Novel Full Chapter 456: Accept Your Demise
Chapter 456: Accept Your Demise
Eyes widened, though his lungs were hollow. Instinct, not necessity, pulled a phantom breath into his chest as his body jerked upright with the cruel familiarity of return. Death had carried him back again, dragged his awareness to the same point, the same instant carved into his very being like a scar. The battlefield unfolded, unchanged. The ruined streets, broken stones blackened by fire. The dome of light overhead still shivered faintly, Titania’s waves of holy power rolling outward like a tide that had begun to recede.
He knew the moment. He knew what followed. Yet hope, thin as it was, clawed at him again.
“We have to stop him!” Ludwig’s voice cracked, raw and sharp as it tore from his throat. The words had more weight this time, as though he believed sheer force could bend the flow of fate. His shout cut through the battlefield, but no one heard him, not truly. The tide was already turning.
The werewolf was smiling. He moved with the ease of someone repeating a motion done countless times, as though mocking Ludwig’s looping despair. His claws sank into his chest without hesitation, dragging free the vine-choked heart that beat with unnatural vigor. The sound of it tearing loose was wet, obscene, echoing against stone.
“Looks like this isn’t your first time!” the Apostle crowed. His laughter was jagged, too sharp, his golden eyes gleaming with cruel awareness.
Ludwig’s jaw clenched so hard he felt his teeth grind. He cursed inwardly, his feet already striking forward. Titania and Sister Gallows clashed again but thankfully the holy power waves had stopped, their blows rattling the air, sparks bursting in the corner of his vision. He ignored them, forcing his body into a sprint, Oathcarver drawn with a sound like thunder scraping against stone. His boots kissed the ground only to launch him further, his frame moving faster than thought, as though velocity alone could change inevitability.
But inevitability had no rival.
The werewolf stepped back, lazy, unhurried. He didn’t need to glance over his shoulder at the rift yawning behind him. He knew it would open, knew what would come. He wanted Ludwig to watch it again. To fail again.
Chains burst from Ludwig’s hands, black links forged from soul-stuff, shrieking as they stretched across the battlefield. They stabbed into the rift like harpoons, sinking into the void, pulling taut with all his weight behind them. His muscles strained, Oathcarver dug into the ground for leverage. For a moment, the portal quivered. For a moment, he thought,
A blur of metal tore through.
The mace struck with a roar. His chains shattered like glass. The backlash slammed through his arms, bones creaking, phantom pain lancing through his marrowless frame. He staggered as the weapon thundered past, missing his skull by inches. Wind tore across his face, his regalia cloak shredded into ribbons, stone beside him disintegrated into dust.
This time he saw it. The weapon wasn’t just large, it was obscene. A boulder given form, studded with jagged ridges, grooves etched deep enough to bleed sparks as it moved. The mace was a monument to destruction, designed not to slay but to obliterate. It could pulp castles, grind armies into nothing. And it was only the herald of what crawled behind it.
The rift screamed.
Metal ground against stone in a roar that shook the entire city. Windows burst outward from the pressure, glass raining down. The air itself split, trembling with each widening tear. A gauntleted hand clawed the edges, black iron fingers sinking into reality as if it were paper. With every pull, the world shrieked. The sky dimmed. The ground beneath Ludwig’s boots shivered as though afraid.
Armor emerged, colossal and jagged, each plate stacked like the shell of a beast born in the abyss. Cracks split the surface, and from within bled crimson light, molten and furious, spilling out like wounds that refused to close. Mist seeped from those fissures, curling in the air in soft, ghostly tendrils that carried whispers. Ludwig heard them faintly, names of the dead, cries of ruin, a thousand voices dissolving in agony.
Then the helm rose. Spiked, horned, cruel. Its design was nightmare made steel. Inside, behind the visor’s bars, crimson glowed. Not eyes, but a pulse, steady and alive, like a heart beating in the dark. Each throb dimmed the battlefield further.
The world itself recoiled.
And yet it came.
The Wrathful Death tore itself free of the rift. A juggernaut of iron and rage, towering, vast. Each step thundered, cobblestones cracking beneath his weight. Rubble scattered. The air thickened with the stink of rust and decay, as if all metal had been ground into dust and poured into the lungs.
Ludwig’s knees nearly buckled. His grip on Oathcarver trembled. He had seen gods, apostles, horrors beyond imagination. None had smothered him like this. Maybe because non held this much hostility toward him but the crux of the matter was… “How the fuck am I going to stop something like this…” he whispered, and the words felt like a confession to the void.
The system answered.
[You have failed in stopping the Wrathful Death from fully descending on the battlefield.]
A scream tore through the battlefield, sharp enough to rattle Ludwig’s bones. It wasn’t just sound, it was raw anguish made physical, a note that vibrated through stone and flesh alike. His head snapped toward it before he could stop himself, dread already coiled in his hollow chest.
Celine.
He saw her collapse onto one knee, her sword falling from trembling fingers as her body convulsed. The veins that had crawled across her cheek were no longer veins but roots, black and barbed, burrowing deeper under her skin. The pale side of her face, once untouched, was spreading crimson now. Her green iris dimmed, then bled with streaks of red, drowning until both eyes glowed with the same fury. Her teeth grit against a scream that came anyway, a sound that wasn’t hers anymore.
The system’s merciless notifications carved themselves into Ludwig’s vision.
[You have failed to stop Celine Bastos from being fully corrupted by Wrath.]
[The Wrath Core has taken over]
[Celine Bastos has now become the Thorn-Wombed Queen.]
Her form writhed, bent in unnatural arcs. Bones cracked and reformed, her spine arching backward as though torn by invisible strings. Her skin split in places, roots surging free in writhing tendrils. They coiled into flowers that bloomed with unnatural speed, pale blossoms too beautiful to be anything but grotesque. Their petals curled and blackened as they opened, reshaping into faces of hunger, mouths lined with thorny teeth.
Her body stretched, rising, twisting upward until she no longer resembled a woman at all. The figure that had once stood by their side now loomed as a hive, a vessel of growth and breeding. A womb for nightmares.
Her scream shifted, guttural, no longer human. It shook the battlefield with a resonance that pressed on Ludwig’s skull, scraping against his mind like claws.
All around, men broke. Adventurers who had stood against abominations and reavers dropped their weapons and fled. Their faces were pale masks, eyes wide in terror as their feet scrambled across broken stone. Clerics clutched their staves and wept openly, their prayers withering on their tongues as if the gods themselves had abandoned them little did they know they truly did abandon them. Some tried anyway, whispering desperate litanies, but the words had no power, no spark. The silence of the heavens was deafening.
The dome above them, fractured already, finally shattered. The sound was like glass collapsing inward, shards of dark magic dissolving into nothing.
Through that ruin, Van Dijk descended at last.
The vampire’s aura stormed around him like knives, arcs of scarlet mana flickering and snapping in every direction. His black hair whipped across his face, and his eyes, cold and bright, were fixed not on the Wrathful Death but on the one who had orchestrated this.
The werewolf.
The beast’s grin widened, teeth flashing with delight. He clutched the Shrike’s broken form with one claw and raised his other in mock greeting. “What a shame! You couldn’t even save your own sister this time! Even with all that power…”
The words dropped like a hammer into silence. Even the horrors paused, as if to savor the cruelty of it.
Van Dijk’s eyes widened, only for an instant. Then his rage ignited. His aura flared outward like a storm breaking its cage, jagged and searing, rattling the very stones beneath his boots. His face remained still, but his mana screamed.
The werewolf laughed, cruel and carefree, tossing a crystal to the ground. It flashed, sucking both himself and the Shrike into its core. They vanished, his laughter lingering like poison on the air.
Van Dijk’s rage detonated. His power warped the space around him, the ground beneath his feet burning black. His gaze flicked once to the monstrous form of Celine, then back to the vanishing trail of the Apostle. For centuries he had carried the torment of loneliness. And now the words of one guard gave him a sliver of hope a doubt that almost threatened to break him anew. His doubts had been chains, but now the werewolf’s words had cut them. His sister had lived. She had lived only to be corrupted, twisted, and once again lost.
The rage in him was absolute, so vast that even Ludwig, a creature with no beating heart, felt it seep into him. Rage deeper than any, sharper than grief. And for the most part, amplified by the creature in the center of all of this.
And then the Wrathful Death moved.
Ludwig barely registered it. A twitch. A shift of an arm, as though brushing dust aside.
The air buckled. The sound of stone splitting rang across the battlefield.
The world turned black.
[You Died]
Gasping, though his lungs did not demand it, Ludwig jolted awake once more. The battlefield lay before him, unchanged, unaltered, waiting like a cruel stage where the script would always play the same. He was back. Again.
The dome still pulsed faintly overhead. Titania’s holy waves echoed once, rolling like distant thunder. The air smelled of ash and blood. He could hear the clash of Sister Gallows’ laughter against Titania’s blade somewhere in the distance. The werewolf’s claws were only just reaching for his own chest again, the grotesque vine-choked heart still within.
It was the same moment. The same cycle.
This time Ludwig didn’t move. His hand stayed at his side, Oathcarver heavy against his back. His legs didn’t tense, didn’t leap forward as they had before. He only stood, watching, his eyes hollow pits that drank the sight of inevitability.
The werewolf tore the heart free, wet and obscene, as he always did. His grin stretched across his muzzle, the cruel mirth in his eyes as bright as ever. He crushed it, vines snapping, blood spilling in slow motion to Ludwig’s gaze.
The portal bloomed again. A wound opening. Reality groaning.
Ludwig’s fingers flexed. The memory of his chains shattering lingered in his arms, phantom pain lancing through. He thought of throwing them again, thought of sprinting, thought of repeating the same hopeless attempt. But the thought withered before it reached his muscles. What use? He had seen it. He had seen the mace break him, seen the juggernaut crawl free, seen Celine fall, seen Van Dijk’s rage, seen the world end.
So he stood still.
The werewolf’s eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. He noticed the difference. A flicker of amusement gleamed in his expression. “Oh? Finally figured it out? That it doesn’t matter what you do?” His voice carried like oil on water, smooth and mocking.
Ludwig didn’t answer. His lips barely parted. Inside his skull, thought churned, dark, heavy, collapsing inward on itself.
The rift widened again. The hand tore reality. The mace crashed through, obliterating chains that were never thrown. Ludwig only watched. The sound of grinding iron roared, the helm emerged, the crimson pulse within its visor beating like a heart mocking his own hollow chest.
He could not stop it. He had never been able to stop it.
The system’s cold message cut into him, inevitable.
[You have failed in stopping the Wrathful Death from fully descending on the battlefield.]
And then came the scream.
His head turned without meaning to. He watched as Celine twisted again, her body betraying her, her eyes consumed in red. He heard her throat tear itself raw with a scream not her own. He saw her body rupture, roots splitting her flesh, flowers blooming into monstrous blossoms that gaped like mouths.
The Thorn-Wombed Queen rose again.
Adventurers fled again. Clerics prayed in vain again.
The dome shattered again.
Van Dijk fell through again. His eyes burned with rage again. The werewolf laughed again, crystal flashing, vanishing with the Shrike again.
It all played as it had. A cycle written into the marrow of this battlefield.
And Ludwig, for the first time since his rebirth, felt something he had not believed himself capable of.
Despair.
It did not come as a scream or a shudder. It was not terror, nor even grief. It was a cold sinking, like being buried alive under earth too heavy to move. A weight pressing against his hollow ribs, filling the silence where a heart should be. Despair not because he feared death, death was an old companion. Despair because there was no path forward. No blade sharp enough, no spell fierce enough, no strategy cunning enough.
Even the dead could be broken.