path toward the wound in its body. Gale reached the broken section just as another wave of monsters forced its way through.

He slammed his shield forward.

The impact was catastrophic. The front rank of intruders burst apart on contact, their bodies shattering like rotten glass against iron. Gale did not stop there. Oathcarver rose and fell in a brutal diagonal arc, shearing through the next row and biting into the edge of the broken wall hard enough to throw fragments of black stone and monster flesh together in a single spray. The undead following him poured into the gap and began hacking, clawing, and tearing at anything trying to pass.

Still, the damage had been done.

What should have remained a perfect defensive choke point had become unstable. The holy corruption left by the paladin’s radiance clung to the cracked section of the wall like a stain, and every second that breach remained open gave Sloth’s creatures another angle of pressure.

Ludwig watched the whole thing with a face that had long since run out of patience for religious stupidity.

”I knew this would happen,” he said.

No one disagreed with him.

Because there, in the heart of the dead city, with the horde still pressing, dark magic still raining, and the first cracks of holy interference now threatening to unravel one section from within, everyone understood the same terrible truth.

The Necropolitis had become their shield.

And the Holy Order’s own brilliance had just stabbed a hole in it.