Deus Necros

The Queen’s roots twisted and gnashed beneath her, her spine arching backward in a grotesque curve that split open the scorched trunk of her body with a sound that was neither wood nor flesh but something wholly other. Her chest peeled apart like the splitting of a chrysalis, wet membranes stretching taut between splintered ribs, then tearing with the sound of ancient silk rotted through. From that yawning cavity, the cocoon pulsed stronger now. It no longer throbbed faintly in silence. It resonated. With each contraction, its internal hue deepened, the reds turning to arterial crimsons, the blues collapsing into storm-dark violet.

The sack felt like it was beckoning something, and Ludwig didn’t need to guess what it was calling for.

The Queen called again, “MY CHILD!”

The words if they could be called that, clung to the air like rot, thick and syrupy, tainting the silence that followed with something older than language. It was not merely a voice, but a command steeped in generations of buried hunger. Each syllable landed with the weight of inheritance, not choice. Something ancestral, something beneath will.

And Celine heard it.

Her limbs convulsed, sudden and violent, like something had passed through her from spine to sternum. A jolt that made the metal of her chains jump and rattle. Her back arched slightly in Ludwig’s arms, and her lips parted not to speak, not yet, but to draw in breath that was not hers. Her nostrils flared, searching, and her fingers curled inward like talons pressed to her chest.

The call was not to her ears, but to the marrow of her bones.

Before he could do anything, the paladins began rushing up the Queen, empowered by their cardinal and their numbers, only for futility and an early grave.

Ludwig watched as a dozen holy flames curved around the Queen’s roots, yet none so much as slowed her. A tendril speared through a paladin’s leg, lifted him, and tore him clean in half without a sound of effort. The other half tumbled backward into the cocoon’s glistening folds, which welcomed it like a gaping throat. It drank. It pulsed again.

It was feeding some more while the screams of paladins and the queen’s own filled the cave.

The Queen’s gaze, eyeless yet terrible, fastened fully now upon him. No. Not upon him. Upon what he carried.

The vampire in his arms stirred with renewed violence. Celine’s fingers twitched against the chains, then curled into claws. Her eyes opened wide, and the veins beneath her skin pulsed like fuses ready to ignite. Her mouth parted, baring fangs that gleamed wet in the light of burning scripture. No growl escaped her throat, but there was something building. A soundless scream swelling beneath skin and sinew.

Ludwig stepped backward, one foot shifting behind the other, calculated and cold.

“Calm down now, we can’t go all berserk here,” Ludwig said.

The Queen’s roots flared wide. Not in attack. In welcome. The womb behind her, once vacant, began to reach. Small tendrils uncoiled from its edges, not as spears or weapons but as grasping fingers, yearning to draw something in.

“Fuck that,” Ludwig said, and the word came out too quiet. Oathcarver propped over his shoulder, ready to fight the queen’s extended roots.

The Queen’s voice rolled from the abyss of her chest like smoke forced through blood. It echoed with syllables not built for the living, but still clothed in language enough to be understood.

“Come to me… my child…”

She raised both arms. Not as a gesture of attack, but as invitation.

“Come to me. I’ll make you whole.”

It was not a command. It was longing. As if something vital to her survival, something central to her purpose, was missing, and Celine, twitching in Ludwig’s arms, was the final piece.

Ludwig’s grip on the chains tightened so hard his knuckles cracked. He took another step back. The tendrils from the cocoon reached further.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he said to no one in particular.

But she did.

With a sudden heave of her massive root-laden form, the Queen’s torso lunged forward. Her frame split further, the womb unraveling like the petals of a diseased flower.

It spread open like a flower, only this one made of teeth thorn and pulsing sinew.

From within, something darted, a root, faster than the others, wrapped not in bark but in pale skin and twitching nerves.

It lashed around Celine’s ankle.

Ludwig raised his weapon high, the paladins near him were all watching, only then did they realize that the person he was carrying looked a bit off…

[You’re under grave danger!]

Before Ludwig could react, or sever the root, before the Knight King could speak, before Thomas could cry out,

The werewolf moved.

Not forward, but down. He dropped from his perch in silence and faster than sight, he landed beside Ludwig with not a sound but the creak of stone under his boots. His body was relaxed, almost amused. His lips parted in a smile that carried neither warmth nor malice. Only hunger for spectacle.

“Let’s not ruin the fun just yet,” he said, and flicked a finger.

Ludwig was thrown backward as if gravity had reversed around his spine. He slammed into a jagged column of stone, ribs cracking anew. The chain unraveled from Celine as his grip faltered. The Queen tugged once, and Celine vanished into the dark of the womb.

[Missed strike! All stacks of Tyrant Blade have been reset!]*

-8,477!

Ludwig staggered to his feet.

His eyes blinked several times over, annoyed, angry and completely enraged, after all that. After all he did, the loops he took, the deaths, the attempts, the oh so many souls he lost from reviving over and over again enough that his stash of souls only had a few unused Soul Items.

This motherfucker, jumps in, last second and throws Celine, his master’s sister, the person Necros requests to save, his quest goal. And the objective that would allow him to obtain the [Advanced Necrotic Rituals] was gone just like that.

Rage crawled behind his teeth like broken glass.

“Motherfucker! You want a show?” he spat at the werewolf, who merely tilted his head, watching. “LIMITE BREAKER!” he howled and his body flared up once again.

“Galvanize! Vengeance!”

Ludwig’s body morphed in all colors of deep red and flaring purple and black smoke as the fueling power of the physical buffs from all three spells increased his base stats tremendously.

“Do not let rage blind you!” the Knight King shouted in Ludwig’s ears, “It is no way to use the Tyrant Blade if your rage is all you can feel,”

“I don’t think he’s consumed by it,” Thomas’s words came from the side, his eyes squinting.

The Knight King didn’t need to speak for Thomas to explain.

“Ludwig always had issues expressing his emotions, that’s why most his spells are weaker than normal, this rage he is feeling however, it’s basically not blinding him, but actually putting him at the level he is needing to properly function…”

And it was true, Ludwig’s eyes, though they looked like they were screaming bloody murder, still had sanity and rational, they were clear.

He knew even with all those buffs, he was still not a match for the werewolf, his eyes were on another prize, a bigger more dangerous one, the Queen that just kidnapped Celine.

Just as he was about to dash forward, his eyes caught motion, from the side, a small figure moved.

Mot.

The child’s bare feet touched the ground, and the moment they did, the earth split with an unnatural groan. A black slit opened, wide and breathing, and from within it, a tendril coiled in madness and stars shot forth. It wasn’t a whip. It wasn’t a limb. It was the concept of force, alive and incomprehensible, and it lashed toward the werewolf’s chest.

The werewolf caught it with one hand, immediately causing his arm to bun, but the grin on his face was never faltering.

“What’s the meaning of this, young saint?” the werewolf asked.

“You’re the one interfering, I’d suggest you remain here, lest you want me to actually ask for help,”

The werewolf’s arm continued smoldering, but he simply laughed, “All I wanted to see was some fun and enjoyment, and in that I already achieved my goal, now all I need to do is watch,” he said and simply tore his hand out, literally and jumped back away from Mot, landing cleanly on the same perch he was on earlier.

The stub left from the torn hand immediately regenerated back and the werewolf smiled as he watched Ludwig, “Struggle well, struggler…”

Ludwig didn’t reply. He sprinted through the chaos, ignoring the numbness in his back and the flickering red warnings in the corner of his vision. He passed paladins screaming. He passed the Queen, now dragging her bloated body toward the far side of the grotto, her limbs breaking and reforming with each bound.

The walls behind her cracked. There was a path.

She burst through it, roots tearing the stone wide.

“GET BACK IN HERE YOU BITCH!” Ludwig howled as he was sprinting full force, leaping forward using [Steadfast Leap]

Ludwig followed.

And ahead of him, cradled inside a mass of tendrils, Celine was being reshaped. Her eyes glowed faintly, and her hair had begun to shift in hue. Her fingers twitched with pain yet again. Just after she was released from centuries of agony, to be exposed to even more, not even Ludwig’s dead heart was that hard not to feel sympathy and pity.

The Queen was birthing something through Celine.

And Ludwig wasn’t going to let it that happen, no matter how much he tried no matter how many loops it needed.

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