Deus Necros

Chapter 733: The Red March

The projected image shimmered above the crystal: Kaiser’s pale face, calm eyes, the hint of amusement that never meant anything good for the people on the receiving end. “Convinced” sounded polite. Ludwig could imagine exactly what it meant in practice.

Ludwig didn’t understand how Kaiser was able to move so fast; he had a whole settlement to manage.

It was unsettling. Ludwig had been negotiating kingship and holding Wrath at bay, and Kaiser had already turned the plains into a network of pressure points. Efficient. Slightly terrifying.

“Good, then we’ll need a place to operate from, this mountain is rather unfriendly,” Ludwig said.

He said it while scanning the edges of the Safe Lands, the torches, the invisible barrier Dedal had opened earlier. The mountain wasn’t just unfriendly, it was actively hostile at night, and Ludwig had felt that hostility with his own skin. Soothsayer’s laughter didn’t fade quickly from memory.

“Just because it is unfriendly, doesn’t mean it is worthless,” Damra said as he approached Ludwig, “It is hostile at night, but quite usable in mornings, we can retreat whenever we need to, and let the Red King dare and come up with his army at night. The Soothsayers will eat his army alive.”

Damra’s tone carried the confidence of someone who’d watched armies fail in this terrain. He wasn’t boasting. He was pointing at a weapon the mountain itself provided, one that didn’t require loyalty, only timing.

The idea settled into Ludwig’s mind like a piece clicking into place. Terrain as ally. Night as a trap. The Red King’s numbers are becoming a liability instead of an advantage.

“I see. You heard that, Kaiser?”

“I heard, loud and clear, I’ll send several squads to the mountain you’re in for assistance. One of my scouts has already contacted the Red King’s army; however, they’re approaching a Tribe of Trolls. I’ve informed that tribe of the approaching danger, but they ate my scout…” Kaiser added.

The last line landed with the flatness of an inconvenience. Ludwig’s mouth tightened. A scout dying wasn’t shocking. A scout dying because the tribe ate him anyway was… depressingly on-brand.

Ludwig frowned, “There is nothing much to do about that then, let’s just leave them be, try and get anyone else to help. And then continue on with army management, you’re far better at that than I,” Ludwig said.

He meant it. Ludwig could kill. Ludwig could intimidate. Ludwig could make decisions under pressure. But Kaiser organized pressure. Kaiser turned chaos into systems. In a war like this, that mattered as much as any blade.

“I’ll do as I was ordered.” Kaiser hung up.

The hologram blinked out, leaving only the faint hum of the crystal in Ludwig’s palm. The bonfire’s crackle rushed back into the silence like it had been waiting its turn to speak.

Ludwig pocketed the crystal and turned to Damra. “I need to know the exact forces we have, and need to learn more about this mountain’s geography and what lives in it. Care to explain more about it?”

Damra’s expression shifted from celebratory to grimly practical. This was his realm: the mountain, the safe lands, the cycles. He looked around once, as if making sure no one would interrupt, then leaned in like a man sharing a story he hated remembering.

“Well, we’ve been living here for a while. The mountain itself wasn’t like this, until a few cycles ago… quite a lot of cycles in fact, some climber, an orc, arrived and caused the mountain to be like this. That was also the time we had a two-horned king. The battle between them made the ground bleed, and when the Orc defeated our king, he ascended…”

The words painted images Ludwig didn’t like: ground bleeding, mountain changing, an orc climber rewriting a whole environment through conflict. That wasn’t normal tower difficulty. That was something else, something that sounded dangerously close to Pride’s style: a person forcing reality to accept them.

“Do you remember anything specific about that orc?”

Damra’s face tightened as if the memory tasted foul.

“Yes…” Damra said.

“What was it then?”

“He was naked, butt naked. Didn’t even wear armor, just fought with his hands… well, more like… I can’t explain it; it wasn’t just a fight, it was an absurd amount of power and arrogance. He didn’t even consider our king to be worth his time… and guess what…” Damra stalled.

The detail was so absurd it almost made Ludwig laugh, and that absurdity made it worse. Naked meant confidence, yes, but it also meant contempt, contempt so deep you didn’t even bother with protection. Ludwig felt his skin crawl at the idea of someone walking into a king’s territory like that and treating it as exercise.

“What is it? it’s already sounding incredibly strange…”

“The strangest part is that Orc was never a king. He was the only case to ever have achieved a kingslayer without having a crown… in fact, he did have a crown, but it wasn’t a crown of the tower.”

The sentence hit Ludwig’s mind hard. Only a king could kill a king, Damra had just said that a few moments ago. And yet here was an exception. An exception meant a loophole. A loophole meant the Tower’s rule could be bent, broken, or bypassed.

“Explain more, I’m getting more confused.”

“He had a crown of thorns over his head. The same thorns that grow on the bodies of those who die from the soothsayers.”

Ludwig’s throat tightened. The vines. The thorns. The entombed corpses. The soothsayers are splitting and regrowing. The “Spirit Anchoring Fire” keeps them out. A crown of thorns wasn’t a decoration here. It was a key. Or a curse.

“Did that orc create those soothsayers?” Ludwig asked.

“No, in fact, the soothsayers weren’t that abomination before. They were spirits of the mountain; they, too, were a race that you could become. But after that orc met with them, they became like this. And no climber ever became a soothsayer, and that race was lost from the tower’s floor.”

The implications stacked fast. A climber altering a race. A race disappearing from the tower’s options. That wasn’t a small ripple. That was the kind of change Pride would enjoy, proof that an individual could rewrite the rules and make the world acknowledge it.

“That’s an incredibly powerful effect, coming from a single person, to eradicate or transform a whole race… a King of his own.”

“Exactly, he was a king of no country nor men, but his own king, and his crown wasn’t adorned with gold or jewels.”

Ludwig felt the edges of something forming in his mind, an answer that wasn’t complete yet. A crown not of the Tower. A kingslayer without kingship. A loophole built out of thorns and arrogance. If Ludwig could understand that mechanism, he might not need to play the Tower’s game cleanly. And Pride’s influence always left mechanisms behind.

Ludwig couldn’t guess or know what that climber was thinking, but if he was capable of beating another king while disregarding the rules, then that meant he was beyond simple and beyond powerful.

And worse, he might have been Pride’s kind of powerful. The kind that didn’t just win. The kind that changed what winning meant.

Not much time had gone by when Damra brought a report of every member on the mountain before the communication crystal lit up.

The buzz wasn’t gentle. It was urgent, a harsh vibration against Ludwig’s palm through cloth. Ludwig’s stomach sank before the voice even came through. Bad news always arrived like that, loud enough to interrupt hope.

“Trouble,” the words sounded hasty.

“What is it, Kaiser?” Ludwig asked.

“The Red Tusks are moving; they’ve already absorbed the troll tribe that refused us.”

Ludwig’s jaw tightened. So Kaiser’s scout hadn’t just been eaten. It had been eaten by a tribe that was already doomed. The Red King didn’t waste time. He converted obstacles into numbers.

“Moving where?” Ludwig asked.

“I expected them, honestly, to move toward the lizardmen settlement, or another tribe, since they might have wanted to get more troops to guarantee the victory… but no, they’re heading directly toward the mountain you’re in. They’ll arrive by morning.”

The bonfire cracked loudly again, as if it approved the timing. Around Ludwig, faces changed instantly. The brave ones went still, hearts beating louder. The cowards’ eyes widened, already searching for exits that wouldn’t matter. Damra’s expression hardened into something grim and old, like he’d seen this too many cycles and never liked how it ended.

Ludwig’s mouth twisted.

He hoped to have at least a few more days to gather more people and convince more tribes to join, but the Red King must have had other plans.