Deus Necros - Chapter 724: The Settlement

Chapter 724: The Settlement

The creature with its face burnt from Ludwig’s torch tripped and fell back, morphing in agony from the blue flames.

“What the hell is this? Gdal! How Envious, to have embraced the spirit of the mountain before me!” The Ogre said as he twirled his weapon and pointed it forward. “I, your brother Dedal, will avenge you!”

Dedal’s voice boomed in the narrow space between the blue torches and the fogline, the sound bouncing off wood and stone and coming back wrong, as if the mountain itself was eager to repeat anything loud.

His grief looked like rage because ogres didn’t mourn quietly; they mourned by swinging something heavy at the nearest thing they could blame. The “brother” on the ground, whatever had been wearing that face, still writhed and smoked under the blue torch fire, its skin bubbling and sliding as it fought the blue light with desperate, childish screams.

“Calm down,” Ludwig said as he grabbed Dedal’s shoulder.

He didn’t grab gently. He grabbed the way you grabbed a man about to charge a cliff. Dedal’s whole body was coiled, ready to lunge into the fog like he could cut his way through whatever watched from within it. Ludwig felt the ogre’s muscle tense under his hand, dense, corded, built for uphill violence.

“Why stop me from taking revenge upon this heinous creature, Stranger!”

Dedal tried to wrench away, weapon still angled, attention split between the burning thing near the torches and the unseen pressure in the fog. His eyes kept flicking to the shadows between trees as if he expected the mountain to send more “brothers” crawling out at any moment.

“Call me Ludwig.” He said, “But I’m not trying to stop your revenge,” he said as he pulled him back while the ogre squirmed on the ground from the effects of the blue flames.

Ludwig dragged Dedal a half step away from the torchline, forcing him to stop presenting his throat to the dark. The blue flame’s glow painted Dedal’s tusks and cheek ridges in cold light, and it painted Ludwig’s blade the same way, steel turned pale, almost ghostly. On the ground, the thing’s limbs jerked in wrong angles, and every time it tried to crawl away from the fire, the torches’ light held it like a collar.

“But trying to save you from joining him pointlessly,” Ludwig said as he pushed the flames of the torch forward.

He used the torch like a shield, widening the circle of blue illumination just enough to carve back the fog and expose what the darkness wanted to keep hidden. The moment the light shifted, the air seemed to tighten, like a net being pulled. Several eyes reflected off the blue sheen of the flames.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of eyes hidden among the fog and shadows.

They weren’t close enough to show bodies, only glints, tiny wet mirrors suspended at different heights, some low like crawling things, some higher like standing ones. The reflection didn’t blink in unison. It moved in a slow, patient way, like predators deciding whether to rush or wait.

“They don’t look too friendly, do they?” Ludwig asked as he backed away slowly.

He didn’t backpedal blindly. He shifted his weight carefully, keeping the torch between himself and the fog while Durandal stayed ready at his side. The mountain’s silence had become crowded now, not with sound, but with attention.

“Curses! It’s not even a full moon night, and there are this many… this cycle is doomed for…” Dedal said as desperation became clear on his face.

The word cycle hit Ludwig harder than the eyes did. Dedal wasn’t speaking like a man encountering horror for the first time. He spoke like a man measuring a repeating pattern and realizing it had gotten worse this time. And his despair wasn’t only fear, it was recognition.

Ludwig realized a couple of things after hearing Dedal. The first was, that they knew of the cycles, and the way he said that this cycle was doomed meant that they had experienced it enough times and were expecting a repeat later. The presence of grief for his brother who died, was also a strange notion for someone who expected a cycle to return. Meaning that his brother will probably not be there the next cycle.

That mattered. A lot. If people vanished here and didn’t come back, then death on this mountain wasn’t “reset death.” It was something else, something the Tower itself might be lying about.

Ludwig could feel Necros’s new quest still sitting in the back of his thoughts like a nail: Treachery. Verify. Shard of Darkness.

’Useful. I should ask more when we’re in a safer spot,’ Ludwig looked around, the whole area felt like it wanted to consume them whole.

The blue flame’s circle was the only thing keeping the fog from swallowing them outright, and Ludwig didn’t like standing still while being watched by a crowd he couldn’t count.

“Is there a safe spot to lie low in,’ Ludwig asked.

His tone stayed practical. No pleading. Just a question aimed at the only local who seemed to understand what was happening.

“With you, stranger? There is nonen who can tell me that you’re not one of them?”

Dedal’s suspicion wasn’t irrational. In this place, faces lied. Bodies lied. Even brothers lied. If Dedal had already watched his own kin turn into monsters, trusting a stranger was a gamble he didn’t want to take.

“I’d have stabbed you in the back ten times if I were, not to mention I’m holding the warding flames,”

Ludwig didn’t try to sound noble. He sounded obvious. He pointed at the most immediate proof: the torch in his hand, the only reason Dedal wasn’t already being swarmed.

“It’s called the Spirit Anchoring Fire.” Dedal said.”

“Sure, now let’s fuck off first, we’re in a bad spot right now.”

Ludwig didn’t give the eyes any more time to decide. The longer they lingered, the bolder they’d get. He shifted the torch slightly, keeping the light between himself and the fog as he started moving, forcing Dedal to either follow or stay alone.

“Follow me,” Dedal said as he realized Ludwig’s words were true about having the opportunity to backstab and not doing it.

Dedal’s decision came fast, like ripping off a bandage. He snapped into motion, shoulders hunched, weapon held low now, not to threaten Ludwig, but to be ready for whatever stepped into the light.

However, what Ludwig didn’t expect was that the Ogre didn’t take him to the half-opened gate surrounded by torches, where the lizardman soothsayer was cooking. But instead around it.

Dedal cut along the settlement’s outer curve, moving them through a strip of dead ground where even grass looked reluctant to grow. Ludwig followed, eyes flicking between torchlight and fog, listening for that awful children’s laughter to return. The farther they moved from the gate, the more Ludwig realized the “settlement” wasn’t just a fortress, it was a shell around something more carefully protected.

Taking note of how they sprinted around the whole barriered fortification and stopped where a large swath of land looked empty of all lifeforms.

The empty patch was too clean, too flat, like a scar. Ludwig’s boots hit packed dirt with no loose stones, no leaves, no branches, nothing that made noise. The kind of ground people made on purpose.

The Ogre looked around for a bit, checking if they were followed.

Dedal’s head moved in short jerks, scanning torchline to tree line, listening with the paranoia of a man who had survived too many nights. Ludwig held the Spirit Anchoring Fire close, keeping its glow steady, and watched the shadows beyond it recoil as if the light offended them.

There was a large perimeter of torches that rose right next to the tree line that surrounded this open swath of empty land. Acting as a barrier for the Soothsayers.

Now the layout made sense. Not one gate. Multiple rings. Blue fire dividing “safe” from “not safe,” not as decoration, but as infrastructure. Ludwig’s eyes narrowed as he read the pattern: these ogres weren’t living here casually. They were holding a line.

The ogre raised his palm forward and pressed against empty air, and suddenly, like a ripple in a lake, the space itself morphed, revealing what looked like a wooden gate.

The air shimmered, the world bending the way a mirage bent, but sharper, more deliberate. A hidden seam in reality opened, and the wooden gate appeared as if it had always been there, and the mountain had simply been hiding it. Ludwig felt a prickling sensation along his arms, like walking past a ward that didn’t like being noticed.

“Get in, fast,” he said.

Ludwig walked forward between the ripple and the gate, and so did the ogre.

The moment Ludwig crossed the threshold, the pressure of eyes in the fog eased, not gone, but distant, like predators losing the scent.

The ripple closed behind them, and in front of them, the gate opened up to a large settlement.

Sound and noise echoed from inside.

There was life here…

Too much life in fact.