Chapter 838: How Exhausting
Ludwig’s eyes shifted to the side.
Van Dijk’s face had changed.
The Black Tower Master was still smiling, in the most technical sense. His mouth held the shape of one, faint and controlled, but nothing about it carried amusement anymore. His eyes had become calm. Cold. Very cold. The kind of cold that made the icefields of Solania seem loud and childish by comparison. Celine was his sister. Difficult, stubborn, proud, and far too eager to throw herself into training she was not ready for, but still his sister. Now she hung beneath the arm of one of the throne carriers, limp and bloodied, in the possession of the enemy’s highest command.
Getting to her would be difficult.
Van Dijk looked at the distance between them, at the horde, at the four monstrous amalgamations carrying the sofa-like throne, at the giant slumped upon it as if the entire invasion were an exhausting inconvenience, and seemed to regard danger as nothing more than a side effect.
Ludwig stopped.
The battle stopped with him.
Not entirely. The undead still shifted. The servants of Sloth still twitched. Dark magic still hissed through the air in fading trails, and Van Dijk’s swamp still dragged broken bodies beneath its surface. But the momentum of the battlefield changed. The endless press of monsters slowed and parted. The front lines opened as if a silent command had passed through every deformed creature between the Necropolitis and the mountain peaks.
The carriers moved forward.
Each step from the four amalgamations made the ice groan. They were massive, each one near the size of Ludwig and Gale in their giant forms, their bodies assembled from too much flesh and too many limbs to be natural. They carried the throne with a grotesque gentleness, careful not to disturb the being reclining upon it, as if waking him fully would be a greater disaster than the war itself.
Ludwig’s gaze flicked to the two captives.
His senses stretched.
There.
Life.
Faint, strained, wounded, but present.
The pressure in his chest loosened by a fraction. A moment earlier, when he saw Celine hanging there, something in him had almost reached for death before thought caught up. Another rewind. Another rejection of the present. Another refusal to accept the shape of the battlefield. But she was alive. Joana too. Their signatures were weak, but not gone.
He tightened his grip on Nightbreaker instead.
The throne carriers stopped when they were close enough for words to cross the dead city’s outer field.
The giant on the throne did not open his eyes fully.
He barely moved at all.
"Why resist us so?" one of the carriers asked.
The voice did not come from the reclining figure. It came from the amalgamation at the front left, its many mouths moving together in a soft, tired harmony. The one on the throne could not even be bothered to speak for himself.
Another carrier continued, "Why put so much effort into living?"
Ludwig stared at the throne.
Then he pointed Nightbreaker toward it. "If you think that, how about you just drop dead? You’d have fewer things to worry about and do."
A faint sigh escaped the figure on the throne, though even that seemed to cost him something.
"Ah," the carrier spoke again, translating the thought. "How I wish I could simply do so..."
Ludwig frowned.
That did not fit.
He had expected arrogance. Hunger. Mockery. Some warped declaration from an Usurper of Death, one of the beings who had refused the end so violently that they became stains upon existence. They clung to life beyond reason, beyond nature, beyond all things that should have ended them. Yet this one spoke as if death were a rest denied to him, not an enemy he had conquered.
"Want a hand with that?" Ludwig asked, raising the mace a little higher.
The throne did not move.
One of the carriers turned its heads toward Nightbreaker. Its many eyes focused on the weapon, and a ripple passed through its fused flesh.
"That is my brother’s weapon," it said.
Ludwig’s gaze hardened.
Another mouth on the creature opened. "You are the one that killed him. He was rather strong-headed. Without you, we would not have taken a step onto these lands."
"If that’s all you can see," Ludwig said, "then unfortunately, you’ll be joining him soon."
"Halt."
This time the word came from the throne.
Not loudly.
Not with force.
Barely a word at all.
Yet the battlefield obeyed.
The effect was immediate.
Behind Ludwig, bodies dropped.
Not the undead. The dead remained standing, hollow eyes fixed forward, bones and armor untouched by the pressure. But the living buckled. Priests fell to their knees mid-prayer. Paladins stumbled as if the weight of their own armor had multiplied tenfold. Soldiers sagged against shields. Mages lowered their hands. Even the Tower Masters stiffened, their faces tightening as they fought something that had no shape and no visible spellwork.
It was not worship.
It was exhaustion.
A terrible, drowning exhaustion, so complete that it seemed to reach into the marrow and whisper that standing was too much, breathing was too much, thinking was too much. None of them slept. Not yet. But none of them looked fully awake either. Their eyes drooped. Their shoulders bowed. Their mouths hung open around half-formed protests that never found the strength to become words.
The cheers from Solania died in an instant.
Ludwig looked back once.
The sight was ugly.
Even Van Dijk had one knee slightly bent, one hand pressed against the head of his staff as if he had decided falling would be too undignified and was willing to kill the ground before allowing it. His eyes remained cold, colder now, but the authority had touched him too. The Red Tower Master snarled under his breath, trying to force mana through a body that suddenly wanted nothing more than stillness. The White Tower Master’s fingers trembled. The Blue Tower Master’s smile was gone.
Kaiser, Gale, and the undead stood unaffected.
"Stop using that authority," Ludwig said. "It doesn’t work on the undead."
"I have knowledge of that," one of the carriers replied.
The giant on the throne finally moved.
Barely.
He shifted his posture with the suffering of a man asked to cross a continent. One hand dragged itself from the backrest. His head lifted by degrees, heavy and reluctant. His eyes opened slightly more, revealing a gaze so tired that even hatred seemed beyond him. He struggled to sit properly, then failed halfway and settled with one elbow resting on a crossed knee, head barely held up by the hand supporting it.
"But why make us..." he said, and this time the words came from his own mouth, slow and faint, "...move?"
The simple act of speaking seemed to irritate him.
His eyes settled on Ludwig.
"You do too much."
Ludwig’s aura crackled.
"Stagnation is death," he muttered.
Sloth’s eyelids lowered. "Effort is futile."
"A stale pond rots."
"A rolling stone eventually stops."
Ludwig’s jaw tightened beneath the monstrous helm. "So," he said, "your reasoning is why move when all ends the same way?"
"Indeed."
"Because motion is life," Ludwig said. "And to truly feel death, you should know what living is."
For the first time, something like interest crossed Sloth’s face.
Not much.
A flicker.
"Spoken like a true apostle of Death."
"Isn’t that because I am..."
The answer drew no immediate response.
Sloth’s gaze drifted from Ludwig to the Necropolitis, to Gale, to Kaiser, to the undead army, then finally to the two captives held beneath his carriers’ arms. Joana hung limp, barely conscious if conscious at all. Celine’s head shifted faintly, enough to prove again that life remained in her, and enough to make Van Dijk’s fingers tighten around his staff until the black wood groaned.
Sloth’s voice came softer. "Do you want these?"
Ludwig’s grip on Nightbreaker became still.
"Indeed," he said. "Hand them over. They aren’t yours."
"Then open the path," Sloth said. "Remove the Necropolitis."
For one moment, the battlefield thinned around Ludwig.
Not physically.
Everything remained where it was. The dead city. The horde. The walls of Solania. The priests on their knees. The Tower Masters fighting not to collapse. Gale standing like a black fortress. Van Dijk cold enough to freeze hell itself.
But the thought entered him.
What if he did?
What if he removed the Necropolitis?
What if he opened the path, took Celine, took Joana, and left this holy city to choke on the consequences of its own stupidity? He had never cared about these people. Not truly. Not their Hero, not their priests, not their laws, not their endless demands. They asked too much. They wanted too much. They condemned dark magic until dark magic protected them. They feared undead until undead stood between them and death. They worshiped laws that had made them blind, then cried for salvation when the bill arrived.
It was exhausting.
All of it.
So terribly, unbearably exhausting.
His forehead tightened.
A notification appeared.
[Your Declaration: I am Strong is faltering!]
Ludwig’s eyes widened a fraction.
Then narrowed.
Pride.
That damned blade had cut both ways from the start.
He could not go back on his word. Not truly. Not after declaring what he was. Not after standing before Pride itself and surviving the weight of that truth. He could feel the temptation to take what mattered to him and leave, to abandon the city, to let the Holy Order’s rot burn itself out beneath Sloth’s feet. Some part of him even agreed with it.
But backing down now would mean listening to Sloth.
It would mean admitting that the weight was too much. That the work was too much. That the demand was too much. That he was strong only when the path was convenient.
The strong did not kneel to exhaustion.
The strong did not obey because a tired giant told them to.
The strong did what they pleased.
And right now, Ludwig pleased to break the bastard in front of him.
His fingers tightened around Nightbreaker.
"That won’t happen, buddy," Ludwig said.
The red aura around him flared so violently that the ice at his feet cracked in branching veins. The pressure of Sloth’s authority still lay over the field, but around Ludwig it burned against wrath and pride, hissing like water poured over iron.
"If you’re here to fight, let’s fight. I already took down three of your kind. What’s one more to the count?" Ludwig locked his eyes with the giant Usurper of Death.
Sloth looked at him for a long moment.
Then his eyes began to close again.
"How tiring," he whispered.
The carriers lowered their heads.
The horde behind them stirred.
And Ludwig felt, with absolute certainty, that the real battle had only just begun.
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