Deus Necros

Chapter 827: Demonic Descent

"What is going on in here?" the loud, nerve-grating voice of one of the people Ludwig least wanted to see echoed from behind the doorway.

The Hero stepped into the chamber with his holy sword already drawn.

Hiro looked older than when Ludwig had last planted his head into the snow and introduced his face to winter. Not wiser, unfortunately. Just older. The same self-righteous glare sat on his face, polished by praise and surrounded by people who had spent far too much time telling him that being chosen meant being correct. His armor was bright, his sword even brighter, and behind him the priests and paladins seemed to regain a measure of confidence just from his presence.

That annoyed Ludwig more than the sword.

Hiro’s eyes swept across the room. He saw the cracked sphere. The blood lines. The paladins and priests collapsed near the entrance. The former Apostle in torn priest robes held by the throat in Ludwig’s hand. Kaiser with his hands buried in burning leyline script. Redd standing half-beast and bloodied on the ground. Mot himself, staff planted, holding back part of the ritual’s feed with something that did not look like any holy magic the Order taught openly.

Then Hiro’s gaze locked on Ludwig.

Recognition turned his face ugly.

"You," Hiro said.

Ludwig sighed. "I was hoping you’d be busy inspiring people somewhere far away from me."

Hiro stepped forward, sword rising. "Drop the priestess."

Gallows’s eyes flickered with poisonous delight despite Ludwig’s grip on her throat. The fact that Hiro had called her that, the fact that he had seen priest robes and decided the answer before asking the question, pleased her far more than it should have. Ludwig felt the laugh trying to move through her neck and tightened his fingers enough to crush it down.

"She’s not a priestess," Ludwig said.

"You invade the Sacrosanctum, attack clergy, damage holy property, cause tremors through the entire church, and now you expect me to believe you?" Hiro snapped. "Release her and surrender yourself to the Church. You will be tried for what you have done."

"I have no interest in your trial."

"You don’t get to decide that."

"I actually decide many things," Ludwig said, glancing down at Gallows. "For example, whether or not I snap this one’s neck again. Though apparently she treats that as a social inconvenience."

Hiro’s sword flared brighter. "Demon worshipper."

Mot turned his head slightly. "Hiro."

The warning in his voice was soft, but it should have been enough. It was not. The Hero’s pride had too much audience behind it now. Priests looked to him for certainty, paladins for direction, and Hiro seemed to inhale all of it as if the room had been built for his dramatic entrance. In his mind, Ludwig could almost see the simple story forming. Intruders. Corruption. A false accusation against the Pope. A ritual created by enemies. The Hero arriving to cleanse what lesser men could not understand.

Ludwig had seen idiots with swords before.

The dangerous part was that this one had power.

Hiro shifted his stance, preparing to move, but before he could launch himself forward, Kaiser spoke from beside the leyline.

"Got it," he said. "The ward is down."

He lifted his head.

Something broke.

There was no visible glass, no ceiling shattering overhead, no mirror splitting across the chamber. Yet every person inside felt it, a crystalline fracture passing through the air as the last veil hiding the ritual from higher perception collapsed. The world outside the Sacrosanctum looked in. Not ordinary people. Not the crowd screaming upstairs. But the powerful, the divine, the entities and saints and old things that could sense when reality had been folded wrong beneath a holy foundation.

Then divine energy descended.

It washed through the chamber like a tide of white-gold fire. The pressure did not come from one god alone. There were different textures in it, different intentions, all flooding the exposed ritual at once. The power swept over the walls, the floor, the cracked sphere, and the blood lines with immediate violence. Wards screamed and shattered. The glowing script began peeling from the stone. The lines binding the dead trembled. The line isolating Titania flickered so hard that Ludwig felt the lantern at his side jolt, as if the trapped souls beneath the Sacrosanctum had all turned toward the same distant opening.

Kaiser’s expression soured.

To the others, he only looked like a young nobleman caught too close to power far above his station. His face paled, and his hands withdrew from the leyline with smoke curling from the skin. But Ludwig knew better. The lantern could veil what Kaiser was, could shift sight and aura so he did not appear as the thing beneath the false youth. Holy energy did not care about sight. It did not care what others thought they were looking at. It found contradiction, rot, undeath, and profanation by nature.

If that wave hit Kaiser fully, the disguise would be the least of their problems.

Ludwig moved to step between him and the descending power, but Mot acted first.

The young Saint struck the butt of his staff against the floor.

Purple light unfolded around Ludwig, Redd, and Kaiser in a smooth, circular ward. It did not clash with the divine energy so much as convince it to travel around them, bending the incoming flood away from their bodies without denying its purpose in the chamber. The white-gold tide split around the barrier, rushed past, and continued attacking the exposed ritual. Blood script burned. Holy wards cracked. The sphere trembled harder.

Ludwig looked at Mot.

Mot did not look back immediately, but the faint smile at the corner of his mouth suggested he had noticed the stare.

Ludwig had always suspected the little bastard knew. Mot was part of the Holy Order, yes, but he did not truly belong to the four patrons in the same way the rest of the Church did. He followed something older, stranger, and far less bothered by the categories priests used to make themselves comfortable. If Mot knew what Ludwig was, he had never said it. If he suspected what Kaiser was, he had just chosen not to make it everyone’s problem.

For once, Ludwig appreciated discretion.

The divine energy soaked into the floor and walls. The leyline hiding the ritual had already been severed, and now the exposed structure began collapsing under the attention it had avoided for too long. The blood lines toward the cells fractured. The veil-line toward Titania splintered in pieces, not fully gone yet, but wounded. The Sacrosanctum shook with the force of every hidden crime being dragged into holy light at once.

But the sphere did not stop.

It cracked again.

The plates of stone and metal split apart from within, and something behind them pressed outward. A membrane appeared in the center of the broken shell, spherical and wet-looking, deep purple to the point of nearly being black. It pulsed with an inner pressure that made the air tighten. The color was wrong. Not simply dark, but thick with the suggestion of a place far below prayer, a womb made from ritual contradiction and fed by stolen faith.

A small scream came from inside it.

A baby’s scream.

Several priests behind Hiro recoiled.

The sound twisted immediately, deepening and stretching into something less human, then returning to that awful infant pitch for a moment before a small hand pressed against the inner side of the membrane. The fingers were childlike at first, soft and almost innocent in shape as they pushed outward, dimpling the purple surface.

"Tsk," Kaiser said. "It started."

Ludwig released Gallows by slamming her sideways into the floor hard enough to keep her occupied for a second, then drew Durandal fully into his hand. "I hate waiting for enemies to power up."

"Don’t touch it," Kaiser warned.

Ludwig glanced at him. "Why?"

"I’ll just kill it while it’s forming" was the obvious end of the thought, and Kaiser knew it from Ludwig’s face before he said it.

"If you touch it while it is forming, it will blow up," Kaiser said. "Trust me, that thing has enough power to eradicate the whole city if the birthing membrane ruptures incorrectly. And if the city dies, the ritual will use the deaths as fuel for a second resurrection. It is best to let it come out, then beat the everliving shit out of it."

Ludwig stared at the membrane.

The small hand grew as it pressed harder against the surface. The fingers lengthened. The nails darkened. The soft shape of infancy began stretching into something wrong, muscle forming beneath purple skin too quickly for the mind to accept. The membrane bulged around the arm, and with every pulse, the room grew hotter.

"What the fuck are you all doing!" Hiro howled.

He charged.

Not toward Gallows. Not toward Kaiser. Not even toward Ludwig at first.

Toward the sphere.

"Idiot," Ludwig said.

Hiro did not care. He had heard enough to decide that anyone telling him to wait was either lying, corrupted, or beneath him. Holy light surged along his sword as he crossed the chamber in a straight line, aiming for the membrane with all the conviction of a man about to doom a city because he liked the shape of his own certainty.

The arm within the sphere grew larger.

Purple muscle formed along it, carved with impossible perfection, as if a god with vile taste had sculpted strength from sin and ash. Fingernails lengthened into black obsidian daggers. The childlike hand became monstrous before it had even escaped. Then the fingers hooked into the membrane and pulled.

A small, disproportionate head pushed through the tear after the arm.

It still looked like a baby’s head for half a breath, round and pale-purple, mouth open in a sound too thin for the pressure it carried. Then the skull stretched. Horns pushed out from the temples, long and curved backward. Ivory-white hair spilled from the scalp in a sudden wave. The eyes opened, black as ebony at first, then so deep that even the chamber’s light seemed to fall into them and fail to return.

Darkness and power surged from within the sphere.

Hiro reached it and swung down with his holy sword.

Durandal intercepted the blow.

Ludwig blocked it one-handed, the impact ringing across the chamber. Hiro’s eyes widened, not because he had been blocked, but because Ludwig had done it while looking more annoyed than strained. The holy sword pressed against Durandal, white light grinding against the cursed blade’s edge.

"Do not stop it," Ludwig said through clenched teeth. "Did you not hear him say it will kill the whole city?"

"You fucking demon worshippers!" Hiro snarled. "I knew you were rotten. Now you proved it."

"You prove my opinion of you every time you open your mouth."

Hiro shoved harder. Ludwig’s arm barely moved.

Behind them, the membrane tore wider. The newborn shape inside unfolded too quickly, no longer a child, no longer anything that could be understood through ordinary growth. Shoulders formed. A chest emerged. The head rose higher. The arms lengthened, one hand gripping the torn edge of the membrane while the other pushed through with claws that scraped against reality itself.

The Sacrosanctum shuddered one more time.

Then the Demon King emerged.

He stepped out of the sphere with a wet, tearing sound, towering above everyone in the room. His upper body was shaped with brutal perfection, dark purple skin stretched over muscles carved with impossible precision. His lower half was covered in thick black fur from the thighs down, ending in hooves that struck the stone with enough weight to crack it. A long pointed tail moved behind him, slow and deliberate. He wore no armor, carried no weapon, and needed neither. Claws tipped each finger. His horns curved back from his head like a crown made to mock every holy symbol in the chamber. His ivory hair fell over his shoulders, too clean for the gore and ritual filth around him.

His eyes, once black, turned crimson.

The air bent under his attention.

"Why," the Demon King asked, his voice deep and calm, "have I been summoned here?"

For a moment, no one answered.

The paladins at the door could not move. Several priests had fallen to their knees. Mot’s purple ward strained but held. Kaiser’s face had gone very still, the expression of someone rapidly revising several theories at once. Redd’s claws dug into the floor, his bestial instincts recognizing a predator so far above the room that even hatred needed time to adjust.

Hiro tried to push past Ludwig.

Ludwig flicked his wrist.

The motion sent the Hero flying.

Hiro’s sword broke away from Durandal’s edge as his entire body was hurled across the chamber, crashing into a cluster of priests and paladins near the far wall. Armor rang, bodies toppled, and several indignant shouts were swallowed by the impact. Ludwig did not bother watching him land for more than half a second.

He looked up at the Demon King.

"You’ve been summoned to get your ass kicked," Ludwig said. "Got an issue with that?"

The Demon King tilted his head.

The crimson eyes studied him.

Then the creature smiled.

Razor sharp.

Anticipating, even.