"Boys, come over," Ludwig said, beckoning some of the allied forces.

His voice carried, but it came out rougher than he intended, scraped raw by shouting and blood and whatever the Heart of Wrath had forced through his throat.

The battlefield had quieted in the ugly way it always did after something decisive ended: not peaceful, just emptied of purpose.

Smoke from scorched grass drifted low. The air stank of iron and burnt fat and spilled bile from the Red King’s gut. Even the wind felt cautious, like it didn’t want to touch what had happened here.

However, none of them moved.

They stood in a loose semicircle, weapons lowered but not relaxed, eyes sliding off Ludwig the way men avoided looking at a corpse that still breathed.

Some of them were still shaking from adrenaline, others from fear, and Ludwig could tell which was which by the tightness in their shoulders and the way their fingers clenched and unclenched on grips.

The undead didn’t hesitate, Kaiser’s legion never hesitated, but the living ones did, because they had just watched Ludwig become something that didn’t negotiate.

He sighed, and walked toward them, breathing heavily, injured, damaged, and struggling.

Each step was heavier than the last, not because the ground was difficult, but because his body was running on borrowed time and a borrowed rage.

He could feel the inside of his ribs grinding when he inhaled. Something warm kept pooling behind his teeth. The Wrath had numbed the worst of it, but not all; numbness wasn’t healing, it was a curtain, and he could feel the damage pressing against it from behind.

A few even backed away when Ludwig approached.

Not fast, no one wanted to look like they were fleeing their king, but enough to make a thin, embarrassed gap open up between him and them. Ludwig noted it without surprise. Fear was honest. Fear kept people alive. It just annoyed him when it got in his way.

"Do I look like I bite?" Ludwig snarled. "Get the corpse of that bastard up the mountain, let it consume and confine him, you don’t wanna see him the next cycle. And apprehend the rest of the Red Orcs, and that motherfucker," Ludwig pointed at the goblin king.

He pointed with a hand that trembled from strain, not uncertainty. The goblin king still stood out in the chaos like a stain, small, crownless, staff clutched too tightly, eyes darting as if he was trying to find a loophole in reality. Around him, the surviving Red Orcs were in various states of broken obedience: some staring blankly at nothing, some swaying as if their bodies hadn’t received the update that their king was gone, a few snarling in confused rage like dogs whose chain had snapped but whose training remained.

Kaiser nodded and gave a command, once the undead army under him moved, it felt like a bolstering of moral for the rest who followed after.

The moment Kaiser’s legion surged, the hesitation in the living snapped like a rope under strain. Skeletons moved with that clean, merciless coordination that made bravery easier for everyone else; it was simpler to follow a tide than to be the first wave.

The undead streamed forward in lines that didn’t bunch or panic, grabbing ropes, pinning limbs, knocking weapons away with blunt efficiency. They didn’t shout. They didn’t celebrate. They just did.

Several Red Orcs began fighting back, bad idea now their king is gone, they were immediately dealt with.

A few lunged as if muscle memory could replace leadership, but they got swallowed by the swarm. Their resistance was brief and expensive, arms pinned, knees buckled, throats crushed under bone hands that didn’t care about pain.

Kaiser’s undead didn’t even need finesse; they had numbers, and numbers turned bravery into a math problem the Red Orcs couldn’t solve.

The rest that simply stood there, staring into the empty, unable to understand what happened were easily captured, placed in ropes and pulled toward the mountain.

Those ones were the strangest. They didn’t look defeated. They looked unfinished, like the thought that had driven them had been unplugged mid-sentence.

The procession began, and the mountain waited ahead like a mouth that remembered what it liked to eat.

Ludwig stood next to Gale and Kaiser, watching.

He forced himself to stand still, because if he sat, he suspected he wouldn’t rise again for a while. His heartbeat, Wrath’s heartbeat, kept thudding like a hammer in a forge, too loud, too demanding. The crystalline growth on his body had retreated, but the ache where it had torn through him remained, deep and sharp. His vision still had a faint red tint at the edges, like wrathful afterimages refusing to fade.

"Ludwig... are you..."

Gale’s tone was careful in a way that felt wrong coming from him. He wasn’t asking out of pity. He was checking the stability of a weapon he cared about.

"I’m fine," Ludwig replied. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

He made it flat, final, the way he used to end arguments in boardrooms and battlefields. The words tasted like blood. He swallowed it anyway.

"Fine? You definitely don’t look fine, your body is collapsing, you have internal bleeding all over, I’m surprised you’re still conscious and standing..." Kaiser jumped in.

Kaiser didn’t bother softening it. His eyes had the clinical sharpness of a man who had dissected too many bodies to respect comfort. Ludwig could tell he was right because Ludwig’s skin had started to itch in places it shouldn’t, and because every time he exhaled, his ribs threatened to turn the breath into pain.

"I said, I’m fine," Ludwig snarled.

The snarl came too easily. That was the problem. He heard it in his own voice, the leftover edge, the irritation that wanted to become violence. It wasn’t directed at Kaiser, not really. It was directed at anything that dared imply Ludwig wasn’t in control.

"The effects of Wrath hadn’t fully dulled..." Gale said.

Gale’s eyes stayed on Ludwig’s hands, on the minute tremors, on the way his shoulders held tension like a man still expecting another fight.