Rebirth: Necromancer's Ascenscion-Chapter 125: The Quiet Between Graves

There was a moment—only a breath’s worth—where the crowd below stood still, caught in the silence that followed Ian’s impossible command.

Then chaos.

"Is he mad?!"

"What the hell did he just say?!"

"Who does he think he is?!"

Shouts rang through Hollow Spine like arrows loosed from too many bows.

Figures leapt back, blades half-drawn, looking to one another in disbelief. Some laughed—nervous, brittle laughs that didn’t quite reach their eyes.

Others didn’t laugh at all.

They only stared at Ian’s silhouette at the top of the stone ridge, unmoving, as if waiting for the punchline to a joke that never came.

One man—a tall mercenary bearing the crest of one of the imperial noble houses—stepped forward, scowling.

"This is the tournament of gods! Not a playground for lunatics!"

Few laughed nervously at his shout.

Another, dressed in the white and gold of the Sanctum’s lower ranks, spat on the ground.

"He thinks because he’s survived a few scraps with our paladin squads, he can threaten us all?"

But others—quieter, more seasoned—said nothing.

They stared at the black sword still humming in Ian’s hand.

They watched the way the torchlight refused to touch him, how the very air seemed thinner around him, like it feared being too close.

And then there were those who knew the rumors.

The whispers.

The demonblade. The man who couldn’t die.

The one who slaughtered a sanctum army so completely their souls couldn’t even be prayed for.

Lyra, standing only a few steps behind Ian, tensed.

"Okay, what the hell are you doing?" she hissed. Her voice trembled—not with fear, but urgency. "This isn’t funny. This isn’t our usual dramatic edge. There are hundreds down there, Ian. Hundreds."

He didn’t respond.

"Ian," she stepped forward now, closer to him than she usually dared. "If you’re planning to pick a fight with everyone in here, we need to know."

Caelen’s voice came next, low and cautious.

"We know you’re strong. Stronger than most of us, maybe stronger than all of us." He gestured with a slight nod toward the crowd below. "But that? That’s more than just adventurers. I see faction subjugators. Veterans. Blood-sworn mercenaries. And those are just the ones showing themselves."

Ian’s blade dropped an inch.

He turned slightly to face them, gray eyes like dead ash in the breeze.

"Relax," he said. "And watch the show."

From below, a man’s voice rang out—a war-scarred face, wrapped in half-burnt cloth and wielding a mace crackling with sanctified light.

"What more tricks do you plan to play, demon?" he spat. "More illusions? More cursed smoke? Or will you conjure the whore gods that accepted your oath to whisper more lies into the ears of the frightened? Huh demon?"

Ian’s gaze turned downward. He blinked once. Slowly.

Then he scoffed.

"How many times," he muttered, "will you call me that?"

He took a step forward.

The black blade of Judgement hummed softly.

"A demon," he repeated, louder now, addressing all of them. "That’s the word you think describes me? It’s the box you try to place me in. Demon?"

He raised his free hand, palm open, as if holding something unseen.

"Do you think demons know betrayal? Do you think they wake up shaking from dreams of evil they didn’t create but they must inherit? Do you think demons breathe slowly so they don’t taste the scent of blood and rot in every heartbeat...after every slaughter?"

He walked to the edge of the stone ridge now, his voice calm and hollow like wind in a catacomb.

"Demons are known quantities. You fight them. You cleanse them. You banish them."

He tilted his head, eyes empty of reflection.

"What do you do," he asked, "when the thing in front of you doesn’t have a name?"

No one answered.

"I was not born in hell," he continued. "I wasn’t summoned with candles and blood chalk. I didn’t crawl from the shadows of your scriptures."

He looked skyward for a moment, as if remembering something distant and cruel.

"I woke to this world in chains," he said. "I bled in the dirt and got what my hands could steal. I was shaped by my own cruelty, sharpened by my own wicked desire for strength. I did not learn death from books. I learned it by burying my enemies in shallow graves while the sun mocked me."

The wind shifted. For a moment, even the crackling of torches below seemed quieter.

"You look at me," he said, voice lower now, "and see a demon."

He raised Judgement again. The air around it warped like heat above a funeral pyre.

"But demons are a far lesser evils," Ian said. "And for that sin, i will slaughter every on of em."

He stepped forward.

"I am not a demon."

He drove the blade into the ground again—gently this time. But even that sent cracks down the stone.

"I am what demons will learn to fear—i...am the worst of men."

No one moved.

Then he said a single word.

"Rise."

The shadows obeyed.

From the cracks in the earth, from the corners behind forgotten darkness, from the black pooled beneath collapsed stone and dead braziers—they came.

First one. Then five. Then twenty.

Dark figures began to pull themselves free from the abyss. Humanoid. Grotesque.

Some whole, some broken and stitched together by invisible threads of corruption.

They rose without sound, eyes glowing faint violet or blue, their forms flickering between what they were and what they’d once been.

Dozens.

Then more.

Over a hundred now, crawling up the steps, emerging from behind any shadow, dragging their weapons—shattered axes, rusted swords, uneven rebar spears.

Undead.

But not like the any a man amongst them had ever seen. These were different. More than corpses. Less than souls.

And all of them bound to the same command.

Ian didn’t speak again.

The silence that followed his word was louder than any scream.

And below, Hollow Spine finally understood what had entered their midst.