Deus Necros - Chapter 747: Trap

Chapter 747: Trap

So the effect of the bone spear was quite… disappointing.

Instead of the satisfying surge he remembered, bone rising like a forest of white knives, shredding everything in a circle, he got a strained, partial answer. A spell forced through a body that didn’t have the reserves to support it.

Only a few dozen rose up, pinning, piercing, and killing a few Orcs.

A handful of red bodies jerked as spikes punched up through their feet and calves, one got skewered through the thigh and screamed until Ludwig cut his throat, another took a bone spear through the belly and folded around it like wet cloth. It helped. It wasn’t nothing. But it wasn’t the kind of field-clearing brutality Ludwig wanted, and the difference stung.

The mana drain became critical, and Ludwig realized that if he forced it some more, the headaches of being tapped out of mana would drop him.

The pressure behind his eyes sharpened into a blade. His vision tightened at the edges for a fraction, and he felt that warning shiver in his teeth that always came when he’d pushed too far. Mana starvation wasn’t just “empty.” It was backlash. It was your own body punishing you for trying to pull blood from stone. Ludwig swallowed it down and stopped forcing.

So he continued fighting using his sword.

He made the battlefield do the killing for him. A red orc lunged with a cleaver and Ludwig turned his shoulder, caught the wrist with Durandal’s flat, and took the hand off with a short, brutal chop. Another tried to tackle him and Ludwig stepped aside, hooked the orc’s belt, and used the enemy’s own momentum to throw him into the path of a spear meant for Ludwig. The spear punched into red flesh with a meaty thud and the attacker dropped, choking. Ludwig didn’t even watch him finish dying. He was already moving to the next.

Yet, he didn’t, not even once, remove his thoughts from the Red King.

It didn’t make sense after all. The Ogres were killing the red orcs in droves. The goblins were allowed to freely poison and cripple the red orcs. Lizardmen were dragging them down to their deaths, while allied orcs were systematically killing any stragglers.

Everything about the fight screamed advantage. Too much advantage. Ludwig hated that more than he hated being outnumbered. Outnumbered was honest. This felt staged.

The Red King had watched an entire third of his force get fed into mud, poison, and water, and he hadn’t corrected it. He hadn’t even flinched.

The fight was supposed to be difficult, very difficult, but this was the opposite.

It was as if the red king was offering sacrifices. Even if this was to exhaust his enemies, then send in a greater force… it’s done in a horrible way.

Sacrifices weren’t useless if they bought something. Ludwig kept searching for what they were buying. Time? Position? Blood? His gaze kept flicking toward the far bank, toward the throne-like bulk of the Red King’s presence, toward the crownless goblin shape near him that kept too still.

’What is he thinking?’ Ludwig kept thinking as he fought, to an almost mechanical level.

’He couldn’t be this stupid, otherwise he’ll never have risen to be a King in so many cycles.’ Ludwig continued thinking as he ducked, weaved, and dodged.

’Something is wrong,’ Ludwig kept slicing and dicing and culling enemies left and right.

The rhythm of killing became a metronome: step, cut, pivot, shove, breathe. His mind ran parallel to his body, one part executing the fight, the other part dissecting the situation with growing unease.

Gale literally moved like a gale of death, where nothing remained wherever he moved or landed. Heavy moves, wide moves, moves that would immediately get one killed if they fought a thinking creature.

But these red orcs were driven with nothing but sheer spite and foolish commands. They didn’t dodge incoming blows; they took them head-on and hoped for the best. The best would be a clean kill if it came to Gale.

They behaved like bodies that had forgotten self-preservation. Like meat pointed in a direction and told to go. Gale’s swings punished that stupidity perfectly, one broad arc and two bodies came apart, one hook and a skull split, one downward slam and a spine stopped functioning. A smarter enemy would have adapted. These didn’t. That wasn’t bravery. That was conditioning.

Just then, when Ludwig stepped on the bloodied ground, he felt a spark of mana going up his feet.

It was subtle at first, a prickling sensation under his boot, like stepping on a live wire. Then it was clearer: a faint tug, a thread of energy riding upward from the ground into him. Ludwig froze for half a heartbeat mid-step, not because he was afraid, but because the sensation was wrong. Blood didn’t give you mana like that unless someone made it.

The attacks that were coming his way had slowed down a great deal. For one simple factor. He wasn’t feared; these fools had none of that.

It was because the Red Orc’s advanced party was almost all wiped out.

The pressure eased around him. Fewer weapons came for his throat. Fewer bodies crowded his space. The roar of battle didn’t vanish, but it thinned, turning into scattered clashes rather than one continuous wall of violence. Ludwig’s breath came harsher in the quiet, and in that quiet, the scrape-laughter from the Red King sounded even more deliberate.

And the feeling of the mana in the blood was rather disgusting.

It wasn’t clean energy. It wasn’t the crisp pull of ambient mana in air or stone. It was sticky, hungry, intimate, like something reaching through gore and grabbing at the edges of his essence. Ludwig’s stomach turned, not from the smell this time, but from the idea of what was being done with all this spilled life.

Only then did Ludwig hear a growl.

The growl was low, satisfied, and it didn’t come from the battlefield. It came from behind it, from the one place Ludwig had kept watching without understanding why. The goblin king stood small beside the Red King’s bulk, staff lifted, posture rigid with concentration. No crown. No dignity. Just function. Ludwig saw the staff’s tip catch light and then dim, as if it was drawing something invisible toward it.

Ludwig looked down on the piling pool of blood and how far it spread and realized…

The blood wasn’t random. It wasn’t just gore soaking into mud. It was a field. A carpet. A medium spread wide on purpose by throwing bodies into a grinder. The stone spears, the river drownings, the poison collapses, every death had contributed to a widening stain that now connected Ludwig’s position to the far bank like a painted ritual circle nobody had bothered to draw neatly.

’We’re fucked.’