Deus Necros Chapter 329: The Deep

The vampire's trail continued through the center. Her steps had sared the moss but left little impression on the stone. Yet sohow, it was obvious she had passed through here. The air was different where she had walked, as though her presence had stirred sothing not quite awake.

As they pressed deeper into the old ruin, the mist began to thin, not because of elevation or wind, but because sothing in the walls pushed it aside. They reached a wide chamber, open and dod, with broken stained glass panels inset into the far wall. The glass was rotted with ti, its colors dulled, its edges webbed with cracks, but the images within were still visible in pieces. One showed a spired tower beneath a blinding sun. Another depicted sothing coiled and radiant, half-bloom and half-star, rising from a circle of kneeling figures with their faces erased. The central panel, though nearly shattered, still held the remnants of a larger shape not human, but regal, its arms stretched outward, its torso aglow with dozens of intersecting lines. Its face was missing. Scraped away.

The Knight stood beneath it, gazing upward, his voice low.

"This is old. Older than the mainland's earliest shrines." The Knight said, "Whatever it was, though, seems like soone wanted destroyed or forgotten."

The Hunter crouched near a fragnt of sculpture fallen from the do, its base cracked open to reveal veins of pulsing red within the stone.

"Or tried to," he said. "This wasn't either. It was hidden."

Ludwig remained quiet. He stared at the murals, not with the curiosity of a scholar but with the narrowed attention of soone reading signs left in blood. He stepped toward the largest of the panels, the one whose central figure had been destroyed. Sothing about the geotry, the lines around it, and the posture felt too familiar. He had seen that shape sowhere before, not in books, not in temples, not in dreams, not in the flicker between waking and undeath.

A sound broke the silence.

It ca from further down the corridor, where the path narrowed once again into shadow. It was not a growl, not a voice, but a sound like roots being pulled free from wet soil. It was not frantic, not violent, just a steady dragging, shifting motion.

Ludwig turned toward it, but the vampire had already vanished beyond the bend.

"She's going deeper," he said.

The Hunter swore under his breath. "How far does this go?"

"As far as the vampire leads us," Ludwig answered.

He didn't need to say it. They all knew it now. This place was older than the Empire. Older than the Order. Older than even the Old Vampire Hunters. They were descending not into a ruin, but into a mory buried too deep for the sea to drown.

And the one carrying the Wrath Core had heard the call.

The corridor narrowed again, closing them in between roots that didn't grow, but held. The way forward curved left and sloped down, no longer smooth stone, but layered strata that suggested both ancient construction and centuries of slow decay. The air beca thicker the further they went, not damp, but dense, like sothing unshed. Breath didn't co easy here. Even the Hunter's usually flippant deanor had grown sharper, more alert. His steps were quiet, his blades drawn but lowered. The Knight had said nothing for several minutes, but he kept a hand on the wall as they walked, touching every third stone with the flat of his palm, as though trying to feel whether the place was breathing.

Ludwig led without hesitation, but not without caution. There was sothing in the rhythm of the steps ahead of them , faint impressions, disturbed dust, the sll of blood that no longer felt fresh but still lingered , that told him the vampire had co this way only monts earlier. She had left no ssage. No glance over the shoulder. No pause to check if she was being followed. Either she didn't care, or sothing else was pulling her forward faster than fear.

"This... feels rather familiar," the voice ca from Ludwig's side.

Unbeknownst to the Hunter and the Knight, Thomas and the Knight King's spectral form were invisible to them, and so was their voice, soundless, but to ludwig he heard it loud and clear.

using his own thoughts, 'What do you an?'

"I have a hunch on what this place could be, but I might be wrong, since it shouldn't have been here... no, more like, even during my ti, their existence was nothing but a myth."

Ludwig pondered as he walked down, if the Knight King, who is an Elf had lived for a thousand years thought of these things as myths, how old would they be? or more over who may they even be?

The passage opened into another chamber, smaller than the first, but more intact. The air was heavier here, laced with the scent of petrified wood and a sour rot that hadn't yet finished dying. The walls bore no murals this ti, but crude glyphs had been etched into the stone, so in long, winding spirals, others in jagged, angular clusters. None of them were readable, at least not to anyone raised on the texts of the Order. But there was a weight to them. They weren't warnings. They were requests. Beggings scratched into the ribs of a tomb.

At the far end, a series of steps led deeper still. Water trickled faintly down the center, black in the low light, threading between the stones like a vein. Just before Ludwig reached the first step, he stopped. His boot had pressed down on sothing too smooth.

He crouched and brushed aside a layer of fine ash and moss.

Underneath lay a hand.

Long skeletal fingers reached upward, still encased in a gauntlet half-lted to the bone. It had not been buried. It had been left where it died, covered only by ti. And the hand was reaching , not outward, but inward, as if trying to escape sothing further down.

The Knight ca to his side and looked, jaw clenched.

"This one was ard. Soldier. Possibly,, but this armor is far too crude and primitive."

"No legible markings on the gauntlet," Ludwig murmured. "Too old to be anything we know of... but what did it die from?."

The Hunter turned toward the dark ahead. "She's still going. You can feel it."

And Ludwig could. There was a pull now, faint, but insistent. Not magical. Not even entirely real. It felt like sothing inside the air, a weight that leaned toward the next chamber. Not an invitation. A gravity.

They descended the steps.

The mont they passed through the arch at the bottom, the scent changed.

Not rot. Not blood.

Flesh.

But not the dead kind. The living kind. The wet, soft, struggling kind.

And then ca the sound.

It was quiet at first. A thrum beneath the soles of their boots, like footsteps several corridors away. Then a vibration along the walls. Then, unmistakably, a scrape. Sothing large, moving slowly. Not directionless. Not disoriented.

Hunting.

Ludwig raised a hand and the others froze.

Across the chamber ahead, just beyond a low rise, they could hear sothing breathing. Not like lungs, but like a bellows with rot in its pipes. The vampire was nowhere in sight. Her trail led down here, but the corridor had split ahead, and now two passages gaped open into darkness. The tremor ca from the left. Her trail went right.

But it was already too late to choose.

From the left tunnel ca the first shape. It moved like it was dragging itself at first , wide-shouldered, spined, thorns blooming along its arms and shoulders in irregular clumps. Its face was a split of bark and bone, hollow in the center, pulsing with a red light that beat once every few seconds. Behind it ca two more. Not slow. Not clumsy.

Perturbants, a different breed, far more deadly as it seems.

Ludwig had only ti to speak once before the first one lunged.

"Contact."

The chamber exploded into motion. The Perturbant struck like a falling tower, limbs hamring down with unnatural weight. Ludwig brought Oathcarver up in a single motion and turned the first blow aside, the blade catching with a shower of rot, gri, and sludge.

[-18,544]

It wasn't an instant kill, "I'm becoming rusty," Ludwig cursed inwardly.

'Stay alert, stay patient," the Knight King said.

The Hunter ducked low, slashing at the knees of the second creature and rolling under a descending limb that crushed the stone behind him. The Knight brought his free arm to bear, intercepting a flailing strike that forced him back several feet with the sheer montum of it, almost threatening to break his arm in the process.

These weren't the shambling horrors from the glade. These ones were stronger. Fasters. Drawn from deeper into this temple, perhaps. But what were they doing here? Was there sothing that needed their presence here?

And now that they had engaged, the fight would not be quiet.

One Perturbant let out a screech as Ludwig's blade tore its arm off at the shoulder. Instead of blood, a black sap-like fluid sprayed outward, hissing where it struck the ground. The creature did not retreat. It staggered once, then ca again, head low, mouth open in a breathless snarl.

The three n held their ground, but the situation looked poor.

And above them, the island began to stir.

***

So monts ago...

At the glade, the Thorn-Wombed Queen had been fighting the Cardinal and was about to completely flip the entire battlefield to her favor. The remnants of the battlefield still echoing with smoke and fire. Her posture shifted, her face still hidden behind veils of thorn and blistered skin. But sothing in her had turned. Her body had recoiled from divine light. Her shell had withdrawn.

But now she felt the tremor.

The pulse that ca from sowhere deeper.

And she knew the Core had moved. Not only that, it also moved where it was incredibly critical for her. Sowhere where no life should set foot at. Fighting the Order was a priority, but that place was too dangerous to let any intruders delve into.

So instead of finishing off these asly weaklings, self-preservation was far more important.

She had no need to finish the Order.

But to retrieve what belonged to her. And kill anyone who dared set foot into her own domain.