Chapter 837: Sloth
Nightbreaker fell again, and old ice shattered beneath it.
The blow did not merely break the ground. It tore memory out of it. The frozen plain of Solania had known too many wars, too many corpses, too many prayers shouted before death. Now it knew wrath again. Ludwig’s aura rolled from him in red waves, thick enough that even the monsters nearest him recoiled before the mace descended. Their bodies remembered what their minds did not. They remembered who had once owned these mountains. They remembered the thing that had made the Dark Continent keep its distance, not out of respect, not out of strategy, but out of fear so ancient it had settled into instinct.
Nightbreaker struck, and the servants of Sloth broke.
Some shattered like brittle glass beneath the force. Others burst apart under the wrathful pressure spreading from the impact, their misshapen limbs and blackened torsos scattering across the ice before Van Dijk’s swamp dragged the remains down and swallowed them. Ludwig moved through them without grace and without pause. There was no elegance to what he was doing. Only violence shaped with purpose. A step forward, a swing, a crushed body. Another step, another swing, another line removed from the horde.
Notifications crawled across his sight.
[You have slain...]
[You have obtained...]
[Crystallized Soul acquired.]
[Crystallized Soul acquired.]
[Crystallized Soul acquired.]
Ludwig ignored them.
The creatures looked monstrous, but they still dropped souls. Strange ones. Condensed ones. Crystallized remnants that immediately vanished into the waiting pull of his lantern, gathering quietly while he continued the massacre. Later, perhaps, he would care. Later, perhaps, he would count what the battlefield had given him. For now, there were too many enemies in front of him and too little patience in his bones.
Gale fought beside him.
The Death Knight moved with that same silence Ludwig remembered, the same heavy certainty that had once made the Tyrant’s Blade feel less like a swordsmanship art and more like a law written by a cruel man for cruel battlefields. Gale had lived once, and though he was undead now, some things had not been lost. He still breathed that one rule into every movement.
The Tyrant’s Blade swung once.
It killed at least once.
It never struck if it did not kill, and it never missed a kill once the swing began. With Oathcarver in Gale’s hand, the art looked even more brutal than Ludwig remembered. The massive slab of steel came down and split a creature from crown to sternum. It swept sideways and took three heads with one arc. It hooked beneath a larger abomination’s shoulder and ripped the upper half of its body free before the Death Knight crushed the remainder under his shield. Gale did not waste motion. He did not posture. He simply ended whatever stood in the path of his blade.
Together, Ludwig and Gale drove a wedge through the horde.
Behind and around them, the Necropolitis pressed its advantage. Undead soldiers surged through the grave streets, weak and strong mixed together with no shame and no distinction. Some were powerful enough to force servants of Sloth back with spear and shield. Others were little more than skeletons in rusted helmets, hacking at monster legs until they were crushed underfoot. Necromancy did not care whether a corpse had been a farmer or a captain. It raised what was available and gave it work. A farmer’s bones could still hold a spear. A dead soldier’s hand could still grip a sword. A nameless skull could still bite if that was all it had left.
The servants of Sloth were far more numerous.
That should have mattered more.
It did not.
An undead that lost an arm fought with the other. An undead that lost both arms threw itself teeth-first at the enemy’s throat. An undead trampled under a monster’s foot still clutched at the ankle until another corpse dragged itself close enough to stab. Death had stripped them of fear, pain, hesitation, and self-preservation. Against them, the warped creatures of Sloth found no soft meat to terrify, no living nerves to overwhelm, no hearts to make panic beat faster.
Worse, the aura of the dead was poison to them.
Whenever a servant of Sloth was properly wounded by the undead, its flesh changed. It became dry, brittle, almost glasslike beneath the black corruption. A skeleton’s rusted blade could cut what red destruction had struggled to erase. A dead soldier’s spear could crack hide that normal mana had only burned. Then the dark bullets raining from the Tower Masters above would strike, and the weakened bodies burst apart in sprays of rotten lightless matter.
Mot added his own horror to the field.
Whatever his magic was, holy, unholy, or something that wore both words as badly fitted masks, it did not behave like the spells of the Tower Masters. It crawled. Purple-black tendrils unfolded from the cracks he had threaded through the Necropolitis, thin at first, then blooming into eldritch limbs that moved with a patience too intelligent to be simple conjuration. They reached into the horde, touched the servants of Sloth, and the creatures they caught did not merely die. They were consumed, outline first, as if something beyond the world had taken a bite out of their existence and found the flavor acceptable.
Mot watched his work calmly.
Ludwig decided not to ask.
The Tower Masters continued pouring low-tier dark magic into the front lines. Dark Bullet after Dark Bullet rained over the battlefield in endless volleys. Basic spells, if one judged by theory. Devastating, if one placed them in the hands of people who had mastered magic long before most mages learned to draw circles correctly. Each projectile struck with precision and rot, softening the horde for the undead charge. Van Dijk’s black swamp kept moving under everything, eating bodies, dragging wounded monsters down, and spreading deeper into the ice like the battlefield itself had begun to decay.
The creatures could no longer move forward.
There was simply too much devastation.
It was like throwing meat into a grinder and hoping the grinder would jam.
This one did not.
The sight changed the people of Solania.
At first, they had watched with horror. Then with disbelief. Then with a shameful, reluctant relief. Now, as the horde slowed, then buckled, then began to hesitate beneath the combined pressure of Ludwig, Gale, Kaiser’s Necropolitis, Van Dijk’s swamp, Mot’s tendrils, and the Tower Masters’ dark magic, hope spread across the walls like fire catching dry cloth.
Someone cheered.
Then others joined.
They cheered for the undead.
The absurdity of it should have been funny. Priests of the Holy Order, paladins who had sworn to burn necromancy from the earth, citizens raised to fear grave magic and all its works, now shouted themselves hoarse as skeletons and corpses held the line for them. Some cheered Ludwig, still calling him Guardian because ignorance was easier than understanding. Others cheered Gale without knowing his name. A few even shouted for the lich, though their voices shook around the word as if speaking gratitude to Kaiser might damn them by sound alone.
For one dangerous moment, Solania believed it might survive.
That was when the catastrophe arrived.
It did not come as a charge.
It came as an opening.
Far beyond the immediate battlefield, around the higher reaches of the mountain peaks, the endless tide of Sloth’s servants parted around a wide clearing. It was obvious once seen. Too obvious. Ludwig’s gaze found it because the monsters avoided that space with the same instinctive obedience they gave to fear. Thousands of them poured down the slopes on either side, but none entered the center. They made room. They bowed without bowing. They gave passage to something that did not need to hurry.
Through that clearing came a throne.
No, not a throne.
A sofa-like seat, wide and grotesquely comfortable, draped in dark fabric that looked too soft for a battlefield. It was carried by four amalgamations, each the size of Gale and Ludwig in their giant forms. Their bodies were massive piles of joined flesh, bone, and black corruption, limbs fused into support structures, backs bent beneath the weight of the seat. They moved slowly, but every step they took crushed stone and ice beneath them. None of the lesser creatures came close.
On the throne, reclining with almost offensive ease, was a man.
At least, he looked like one at first.
He was far too large to be human, nearly giant-sized, with long limbs and a body draped across the seat as if even sitting upright demanded more effort than existence was worth. One arm lay over the backrest. One foot dangled lazily off the side. His head tilted forward, then back, then forward again, his eyes half-lidded and heavy. He looked as if he were desperately struggling to stay awake and resented the entire world for requiring it of him.
The cheering on Solania’s walls died.
No command had been shouted. No spell had struck. Yet the field felt suddenly quieter, as if the arrival of that reclining figure had smothered sound beneath a blanket.
Ludwig stopped mid-step.
The red aura around him did not fade, but it tightened.
The mace in his hand vibrated harder.
The monsters near him recoiled, but he no longer looked at them. His gaze had gone past the front line, past the undead soldiers, past the swamp and dark bullets and the walls of the Necropolitis, to the throne carried down from the peaks.
Then he saw what two of the amalgamations held beneath their arms.
Two bodies.
Living or dead, he could not tell from that distance at first. One hung limp, hair spilling over a shoulder, clothes torn and darkened with blood and grime. The other twitched faintly, not enough to struggle, but enough to make the sight worse. The carriers held them casually, like spoils taken from a road, like food saved for later, like props brought to make a point.
Ludwig recognized them immediately.
His grip tightened around Nightbreaker until the living metal of his gauntlet creaked.
One of them was Joana.
The other was Celine.
For a moment, even the wrath around him went still.
Then something in Ludwig’s chest turned colder than the ice beneath his feet.
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