The Demonlings fell fast under the combined pressure, not because they were weak, but because they were late. They had woken into a battle already decided.
Redd tore through torsos, Tull severed limbs with efficient arcs, and the ground beca a litter of bodies too quickly to count. Ludwig, anwhile, did not pause. He lifted the mace again and brought it down with renewed emphasis, each strike aid at widening the cracks.
The sense that sothing was wrong could only grow stronger with each hit. But he felt that it wasn’t coming from the Crystal but sothing else that he must have either forgotten or didn’t account for.
Blow after powerful blow, Ludwig made sure to keep hamring at the crystal. The impacts ca in a steady, brutal rhythm. Crack lines multiplied, intersected, deepened. The chains shuddered and strained as the crystal’s integrity failed. Then, at last, it didn’t explode. It collapsed, breaking into shards that clattered and slid across the sand like brittle ice. The chains sagged, suddenly aningless, as though they too had been relieved of duty.
The effect was almost too sudden, an explosion of magic that did nothing more than ruffle the hair on Ludwig’s head and passed through everything in the vicinity.
The pulse expanded outward, not as heat or force but as presence, a wave of released rule snapping free. It passed through the others, through bodies and weapons, without harm, yet it left behind the unmistakable sensation of sothing ending. The wave had no intention of stopping or halting as it grew outward. Feeling like it was fixing everything that was wrong with the world and protesting against what The Envious Death caused.
When the wave touched the river, the transformation was imdiate. Visible even from the corner of the eye. The river brightened, not rely in color but in spirit, as if the souls within it exhaled for the first ti in centuries. The yellow turned gold, and the gold looked cleaner, less sickly, and the current resud its flow with purpose. The surface shimred as though relieved of a weight it had carried too long.
All the crystalized shards fell to the ground. Among the scattered fragnts, sothing remained intact, untouched by the shattering. It sat there as though the crystal had been grown around it, fed by it, enslaved to it. Ludwig’s eyes narrowed. This was the true core, the seed that had made the law possible.
An ebony-sized oval-shaped rock.
It was small in the wrong way, too modest for the damage it had caused. Dark enough to swallow light, smooth enough to look deliberate. It didn’t gleam like tal or stone. It simply existed, heavy with quiet nace.
Almost like an egg, but Ludwig had a feeling that it wasn’t an egg.
The shape suggested birth, but Ludwig felt no warmth in it, no promise of life. It felt like a heart-shaped absence, like sothing that had once beat and then learned how not to. His instincts, such as they were, warned him that it was not ant to hatch. It was ant to fuse.
His fingers closed around it, and the contact sent a chill straight into his bones. The surface was not cold like ice; it was cold like the void between thoughts. Ludwig’s grip tightened reflexively, as if expecting it to resist being held.
***
[You have obtained the Heart of a fallen.]
***
The notification appeared with blunt finality, but the object didn’t remain an object for long. It began to lt, not dripping, not dissolving, but sinking into him as though his hand was a doorway. The sensation was imdiate and invasive.
The item lded in Ludwig’s hand, seeping right through his Living Vessel and into his bones. He could feel it, the matter that constituted this [Heart of the Fallen] was reacting aggressively with sothing he had in his body since the first few days he ca to this world. It slid beneath skin and muscle with no resistance, like smoke entering a crack, but heavier. Ludwig felt it thread along his veins, then deeper, where the Living Vessel ended and sothing older waited. It wasn’t pain. It was pressure, a tightness that made his limbs feel suddenly foreign. The Heart didn’t ask permission. It claid space. And it did so voraciously.
[Nephilium]
The na surfaced in his mind like a bruise pressed. That blood. That inheritance. That which gave him all he was today, the diluted gift of his master and the corrupted concentration of the sa blood he’d carried since he discovered the fallen angel’s corpse. Ludwig felt it stir as the Heart touched it, defensive and furious.
It was fighting it, then fusing with it, then reinforcing it, all in the present ti, while Ludwig groaned not from pain but from the sudden inability to move his body as the Heart of A fallen was forcibly changing sothing inside him.
His muscles locked as though commanded. Breath caught half a beat. The transformation inside him was too fast to track with thought, a violent argunt between forces that did not speak in words. Ludwig’s groan escaped him, low and strained, more from frustration than suffering. He could feel the battle occurring under his skin, a rapid sequence of resistance and surrender, of rejection and acceptance, like two incompatible tals being hamred into one.
"Ludwig? you good man?" Redd was the first to notice as he flung his claws in the wind to get rid of all gri and blood.
Tull was the second to notice that the dark mage was suffering from sothing.
Even Ludwig understood what happened.
The understanding arrived sharp, imdiate, cutting through the paralysis like a blade through cloth.
The Heart of the fallen had cleansed instead of corrupted. And what it had cleansed was the [Nephilium] Blood he had on him. All of it. He had consud it all in order to battle the Wrathful Death, the undiluted form of this substance, which gave him growth but also was a fetter he never felt until now. It was hampering his progress.
And this fallen heart could cleanse and remove those fetters.
That was the intent. Purification. Not rot, not degradation, but correction. Ludwig could feel the Nephilium blood shifting in nature, shedding sothing old, becoming sothing else. It was almost insulting, really, that sothing in this world could change him without trying to poison him first. Almost.
But for sothing that is able to ’cleanse’ and correct. How co it was doing the opposite here in the river? Ludwig couldn’t understand the hows and whys. Not to ntion the ’human’ magic that was also applied to the prism stone. Which probably altered its function. Many thoughts, many ideas, but no possibility to comprehend them. And even if he tried to, he didn’t have the ti to do so. The feeling of things being wrong beca more and more apparent. More pervasive, and more existential.
And then to confirm it all, he realized that there was a very big issue at hand right now...
The issue was simple and brutal, and it didn’t care about divine intention.
While the blood was being changed, Ludwig was completely still. Unable to move.
He stood like a statue in the open, mace still in hand, mind awake and body useless. He could not lift his arm, could not step, could not even turn his head properly. The river flowed beside him, gold and alive, and the battlefield around him was too wide, too exposed. Ludwig’s thoughts raced while his limbs remained dead weight.
Even his companions felt it now. The wrongness in the air.
**
[You’re in a Hostile Environnt]
**
The system’s warning was not dramatic, just factual. It didn’t say you might die. It said you are where death happens. Ludwig could almost laugh at the bluntness, except he couldn’t move enough to do it.
"Emm, idk what to tell you, but rember that prickly feeling I was having earlier," Redd said as all the hairs on his furry back seed to be standing up.
Redd’s voice had lost all humor now. His fur bristled, spine arched slightly, body reacting before his mind finished catching up. Every instinct in him scread the sa ssage: predator. Bigger. Worse. He shifted his stance, claws flexing, eyes scanning the distance beyond the river’s curve.
"Seems like it’s getting more intense... Ludwig? Why are you silent? You look like you’re constipated, man, you good?" Redd asked again.
The attempt at humor ca out strained, forced through tension. Redd glanced at Ludwig and froze for a fraction of a second, because Ludwig’s stillness was wrong. Not calm. Not composed. Locked. Redd’s ears flattened. He took a half step closer, then stopped, torn between guarding Ludwig and facing whatever was coming.
Just then, they heard the howl. Turning in the direction of this roar, they saw a creature the size of a palace bounding toward them. Purple in color, with a pig’s snout and with the body of condemned ugliness in one.
The sound rolled over them like thunder, a howl that carried weight, malice, and ownership. The ground trembled beneath it. Even the river’s surface shivered, gold rippling as souls recoiled.
In the distance, the shape appeared, massive, obscene, moving with the confident violence of sothing that had never been punished for existing. Purple flesh caught the light like bruised at. A hog’s face with several tusks protruding from its mouth and even cheekbones. Ugliness dominated its face, but it was not a pig, not anything natural. It was ugliness made deliberate. If beauty were a concept, this was its antithesis.
The Lustful Death is coming.
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