[Necros is enraged at the audacity of humans.]

[Existence Quest IV addendum]

[Someone has been experimenting on human bodies and has severed the connection between body and soul. But by using some unfamiliar magic, they somehow managed to keep the souls trapped in the lower realm of man.

Destroy the mechanism that is locking the poor souls, and allow them to pass on, to cleanse themselves in the Yellow River before returning to Necros.

Reward: 100,000 Soul.

*** 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

"I cannot see it, but I feel your lantern’s shaking," Kaiser said.

"Necros just asked me to break the mechanism holding these souls," Ludwig said as he looked up, "They’re trying to leave, but the words written on the walls are acting like a barrier; they can’t get out."

"I see, but we can’t do that now..." Kaiser said.

"Why not? If that writing traps them, can’t you, you know, do the same thing you did with that ward earlier?" Redd asked.

"No, this is different; this is continuous. If I break it, it’ll alert whoever made it or whoever is keeping it working. We can’t do that, not now, not this early..." Kaiser said.

"We’ll handle this later. Let’s keep going," Ludwig said.

They kept moving, checking cell after cell. The more they moved and the deeper they got, the fresher the bodies became.

The old corpses gave way to newer ones, and the newer ones gave way to bodies that still carried warmth in the shape of them even if life had long since gone.

Here and there, blood remained dark but wet. Scratches marked the floors near some doors, as if fingers had clawed against stone until the nails broke. Ludwig did not speak. Redd did not joke. Kaiser’s expression hardened until even his usual disdain had no room left to breathe.

Then they heard it. Not a scream, not exactly. A small sound. A broken, thin whimper that slipped through the bars of one cell and died almost immediately, as if whoever made it had learned sound only brought worse things.

Approaching the cell, they saw small kids. Barely the age of ten, some missing hands, some missing eyes, some who were barely alive without legs and arms. The cell was cramped, the floor stained beneath them, and the children were arranged less like prisoners and more like abandoned remains that had not yet finished becoming corpses.

One child opened their mouth when the light from Kaiser’s spell passed over them, and there was only a raw emptiness where a voice should have been. Another tried to move but only managed a trembling shift of the shoulder. A third stared without blinking, one eye clouded, the other too dry, too still, too emptied out to belong to someone that young.

Ludwig’s lower lip twitched. It was a small movement, almost nothing, but it was the first crack in his expression since they entered the catacombs. His gaze fixed on the children, not on their wounds first, but on their faces.

"Their eyes..." Ludwig said as he saw the few kids.

The kids saw Ludwig, they saw Kaiser, and they saw redd’s royal robes. They saw armed men, powerful men, men who had walked into the place where they had been abandoned and ruined. Under any normal cruelty, there should have been a response. A flinch. A plea. A cry. Even terror would have been something human. But the expression and the words they were supposed to say never came out.

They didn’t cry for help, they didn’t cry for assistance, they didn’t cry in pain. They simply didn’t cry. Their eyes moved, but without expectation.

Their bodies reacted to presence, but not to possibility. It was as if something deeper than flesh had been carved out of them and taken away, leaving behind children who understood pain but no longer believed in escape.

"They... took away their hope," Ludwig said, and every hair on his body stood up.

The words came quietly, almost too quietly for the corridor around him, but they carried a weight that made the air feel suddenly thinner. His hands did not shake. His voice did not crack. His face did not twist into some obvious mask of rage. That was not how the danger showed itself.

It wasn’t fear, nor panic, nor an instinct warning him. No, it was his own body trying its absolute best to do one thing.

Rein in Wrath. Because wrath was about to take over.

These children did nothing.

Ludwig suddenly understood why the corpses above had not been discarded. This place was not killing people. It was processing them.

"What the fuck..." Redd muttered quietly, and for once, there was no humor in his voice. The words barely carried through the corridor, strangled by the weight of what stood before them. He looked at the children, then at the bars, then at the blood-darkened floor, and whatever vulgar joke might have usually crawled out of his mouth died before reaching his tongue.

Kaiser stepped closer to the bars, his expression hardening the longer he observed the children. The old scholar’s eyes moved from one mutilated body to another, not with indifference, but with the controlled horror of a man forcing himself to think because someone had to. "Their minds are damaged," he said. "No... not damaged." His brows furrowed further as he studied the vacant stares, the lack of reaction, the absence of instinctive pleading. "Suppressed."

One of the children slowly looked up at Ludwig. A little boy, thin enough to see the outline of bone beneath pale skin, turned his face toward him with the exhausting slowness of someone who had learned that movement invited pain. His right arm ended at the elbow, wrapped in stained cloth that had not been changed in days, and the fabric had dried into ugly layers of brown and black. Yet what unsettled Ludwig most were the eyes staring back at him. They were empty, not dead, not broken in the normal way, but vacant, like someone had reached inside and scooped away the part that resisted.

Ludwig felt something shift violently inside his chest. Heat spread beneath his ribs, dense and suffocating, and his pulse thickened with an unnatural rhythm that did not belong to ordinary anger. The Heart of Wrath reacted before he consciously did, and a dull crimson glow pulsed beneath the black layers of Noctivex, faint at first, then brighter. The air around Ludwig distorted subtly as heat rolled off him in uneven waves, bending the dust and stale underground dampness around his frame.

Kaiser noticed immediately. "Control yourself," he warned quietly, though there was no sharpness in the warning. It sounded less like an order and more like a man placing his hand on the edge of a door he already knew was about to break open.

Ludwig barely heard him. The boy in the cell had lowered his head again, not because he was afraid, and not because Ludwig’s presence had overwhelmed him. He lowered it because he genuinely did not believe Ludwig mattered. That realization struck harder than any insult Ludwig had ever endured, and it did not strike outward. It struck inward, somewhere low and deep where anger had already begun sharpening its teeth.

Every muscle in Ludwig’s body tightened simultaneously as violent impulses flooded through him. He wanted to rip the bars apart. He wanted to tear through every corridor beneath Solania until he found whoever had done this. He wanted blood, screaming, and ruin, not as abstract justice or moral punishment, but as a physical necessity so intense that restraint began to feel like complicity.

The Crown of Pride reacted next. Invisible thorns manifested faintly across Ludwig’s forehead beneath his hairline, pressing into him with a cold authority that steadied his breathing just enough for thought to remain intact.

Wrath demanded destruction.

Pride refused loss of control.

For one brief moment, the two Sins collided inside him like opposing storms, one howling to tear the world open, the other refusing to let him become an animal in front of the very people who needed him sane.

Redd took an unconscious step backward as the pressure rolling off Ludwig thickened.

"...Why do I suddenly feel like we should run?" he asked carefully, his voice low, cautious, and painfully aware that the answer was standing right beside him.

Because Ludwig no longer felt entirely human. Dust lifted from the floor in tiny trembling clouds around his boots, disturbed by the pressure spreading from him in waves. Black and crimson mana intertwined around his frame while Noctivex crawled further across his skin like something eager to consume flesh, tightening and shifting as if it had smelled violence and wanted permission to feed.

Then the little boy spoke. His voice came out dry and weak, so thin it should have disappeared beneath the silence of the corridor, but somehow it cut through all of them with perfect clarity. "...Are you here to take more parts?"

Silence filled the corridor. Ludwig froze completely, not because he had no answer, but because the question itself had reached a place words could not defend. The child had not asked for rescue. He had not begged for help. He had not even asked who they were. He merely wanted to know what would be taken this time, as if that was the only possible reason adults came to this place.

Something inside Ludwig snapped, not mentally, but morally. It was the kind of break that happens when restraint ceases to feel virtuous, when patience starts to look like cowardice wearing clean clothes, and when the line between justice and vengeance becomes too thin to matter. Kaiser immediately raised a hand.

"Ludwig."

Too late. Wrath answered first.

The floor beneath Ludwig exploded outward as cracks spread through the stone like a spiderweb, racing beneath the dust and old stains in jagged black lines. The bars trembled in their sockets, the cell walls groaned, and the stale air shuddered around him as if the catacombs themselves had recognized something worse than fear entering the room.

For the first time since entering the catacombs, Ludwig smiled, except there was absolutely nothing sane in the expression.

"Alright," he said quietly. "Now I’m Pissed."