Deus Necros - Chapter 721: Living Mountain

Chapter 721: Living Mountain

“Wouldn’t be smart telling you,” Ludwig replied as he moved closer. “After all, you could easily adapt. So…” Ludwig said as he placed his sword next to Akro’s face. “Who are you?”

The blade hovered a hair’s breadth from its cheek. Ludwig watched the eyes. The thing’s pupils were wrong, too still, too confident for something pretending to be wounded prey.

“Nothing a dead orc needs to worry about!” it said and lunged.

More like, its neck elongated like that of a bounding serpent toward Ludwig’s face. With his jaws opened wide enough to gobble up ludwig’s entire head in one bite. The motion was obscene, vertebrae stretching, skin tightening, the grin turning into a maw. The air snapped with the speed of it.

However…

Ludwig’s hand snapped forward, faster than the creature’s ambush. He struck with the bottom of his palm at the lower jaw of the creature, forcing his snout to shut, and then in the same motion, he clamped tight with the same left hand on the snout, closing it.

The impact jolted Ludwig’s arm all the way to the shoulder, because even nerfed, his strength had to fight the thing’s momentum. But his grip held. Fingers locked like a vice. The creature’s jaw quivered under his palm, teeth grinding uselessly behind lips forced shut.

Ludwig’s body was indeed weak, but not weak enough for something like this lizardman to escape his grip.

“Did you know that an alligator has the strongest biting force of all animals… but at the same time, it can’t easily open its mouth if it gets clamped on, so tell me, how does it feel? That despair of yours?” Ludwig asked.

The creature thrashed, claws scraping at Ludwig’s forearm, trying to pry his hand loose. It couldn’t. Its whole advantage, its mouth, was turned into a liability. The moment it realized it couldn’t bite, its movements became frantic, less predatory and more panicked.

The monster tried to wrench itself free, but it was unable to; it tried to pull its head away, but felt like it was gripped by a vice. Then, when Ludwig placed Durandal underneath its elongated neck, it stopped. The stillness wasn’t surrender. It was calculation, looking for another angle, another trick, another way to slither out.

“Seems like you’re not going to tell me much,” Ludwig looked at the fallen lizardmen, “But I don’t suppose I need to hear it from you,” he said as he flicked the weapon up, beheading the creature.

Steel bit. The head came free with a wet sound and dropped into the dirt. Blood sprayed out, and the lizardman, or the monster impersonating the lizardman, fell to the ground.

But even the blood was wrong. It didn’t splatter like life. It behaved like a ritual.

Once Ludwig let go of the head, he noticed something interesting. The ground didn’t get soaked. Instead, the blood gathered around the monster’s body and infused itself with it. It pooled in unnatural rings, creeping back toward the corpse as if drawn by a magnet, soaking into flesh that should have been cooling.

Vines came out from the mountain itself, from underneath the creature, and pierced right through it. They didn’t grow slowly. They arrived, thorns spearing through muscle and pinning the body in place like a specimen. The form of the lizardman began changing the moment that happened.

Instead of looking like Akro the champion, it began morphing to look like one of those Soothsayers, only this one was far smaller. Far younger as it appeared. The hair thickened into that black curtain. The torso softened into that obscene shape. The limbs rearranged with sick efficiency, as if the mountain was correcting a mistake and returning the body to its “true” template.

“Hmm, so even you guys are susceptible to this… but,” Ludwig frowned, unlike the other adult soothsayers, this one didn’t split in two when it got cut.

That detail stuck. No duplication. No immediate regeneration into two threats. Either because it was younger, weaker… or because the vines were doing something more specific than simply “infecting.”

Another thing also happened in front of Ludwig. The vines began digging deeper into the body, and then began pulling it into the dirt. Submerging it away from sight.

The ground accepted it like water accepting a stone. The body sank, not resisting, vines tightening and dragging until nothing remained but disturbed soil and a faint, thorny twitch beneath the surface. Ludwig hesitated for a second, but then let the process continue until it fully disappeared. Chasing it underground without understanding the trap would be idiocy. And Ludwig wasn’t in the mood to donate himself to the mountain.

He looked to the side and saw the two downed lizardmen; they were real.

The relief was brief and bitter, because “real” didn’t mean “alive.”

He flipped one and saw that he no longer had a chest. His entire chest cavity was ripped open with all its innards gone. The ribs were spread like broken cage bars, the inside hollowed clean. It wasn’t a kill meant to stop a body. It was a harvest.

The vines from the ground, however, did not grow to consume him.

That absence was as disturbing as the vines themselves. The mountain didn’t care about this corpse. Or it couldn’t use it. Or it had rules about what it claimed. Ludwig filed that away quickly. Rules meant exploits.

The second one, however, was simply unconscious and bleeding from the back of its head. Turning his head around, Ludwig noticed a rock not far away that had blood stains on it. A blunt impact. A simple, ugly kill attempt. Something had chosen not to finish the job, or had been interrupted.

“Oi, wake up,” Ludwig said to the lizardman as he noticed it was still breathing.

Slowly, the lizardman fluttered its eyelids and opened them to see Ludwig. His eyes were unfocused at first, then snapped sharply the moment he recognized the silhouette looming over him.

“B-boss… am I dead?”

“No, but tell me, what happened to you guys?” Ludwig asked.

He kept his grip firm as he helped the lizardman sit up, one hand braced behind his shoulder so the injured head didn’t slam back into dirt. The lizardman winced hard, swallowing a hiss as pain caught up to him.

“They… they attacked us. From nowhere…The Ogres,” The lizardman said as he winced, placing his hand on the back of his head and seeing blood, he hissed.

His gaze kept darting around the clearing like he expected the trees to open again and hands to come out of the ground. Ludwig didn’t blame him. This place felt designed to make paranoia reasonable.

“You’re injured badly, let’s get you up this slope, talk while we walk, let me help you,” Ludwig said as he propped the lizardman up and placed its shoulder around Ludwig’s neck.

The lizardman’s weight settled awkwardly, heavier than it should have been for his frame; shock did that, made bodies deadweight. Ludwig adjusted his footing and started moving, slow but steady, keeping Durandal in his free hand.

“Yes, boss…” the lizardman said as he looked up the mountain.

Its eyes tracked the fog and the dead trees, searching for something familiar, something safe. Ludwig watched his face from the corner of his eye, watching for the same wrongness he’d seen in the impersonator.

Its mouth, for a tiny second, cracked in a smile.