A claw swipe almost tore Ludwig’s face off, but he ducked under and took a sidestep. The air snapped where his head had been, a clean whistle of displaced wind that carried grit and the faint stink of scorched stone.

His boots scraped as he slid, heel catching on a loose chunk of masonry, and he corrected without thinking, hips turning, shoulders narrowing, blade angled low so it wouldn’t snag on debris.

Ludwig couldn’t remember, nor cared to account for how many times he had died. It was no longer worth mentioning

Death in this floor, for some reason had no effect nor cost on his souls. He didn’t get deducted half the cost, he never lost a single soul from dying, and Necros never came to collect.

No cold tug from the lantern. No invisible hand dipping into his reserves. No familiar sense of payment being taken from him like a tax the universe demanded.

He would fall, the world would blink, and then he would be standing again with the memory still lodged behind his eyes like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

It all repeated, and he was certain of one thing. Not because it felt good to be certain, certainty was usually how the Tower tricked you, but because the pattern refused to change no matter what he tried. The city would reset. The damage would reset. The distance would reset. He would reset. And the cost that should have followed him like a shadow simply... didn’t.

This floor, wasn’t one that permitted death and revival. Not in the way his life normally worked. It wasn’t his lantern’s mercy, and it wasn’t his own resource management. It was the floor itself behaving like a sealed box that refused to acknowledge consequences the outside world insisted on.

Necros was aiding him. The realization sat heavy, not comforting, not reassuring, more like realizing the rope around your waist was being held by someone you didn’t trust, but you were hanging over a cliff so you’d take the help anyway.

For reasons only Necros knew, for reasons Ludwig had no ideas about. Necros wasn’t making him pay for the cost of death here. That should have made him grateful. Instead it made his stomach twist in a way his undead body didn’t usually bother with. A deity that waived a price did it because the real invoice came later.

Ludwig struck down with his sword, it wasn’t meant to kill, harm or injure. Though the blow was directed at the head of the creature. Or, the Angry Ludwig in front of him.

The movement was sharp and honest, the kind of strike that would end a fight in any sane world, but Ludwig’s intent was purely mechanical.

He had noticed one thing; the creature didn’t know it cannot be injured. It fought like it could bleed. It guarded like it could lose something. That ignorance was the only crack Ludwig could wedge his will into.

So, when it saw the sword coming down on its forehead, it dodged it. Giving Ludwig time to reposition. Not much, just the width of a breath, the half-beat where the creature’s shoulders shifted and its weight committed to avoidance instead of attack. Ludwig stole that beat. He moved into the space the monster refused to occupy, and the city’s dust scuffed under his boots as he slid into a better line.

"Here it comes," Ludwig positioned himself by taking another step to the left, and the creature howled like a mad beast, struck both hands in the ground, and aimed with the curved horns on its forehead toward Ludwig.

The howl wasn’t a voice so much as a pressure wave, a raw vibration that made loose pebbles jitter and made the air feel too thin. Ludwig watched the horns settle like sighting a weapon, deliberate, ugly, practiced through repetition.

Aimed here, was perfectly used. Since what was coming next wasn’t a bull charge with horns the size of an elephant, but something much worse. Ludwig’s muscles went tight anyway, because instinct still hated anything that looked like a charge, even when experience said it would be something else. He lowered his center of gravity and kept his blade ready, not for impact, but for the moment he’d need to move.

A culmination of barely stable energy began rising from the horns. Static, and electric began charging between the tips of the horn creating a flickering energy orb that hovered between the two protrusions.

The orb didn’t form cleanly. It stuttered into existence like a wound opening in the air, bright threads of electricity snapping and reconnecting, the light sickly and violent. The smell hit Ludwig a heartbeat later, ozone, scorched dust, something metallic like blood on stone.

Suddenly, as the creature howled and the orb of baleful, wrathful, and sinister energy shot forward in a beam of pulverization that eradicated any and all that stood in its way. Buildings? Gone. Streets, Gone. Walls, decorations, fountains, anything the city had, when it touched this beam of energy it simply turned to dust. The beam didn’t cut, it erased. It moved like a judgment line, and wherever it passed, the world stopped being solid.

The shockwave that followed made Ludwig’s teeth click together, and dust rolled through the street in thick choking curtains.

Ludwig however, had died to this move many times, but not this time, as right before the ray had touched him, he used the Black Mirror magic. Not to redirect it, he tried that before, didn’t work as the mirror simply broke and he broke after it when he stood behind it.

He still remembered the sensation of relying on a defense and learning, instantly, that the defense was a lie. The mirror shattered. The beam didn’t even slow. And Ludwig, predictably, had been reduced to a lesson.

This time, he placed it under his feet and appeared right next to the beast who was still shooting rays of death and destruction at anything that stood still. The shift was seamless and nauseating in the way space always was when it decided you weren’t allowed to occupy the spot you’d been standing in. The heat of the beam washed past him at an angle, close enough to make the air shimmer, but the monster’s focus remained forward, committed to obliterating an empty street like it owed it money.

With the back of Durandal, Ludwig struck between the horns of the Wrathful Ludwig, a simple bonk, not aiming to harm or kill, but draw attention, and do one little thing of magic. The impact was almost insulting in its smallness. A tap that said, I’m here, and more importantly, you missed.

Piss the monster off some more.

"What are you shooting at, I’m right here," Ludwig mocked. His tone wasn’t brave. It was practical. Mockery was a tool. It wasn’t meant to impress anyone. It was meant to steer a beast that couldn’t be reasoned with.

The creature howled as it swiped at Ludwig with the back of its hands, where Ludwig blocked by angling Durandal, the blow made Ludwig skid several steps back. The block rattled through Ludwig’s arms, a heavy thud that tried to fold him in half. His heels carved lines in dust and grit, shoulders screaming as the force pushed him away. He didn’t fall, but only because he’d learned how to borrow balance from the ground at the last second, knees bending, spine giving just enough to survive the shove.

The creature’s energy rose more. Ludwig could feel it in the air, like pressure building before a storm breaks. The beam cut off, not because the creature calmed, but because it had decided Ludwig deserved its full attention now.

This was when Ludwig always lost, it was when the Wrathful Ludwig became the worst version of itself. Not the version that swung hard.

The version that grew. The version that stopped being merely violent and started becoming a vessel designed to carry violence until it tore itself apart.

Size began growing, the aura that encased him became much more robust and powerful, it fed on the heart, and the heart supplied. It beat so much that Ludwig could hear the heart of his enemy in his own head.

Each pulse landed like a drumbeat behind his eyes, a rhythm that tried to overwrite his own thoughts. The aura thickened into something almost visible, a red haze that made the ruined street look like it was underwater in blood.

Crystalline growth began changing the copy, as they grew from the vertebra on its back, tail like a dragon’s, and hooves instead of feet. It grew, its shins became longer, its body tore open and reconstructed as it created a bigger vessel out of its host.

A vessel that can further abuse the power of Wrath. The sound of it was wrong, wet tearing mixed with grinding crystal, like flesh and stone arguing about which one was supposed to exist. Shards pushed out in jagged ridges. Bone shifted. The muscle swelled and then rearranged as if it were being rewritten.

"We fought for a really long time now." Ludwig said, "But you look like you need to chill for a bit, see ya," Ludwig said as he stepped back into a Black Mirror he created and appeared on the rooftop of one of the faraway buildings that still remained standing, or barely standing.

His exit wasn’t panicked. It was timing. He didn’t wait for the moment when the thing became unstoppable.

He left the instant it crossed the threshold where fighting it directly stopped being "training" and started being "wasting deaths."