The Red King’s movement felt strange. He didn’t send in more orcs, he didn’t send reinforcements or call back his advanced party. No, he simply laughed.

It was the wrong reaction for a commander watching three hundred of his own get shredded in the reeds and stone teeth. Ludwig expected a horn, a counter-charge, some ugly tactic meant to punish overextension.

Instead he got sound, an abrasive, grinding noise that didn’t belong in a throat. It wasn’t laughter the way living creatures laughed. It was like chairs and tables being dragged across stone, splintering and screeching, the kind of sound that made your teeth itch, and your spine tighten. It crawled under the roar of battle and stayed there, persistent and deliberate, as if the Red King was enjoying the rhythm of his own losses.

Ludwig, for a small second, was distracted by that laughter and took note of where it came from amidst the blood and gore he was covered in and was within.

He shouldn’t have looked. He knew that. But the sound pulled attention the same way a bad smell pulled breath, reflexive, unwanted.

Ludwig’s face was slick with other people’s blood, warm splatter drying into tacky patches on his cheekbones and brow.

Durandal’s grip was wet enough that his fingers ached from squeezing it so tight. He turned his head anyway, eyes cutting through the broken formation, past the maze of jagged stone, past bodies twitching from poison and bodies not twitching at all.

Once he noticed it was the Red King, he failed to see a club coming toward his face.

It was the smallest mistake with the biggest consequence.

Ludwig caught the movement too late, an arc of wood and metal, crude and heavy, coming in from his blind side.

The kind of swing meant to break a skull rather than duel. His body tried to answer, but this orc flesh still lagged a fraction behind his thoughts; his shoulders started to dip, his wrists started to raise Durandal, and he already knew he’d missed the timing.

The moment he realized it, he was too late in ducking or raising his sword to block.

Only one thought came through Ludwig’s head, ’This is gonna hurt.’

However, the club snapped in half and barely grazed his ear. Looking to the side, Gale had just flashed by, for the first time in this fight, a swing of his sword didn’t take out a life, but saved one.

The impact that should have shattered Ludwig’s face turned into a sharp sting and a wet warmth at his ear instead. He felt the graze, skin tearing, blood immediately mixing with the blood already on him, then saw the broken halves of the club spin away.

Gale’s movement was a blur of black steel and pale aura, his blade’s path so clean it looked like reality had simply decided the club wasn’t allowed to exist intact. Gale didn’t stop. He never stopped. He just adjusted one angle of death long enough to keep Ludwig alive, then continued moving through the enemy line as if saving people was just another kind of killing.

"Keep your head in the battle," he said.

It didn’t sound like admonishment, more like a reminder. But Ludwig still felt a form of guilt, having disappointed Gale. Even if Ludwig was his master, he still treated Gale like his mentor.

The words landed harder than the club would have. Gale didn’t need to shout to make Ludwig feel it. Ludwig swallowed the irritation that rose in his throat, Wrath’s instinctive how dare you, and replaced it with something colder: discipline.

A single lapse here didn’t just risk him; it risked the entire line. Gale had stepped in because Ludwig had slipped. Ludwig hated needing saving. Not because of pride, because it was inefficient.

"Right! My bad," Ludwig said and flew forward. Several spears missed him by a hair’s breadth; he wasn’t aiming for the ones close to the stone, but to go even deeper.

He pushed into the pockets where red bodies still clustered, where their momentum had been broken but their rage hadn’t. Spear tips flashed past his ribs, close enough that he felt the wind of them. One scraped his shoulder guard and skittered off, another punched into the mud where his foot had been a heartbeat earlier. Ludwig didn’t slow. He used the stone teeth as cover, vaulted a low boulder, and slipped between two red orcs mid-swing, letting their own weapons collide behind him with a crack of wood and metal.

For now, Ludwig’s kill count has already reached twenty red orcs. He wasn’t weak. Not by any means or form.

Twenty wasn’t a brag. It was a measure, proof that even suppressed, even nerfed, he was still Ludwig. He could feel the toll in his forearms and shoulders, the way repeated strikes made muscle burn, the way the orc body demanded breath and oxygen and didn’t simply ignore fatigue the way his undead shell used to. But he was still carving through them. Still choosing angles. Still surviving.

Ludwig was incredibly skilled. Compared to the first years he was here in Ikos, the time he spent fighting Wrath taught him how to compose himself and how to spend his effort. Effort here, since he was an Undead back then. But now, it was stamina. And he needed to spend it wisely, as he kills as many and disrupts as many as possible.

Wrath had taught him the cost of waste. It had taught him that strength without control was just noise. Here, control mattered even more because this body cared. It cared when his lungs pulled too fast. It cared when his legs started to tremble after a sprint. It cared when he swung too wide and had to recover.

So Ludwig kept his strikes compact, his movement economical. He didn’t chase kills into bad positions. He cut tendons when he couldn’t finish cleanly, shoved bodies into one another when a second swing would cost too much, and let goblin poison and lizardman water do part of the work.

Once Ludwig reached the hottest point of contact, where most Red Orcs were gathered, he raised a foot up and stomped down.

Mud and blood splashed up his shin. The ground there was saturated, water, blood, churned soil, soft enough that every step sank a fraction. Ludwig planted himself anyway, braced his weight through both legs, and forced mana down despite the emptiness clawing at the back of his skull.

"Bone Spears!"

He didn’t have much mana left, and he didn’t have any mana potions worth drinking right now. The Bastos wine was a great mana recovery item that could replenish his mana rapidly. But it was deadly to anything living. And currently Ludwig’s orc body would not survive the abdominal pain it would cause.

He could almost taste that wine just thinking about it, the way it would flood his veins with power. He could also imagine what it would do to a living gut: the cramping, the tearing, the kind of pain that would drop him in the mud while red orcs finished the job. Not an option. Not today.

Right now, he needed to use his natural regeneration and cause death with his own ability.