Deus Necros

Chapter 832: The Gallows Can Wait

The silhouette of something moved atop the peaks of Solania, and then after it, the white-capped tips of the mountain began bleeding black.

At first, the people on the walls thought it was shadow.

That was the easiest lie for the eyes to accept. A cloud passing over the snow. Smoke from the mountain struck during Ludwig’s battle with the Demon King. An avalanche of dark stone loosened by the tremors rolling through the land. Anything else would have required the mind to accept that the peaks themselves had opened and something beneath them was pouring out.

Then the blackness moved.

It did not fall down the mountain in a single stream. It spread. It crawled, surged, split, and multiplied, turning the slopes into a living carpet that covered the ice with thousands upon thousands of bodies. From that distance, individual shapes were hard to define, but the wrongness of them carried across the frozen air. Long limbs, hunched backs, pale eyes, dragging arms, bodies too thin or too swollen, all moving with the awful unity of creatures answering the same command. They came down from the peaks in a wave so vast that the mountain looked as if it had begun shedding its own rotten skin.

The cheering died instantly.

On the walls, guards stopped arguing with priests. Citizens who had leaned forward to see Ludwig now backed away from the battlements, some dragging children with them, others too frozen by terror to move. The paladins below raised weapons on instinct, but their formation broke before it was ever properly formed. There were too many. The horde stretched from one side of the visible mountain range to the other, flowing down slopes, over cliffs, across ice shelves, and into the open white plains of Solania.

"They broke through?"

The voice was quiet, but the field heard it.

For the first time since descending, the Gray Tower Master had spoken. The old bearded man stood with his hands folded behind his back, eyes fixed on the peaks. His expression had not changed much, but there was a weight to the words that made the other Tower Masters turn slightly toward him. If even the Gray Tower Master was asking that question, then the thing pouring down from the mountains was not some local disaster.

Ludwig did not look away from the horde. "They were never trapped."

The Gray Tower Master’s gaze shifted toward him.

"They just didn’t receive the order yet," Ludwig said.

The silence after that was colder than the ice beneath them.

Mot approached from near the gate, staff in hand, the purple aura around him no longer spread wide to hold back shockwaves. There were no shockwaves now. Only the rolling pressure of a tide too large to stop by standing in front of it. He looked up at the mountains, then toward Ludwig, and the faint amusement that usually hid in his face was gone.

"I suppose what you meant about me breaking the skies," Mot said, "was due to this."

"Yeah," Ludwig replied. "Don’t call him yet."

Mot’s eyes narrowed slightly. "Azathoth is too unstable."

"He is but a dreamer," Mot said, though the words sounded more like doctrine than argument.

"Let him slumber then," Ludwig answered. "Some things are better left asleep."

For once, Mot did not smile immediately. He looked back to the black tide covering the mountains, then slowly nodded. "Wiser words haven’t been spoken yet." His fingers tightened around his staff. "But I fail to see how we could stop that."

"Don’t worry, little one," the Red Tower Master said.

His voice cut through the pressure with irritating confidence. He stepped forward with a grin that belonged to a man who had been waiting for an excuse to make the horizon burn. Red robes shifted around him, not from wind, but from the rising heat gathering at the head of his staff.

"I got this."

He pointed the staff toward the distant mountains.

Several orbs of concentrated energy appeared around him.

They were small at first, each no larger than a fist, floating in a loose halo of burning red light. Then they moved. They spread outward, drifting ahead of him, multiplying as they went. One became two, two became four, four became eight. The sky in front of the Red Tower Master filled with them in seconds. They continued dividing, every new orb carrying the same condensed heat and violent pressure as the first. The color deepened until the air around them shimmered. They looked like fire, but fire did not bend space around itself like that. Fire did not make the teeth ache from merely existing nearby.

The orbs spread wider, faster, multiplying again and again until even the Tower Master’s control over them became less like directing individual spells and more like opening the throat of a disaster.

Then they shot forward.

The sky screamed red.

The incoming servants of Sloth surged down the slopes and across the plains, meeting the rain of crimson spheres head-on. The first ranks raised malformed arms, dragged themselves over each other, and kept coming as if the sight of annihilation meant nothing to them.

Hiro, still damp with melted ice and humiliation, scoffed.

"Fire orbs?" he said, loud enough for those around him to hear. "You’re a Tower Master, and you’re using fire orbs?"

Ludwig frowned without looking at him. "Can you not afford silence? It’s far better than showing everyone how ignorant you are. If you think that’s fire..."

"Oi, fucker," Hiro snapped, stepping toward him. "We’re not done yet, by the way."

No one important turned toward him.

The Red Tower Master did, however, glance at Ludwig with sudden interest. "So, you can see what this is?"

He sounded impressed, which made Hiro’s face tighten further.

"Yes," Ludwig said. "Concentrated destruction itself. Looks powerful, but highly unstable."

The Red Tower Master laughed, delighted. "Hah! You really got yourself a good one, Van Dijk." He gave the Black Tower Master a sideways look, then returned his attention to Ludwig. "Indeed, this is not fire. A lesser mind would think it is. This is pure destruction and chaos concentrated."

"But," Ludwig said.

The Red Tower Master’s smile paused.

By then, the orbs had reached the first rows of the horde. Their red glow painted the ice, the monsters, and the lower slopes of the mountains in violent color.

"I doubt it’ll stop them," Ludwig said.

The Red Tower Master’s brow rose. "Are you also doubting me, young one? I expected more."

"I never doubted you, Tower Master," Ludwig said, and began channeling mana through his own body. "But those things are not easy to kill using normal mana."

The Red Tower Master did not answer.

He did not need to, or so he thought.

The first orb struck.

The explosion was white.

Not red, not orange, not flame in any ordinary sense. Pure destruction unfolded in a perfect sphere, erasing the front rank of monsters in a burst that made the whole plain convulse. Then another orb detonated. Then ten. Then a hundred. The front of the horde disappeared under a line of spherical white annihilations, each one blooming into existence with enough force to rattle Solania’s outer walls. Ice became steam. Snow became vapor. Flesh turned to smoke. The mountain slopes flashed with violent light as if a storm of suns had been buried beneath the snow and ordered to wake all at once.

The sound arrived a heartbeat later.

It hit the city like repeated thunderclaps, rolling across the field, shaking armor, knocking loose frost from battlements, and sending citizens stumbling away from the walls. Even the paladins had to brace themselves. Priests raised wards around the weaker clergy, their expressions caught between awe and fear. The Red Tower Master stood relaxed through it all, staff still pointed forward, smile returning as destruction marched across the enemy line like carpet bombing from the heavens.

For a moment, it looked like enough.

The front ranks were gone. The slopes were swallowed by steam. Broken pieces of malformed bodies tumbled through the air, burning, dissolving, scattering across shattered ice. The smell reached them a moment later, cooked flesh, bitter mana, and something deeper beneath it that made several priests gag into their sleeves.

Then the steam shifted.

Ludwig pulled out Nightbreaker.

"Unfortunately..."

Shapes moved behind the boiling wall.

Not a few.

Not dozens.

Hundreds of thousands.

The horde emerged from beyond the explosions as if the destruction had merely opened a curtain. Their front ranks had been obliterated, yes, but behind them came more. The monsters poured through the steam in a relentless tide, climbing over the blackened remains of those erased before them. Some were injured. Some burned. Some dragged limbs that should not have functioned. But the majority kept moving, their bodies carrying little sign that the Red Tower Master’s spell had done anything beyond carving a shallow wound into an ocean.

The Red Tower Master’s smile faded.

"They’re almost immune to normal magic, what killed them wasn’t the power of destruction or its magically created fire. Merely the pressure of that power itself...." Ludwig said.

He cracked his neck once and stepped forward.

"Wait," the White Tower Master said sharply. "How do you know this?"

Ludwig kept his eyes on the horde. "I fought here in these peaks for five years. Trust me, I know a fair bit about these things."

The Gray Tower Master approached him.

The old man did not hurry, but every step carried authority. His beard moved faintly in the cold wind, and his eyes were no longer unreadable. They were measuring Ludwig now, not as a mage might measure a spell, but as someone listening for the parts of a story being deliberately left out.

"You know something," the Gray Tower Master said. "You are holding out on us."

Ludwig looked down for a moment.

Then he looked back at Solania.

The holy city stood behind them, terrified and exposed, the Sacrosanctum still shaking from whatever Titania was doing inside. The bishops and high priests were pale, the paladins stiff, the guards angry, the citizens desperate for someone to know what came next. The Holy Order’s authority was broken, but not gone. The Empire’s laws were not quite here, but not quite absent either. The Tower Masters had power, but power did not erase politics unless one was willing to pay the price.

Ludwig hated that he understood enough of this to use it.

"This is outside the Empire’s territory, I suppose?" he asked.

The Gray Tower Master narrowed his eyes. "In a sense, yes. This is the land of the Holy Order."

"And only the Holy Order gets to judge people here, I suppose."

"Yes. They have the better sway." The old man’s expression tightened. "Where are you getting with this?"

Ludwig’s left hand rose slowly.

"Well then," he said, "I’m glad their hierarchy and their head are in trouble with Titania. So I’m pretty sure I’ll be pardoned if I do this."

He pointed his left finger toward the incoming tide.

The priests understood first.

Not all of them. Not the guards, not the citizens, not even some of the paladins. But the high priests did. The bishops did. The White Tower Master did. Van Dijk certainly did, because his eyes sharpened with the kind of pride he usually tried to disguise as amusement.

Ludwig’s mana turned black.

Not shadow. Not the absence of light. Dark magic had a texture to it, a wrongness that every law book in the Empire had described in far too much detail. It carried corruption, curses, hexed decay, and the ancient memory of every mage who had gone too far because forbidden knowledge had whispered that it was worth the cost. Back in the Empire, using it openly was not merely a crime. It was a sentence. Gallows first, trial never.

Here, on Holy Order land, under the eyes of bishops whose authority was busy bleeding from the inside, Ludwig let it gather anyway.

"Dark Bullets," he said.

The air above him filled with black points.

One became ten.

Ten became hundreds.

Hundreds became thousands.

Each bullet was small, dense, and ugly, a bead of compressed darkness wrapped in thin rings of pale mana that kept it from collapsing too soon. They did not glow. They made the world around them look dimmer, as if every bullet was eating a little of the light touching it. The paladins near Ludwig stepped back. Priests cried out in objection. Hiro’s mouth opened, but for once no words came out immediately.

Ludwig raised his finger slightly higher.

"Rain Fall."

The sky answered.

The black bullets rose in a reverse storm, spreading overhead until the frozen field between Solania and the mountains fell beneath a canopy of dark magic. Then, all at once, they dropped.

The first line hit the horde.

Where the Red Tower Master’s destruction had bloomed outward in vast white spheres, Ludwig’s spell punched inward. Each bullet struck a servant of Sloth and sank through flesh like a nail driven into rotten wood. Then the darkness inside each projectile unfolded through the body it touched, not exploding in light or force, but corroding the thing’s animating principle from within. Limbs locked. Bodies collapsed. Heads burst open without flame. Torsos folded inward as if something inside had been cut from the world and the rest no longer remembered how to stand.

The rain thickened.

Black streaks fell over the frozen plain, hammering into the horde with merciless rhythm. The servants of Sloth did not scream like ordinary creatures. Their sounds were wet, low, and hollow, but for the first time since they appeared, the tide slowed. Not stopped. Not yet. But slowed.

The reaction behind Ludwig was almost as violent as the spell itself.

"He used dark magic," one of the bishops whispered, voice shaking between outrage and fear.

A high priest lifted a trembling hand. "Dark magic is forbidden."

"Back in the Empire," Ludwig said without turning, keeping his finger raised as the storm continued. "We’ve already established this isn’t the Empire."

The Gray Tower Master stared at the rain of black bullets, then at Ludwig. The Red Tower Master looked offended and fascinated at the same time. The White Tower Master’s face had gone pale, though not from fear alone. The Blue Tower Master smiled faintly, as if some hidden piece of a puzzle had finally shown its edge.

Van Dijk’s expression was the worst.

He looked proud.

Ludwig kept pouring mana into the spell, watching the front of the horde finally buckle beneath power that did not behave like ordinary magic.

The gallows would have to wait.

The servants of Sloth were already here.