[You have chosen to spare the Bearer of the Wrath Core, and now it falls upon you the responsibility of protecting them. By either saving them, or ending them.
The bearer of the Wrath Core has run away. Find them before the Thorn-Wombed Queen does.
Failure to do so will immediately send you back to your first Death Point: {Sorrowful Mist}]
Ludwig’s jaw clenched at the message. His eyes darted side to side, scanning the broken trail before him for footprints, blood trails, anything that could suggest a direction. The chains that had held her had been too weak to detect her slipping away, and the scent of blood was now too thick in the air to distinguish hers.
“For crying out loud,” Ludwig shouted, voice echoing off the close-set trees. His gaze swept across the underbrush with the desperation of a man who knew the consequences were no longer measured in pain but in undoing everything.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw it.
The cleric.
She was upright. Running. Her remaining hand clutched the cauterized stump of her missing arm, her robe tangling beneath her feet as she stumbled forward. Her staff was gone, but fear lent her strength
“Well, she’s also running,” the Hunter said, barely able to lift his brows in tired irony.
Ludwig swore again, louder this time. His breath caught in the back of his throat as he looked between the tree line where the cursed woman had disappeared, and the cleric scrambling through brush and vine.
He didn’t get to choose.
A scream rang out.
It was high, piercing, sharp enough to split the air like glass. It came from the cleric’s direction. A moment later, a brilliant flare of red light soared into the sky, arcing like a meteor, then bursting into a bloom of fire. The shockwave pulsed outward with a faint, warbling hum that sent leaves rustling and birds fleeing in bursts of wings.
Ludwig moved. He didn’t think. His body reacted faster than his mind could argue. He crashed through the undergrowth, branches lashing at his coat, brambles scraping against his boots. Every stride pounded with urgency, each heartbeat echoing louder than the last.
He arrived seconds too late.
Three Perturbants loomed over the now-silent cleric, their twisted forms hunched with monstrous purpose. Their limbs, thick and gnarled like ancient roots, pulsed with unnatural life. One of them had already torn through her face, its vine-like appendage coiled through her jaw and into her throat, splitting bone and cartilage with mechanical precision.
Another had impaled her abdomen, vines writhing inside the cavity like serpents feasting on the warmth of a fresh kill.
The third had plunged both limbs directly through her eyes. Roots and stalks now flowered grotesquely from her ears.
The scream had ended the moment it began. Now, her body jerked only once more, a final spasm, then went still. Lifeless.
The Perturbants turned. They saw Ludwig.
But they did not charge.
They didn’t need to. Dozens more were already arriving, drawn by the beacon of light. From every direction, the trees came alive with shifting movement. Leaves fell like rain, driven down by the weight of twisted bodies breaking through the forest’s calm.
Ludwig didn’t wait.
He spun on his heel and ran.
“Move!” he shouted, his voice slicing the still air as he charged back toward the Knight and the Hunter.
The Knight was already reacting. He had learned not to hesitate. He was sprinting forward before Ludwig had even reached them, sword sheathed to free his arms. The Hunter, slower to register, blinked and turned just in time to see the underbrush behind them rip open.
Three Perturbants burst out, their howls shrill and grating. Behind them, a second wave followed, then a third.
“Shit,” the Hunter gasped, drawing his weapons again even as he turned to flee. “What the hell is going on?!”
“In case you didn’t notice,” Ludwig replied, voice clipped as he leapt over a low root that curled across the path like a skeletal limb, “all the Perturbants in the area just saw a lovely flare of light. They’re converging. I’m not planning on sticking around long enough to shake hands.”
“Still don’t see how it gets worse than this,” the Hunter muttered, ducking under a thick branch that swung back and slapped at his legs.
“The Holy Order,” Ludwig said. “They’re far worse.”
The forest suddenly broke.
The path ended at the top of a small rise. Below them, the terrain opened like a gaping wound in the trees. A clearing spread out ahead, unnatural in its symmetry, bordered by high thickets on every side. From their vantage, they could see the whole scene.
And it was far worse than any of them could have imagined.
Ludwig screeched to a halt at the edge, eyes narrowing.
“Well,” he muttered, “sometimes, one should just stay quiet. Because it can always get worse…”
Below them stood hundreds of paladins. Their armor glinted in the dying light, arranged in rings of steel and gold around something that should not have existed.
It was not standing.
It was suspended.
Roots thicker than ancient oaks coiled around its limbs, hoisting it upward like a marionette built from nightmares. Her body hung open, not with violence, but with a horrible invitation. Her abdomen was split from sternum to pelvis, petals of flesh peeled back to reveal an interior that should never have seen light. Inside pulsed vines, thorns, and lattices of blackened sinew that twisted in rhythm with an unseen heartbeat.
From her spine bloomed a fan of thorny antlers, dark crimson and slick with sap. They pulsed faintly, each thorn a curved claw of intention. At her crown, bone-petals shaped like royal coronets curled outward, framing her head like a queen born from rot.
But it was her face that chilled Ludwig.
She had none.
Where expression should have been, there was only a smooth veil of pale, taut skin. It glistened with sores and was stitched closed with fine strands of thorn. Beneath it, something moved. Something breathed.
A silent scream.
Her arms were stretched wide, nailed at the wrists with javelins of rusted iron. From her fingers grew thin vines ending in small, vivid red flowers, which opened and closed with the rhythm of unseen prayer.
And her voice.
It came not from a mouth, but from the very roots that held her. It rose not in melody, but in pressure. It pushed into bone, resonating through marrow. It was grief given song, a lullaby for the condemned. A choir of every scream silenced by time, now echoing back in mournful hymn.
The paladins had not attacked.
They stood still, weapons raised not in challenge, but from habit. Clerics were kneeling. And many whispered prayers for salvation. A few even had their hands shaking around weapons too heavy for trembling faith.
The Thorn-Wombed Queen did not move.
She didn’t need to.
The land beneath her had begun to bleed. And the sky was starting to follow.
The sight rooted Ludwig where he stood. Not from fear, but from the sheer scale of wrongness strung before him. That such a thing could exist here , so close, so still, while the bearer of the Wrath Core had vanished into the trees? It chilled him deeper than any wound. He didn’t know if they had crossed paths yet. He only knew that if they had, there would be no saving either of them. As for facing the Queen herself… That wasn’t a decision. It was the kind of thought only madmen entertained, and Ludwig might just be going a bit insane right now.