"I still don’t fully understand the relation..." Kaiser said.

He did understand it, half of him did. The other half refused to accept it because accepting it meant admitting that control was the rarest resource in any form of power.

"Mountains above mountains, and seas below seas. It is merely a perspective for those who experience it. For you, Ashkar is supreme, but he still perished. For myself, I ruled for a thousand years, until I met Gluttony; not even the emperor of these lands back then could raise their head in my presence. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even scathe Gluttony’s skin. The difference between Ludwig and Gluttony is... the Usurper was in control of his urges. Despite his full-on voracity, he didn’t consume Ludwig when he was in front of him... and that makes him efficient, that makes him dangerous..."

As Gale spoke, Kaiser could almost see the contrast: Gluttony as a perfectly restrained disaster, an endless appetite that still knew when not to bite.

That discipline was what made it terrifying. Wrath, on the other hand, was the opposite temptation: burn everything now, accept consequences later.

Kaiser’s gaze kept snapping between Gale’s battered steadiness and Ludwig’s escalating brutality, and he felt the answer pressing in like a bruise.

"And you believe that Ludwig’s lack of control over Wrath is what is causing this?"

"It is."

The single-word confirmation landed heavier than any long explanation. Kaiser didn’t like how final it sounded. He didn’t like how little room it left for denial.

"Can you even control that damn thing?"

"Difficult. Extremely so, borderline impossible." Gale shook his head.

The motion made the bruising on Gale’s neck shift, dark marks stretching under green skin. Even so, he looked more composed than Ludwig did right now, and that fact alone was horrifying.

"Then it’s hopeless, we should help."

Kaiser’s fingers twitched, already imagining a dozen solutions, chains, seals, forced suppression, ritual clamps. He could do something. He could always do something. That was what a lich was.

"No, it’ll only make things worse. Right now, all Ludwig sees is red. You get in his way, you’ll be the next on the chopping block."

Gale didn’t say it as a threat. He said it as a simple prediction. Kaiser believed him immediately, because Ludwig’s movements had started to carry that indiscriminate rhythm: cut, tear, move, anything that entered the radius became part of the problem.

Several red orcs approached Ludwig while he was pulling several tendons from the red king and twisting them in knots. They tried to ambush him, but Ludwig didn’t even turn toward them. The chain on his left wrist shot out, like the head of a great red crystalline snake.

The chain moved with malice that felt alive. It didn’t whip. It hunted. It snapped backward in a brutal arc and took bodies apart with impact alone, ribs folding, skulls cracking, torsos collapsing into wet piles. Ludwig didn’t even glance at the kills. The Red King was his focus, and everything else was just noise to be silenced.

"Without Undeath, he’ll be hard-pressed to control that thing. Without that Elven Spring Dew amulet, which I presume had already been fully exhausted, he cannot return to sanity. He is losing his mind to wrath, if we leave him be... he may never return." Kaiser said.

Kaiser hated how clinical he sounded, but he couldn’t afford sentiment. This was diagnosis. A living body couldn’t absorb this kind of emotional toxin the way an undead vessel could. Wrath wasn’t a buff. It was a parasite that ate judgment first.

"That is a risk..." Gale said.

"And you’re willing to take that, he’s your and my master. We’ve invested too much to just see him... wither."

If Ludwig became another Morde’Xander, that didn’t just threaten the floor. It threatened the very structure of their existence, Gale bound to the codex, Kaiser bound to his own experiments, all of it anchored to Ludwig’s will.

Gale’s silence stretched long enough for Kaiser to feel it as tension in the air.

"That is also another risk."

"You’d go so far as to risk your own existence. That’s what they call a Sunk Cost fallacy... too much risk not to do anything..."

Kaiser leaned forward on his mount without realizing it, nails digging into the creature’s rotten hide. His instincts screamed to intervene, to clamp down on the out-of-control variable. Gale, of all people, was choosing patience in the face of a king’s madness.

"I didn’t choose to serve a powerful master. I chose to serve a worthy one, and do you know why I believe he is worth it?" Gale asked.

"Enlighten me, senior," Kaiser said, though the last word was slightly... sarcastic. Deep down, very, very deep down, Kaiser believed it.

If Ludwig fell to Wrath permanently, it wouldn’t just be a setback. It would be a betrayal of the only reason Kaiser tolerated serving someone else.

"Because he chose to fight Wrath for five years. Consequently, day after day, endless deaths and revivals, without ever uttering a single word of complaint. He has the will to break Wrath, he just needs to find it again. Before Wrath controls him... before another Morde’Xander is born..."

Gale’s words dragged old images into Kaiser’s mind: A man who could be ground down into paste and still stand back up with the same flat determination. That stubbornness was the only thing Kaiser trusted more than magic.

But stubbornness was also fuel, and Wrath was a furnace.

"And from the looks of it," Kaiser looked at the scene ahead. "I think we might have just missed that window."

Crystalline growth began ripping through Ludwig’s back muscles, arms of crystal, red like blood, and a crown of the same material rose atop his head; his nails grew larger, in the same manner, his body inflated more. You could almost see a crystalline armor growing on top of his skin while he began ripping bits and pieces from the Red Orc. Slowly, painfully.

It wasn’t a clean transformation as the horns had been. This looked violent, Wrath forcing its "ideal" shape onto living flesh, growing armor by tearing muscle to make room for it.

The crown was the worst part, not because it was pretty, but because it was symbolic. Not a helm. Not protection. A declaration.

Ludwig’s laughter rose, raw and wrong, too loud for a throat that was already coughing blood minutes ago. It didn’t sound like joy. It sounded like something inside him had finally found a way to breathe.

The Red King’s screams answered it, deep and shaking, the noise of a massive creature being dismantled while still alive enough to understand what was happening.

Kaiser’s hands tightened on his mount, and for the first time since the tower had thrown them into green skins and reduced stats, he felt something close to dread settle into his gut, heavy, slow, and absolute.

Because this wasn’t Ludwig using Wrath anymore.

This was Wrath beginning to wear Ludwig. And if nothing changes. If nothing happens soon, then their master will suddenly become their worst nightmare. Another tyrant walking the lands...

One could hope... 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

But hope is always fleeting.