Deus Necros

[Noctivex has felt its Master’s Pain.]

[Noctivex is assisting.]

Immediately, Ludwig felt like hundreds of blades were stabbing right through his already broken arms. Sharp long needle like shards of steel shot right through his muscles, and pinned his broken and fractured bones, they corrected them, repositioned them, and aligned then. Then they pierced right through them and grew, creating a fortified shell that protected Ludwig at the cost of feeling pain.

Noctivex did not heal like a healer. It repaired like a siege engineer fixing a wall while the enemy was still climbing it.

His shattered forearms jerked as internal splints forced the fragments together. His shoulders dragged themselves back into place with a wet, grinding snap that made the inside of the helm feel too small for his own grunts.

The armor thickened over the damage, sealing him inside reinforcement that worked beautifully and felt like being punished for not dying correctly.

The world began turning redder through his eyes. Not metaphorically, not simply anger clouding judgment, but an actual deepening of color through the helm’s narrow slits.

Gold became rust.

White became bone.

Pride’s figure sharpened in the center of it all, surrounded by the palace’s broken reflections and the faint shimmer of authority he wore like a second skin.

Ludwig’s breathing, unnecessary as it was, came out in low metallic bursts. Each one sounded like a furnace being forced open.

The pain did not fade. It became background, a constant screaming choir under the heavier drum of Wrath pressing through Noctivex and into him.

“You do not fathom the power you have, release it, and die, it is better for someone like you.” Pride spoke with the same poisonous certainty, but Ludwig watched him more carefully now. The words tried to place distance between them again, to restore the hierarchy Pride enjoyed so much.

Yet the fact he was talking mattered. The fact he was advising him to release the power mattered even more.

Pride had stopped the first blow, yes, and had nearly ruined Ludwig’s arms through the backlash.

But now Pride was warning him away from Wrath, from Noctivex, from whatever connection was forming deeper between the Heart and the Living Metal.

Warnings were just fear wearing formal clothes.

“All I hear is,” Ludwig huffed, “That you’re scared of Wrath.” The huff came out as a distorted metallic breath, red light pulsing from between the plates of his chest.

He rolled one repaired shoulder, and the internal spikes of Noctivex shifted inside the limb with a fresh stab of pain, just in case he had started getting comfortable. He had not. His hands tightened on Nightbreaker again, and this time the grip felt reinforced, ugly, painful, but functional.

“My foolish brother was powerful, but he was never enough to match me,” Pride said. His tone smoothed out again, but the palace had changed.

The mirrors nearest the previous exchange showed hairline fractures. The floor beneath Ludwig’s boots was no longer pristine. Noctivex’s red aura reflected in the gold and made the chamber look less like a throne of perfection and more like a treasury burning from the inside.

Pride stood in the center of it all, still composed, still impossibly dangerous, but Ludwig was no longer measuring him as an untouchable end. He was measuring him as a problem with a boundary.

“Is that so,” Ludwig smiled, “Then let’s see if that’s true.” Suddenly, the molten looking aura around Ludwig raged on, flaring with bigger and more menacing light.

The smile could not be seen beneath the helm, but it changed his voice, adding a rough edge of satisfaction that slipped between the grinding tones of metal.

Wrath surged from the Heart like a furnace door thrown open, flooding through the seams of Noctivex until the red glow became almost liquid.

Heat without flame rolled off him, distorting the air. The floor around his boots began to darken, thin cracks spreading outward like veins. Ludwig felt the power answer his challenge, not politely, not safely, but with the immediate enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for permission to stop pretending.

The armor shuddered, and began changing, readjusting to Ludwig using aura alongside Noctivex. Plates loosened and slammed back into place in new arrangements, the sound filling the arena with a rhythm like a thousand blacksmiths striking in unison.

Noctivex was no longer merely covering him. It was adapting to the Wrath pouring through him, reinforcing the lines where the aura pushed hardest, opening seams where the red force needed to breathe.

The internal metal threaded deeper through his broken arms, up his shoulders, across his spine, dragging his posture straighter until the slumped humiliation from earlier vanished beneath a more terrible shape.

It hurt. Of course it hurt. But pain was a sign of life, something an Undead would never let go of.

The horns forced their way out of the helm with a cracking shriek, translucent red crystal gleaming like frozen blood under the palace lights. Around his shoulders, the jagged protrusions lengthened and refined into sharper, crueler shapes, no longer random metal violence but crystalline intent. The spikes around his belt and knees grew with the same brutal elegance, while the knuckles of his gauntlets extended into red-edged ridges that promised to turn even a missed punch into a problem.

The mirrors along the dome caught the transformation and multiplied it until Ludwig seemed surrounded by versions of himself becoming less human with every second.

Nightbreaker’s head expanded again, not as smoothly as before, but with a violent, pulsing growth that made the weapon look like it was inhaling Wrath and hardening around it. The pentagonal mass thickened, its spikes stretching outward into red-black points, the edges gaining crystalline ridges that caught the aura and burned with it. The shaft grew denser in Ludwig’s hands, heavy enough that the floor protested every time he shifted it. The weapon had been a siege instrument before. Now it looked like a piece of execution architecture that had gotten tired of waiting for a castle to come to it.

“Then block this one,” Ludwig howled as he struck down. The howl tore out of the helm with a deep, distorted violence that shook the cracked mirrors.

He raised Nightbreaker with both repaired arms, the metal splints inside him screaming as they bore the weight, and brought it down with everything the form could give. This was not the clean testing strike from before. This was Wrath given trajectory.

The mace descended through the red-tinted air, and the arena seemed to shrink around the path of the blow.

This time, for the first time since they ever fought, Pride didn’t simply parry, stop, or use his authority. Ludwig saw the moment approach as if time had thickened. Pride’s hand did not rise in that arrogant, effortless way. His posture did not settle into certainty. The authority that had pressed down on Ludwig moments before did not manifest as an invisible wall.

Instead, there was a shift in Pride’s stance, a minute adjustment of weight that would have meant nothing to anyone who had not died repeatedly trying to read him.

Ludwig’s eyes narrowed behind the helm. There. There it was. A crack that was not in the palace, but in Pride’s pattern.

For the first time, something inconceivable happened. In the same beautiful, gold-poisoned arena where Ludwig had been killed, dismissed, and reset so many times that death had started feeling like a bad habit, the impossible rhythm broke.

Pride’s body moved away from the line of impact. It was swift, elegant, and controlled, because of course even retreat had to look expensive when he did it.

But the meaning was not elegant at all.

Pride dodged.

The blow landed on the palace’s floors. Nightbreaker struck stone, and the palace answered like a creature being gutted. The floor did not crack so much as erupt, slabs of polished material twisting upward around the impact while red crystalline spikes burst outward in a violent ring.

They speared through the ground, the walls, the decorative pillars, and the lower curve of the dome, forming a jagged circle of Wrath-made crystal that pinned the arena’s beauty in place like a butterfly under glass. The shockwave slammed through Ludwig’s legs, but Noctivex held him steady, claws of metal biting into the broken floor.

The dome of the palace shook and its mirrors shattered along with all its gold and its treasures. A rain of glass, gilded fragments, and broken ornamentation fell from above, clattering across the ruined floor in a glittering storm.

The mirrors that had reflected Pride’s perfection exploded one after another, their surfaces bursting into shards that caught the red light before scattering into dust and razors. Gold split from the walls in torn sheets. Treasures toppled, cracked, and vanished under slabs of stone forced upward by the impact.

The arena that had once felt untouchable now looked wounded. Not destroyed, not yet, but marked. Ludwig watched the destruction spread and felt something colder and sharper than satisfaction settle inside him.

Ludwig’s arms throbbed inside their metal prison, his body still screaming from Noctivex’s repairs, but that pain became distant compared to the shape of the new fact in front of him.

Pride could be forced to move. Pride could choose avoidance. Pride could recognize a blow as something not worth touching.

Ludwig smiled. Beneath the sealed helm, behind the red glow and the grinding metal, the expression stretched across his face with ugly satisfaction. It was not relief. Relief was for people who were safe, and Ludwig was currently standing in front of something that could still probably kill him in several creative ways.

It was not victory either. Victory was a long way off, somewhere behind a pile of mistakes he had not made yet. But it was the first honest taste of progress, and after a couple dozen deaths, progress tasted better than dignity.

Change is good.

Change is information.

And if Pride dodged. That meant one thing and one thing only. Ludwig turned the logic over once, twice, making sure anger did not dress itself up as certainty.

Pride had stopped the first strike and reflected the force back.

Pride had used authority and failed.

Pride had warned him away from Wrath. Pride had claimed superiority over his brother.

Then Pride had dodged the empowered blow rather than block it.

No matter how arrogant he was, no matter what words came next, his body had answered the question before his mouth could lie about it.

He couldn’t take that blow head on.

Ludwig shifted Nightbreaker out of the crater it had created, the weapon dragging loose with a heavy scrape while red crystal splinters fell from its head. The sound was rough and beautiful in the worst way.

Ludwig laughed, “Finally, I can see it.” Ludwig turned to Pride, “That hope of yours, it finally wavered!”