No matter what Ludwig conjured in his mind, plans rehearsed like old lines, tactics borrowed from mory, or desperate improvisations born of sheer panic, it all unraveled the sa way. His chains snapped. His sword broke. His body shattered. Even when his blows struck true, the Wrathful Death did not falter. The ending was always written before it began.
The loops repeated, countless and rciless. Death, destruction, a struggle that bled into nothing, and then death again. The thing that lood over him did not need to act with intent; it simply was. Its presence smothered hope like a hand pressed to a fla. A twitch of its gauntleted hand tore apart streets. A breath from behind its visor silenced thousands. To Ludwig, it was as if inevitability itself had taken form, wearing steel and crimson fire.
Every revival left him heavier. Not with pain, the numbness of his undead flesh dulled agony into sothing distant, but with a weight in his skull, a grinding ache where sanity had once lived. And worse, every cycle devoured the reservoir of souls he had hoarded so carefully, one by one, like candles snuffed in a storm.
He watched his lantern dim with each return. He had gathered sixty thousand once, a tide of pale lights swirling behind the glass. A treasure. A shield. Now, they bled away with every failure. Sixty thousand beca thirty, then ten, then one. Every ti his body re-ford, the lantern’s glow was fainter, the silence inside it deeper. Each lost soul was a whisper cut short.
At first, he had fought with fury, with desperation, with curses spat into the void. Then despair took hold, a cold fog that wrapped around him, numbing his mind as much as his flesh. He had watched the monster descend again and again, his hollow chest tightening as if breath were still possible.
But then, sothing shifted.
On one cycle, he did not move. He let Oathcarver hang heavy at his side. He did not sprint into futility, nor hurl himself at the mace to be crushed. He only watched.
And in that stillness, his eyes found what they had never found before.
The portal.
It flickered, a wound in the air, barely three seconds of life before it collapsed in on itself, as though the world itself refused to remain open to what it had let through. He stared, transfixed, his mind cutting past the looming juggernaut to the fragile truth behind it. No chains of magic, no visible ritual. No anchor. It was not sustained by will or spellcraft. It opened, it vomited its horror, and then it healed.
Three seconds.
That was all it gave him.
Hope sparked again, faint and perilous. If he could hold Wrath back for that breath of ti, if he could keep it from stepping through, from tearing the wound wider, then maybe, just maybe, the rift would close with the monster still inside.
It was madness. Impossible. A chance so slim it mocked the word itself. But compared to the certainty of failure, it was salvation.
The question was how.
He scanned the battlefield, every loop burning the images deeper into his sight. Mot, hunched and pallid, his small body trembling after drinking too deeply of Azathoth’s well. Titania, lost in berserker fury, locked against Sister Gallows, her holy light more dangerous than helpful. Celine, trembling at the edge of corruption, vines already crawling across her flesh, her red eye flaring. The mont she ca close to Wrath, she would be lost. And Van Dijk, Van Dijk had power enough to shape the battle itself, but his rage had blinded him, his aura flaring too wild to aim. Wrath’s presence itself seed to fan it further, amplifying hatred until reason drowned.
No one could help.
Not a soul.
Only Ludwig.
His hands curled at his sides. The spells he carried, third-circle scraps like Flaming Spear, Fireball, and crude debuffs, were laughable here. Child’s tricks thrown at a storm. He had nothing of eighth or ninth circle power, no way to cut a god of war from the sky. His mastery of magic was locked behind the low quality of the jewel on his forehead. For other fights it was enough, but here, It was tuned only to diocrity.
And still, he smiled. A grim curl of his lips, bitter but determined.
"This is going to be hella costly..." he whispered, and dragged a to from his inventory. Its cover slled of dust and old ink, leather stretched tight, its corners scarred from age.
Mot’s head snapped toward him, his young face pale. "What are you doing?" His voice cracked, sharp with disbelief. "This isn’t the ti to be studying!"
"You think I don’t know that?" Ludwig shot back, though his tone was hollow, eyes locked on the pages as his fingers flicked through them with urgency.
The book was one of Van Dijk’s, taken from the library he had never had ti to read properly. Since leaving the Black Tower, every mont had been spent fighting, bleeding, running. Only once had he sat and simply learned but that wasn’t enough. The regret of it filled him. So here the price of this lesion will be far too costly. Here he’ll have to learn and change the situation. Here in this crucible of hopelessness.
The parchnt whispered as he turned page after page, glyphs scrawled in Ludwig’s hand spiraling like smoke. The sll of ink was sharp, almost tallic, as though the words themselves carried residue of blood.
He stopped suddenly, eyes narrowing at a passage. His fingers dug into the edge of the page.
"This better be worth it," he muttered, lowering himself into a seated crouch amidst the rubble, the battlefield cracking around him like a storm.
Titania clashed with the Shrike, each blow ringing like thunder. Celine writhed, corruption spreading like ink across pale skin. Van Dijk’s aura shattered the sealing do above them, a storm of scarlet knives. The Wrathful Death raised its mace, and the sound of it falling was like a cathedral collapsing into ruin.
Thirty seconds. That was all he got.
[You Died]
The world snapped back, jarring as always, his body rebuilt in the sa place, in the sa mont. The werewolf’s claw was already plunging toward his own chest, ready to drag free the heart that would tear reality open.
Ludwig no longer wasted ti. He didn’t even watch the creature’s grin. The book was already in his hands, pages whipping beneath his fingers until he found the sa sigils, the sa cramped script he had burned into his mory seconds before. His eyes devoured it hungrily, as though if he read fast enough, the words themselves might change.
The loop carried on, unbending. The Shrike reford from blood, Titania struck her down, Van Dijk shattered the do, Wrath’s mace fell like the hand of God.
[You Died]
The sound of breaking bones echoed inside his skull even though his body was already gone.
He returned again, his lantern dimr.
This ti, his jaw clenched, and he didn’t waste the cycle entirely. His free hand flared with fire as he muttered the word for the simplest spell he knew. A fireball ford, crackling weakly, and he hurled it at the werewolf.
The Apostle’s head tilted, surprised more than threatened. He swatted it away with the back of his clawed hand. Sparks hissed uselessly against his fur. His lip curled, eyes narrowing as the fireball fizzled against stone.
"Pitiful tricks," he snarled, tearing the heart out anyway.
But he hesitated for the barest instant. Because Ludwig, instead of fighting, instead of posturing, was hunched in the dirt, a book open on his knees, eyes scanning as though the chaos around him did not exist.
It was enough.
A second longer before Wrath arrived. A second Ludwig stole.
Then the cycle ended.
[You Died]
Again.
The pressure of the mace crushing through the city and breaking his ribs from just the impact lingered like mory even as his body reford. His hands shook slightly, though they didn’t need to. His eyes burned, though they couldn’t tear.
Another bunch of souls gone. innurable at once sotis. Sixty thousand had once been a proud light inside the lantern, a swirling sea of faintly glowing fragnts. Now it was a puddle, seeping away each ti he revived. He could feel the difference, the glow dimd, the silence deeper. Thomas’s voice was one of the few left, echoing faintly, indignant but powerless. The Lich’s soul lingered too, cold and silent, like a guest waiting to be noticed. The rest? Shadows, ashes, nothing.
He clenched his jaw and dragged sothing else from his inventory, a Soul item to break. The soul trapped inside cracked with a sound like brittle glass, light spilling into his palm. One hundred souls, nothing. A droplet compared to the tens of thousands he had lost. But it bought him seconds.
Precious seconds.
[You Died]
Each ti he returned, he tried sothing new. A spell muttered quicker. A page morized. A fireball hurled to stall the werewolf’s hand. Sotis it bought him a breath. Sotis less. But always sothing. And always he returned, his lantern dimr, his reserves dwindling.
Dozens of revivals. Dozens of failures. Dozens of deaths. And his thousands of souls reduced to the single digits.
The deaths should have broken him. Any sane creature would have despaired and let go. But Ludwig was not alive. He had no pulse, no warmth, no heart to feel terror. What filled him was sothing colder, an obsession carved out of the bones of despair.
He would not stop.
Another fireball blood in his hand, seared the air, and burst against the werewolf’s claw. The Apostle growled, slapped it aside. A pause. Another second. Another line read.
The heart tore free. The rift opened. Wrath stepped through.
[You Died]
The pain was always the sa, a crushing collapse, the sensation of his body folding in on itself, ribs snapping like dry twigs, his skull splintering. He didn’t scream anymore. Screaming wasted ti.
Back again.
The lantern flickered so faintly now it looked ready to gutter out. He filled it again, he still had more of the hundred soul items, a truckload of them, if it takes him his entire reserves to succeed, he would use it all.
In his hands, the book trembled, pages fluttering like wings. He was nearly there. The last paragraph lood, written in Van Dijk’s scrawl, a diagram curling around it like a snare.
And then,
[Your understanding of the Third Circle Magic [Explosive Mines] has improved.]
[You have learned the Third Circle Magic: Gravitas.]
[You can now use Graviol.]
Ludwig exhaled slowly, his hollow chest shifting though he didn’t need to breathe.
Finally.
He lifted his eyes toward the werewolf, whose grin widened as he dragged the heart free yet again.
"That was expensive... But it better work..." Ludwig whispered.
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