Deus Necros

”Yeah, yeah,” Ludwig said, voice rough inside Noctivex’s helm. ”Got anything else you can say besides futile this, futile that?”

Sloth looked at him.

For a long moment, the Sin did not answer. He simply stood in the ruin of the blast, half-charred and leaking blue blood across the ice. The left side of his body had been burned down to bone in places, and what remained of his arm hung with strips of blackened flesh that should have made any living creature scream. One side of his head was broken open, pale material and blue fluid sliding down his neck and chest in slow lines.

He looked down at himself with no particular interest.

Not shock. Not anger. Not even pain.

He did not seem to have the will to care that his body had been ruined. Damage was another demand. Pain was another effort. Concern was a motion of the mind, and Sloth seemed unwilling to spare even that much for himself.

”We seem to have come too hastily,” Sloth said.

The words were soft, but they traveled across the field all the same. The remaining servants near the center twitched as if the sound had passed through their bones. The pressure of his authority remained, though Status Quo kept the living from sinking back into helpless stupor. Still, everyone felt the difference. Sloth was no longer treating this as a slow walk into a city that would inevitably fall. He had been struck. Not merely resisted. Struck.

That mattered.

Sloth raised his remaining arm.

”Then so be it. We shall withdraw for now.”

The entire horde answered.

The servants of Sloth began retreating at once.

Not slowly. Not with the same dragging, exhausted motion their master preferred. The monsters turned and sprinted toward the mountain range as if pulled by a command deeper than instinct. Amalgamations tore themselves free from the Necropolitis walls. Crawling things abandoned half-chewed dead soldiers. Towering beasts staggered away from Gale’s shield and sword, dragging severed limbs and spilling black blood over the ice as they fled. The army that had pressed Solania like an oncoming extinction suddenly reversed direction and ran back toward the peaks.

”You don’t get to come here and leave as you wish!” Ludwig howled.

He tried to charge.

His first step nearly failed under him.

Noctivex caught the movement, plates shifting around his knees and spine, forcing the body upright through structure more than strength. Ludwig still pushed forward, because anger was easier than standing still, but the truth was ugly. He had burned through everything in that last attack. Wrath was gone from his limbs. His Living Vessel felt hollow, scraped clean from the inside. The declaration of Pride still existed, but a law did not give him stamina. It only denied stillness. Denial alone did not fill an empty body.

Sloth watched him struggle.

”If we wish to come,” he said, ”we’ll come. And if we wish to depart, we’ll depart.”

Ludwig forced another step forward, Nightbreaker dragging behind him.

Then Sloth’s body began to come apart.

Not like flesh dying. Not like a monster dissolving under holy light or dark magic. His charred skin and exposed bones loosened into pale fragments, then into motes of frost and pieces of ice, each shard thin as ash. The frigid wind that rolled down from the Solania Peaks caught them immediately. Sloth’s ruined body drifted apart in the air, scattering backward toward the mountains piece by piece until only his three-eyed gaze remained for one final breath.

Then that too became ice dust.

Ludwig swung Nightbreaker through the space where he had been.

The mace cut nothing but cold wind.

”Coward,” he spat.

No answer came.

Only the retreat.

The battlefield shifted from desperate resistance into pursuit fire. The Tower Masters did not let the fleeing horde depart peacefully. The Red Tower Master raised both hands and sent arcs of destructive flameless force crashing through the backs of clustered monsters. The White Tower Master’s dark bullets fired in heavy volleys, punching holes through the retreating mass. The Blue Tower Master shaped her magic into thin lines that snapped through legs and spines, dropping anything large enough to slow those behind it. The Gray Tower Master maintained Status Quo with one hand while casting with the other, his expression tight from the strain.

Van Dijk’s black swamp continued eating.

The spell did not care that the enemy had chosen retreat. It seized anything that stumbled too close, dragged it down, and swallowed it beneath tar-like darkness. Spears rose from the surface and pierced fleeing backs. Hooks caught ankles. Blades carved through knees. Van Dijk himself stood near Celine and Joana, but his spell remained at the front like a patient executioner finishing unfinished work.

The Necropolitis did not cheer.

The dead did not understand triumph.

They simply continued until there was nothing within reach to kill.

Gale finished last.

One of the drowned giants tried to turn and flee after the horde began withdrawing. Oathcarver descended before it could take three steps. The blade split the creature from shoulder to gut, and the Death Knight drove his shield into the second giant hard enough to break its spine backward. Only when both fell did Gale turn his helm toward the mountain range, silent and immense, the sword in his hand dripping black blood onto the ice.

The retreating army disappeared gradually into the white and gray distance.

For several breaths, no one trusted it.

No one among the living moved except to aim spells or raise shields. Paladins stared at the emptying field as if expecting Sloth to reappear behind them. Priests remained frozen with healing light gathered around their hands. Soldiers who had been dragged away under Status Quo held each other up and watched the monsters run.

Then one voice rose from Solania’s wall.

It was not a word at first.

Just a sound.

A cracked, disbelieving shout.

Another joined it.

Then another.

The people began cheering.

It spread badly at first, awkward and uncertain, because the thing standing between them and annihilation was an undead city. The walls were black. The towers burned with blue soul flame. Dead archers lined the battlements. Skeletons and corpses stood where living knights should have stood, and every lesson the Holy Order had carved into the people told them that such things were abominations.

But those abominations had saved them.

The cheer grew.

It rolled over Solania’s walls, through the broken streets, across the wounded clergy, past the paladins who could not look directly at the Necropolitis without feeling doctrine crumble under gratitude. Some people shouted for the Tower Masters. Some for Titania. Some for Ludwig, though most did not know what name to use for the monstrous black-armored giant who had fought Sloth at the center of the field. And instead called him Guardian of Solania. Since he resembled the old one.

Then, impossibly, some began cheering for the dead.

For the Necropolitis.

For the undead standing before their city.

It was ugly.

It was awkward.

It was honest.

Kaiser heard it from the battlements and stared at the living with a complicated expression. Disgust came first. Then disbelief. Then something far older and more bitter that he buried before anyone could name it.

”Now they cheer,” he muttered.

The thing was, Ludwig did not hear most of it.

The moment the last visible servant of Sloth vanished into the mountain haze, his knees hit the ice.

Nightbreaker’s head slammed down beside him, steaming where the last residue of Wrath still clung to its metal. Both his hands spread against the vaporizing ice in front of him, fingers digging into the melting surface. His enlarged body shook once. Then again. The red glow that had filled the seams of Noctivex was gone completely now, leaving only black armor and the heavy scrape of exhausted breath inside the helm.

Several people noticed.

Two Tower Masters moved first.

The White Tower Master and the Red Tower Master reached him almost at the same time, crossing the damaged field with spells ready in case this was another trick. Up close, Ludwig looked less like a victorious monster and more like a man whose body had been used as a furnace until nothing remained to burn.

”Kid,” the Red Tower Master said, crouching near him. ”Are you okay?”

”Exhaustion,” Ludwig said.

It was true.

Painfully true.

As an undead, he had been able to endure things living bodies had no right to survive. But this was a Living Vessel. A powerful one, strengthened by everything he had stolen, earned, and forced into himself, but still finite. Stamina existed. Muscles existed. Channels could empty. Wrath could be burned away. That final attack had demanded every ounce he could give and had failed to kill Sloth anyway.

That last part annoyed him more than the exhaustion.

Noctivex began withdrawing.

The living metal peeled back from his giant form in layered strips, folding inward, shrinking with him as Ludwig’s body returned to normal size. The massive outline collapsed down through stages, armor plates sliding over one another until the monstrous figure became a man again. He tried to remain on one knee through dignity alone.

Dignity lost.

Ludwig sprawled onto his back on the ice, chest rising and falling in rough breaths.

”You did great.”

The voice came from above him.

Titania stood nearby, her glow reduced but still present, sword lowered at her side. She looked tired as well, though not nearly as ruined. Mot stood a little behind her, tendrils withdrawn, his strange eyes still fixed on the direction Sloth had vanished.

Ludwig stared at the sky.

”Great didn’t kill him.”

”No,” Titania said. ”But great kept the city alive.”

He did not have enough energy to argue properly, which was a rare and tragic state of affairs.

From the wall of the Necropolitis, Kaiser called down, ”So, what am I going to do? Keep these walls up?”

Ludwig turned his head slightly without getting up. ”For now. We don’t know if they’ll return or not.”

”I wasn’t talking about those guys,” Kaiser said.

Ludwig frowned. ”Then what?”

”The imperial army that just came out of Solania.”

Ludwig raised his head from his sprawled position.

Beyond the edge of the battlefield, past the wounded clergy and retreating soldiers, the city gates had opened wide. An army was marching out.

Not a squad.

Not a company.

An army.

Imperial banners rose above the ranks, snapping in the cold wind. Lines of armored soldiers spread from the gate until they seemed to span the entire front of Solania. Cavalry pushed ahead in disciplined formation. Spearmen formed blocks behind them. Mages moved beneath guarded standards. The timing was so absurd, so perfectly idiotic, that for a moment Ludwig wondered if Sloth had left behind one final curse after all.

At the front rode a prince.

The Second Prince sat atop a warhorse clad in polished armor, his cloak bright, his posture upright, his expression filled with the kind of authority men wore when they had missed the entire war and arrived just in time to claim command over the survivors.

He raised one hand.

His voice carried across the field.

”By imperial order! Everyone here is under arrest!”

The cheering died.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Across the ice, Tower Masters turned their heads.

Priests froze.

Paladins looked between the imperial army and the undead city that had just saved them. Kaiser went very still on the battlements of the Necropolitis. Van Dijk’s expression emptied of whatever small relief Celine’s survival had given him.

Ludwig let his head fall back onto the ice.

”For crying out loud...”