"Damn it," Kaiser cursed as he saw Ludwig throw away the crystal. He wasn’t angry at Ludwig, per se, but at what he had just become.

From the saddle of his grotesque mount, Kaiser watched the crystal skip away into dead grass and churned mud, the little glint of it vanishing between boots and bodies like it had never mattered.

For a second, he wanted to snap his fingers and recall it out of spite alone, some petty insistence that his link wouldn’t be discarded like trash.

But the truth was uglier than pride. The moment Ludwig threw it, Kaiser knew Ludwig had made a choice, and it wasn’t a tactical one. It was a surrender to the simplest voice in the room.

Wrath was loud enough to drown even a lich.

"Leave him, this was something that he needed to experience..." Gale’s voice came from right next to Kaiser.

Turning his head from atop the hexapedal mount, Kaiser saw Gale, bruised and battered, with a chipped tusk, and what looked to be a large bruising on his foot and arm. "You look like you’re suffering from... pain."

The sight of Gale standing upright at all would’ve been impressive if Kaiser wasn’t busy watching Ludwig carve a king like a butcher with a deadline.

Gale’s armor, no, his body, still carried the evidence of that single swat. One shoulder sat a fraction too low. The angle of his forearm was wrong in a way that promised grinding agony with every movement.

His tusk had a jagged chip that made him look even more predatory, even when he stood still.

"A long since forgotten sensation, still, can’t say I miss it much," Gale replied.

His voice didn’t shake. That was the terrifying part. Gale talked about pain like it was weather, unpleasant, inconvenient, and beneath complaint.

Kaiser, who had lived through centuries of decay and reassembly, still found it absurd that a living body could produce that much suffering just by existing incorrectly for a moment.

"Makes you wonder what others find so interesting in being ’Alive,’ Kaiser said.

The battlefield smelled like it. Hot blood, opened stomachs, scorched grass. Life was always loud when it was leaking out of something.

Kaiser had spent so long regarding bodies as containers, useful, replaceable, that the whole concept of wanting to feel inside one seemed like a kind of madness.

"Alive has its boons,"

Gale’s answer came without romance. No wistfulness. Just a simple statement, like he was listing a weapon’s advantage.

Kaiser’s eyes flicked, involuntarily, to Ludwig again, because right now "alive" looked like a liability wrapped in muscle.

"What did you mean, though, by leaving him, Gale? He’s losing his sanity, fast." Kaiser said.

A loud squeal echoed from the red king as Ludwig’s sword began carving at him, despite the regeneration it had, and the mass it had, it was unable to even land or sustain enough damage against Ludwig.

The squeal wasn’t dignified. It wasn’t even rage anymore. It was panic made into sound, high, wet, and ugly, the kind of noise a giant made when it realized it could still be helpless. Ludwig’s Durandal kept rising and falling with relentless economy, peeling away chunks that should have been protected by sheer thickness.

Every cut was answered by regeneration that tried to stitch itself back together, and every stitch was immediately punished with another cut.

The Red King was trying to heal faster than Ludwig could ruin him.

It wasn’t succeeding.

"He always used this power...wrongly. By suppressing its emotional drawbacks, he only used a fraction of it. But now, by fully unleashing it, he’s using most of it." Gale said.

Gale didn’t look away from Ludwig while he spoke. His gaze was sharp, assessing in the way only a king who’d watched countless men break could be.

Kaiser knew Gale wasn’t admiring the slaughter. He was reading it, tempo, intent, waste, efficiency.

Wrath wasn’t just strength. It was a philosophy, and Ludwig was finally letting it speak in full sentences.

"Not all? Just most?" Kaiser asked, frowning.

The idea offended Kaiser on principle. If Ludwig was already doing this with "most," what did "all" look like? He didn’t want to find out. The battlefield didn’t want to find out. The mountain itself probably didn’t want to find out.

The Red King screamed some more as Ludwig cut off one of its ears.

The ear came off like a slab, thick cartilage and meat, tumbling into the mud with a wet slap. The Red King’s head jerked, mouth opening wide enough to show strings of half-digested muscle still caught between teeth.

It tried to swing a hand up, tried to swat Ludwig away like an insect again, but the motion came late, too slow, too clumsy under the constant bleeding.

Wrath didn’t give enemies time to organize.

"Everything needs balance, even the peak of wrath cannot be achieved by simply being wrathful at the world. It needs to be focused and focalized, otherwise it’s inefficient. The Usurpers aren’t mere beings like us. They’re concepts, ideas, and doctrines, morphed into bodies that seek the perfect display of such...Sin." Gale said.

Kaiser heard the words and hated that they made sense.

Wrath wasn’t screaming because it enjoyed the noise. It screamed because screaming was part of the mechanism. But mechanisms still needed direction to become something other than a broken engine. That’s what Gale meant by inefficient.

"Even for someone as smart as me, this sounded too philosophical."

Kaiser didn’t bother hiding the irritation. Philosophy was for people who had the luxury of sitting somewhere safe and pretending the world could be solved with metaphors. Right now they were watching Ludwig turn into a living catastrophe on the cusp of breaking his own vessel.

Gale turned to Kaiser, "What is the peak of necromancy?"

Kaiser blinked, thrown by the question’s timing. He wanted to snap back that this was not the moment for riddles, but Gale’s tone wasn’t casual. It was surgical. Kaiser felt the trap, the way Gale was guiding him toward a conclusion.

Kaiser thought for a second, then raised his finger up, "This... the King Ashkar’s legacy. Nothing has ever come close to it. He was basically a god."

He gestured with his hand, red finger up, as if presenting the entire concept of Ashkar to the air itself. To Kaiser, Ashkar wasn’t myth. He was a benchmark. A towering ruin of mastery that still cast a shadow over anyone who dared call themselves a necromancer.

"Yet it died," Gale replied.

Kaiser quieted down for a second.

The silence wasn’t agreement. It was the uncomfortable pause of someone whose pride had just been poked with a needle. Kaiser had spent years telling himself Ashkar was supreme because the idea of supremacy was comforting. Supremacy meant there was an end point. A final form. A ceiling you could reach.

Gale had just reminded him there was always a higher blade.

"Same here for Wrath, it was manifested in Morde’Xander, yet he still died, to a novice, a rookie, someone who only had grit and the will to keep trying."

Kaiser watched Ludwig again, watched the way he moved with that old, terrifying familiarity, like a man who had already died enough times to stop flinching at the idea of more.

Gale’s point slid into place.

Supremacy didn’t matter if it could be overcome by persistence and timing.

Being a concept didn’t make you invincible.

It made you consistent, predictable, and exploitable if the one facing you could afford to learn.