The street beca a maelstrom. The ghost child blurred in and out of existence around Mot, striking from impossible angles. The dancer’s every motion swelled the undead ranks, tightening the noose. And the Death Knight pressed forward in a straight, rciless line toward the heart of it all.
Ludwig found himself almost pitying the boy. To any observer, Mot was buried under an onslaught no single person should be able to withstand. Fire, poison, steel, and a tide of clawing dead pressed from every side. The branches of the flesh-tree groaned under the constant assault, pieces torn away only to regenerate again in slow pulses.
Then, in the middle of that chaos, Mot simply shook his head. It was a tiny gesture, but Ludwig caught the faint exhale, the slow blink that followed. The boy raised his hands, small, pale, deceptively fragile.
The world rippled.
No sound marked the change, but Ludwig felt it in his bones. Reality seed to resist, to bend unwillingly. The air split in jagged lines, each one stretching open into fissures the size of streets. There were a dozen of them, hanging in the air like wounds in the fabric of the city. From beyond those rents, a pressure rolled out, imnse, crushing, and wrong.
Tentacles erged, not from the ground, not from anything of this world, but from the source itself. Their skin glistened with a texture Ludwig’s mind refused to identify, and each one moved with a deliberate weight that made the cobblestones shudder.
The presence that seeped through those fissures was vast. It pressed against Ludwig like the heat of a furnace, though it was no warmth, only the suffocating awareness of sothing that should never have been allowed to notice him. It was a weight he recognized, one he’d felt only once before. The sa scale of existence he had encountered when standing in the presence of Deus Necros.
[As an Undead you are immune to all forms of Fear.]
The ssage in Ludwig’s mind rang hollow against the reality of what pressed down on him. His body did not tremble with terror, but the force was enough to drive him to one knee. The cobblestones beneath him cracked in spiderweb patterns, dust rising as the ground itself buckled, as though even the stone sought to crawl away from the gaze lurking beyond those rifts. He could barely keep his eyes on the battlefield. Each attempt to focus felt like staring into the heart of an eclipse, where light was devoured rather than obscured.
The Lich was faltering. Ludwig saw it in the way the black-blue light in his eye sockets flickered, in the tautness of his grip on the staff. His once-imnse army was crumbling. The appendages that fell from the fissures tore through them as if they were nothing but brittle dolls. Armor split like thin parchnt, and even the Death Knight, unyielding, relentless, was caught mid-strike and wrenched into the air before being slamd down hard enough to leave a crater in the cobblestones. He didn’t rise again.
The dancer’s perfect poise shattered as a tentacle thicker than a city pillar swept her into a wall, the motion so fast Ludwig barely caught the blur of white dress before she was gone. The ghost child dissolved into smoke again and again, but every re-formation was t by an appendage that adjusted, predicting its position, until it was snared mid-phase and torn apart in a flash of smoke and shreds.
The Lich’s bony jaw moved, shapes of words forming in the oppressive silence. Ludwig didn’t need sound to know they were curses. His skeletal fingers tightened around the staff, pulling what remained of his mana into a single surge. The air around him warped, dense with necrotic energy, and a sphere of black radiance ford at the staff’s head.
He unleashed it in a lance of raw destruction, straight toward the oncoming appendage. The projectile burned through the air, eating away light itself in its wake.
It struck, and the tentacle didn’t so much as slow. The magic fizzled against it like a spark against wet stone. Then the impact ca, a force like the blow of a mountain in motion. The Lich vanished in an eruption of pulverized bone and shredded robes, fragnts scattering across the ruined street.
Only his staff remained, spinning end over end through the settling dust before clattering to rest a few paces from Ludwig. The purple gem atop it pulsed once, dimd, and went cold. Whatever connection it had to its master was gone.
Ludwig didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward, boots crunching over shards of bone, and snatched the staff up in one hand. Its weight was strange, light, but with a pull that made his grip tighten unconsciously. Without ceremony, he slid it beneath his coat, hiding it away before any other scavenger could spot it.
The battlefield grew still. The tentacles withdrew one by one, sliding back through the fissures until nothing remained but the gaping wounds in reality, and then those too sealed shut. The flesh-tree collapsed in on itself, folding inward until there was only empty cobblestone where it had stood.
Mot was seated on a chunk of fallen masonry, legs crossed, an apple in his hand. His dark hair was as neat as when he’d first arrived, his clothes immaculate, not a single drop of blood or dust marking him. He bit into the fruit, chewed, and swallowed as though nothing unusual had happened. From that distance, Ludwig could swear the boy’s eyes were not looking at the ruins around him, but far beyond, at sothing only he could see.
Then Mot glanced Ludwig’s way. No hostility, no warmth, just a flat acknowledgnt. He lifted his free hand in a casual wave, turned, and walked deeper into the city without a word.
The silence left in his wake was heavier than the pressure from before. Ludwig exhaled slowly, realizing he’d been holding his breath despite having no lungs.
"That was sothing..." Thomas’s voice returned at last, the unnatural muting effect fading. The Knight King’s presence beside Ludwig was steady, though his tone was sharper than usual.
But Ludwig wasn’t listening. His gaze was on the rubble where the Lich had fallen, scanning each shadow, each heap of shattered stone.
"What are you looking for?" Thomas asked.
"The Soul Vassal. The Phylactery," Ludwig said, already moving toward the wreckage. His hands were on the nearest pile before Thomas could reply, tossing chunks of masonry aside with a speed that sent dust into the air in choking clouds.
"You think he’ll leave it here?" Thomas asked.
"He has to," Ludwig muttered, not pausing. "A Lich can’t stray too far from its phylactery. It’s the only anchor keeping his existence tethered. Without Necros’s blessing, without the lantern’s protection, these Apostles have found their own ways to cheat death. The Sister Gallows, her body reforms no matter what you do to it. The Werewolf sold himself to the Gluttonous Death. The Piper scatters his life between countless bodies. This one? He bound his soul to an object. Which ans it’s here. And if I don’t find it before he reforms..."
He didn’t need to finish.
"Mana," the Knight King said suddenly.
Ludwig glanced over his shoulder. "What?"
"Your mana," the spectral monarch repeated. "You’re an undead. Your essence carries the sa weight, the sa... resonance, as his. Spread it. Let it seep into every crack and shadow here. The living can’t feel it, humans, even mages, their mana is different. But yours will stir when it brushes against a phylactery."
Ludwig’s eyes narrowed in thought. The logic was sound. He shifted into a crouch, planting both palms flat against the fractured cobblestone. His fingers splayed, and he exhaled through clenched teeth as he pushed every thread of mana outward.
It poured from him in a creeping tide, curling over stone and rubble like smoke on the wind. The sensation was strange, like dipping his awareness into an ocean and feeling the currents flow around jagged reefs. His reach extended to the edges of the ruined street, down through the gaps in the broken earth, into the hollows left by fallen buildings.
For long monts, there was nothing. His mana thinned with each pulse, his reserves slipping toward empty. He could almost feel it unraveling at the edges, ready to dissolve back into him in defeat,
And then, it caught.
A tug. Sudden and sharp, as though sothing beneath the debris had hooked into his very being and was trying to drink it dry.
Ludwig’s head snapped toward the source, eyes locking on a mound of rubble near where the Lich had first fallen. Without hesitation, he broke into a run, boots grinding over bone shards. He dropped to his knees in the dust and began tearing at the pile with bare hands. Each brick and shattered slab ca away in a cloud of grit, the pull on his mana growing stronger, more insistent.
Stone gave way to sothing smooth and cold. He pushed the last slab aside, and there it was.
An old lantern. Identical in design to his own Soul Letting Lantern, its tal fra untarnished despite the destruction, the glass flawless and uncracked. The stillness of it was almost mocking, as if the object itself knew it was the heart of the enemy’s immortality.
The mont his fingers closed around its handle, a ripple of dark energy surged through him, and a notification flared before his eyes.
[You have picked up an Ownerless Soul Letting Lantern. Would you like to upgrade your own Soul Letting Lantern by foddering this one?]
A slow, wicked grin curved Ludwig’s lip. His grip tightened until his knuckles whitened.
"That," he said, his voice low and edged with satisfaction, "Shouldn’t even be a question."
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