Another pig-like squeal emerged from the Red King.

"You must make haste! You don’t have much time!" Kaiser’s words echoed from the crystal.

"Time? for what?" Ludwig asked, but he felt that his vision was slowly changing. Becoming more red.

More focused.

Kaiser’s urgency hit Ludwig at the exact wrong moment, right as the world started narrowing into that familiar tunnel where only targets existed. The red tint wasn’t metaphor. It was Wrath turning perception into a weapon, scraping away nuance until only movement and vulnerability remained.

Wrath wasn’t rage. It never was. Wrath is the absence of all emotions until only violence remains.

"Your time, and his. You’re overcharging that body; you can’t even see it, but your vines are rupturing as we speak, your muscles are screaming. But the heart of wrath is stopping that sensation; it isn’t the same as using it with an Undead body. While the Red King is stabilizing, the more time passes. Once he digests the food in his stomach, it’ll be a whole lot of trouble coming your way."

The explanation was brutal because it was true. Ludwig couldn’t feel half of what was happening under his skin.

Wrath was smothering warning signals the way a drunk smothered guilt. But he could see the evidence now that Kaiser named it: small tremors in his forearms, tension that didn’t release, the subtle wet warmth of internal damage being kept quiet by Wrath. Meanwhile, the Red King’s belly rolled with stolen life, and every second it lived was a second it became harder to put down.

"Fine, I got a way around that," Ludwig said.

"Well, do it fast then, you’ve got about a minute before your body fully breaks down, even an orc’s natural regeneration isn’t enough to bypass the damage you’re dealing to that body."

Ludwig nodded and looked at his forearms. He was right, there was some bruising and internal bleeding underneath the skin, redness of wrath, and the muscular exhaustion was rapidly increasing.

He really didn’t have much time.

"Fine," Ludwig opened his eyes wide; they turned purple like a jewel. "What great form you have, it would be a shame if it were to simply wither!"

He forced the words out like a lever being pulled, not a spell cast with comfort. His eyes burned as the color shifted, purple, rich and unnatural, the gaze of Envy trying to establish its own law over the battlefield.

For a heartbeat, it felt like the world leaned toward that power, like reality recognized the claim.

[Warning! You cannot use {Equilibrium}, your enemy is far weaker than the current you!]

[Eyes of Envy have failed to activate.]

’Damn. I should have used this when I didn’t have the Wrathful Heart active.’

The failure stung worse than it should have. Not because Ludwig needed validation, but because he needed efficiency, and the tower had just denied him one of his cleanest tools. Wrath made him strong, yes, but it also made him ineligible for the very mechanic Envy fed on. A stupid synergy problem, except the cost of it was his body tearing itself apart.

He closed his eyes and then opened them again; this time, they were black as night.

He didn’t waste time sulking. He switched tracks the way he always did when the system refused to cooperate: find a different knife.

[{Evil Eye} has activated. Misfortune has locked her gaze upon [Red Orc King]

The Red King didn’t feel or act like anything had changed, so it rose with half of its fingers missing. It still howled at Ludwig and stomped its foot down, rumbling the earth and cracking it.

The stomp came with all the same arrogance as before, an attempt to turn intimidation into terrain. The ground split in a jagged line, dirt buckling under the force, and the Red King tried to leverage sheer mass into control of space. The power of the stomp once again forced many more of his own allies and enemies back into the dirt, some unfortunate enough to fall in the crevices of that seismic impact. Some had been buried, and some had broken bones and torn flesh.

This was the Red King without a weapon. The massive tree-sized hammer that was all the way back where his palanquin was felt too far out of reach.

A small issue occurred immediately after. The moment its foot stomped the ground for that effect, it dug too much into it, making it stuck for a brief second.

It wasn’t a dramatic slip. It was a fraction of a second where weight betrayed pride, where the Red King’s own attempt at dominance snagged on the earth. Its ankle sank deeper than intended, and for the first time, it looked less like a god and more like a fat animal caught in mud.

Ludwig, who jumped away from the fissure, rushed forward, and with a powerful swing of his sword, he managed to separate the stuck foot of the red king from its ankle. Forcing the giant to fall on the ground again.

He moved the instant the misstep happened, Durandal coming down with the kind of finality that didn’t ask questions. The blade sheared through tendon and bone, and the severed foot stayed planted in the cracked earth like a grotesque monument. The Red King’s balance vanished with it. It toppled again, huge body slamming down hard enough to spit dust from the ground.

Screams of pain and agony filled the battlefield.

"Good, like a pig to the slaughterhouse," Ludwig said as he placed Durandal on his shoulder. "Time to get rid of you- Cough!" a cough left Ludwig’s mouth, something he completely missed the feeling of.

After all, ever since he became an Undead, coughing, sneezing, or even yawning, those were things a living body did.

Why did he cough now?

He wiped his mouth and saw long streaks of blood spread all over his forearm.

The warmth of it was wrong. Too human... Too orcish, Too alive. His stomach lurched, not from fear, but from the sudden reminder that this body had limits Wrath couldn’t bully forever. His lungs felt raw for an instant, and the second cough threatened to follow.

[Evil Eye has intensified!]

"You’re using too much of that horrid power. Wrath and Envy aren’t things that a living body should use! Ludwig, disable them! Now!" Kaiser howled at Ludwig through the crystal.

"Ah, you’re awfully loud," Ludwig said as he picked up the crystal and threw it aside.

The crystal spun end over end and clattered away into dirt and dead grass, skipping once before settling. The act wasn’t just irritation. It was Ludwig buying silence, because if he listened too long, he might hesitate, and hesitation was death when you were bleeding internally and fighting a king. Or so he thought... or so he was made to think.

"This is just getting more fun... Haven’t heard all the ways pigs could scream, and this one has enough meat on it. Surely it’ll make some pleasing sounds!" he said as he got closer to the Red King.

He stepped toward the downed giant with blood on his mouth and black in his eyes, Durandal riding his shoulder like a promise.

Behind him, the battlefield felt distant, troops, screams, the tower’s rules, reduced to background noise.

Only he spoke... Only Wrath Spoke now.