"The living are seldom appreciated. The dead, never forgotten."
— Arthas Menethil, Prince of Lordaeron
CHAPTER V
THE WEIGHT OF CROWNS
— or, The Education of a Dead King in the Manners of Living Men —
"norm" • regular speech | *thoughts* | **Wrath Knight speak** | Spellcasting
—— Ezekiel P.O.V. ——
Victory, as it turns out, smells remarkably like burning leather and wounded pride.
The soldiers who had survived the particular
A voice broke through the settling dust like a pebble through still water.
Village Elder: "E-Excuse me?"
I turned. The speaker was an older man — weathered, broad-shouldered, with the careful posture of someone accustomed to being the tallest tree in a small forest. Their village chief. He looked at the two of us the way one might regard a pair of wolves sitting politely on the doorstep: uncertain whether to offer them tea or barricade the door.
Village Chief: "Why did the two of you come here?"
Ainz and I exchanged one of those glances that required no words — the kind honed by years of shared raids, guild halls, and the particular unspoken language of people who have, on more than one occasion, watched each other do something monumentally stupid and survived it anyway. He answered first, his voice carrying the measured resonance of a man who had rehearsed this sort of thing.
Ainz: "We could not stand by and watch innocent people be slaughtered. Call it a moral obligation."
The villagers erupted in hushed, fractious murmurs — the sound of thirty people simultaneously deciding whether to believe something that sounds too good to be true, which, in Ezekiel Douglas's experience, it almost always was.
I stepped forward.
Ezekiel: "Let me try something."
Then I let silence do half the work — let them look at me: the white-blue glow of Frostmourne's edge at my hip, the death-pale complexion that peeked at the collar above the armor of the Lich King, the frost that clung to my breath even in the mild evening air. A dead man standing in their village square, asking nothing.
Then I spoke.
Ezekiel: "We don't do this out of charity. Protection is a service. We expect payment."
The murmuring stopped. Shoulders dropped. Eyes softened from suspicion to that most pragmatic of human expressions:
Oh. You want something. I understand that.
And there it is. The oldest truth in every world I've ever known: altruism unnerves people. A man who wants nothing from you is a man you cannot predict. But a man who names his price? That man you can work with. They'd react very differently if they saw what I actually am — what we actually are. The living have always feared the Scourge, and no small speech about moral obligations would fix that. This way is cleaner. Give them a transaction. Give them a category to put us in. As for those girls... Ainz will need to address their memories before we leave.
❖
[ Timeskip — Brought to you by a chibi Ezekiel being aggressively embraced by a chibi Delta, who has decided today is a hugging day and will not be taking questions. ]
—— Still Ezekiel P.O.V. ——
The chief's house smelled of pine resin, old wool, and the particular kind of exhaustion that settles into timber after thirty years of hard winters. He and his wife sat across from us at a table that had hosted better evenings, and we told them our story — two wandering magic casters, vastly skilled, vastly lost, stumbling through a world that hadn't had the courtesy to include a map.
They believed us without hesitation.
What kind of magic casters does this world produce? I'm wearing the armor of the Lich King. There's frost on the table where my gauntlet rests. Frostmourne hums at my hip like a chorus of the damned and this man just offered me tea. I genuinely cannot decide if this world is admirably trusting or catastrophically under-informed about the concept of 'danger signs.'
The gold we'd carried from our world — gold that had once purchased siege engines and guild halls and the particular brand of temporary friendship that money buys — was worth something here, but barely. A curiosity more than a currency. So we moved to more valuable coin: information.
The world, it turned out, was divided into three great powers, each one a kingdom unto itself, each one carrying the ancient and apparently non-negotiable conviction that it alone deserved to exist.
Carne Village and the Great Tomb of Nazarick both sat within the Re-Estize Kingdom — a nation which had been, for generations, engaged in the time-honored tradition of trying to push the Baharuth Empire back over the mountain range that served as their mutual border. The two powers met each other regularly on the open plains near E-Rantel, the walled capital, and each time managed to walk away having accomplished roughly nothing except ensuring another battle next year. War as calendar event.
I know this model. I built one. The Scourge didn't conquer Lordaeron by meeting the Alliance across a field and asking them to commit to a schedule. Something to remember.
Then the chief mentioned the Easterlings.
An independent people. A city that had been theirs. A king who had decided, with the particular arrogance of men who confuse power for rightness, that E-Rantel's walls were worth more than the people already living inside them. They'd been driven out. Scattered. Now they wandered the periphery of their own home like ghosts who hadn't yet accepted the haunting — some hiring their swords to the Baharuth Empire, waiting for the tide to turn.
Now that. That is a story I recognize. A people without a throne. A cause without a crown. Every great empire I've ever watched built itself on the backs of men who had everything taken from them and nothing left to lose. File that away. Don't lose the thread.
Village Chief: "Something troubling you, sir?"
Ezekiel: "No. Forgive me. Is there anything else worth knowing about the surrounding land?"
Village Chief: "The closest city is E-Rantel. The road is safe enough if you stay on it — orcs, goblins, a few of those Easterling wanderers in the woods, but the adventurers keep their numbers manageable."
I should probably not mention that Korth'azz is technically an orc. With a bag over his head. Standing seven feet tall. The bag is not fooling anyone but I appreciate the effort.
Ainz: "Adventurers?"
Village Chief: "Contracted monster hunters. If you need their services, there's a guild hall in E-Rantel where you can post a request."
Ainz: "An adventurer's guild."
I placed one gauntleted hand slowly, deliberately, over the front of my helmet.
Ezekiel: "Yes, Ainz. I heard him. The first time."
He ignored me with practiced ease and continued.
Ainz: "How significant is E-Rantel, as a city?"
Village Chief: "Considerably larger than here, I can tell you that much."
Ainz: "As I suspected."
E-Rantel. A walled city at the intersection of three powers, sitting atop the bones of a displaced nation, populated by adventurers who kill monsters for coin. If we want to understand this world — if we want to be understood in it — that is where we go. Plant the name. Grow the legend. Wait.
❖
[ Timeskip — Brought to you by a chibi Ezekiel dispensing headpats to a chibi Beta, who is vibrating with the suppressed joy of a person who has been waiting for this exact moment for the entire chapter. ]
—— 3rd Person P.O.V. ——
The graveyard breathed.
Not literally — that was Ezekiel's department, and even he did it more out of habit than necessity — but there was something alive in the stillness of it: the way grief moves through a crowd like wind through wheat, bending each person at a slightly different angle, at a slightly different time. The surviving villagers stood among the stones as the sun bled orange across the western hills, and they mourned with the loud, unguarded sorrow of people who had not yet learned to be ashamed of it.
Ezekiel and Ainz kept to the shade of an ancient oak at the field's edge, the distance between them and the graves respectful and deliberate, like men standing outside a door they knew better than to open.
[Ainz]: The wand is in my inventory. One casting. One. And those fresh-turned mounds would be unnecessary. But a caster who raises the dead as casually as another man lights a candle — in a world that doesn't know us yet — that is not a reputation we can afford. The cost of that spell is trust we haven't earned. Not yet.
Not far from the largest stone, two girls knelt side by side: the older one with her arm around the younger, both of them crying with the particular, bottomless grief of children who have lost something they cannot yet name as irrevocable. Ezekiel watched them for a moment that stretched longer than he intended.
[Ainz]: Besides. They are alive. Their village stands. That should be sufficient. The living are a practical consideration. The dead are a closed account.
The sun sank. The village rose — creaking, aching, resolute. Where soldiers had broken things, hands rebuilt them; where fire had scarred, soot was scraped and timber was replaced. Ainz, Ezekiel, Korth'azz, Zeliek, and Albedo moved through the work in a loose procession, passing villagers who didn't quite look at them directly, the way people don't quite look at lightning twice.
[Ezekiel]: The story of this night is already writing itself. Carne Village — saved from a knight's raid by two wandering spellcasters of unknown origin and considerable destructive capacity. These things travel. Farmers tell farmers, traders tell traders, and somewhere down the chain of whispers and embellishments a name arrives in a city and a name in a city becomes a reputation and a reputation, in the right ears, becomes a summons. If there are other players from our world here — and there may be — they will hear the names Ainz Ooal Gown and Ezekiel Douglas. And they will come looking. Until then: no unnecessary blood. No civilian casualties. Build the cause before you build the empire. You cannot rule what you've already buried.
Ezekiel noted the subtle sag in Ainz's posture — the specific tiredness of a man carrying more than he intends to show — and rested one frost-pale hand briefly on his shoulder before addressing the others.
Ezekiel: "Today was a success. Let's go home."
Albedo, Korth'azz, Zeliek: "Yes, my lord."
A villager passed nearby, hauling broken stone piled high enough to render him invisible from the chest up, shuffling along on optimistic feet.
Random Villager: "Evening."
Albedo's expression navigated the full journey from neutrality to contempt in the time it took the man to disappear around a corner. Korth'azz and Zeliek's eyes tracked him with the focused, hungry attention of two men who had just been told dinner was cancelled and were reconsidering their life choices.
Ainz: "You appear to have a strong opinion about humans, Albedo."
Albedo: "What is there to form an opinion about? They are fragile. Temporary. Small creatures who believe their smallness is their own fault, and compensate for it by building walls. They are, in short, insects — and insects deserve to be beneath our heel."
Ainz: "And yet. Here we are, among them. I need you to set that aside — to wear civility the way you wear that armor: completely, and without visible complaint. You will treat them with respect. That is not a suggestion."
Albedo's jaw tightened. Something crossed her face that was approximately as close to wounded obedience as her architecture permitted.
Albedo: "...As my lord commands."
[Ainz]: It's a hypocrisy I recognize in myself. I don't feel what I once felt for them — not the warmth, not the weight of it. That particular frequency has gone quiet. But Ezekiel was watching those girls. There was something in his posture. Whatever that was — I want to understand it better.
Ezekiel, meanwhile, had turned to find Korth'azz and Zeliek staring after the departing villager with an expression that had nothing to do with architecture or philosophy and everything to do with appetite.
Ezekiel: "...Why are your mouths watering?"
Korth'azz: "I beg your pardon, M'lord. It's simply been... a considerable stretch since our last encounter with. Ah. Soft meat."
Ezekiel: "I'm sorry — what."
Zeliek: "Human flesh is considered something of a delicacy among our kind, M'lord. Not a staple, mind you. More of a... seasonal treat."
A pause that could have comfortably housed a small family expanded between them.
[Ezekiel]: Alright. So. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are standing in a farming village and at least two of them are thinking about the menu. This is fine. Everything is fine. We are absolutely under control.
Ezekiel: "Hear me — both of you. No one in this village gets eaten. No one in this world gets eaten. This is law. This is non-negotiable. This is the hill I will personally die on — and I say that as a man who has already died once and found the experience formative."
Korth'azz & Zeliek: "Awwww... yes, M'lord."
They looked, devastatingly, like enormous undead dogs who had just been told no treats before dinner.
❖
Ainz and Ezekiel had nearly reached the edge of the square when the sound of urgent, barely-contained panic drifted from a cluster of villagers near the well.
Random Villager: "What are we gonna do, Chief? We can't just—"
Village Chief: "I don't have an answer for you yet—"
Both of them stopped walking at the same moment.
Ezekiel: "It never ends, does it."
Ainz: "Not voluntarily, no."
They crossed the square.
Ainz: "Village Chief. What's the situation?"
The man turned, and relief crossed his face like morning across a cold plain — fast, welcome, and immediately complicated by what came behind it.
Village Chief: "Lord Ainz. Lord Ezekiel. Thank the heavens. I've just received word that more soldiers are approaching — fast, and in numbers. I don't know what to do."
Ezekiel: "Is that right."
Not a question. More of an acknowledgment — the verbal equivalent of rolling one's sleeves up.
He looked at the crowd: every face drawn tight with the specific, grinding terror of people who have survived one disaster and immediately found themselves standing at the threshold of the next. He let the silence sit for exactly long enough that what he said next would land somewhere below panic.
Ezekiel: "Gather everyone into the chief's house. No one on the streets. When they're settled, meet us in the square. You have my word that nothing touches this village tonight."
Shoulders unknotted. Breath returned. Something that might, with some optimism, be called hope moved through the crowd like current through water.
Village Chief: "Yes. Yes, of course."
The thunder of hooves reached them before the riders were visible — a rolling, rhythmic percussion that rose from distant vibration to present reality with the swiftness of a problem that refuses to remain hypothetical. A company of soldiers poured down the road in disciplined formation and reined in hard at the village entrance, their captain's eyes moving with the practiced speed of a man conducting a rapid threat assessment.
He found two figures in the square and his expression made the journey from prepared to uncertain.
Gazef Stronoff: "I am Gazef Stronoff — Chief Royal Warrior of the Re-Estize Kingdom. By His Majesty's command, I have come to hunt down the knights responsible for these attacks. The people of this village are under royal protection as of this moment."
Village Chief: "Thank you, General Gazef."
Stronoff's gaze moved to the two strangers. He took them in with the deliberate care of a man who had learned, at some formative and probably painful juncture in his career, never to dismiss what he didn't understand. The armor. The pallor. The rune-carved runeblade at one figure's hip, the runeblade that seemed to breathe with something older and colder than simple steel.
Gazef: "Chief — who are these two? I don't recognize them."
Village Chief: "Well, you see, they—"
Ainz: "No need for lengthy introductions, General. It is a pleasure."
Ainz and Ezekiel inclined their heads in the same motion — the instinctive synchrony of men who have spent enough time side by side that courtesy has become choreography.
Ainz: "I am Ainz Ooal Gown."
Ezekiel: "And I am Ezekiel Douglas. Wandering magic casters, nothing more. We found the village mid-raid and did what we could."
Stronoff was quiet for a moment that was longer than it needed to be.
Then he dismounted.
Gazef: "These people would have been massacred without you. You have my gratitude — both of you."
He said it the way a man says something he means entirely: simply, without theatre, looking them in the eye.
The soldier who approached Stronoff practically vibrated with urgency.
Random Soldier: "General — we've spotted a force of unknown origin. They've surrounded the village. All sides. Equal intervals. They're already in position."
The word
The word "already" did the heaviest lifting in that sentence.
Stronoff's expression hardened into the professionally-composed grimness of a man tallying numbers he doesn't like. Ezekiel and Ainz went very still — the stillness of two people doing very rapid mental arithmetic.
❖
[ Timeskip — Brought to you by a chibi Albedo clutching a chibi Ainz body pillow. The pillow has not consented to this but lacks the structural integrity to object. ]
The window was small and the world beyond it was not.
Stronoff and one of his men stood at the glass, reading the shapes in the dark: soldiers arranged with the careful, clockwork precision of people who had been told exactly where to stand and why. Behind the human line, other shapes moved — wrong shapes. Wrong proportions. Wrong in the way that things from other worlds are wrong when they stand in one that doesn't expect them.
Gazef: "There they are."
Random Soldier: "Equal spacing throughout. Whoever commanded this deployment knew what they were doing."
Ezekiel stepped up to the window.
Ezekiel: "I had a conversation with one of the knights from the original raid. He confirmed it. Slane Theocracy. Their operation from beginning to end."
The exhale that moved through Stronoff was slow and controlled, the sigh of a man who has just confirmed a suspicion he was hoping was wrong.
Gazef: "Only the Theocracy deploys this kind of magic support density. And that formation — that's not standard military. That's a Scripture unit. One of the Six. Reporting directly to the Pontifex himself."
Ezekiel: "They dressed their vanguard as Imperial soldiers. Misdirection. Blame the Empire, discredit the kingdom."
Ainz: "Which raises the question: does this village hold strategic value that would justify this scale of deployment?"
Stronoff was quiet long enough that the question answered itself.
Gazef: "If they weren't after the two of you... then there is only one target worth this many pieces on the board."
[Ezekiel]: The village was bait. The raid was a summons. Draw the Chief Royal Warrior into open ground, strip him of preparation, finish him when he's already spent. Simple. Efficient. Old.
Ainz: "You are quite spectacularly despised, Chief Warrior."
The laugh that Stronoff produced at this was dry and genuine in equal measure — the laugh of a man who has made peace with a joke that isn't entirely funny.
Gazef: "So it would seem. Lucky me."
He turned back to the window, and something in his posture shifted — a settling, like a door finding its frame.
Gazef: "To think. The Slane Theocracy sends their finest simply to put one man in the ground."
[Ainz]: Those shapes at the perimeter. Those are not native creatures. Those are Archangel Flames. From YGGDRASIL. Standing in a field in a world that has no business knowing they exist. What in creation is happening here.
Gazef: "Sir Ainz. Sir Ezekiel. Name your price. I'll hire both of you — anything you ask."
Ainz: "We must decline."
Ezekiel's head turned slowly. The silence between them was extremely legible.
Stronoff absorbed the refusal with the composure of a man who has heard no in worse circumstances.
Gazef: "I understand. Then you have my thanks — for everything you've already done."
He turned to Ezekiel then — and took his hand. Firm. The grip of a man who means what his hands say.
Gazef: "I know what I'm asking is selfish. I have nothing to offer you right now. But these people—"
He began to lower himself to one knee.
Ezekiel stopped him.
Ezekiel: "Don't. Stand up."
He waited until Stronoff was eye-level again.
Ezekiel: "You have my word. I will protect every person in this village as though their lives are the only ones that matter. To my last breath — and I say that knowing full well what my last breath was, and what came after it."
Ainz stepped forward and placed a hand on Stronoff's shoulder.
Ainz: "You can count on both of us."
Something moved across Stronoff's face — the particular expression of a man who has just decided to trust something he can't fully explain and has accepted the cost of that decision.
Gazef: "Then I have nothing to fear."
Ainz reached into his coat and pressed a small object into Stronoff's palm without ceremony.
Ainz: "Take this. I insist."
Stronoff looked at it — turned it over — looked up.
Gazef: "A gift. I'm grateful."
Ainz: "Good luck."
One nod. No more words. Stronoff walked out into the dark, mounted with the efficiency of a man for whom horses are extensions of thought, and drove toward the enemy line without looking back.
The five of them stood at the doorway and watched the darkness swallow him.
Albedo spoke — not to Stronoff, who was already beyond hearing, but to the air, to the idea of him.
Ainz: "Albedo. When I first came to this place, I looked at every human the way you do now. Insects. Moving furniture. But the more hours I spend in conversation with them... I find the architecture of my contempt developing structural issues."
Albedo: "Is that why you pledged protection, Lord Ezekiel?"
Ezekiel: "Perhaps."
The chief's voice arrived like an interruption that had been waiting politely for an opening.
Village Chief: "Lord Ainz — those soldiers are still out there. Why is the Chief Warrior riding toward them?"
Ainz: "Because he is what they came for. Not the village."
Village Chief: "Then we wait here while he fights alone?"
Ezekiel turned.
Ezekiel: "He won't be fighting alone. He'll be fighting loudly — which is different. Noise is a tool. Chaos is a map. When he breaks their line, the disruption creates a window. We move through it. We move fast. And we bring everyone."
The chief and his wife exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation about trust and the absence of better options.
Then they nodded.
❖
Gazef Stronoff — P.O.V.
Speed was mathematics.
At full gallop you covered ground faster than arrows could be aimed at you. At full gallop you were committed — no half-measures, no braking, no quiet negotiation with what waited at the end of the ride. Gazef had always appreciated mathematics.
He raised his voice above the thunder of the charge.
Gazef: "Head-on — straight through their line! Break their formation and scatter them! Keep moving, keep them chasing! Timing is the blade — timing is everything!"
Troops: "Sir!"
He pulled his sword.
Gazef: "NOW — LET US REMIND THEM WHAT THE SONS OF RE-ESTIZE ARE MADE OF!"
The war cry that answered him was a single sound made by forty-something individual voices: rough, ragged, and whole.
He loosed an arrow first — habit, test, provocation. It found a Theocracy soldier's direction and promptly ceased to exist, dissolved by a counterspell in a flash of amber light. So. Magic support was active. No distance game then.
He drove in with the sword.
A soldier caught his horse's flank on the wrong angle and Gazef went over — the world spinning exactly once — and hit the ground in a controlled fall that he'd practiced enough times that his body knew the drill. He was up before the dust settled, moving, feet under him, sword in hand.
Random Soldier: "General — take my hand—!"
The Archangel came from the left — not running, not charging, something between gliding and falling with intent — and Gazef intercepted it with a slash to the flank. It might as well have been a suggestion. He drove his blade against it with his full weight, forcing it earthward, but it rose again with the bored patience of a thing that had decided to let him tire himself out.
Gazef: "Tough one, aren't you..."
It lunged.
Gazef: "Martial Art —"
HARDEST BATTLER!
One stroke. Clean. The angel came apart at the midsection with the sound of something that had never expected to break.
More came.
Gazef: "Magic is an insufferable convenience for everyone except the person on the receiving end of it..."
He watched his men ride clear through the gap they'd carved — dark shapes pulling away into distance, into safety — and felt something settle in his chest that was not quite peace but was related to it.
[Gazef]: Good. Run. That's the plan. This is the plan. I am the distraction so that men with families and names can return to them. This is a perfectly acceptable outcome. I have made worse bargains.
[Gazef]: It's in your hands now, Sir Ainz. Sir Ezekiel. Whatever you are.
He turned back to what remained of the Theocracy line and raised his sword.
And then the hooves came back.
Thirty seconds was all it took. Thirty seconds and the sound of men who had decided, collectively and apparently unanimously, that the mathematics of survival could go straight to the bottom of the Twisting Nether.
Random Soldier: "STAY BY GAZEF'S SIDE!"
Random Soldier: "WE ARE THE SWORD OF THIS KINGDOM! WE DO NOT RETREAT WHILE OUR GENERAL STANDS!"
All Re-Estize Soldiers: "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Gazef: "I gave you a clear order — I told you to retreat — what in the—"
He stopped. Looked at them. Every face flushed and furious and alive with something that professional soldiers aren't supposed to carry into the field because it is, objectively, terrible for tactical decision-making.
[Gazef]: You absolute idiots. You glorious, suicidal, magnificent idiots.
Gazef: "Fools. Every last one of you."
A beat.
Gazef: "My fools. Now — with me."
The battle became a crucible.
By the time it had finished with him, Gazef's armor was a catalogue of near-misses, his sword arm a bibliography of things he'd survived. His men were scattered — some standing, some kneeling, some at rest in the permanent way. Magic missiles had found him in the gaps between parries, each one a small, insistent argument that he was losing. An Archangel's blade had found the join between his cuirass and his hip-guard and made a point that was difficult to dispute.
He was on one knee in the grass.
High Priest: "Finish him. Spare nothing. I want it done before he can make another speech."
The angels converged.
Gazef made the specific internal decision of a man who has run the numbers on his situation and declined to accept the answer, and he came off the ground screaming.
Gazef: "I — AM — NOT — DONE —"
The High Priest's expression developed a crease of displeasure.
Gazef: "I am the Chief Warrior of Re-Estize! My blood, my breath, my death belong to this kingdom and to no one who has not earned the right to them! I will die ten thousand times before I yield to a man who sends other men's children to do his killing and calls himself holy!"
High Priest: "You will die. That much hasn't changed. Surrender, Stronoff. Make it painless. Lie down like a good and faithful soldier."
Gazef, despite everything, laughed.
High Priest: "Is something funny?"
Gazef: "You. Your certainty. The fact that you've been in this field for twenty minutes and still haven't looked behind you."
High Priest: "A bluff. Kill him — make him regret the theatrics."
The angels surged forward.
And the world performed a conjuring trick.
Gazef Stronoff — blades converging, blood pooling, doom arriving on the wings of things that should not exist — simply ceased to be where he was.
A voice, felt more than heard, like cold water poured into a warm thought:
Ainz: "Looks like it's time for us to switch."
Then: silence. Stone. The smell of pitch and timber.
Gazef: "Where... where am I..."
Village Chief: "The storage house, General. Lord Ainz set a barrier. You appeared here — and your men with you. Just as they vanished from the field."
Gazef: "Lord Ainz. Lord Ezekiel. Are they—"
Village Chief: "They were here a moment ago. Then they were gone. And then you were here."
Gazef reached into his coat. The item Ainz had pressed into his palm — small, warm, rune-marked — sat there for exactly one breath.
Then it dissolved.
He stared at the empty palm. He understood: the gift hadn't been a gift. It had been a key. A tether. A thread woven through the distance between
He stared at the empty palm. He understood: the gift hadn't been a gift. It had been a key. A tether — a thread woven through distance and danger to bring him home. A plan laid before he'd known a plan was needed.
[Gazef]: I'll be damned.
He fell back and was asleep before he hit the floor.
❖
On the field where Gazef had knelt, three figures stood.
The Theocracy soldiers stared at the spot where their target had been.
Then at the strangers who occupied it.
High Priest: "And who in creation are you supposed to be?"
Ainz: "A pleasure. I am Ainz Ooal Gown. Do call me Ainz."
Ezekiel: "Ezekiel Douglas. Charmed."
—— Ezekiel P.O.V. ——
The swap had been clean. Timing was everything, and this particular timing had the rare, satisfying quality of a plan that works exactly as intended — which, in Ezekiel's long and occasionally catastrophic experience, was the exception rather than the rule.
He took a moment to look at the field around them: soldiers arranged in concentric discipline, Archangels floating at intervals with the patient glow of things that hadn't yet been told to stop, and at their center, a High Priest in robes that communicated both institutional authority and a very sincere belief in his own immunity from consequences.
Hello. So this is what a Six Scripture deployment looks like from the inside. Instructive. Expensive. And entirely aimed at one man who is now asleep in a storage house, which means it is now, technically, aimed at us. I've survived worse odds with a plagued sword and half a company of death knights. I refuse to be impressed.
Ainz: "We have a certain investment in the wellbeing of these villagers."
High Priest: "Have you come to beg for their lives? Or for your own?"
Ezekiel laughed.
It was a genuine laugh — the kind that comes from somewhere honest and uncalculated, the kind that happens when something is exactly as ridiculous as it appears.
Ezekiel: "No. You misread the situation. We overheard your conversation with Stronoff."
The laughter stopped. What replaced it was quieter and considerably more dangerous.
Ezekiel: "You told a dying man — in those exact words — that once you were done with him, you'd kill every person in this village. Casually. As a footnote. As if it were a chore on a list."
He took one step forward. Frost traced the edges of his pauldrons like cursive writing in a language only the cold knew.
Ezekiel: "I want you to understand something. We spent the better part of this evening keeping those people alive. And you just — openly — announced your intention to undo all of it, as though we weren't standing right here. I have many things that I am willing to overlook in this world. That is not one of them."
High Priest: "Bold. For a pair of wandering casters. What exactly do you intend to do about it?"
Ainz: "Your choices are simple: surrender without resistance, and your death will be clean. Refuse, and we will demonstrate, in considerable detail, why that was the wrong decision."
The High Priest's face didn't move. He raised one hand.
High Priest: "Kill them."
Two Archangels dove from the ambient dark like celestial javelins and drove their blades through Ezekiel with the absolute confidence of things that had never encountered a target they couldn't puncture.
High Priest: "Was that it? After a declaration like that?"
He leaned forward.
The angels were not moving.
They were straining — tilting, pulling, anchored to something that shouldn't have been possible — their golden blades buried in a man who was looking down at them with the mild, academic interest of someone examining a moderately interesting geological formation.
Ezekiel had them by the heads.
Ezekiel: "I want to ask you something, genuinely: at what point in this sequence of events did you decide we were bluffing? Was it the armor? The frost? The part where your entire vanguard fled screaming? I'm asking for pedagogical purposes."
Random Soldier: "It's a trick — it has to be—"
Random Soldier: "Illusion magic — something—"
Ezekiel: "Ainz was kind enough to put a nullification ward on me before we arrived. Not that it was strictly necessary — low-tier summons and standard-issue steel don't really leave marks on someone like me. I'm speaking from experience, and the experience is extensive."
He brought both angels down.
They did not get up.
Ainz: "Archangel Flames. Exactly as I thought. YGGDRASIL creatures standing in a field that has no architectural reason to contain them. I want very much to understand how that happened. I want to understand who taught you to call them and with what. But that particular conversation will have to wait until after we kill you."
He tilted his head at the angel's remains with the mild concern of a craftsman examining someone else's inferior work.
Ezekiel: "You wanted a massacre."
He drew Frostmourne.
The blade spoke when it cleared the scabbard — not in words, but in frequency: a low, cold resonance like the opening note of a dirge, the sound of a weapon that remembered every life it had ever ended and kept a running tally.
Ezekiel: "[object Object]"
The High Priest flinched.
The flinch was involuntary. The kind that bypasses decision-making entirely and reports directly to the part of the brain that remembers, on an evolutionary level, what genuine danger feels like.
High Priest: "Attack! All of you — NOW!"
Ainz: "Albedo. Step back."
She moved.
Ezekiel exhaled.
Let everything slow down to the speed of intention.
When time resumed its normal pace, every Archangel on the field had become fine particulate suspended in the cold night air.
Ezekiel sheathed the blade.
Ezekiel: "Too easy."
The High Priest appeared to be conducting an internal audit of his choices.
High Priest: "H—How—"
The Theocracy soldiers opened everything they had. Spell after spell — and every single one of them was drawn from the lexicon of YGGDRASIL, cast with the trembling confidence of men who were deploying their most serious threats and watching those threats dissolve against two people who weren't even flinching.
Ainz: "The breadth of their knowledge is more significant than I expected. Somewhere in the history of this organization is a source. A relic. A player. I intend to find it."
A soldier — young, panicked, out of options — loaded a slingshot.
Albedo moved before any of them could speak, caught the projectile at half-speed and returned it to its point of origin at full speed.
The soldier sat down with some finality.
Ainz: "Albedo. There was no need."
Albedo: "If these creatures wish to challenge the Supreme Beings, they will do it through me first. That is not a policy. That is a principle."
Ainz: "These men wouldn't survive your most preliminary screening in ten combined lifetimes. Now—"
The High Priest's eyes had found the largest shape on the field — the thing hovering at the back of the formation, massive and radiant and waiting like a word at the end of a sentence.
High Priest: "PRINCIPALITY OF OBSERVATION — ADVANCE!"
The enormous angel descended with its mace raised — brought the weapon down with the force of something that had never met a target that hadn't yielded.
Ainz caught it in one hand.
Ainz: "I suppose I shouldn't let Ezekiel have all the entertainment. Hellflame."
The fire was the color of judgment. The angel was inside it for one second and then the angel was history.
A silence fell over the field that had the particular texture of stunned disbelief.
High Priest: "One hit. One strike. That's... that's not—"
Random Soldier: "Captain — what do we do—!?"
The High Priest reached into his vestment and produced a crystal the shade of winter sky — clear and cold and radiating the particular wrongness of something that had come from elsewhere.
[Ezekiel]: YGGDRASIL items. They don't just know the magic — they have artifacts from our world. This changes the equation considerably. Someone brought things through. Someone paved a road.
Ainz: "Albedo. I may have use for you momentarily."
Albedo: "My lord."
High Priest: "You have pushed me to my final card. Behold the pinnacle of divine intercession — the summit of seventh-tier conjuration — witness the mightiest of holy servants: DOMINION AUTHORITY!"
The light was the kind that argued with closed eyelids. Ezekiel brought one gauntlet up against the glare on instinct, and when he lowered it, the night above them was occupied.
Something vast. Something radiant. Something that had been pulled from a deeper layer of the world and was now standing in this one, wearing the silence the way a mountain wears weather.
Ezekiel: "So. That's the final card."
High Priest: "I didn't think I would need it. But you two have earned the honor of facing it. Behold what mankind cannot—"
Ainz put one hand against the side of his mask.
Ainz: "I am embarrassed."
High Priest: "I— what—"
Ainz: "Not for myself. For you. On your behalf. This is genuinely painful to witness."
High Priest: "You're BLUFFING! You CANNOT stand against its divine—"
Ainz: "This is child's play. I cannot believe we lost a single moment of concern to this."
High Priest: "ENOUGH! SMITE THEM! JUDGMENT — NOW — LET THEM BURN!"
The pillar of light fell.
Blue-white, column-wide, absolute.
When it cleared —
Ainz & Ezekiel: "HEH — hehehe — HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—"
Ainz: "So THAT'S what it feels like to take damage — I'd genuinely forgotten—"
Ezekiel: "IT'S BEEN SO LONG — I FORGOT THIS WAS A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN—"
The High Priest stood with his mouth open.
Albedo did not.
Albedo: "YOU."
The High Priest made a small, involuntary noise of biological alarm.
Albedo: "THAT IS MY LORD. MY BELOVED AINZ OOAL GOWN, THE SOVEREIGN OF MY HEART, THE REASON THE SUN RISES AND THE REASON RISING IS WORTH IT. YOU CAUSED HIM PAIN. I WILL TEACH YOU THE DEFINITION OF CONSEQUENCE IN TERMS YOU WILL COMPREHEND—"
Ezekiel: "I was also standing there, for the record. I also got hit. Just noting that."
Nobody looked at him.
Ainz placed a hand on Albedo's shoulder with the patience of a man who has spent a great deal of time in the vicinity of overwhelming force and learned how to redirect it.
Ainz: "Enough. I'm fine. Everything is proceeding exactly as intended."
He walked forward.
Ainz: "And now — my turn. Black Hole."
The void that opened was the size of intention and the depth of consequence, and Dominion Authority folded into it like parchment into fire, like pride into reality, like all things that believe themselves permanent eventually fold.
Stars. Then dust. Then nothing.
High Priest: "Not even demons have this kind of power... what IN CREATION are you two?"
Ainz: "Ainz Ooal Gown."
Ezekiel: "Ezekiel Douglas."
A beat, long and cold as a winter road.
Ezekiel: "Once upon a time, there wasn't a soul alive who didn't know those names. Once upon a time — those names were the last thing kingdoms heard before they fell. We are choosing, in this new world, to give you the opportunity to encounter us before that precedent is re-established. Use it wisely."
Glass shattered somewhere in the distance.
High Priest: "What was that?"
Ainz: "Reconnaissance spell. A scrying lens, most likely. Someone was watching."
Ezekiel: "The barrier held. They didn't see much."
High Priest: "My... my own country was... watching me—"
Ainz: "If that was all you had — we're done here."
The High Priest collapsed.
Not dramatically. Not with theatricality. He simply folded at the knees with the graceless practicality of a man whose legs had voted independently from the rest of him.
High Priest: "Please — please — I'll give you anything — anything you name — spare me, the rest of these men are nothing, they're nothing to me — please—"
His troops had opinions about this characterization. They expressed them loudly, in several registers, with the kind of language generally not recommended in religious settings.
Albedo: "You're confused. Lord Ainz and Lord Ezekiel have no use for what creatures such as you can offer. Consider yourself privileged that they're willing to end your existence personally. Lesser beings don't get that consideration."
High Priest: "Creatures? What... what does she mean... humans like me—"
Ainz and Ezekiel removed their masks.
The High Priest looked at what was underneath them.
He had been a priest of the Slane Theocracy for thirty years. He had read every account of divine manifestation that the Church had ever produced. He had studied demonology, celestial taxonomy, the complete historical record of things that should not exist in the material world.
He was not prepared for this.
Ezekiel: "You told Stronoff to lay down like a good dog and his death would be painless."
Frost crept across the ground from Ezekiel's boots in fractal patterns, each one the shape of a different kind of ending.
Ezekiel: "I made a promise of my own. A painful death. And unlike you — I keep mine."
He looked past the soldiers.
Ezekiel: "I should mention — my retinue has been patient all evening. Patient, and hungry. And I did promise them that tonight would be worth the wait."
The soldiers turned.
The treeline moved.
Korth'azz and Zeliek came through first, because they had been standing there in barely-contained anticipation for the last twenty minutes and had approximately zero interest in waiting for a formal introduction. Behind them, more shapes — vast, inexorable, the specific kind of terrible that doesn't rush because it doesn't need to.
The screaming started before the treeline had fully emptied.
It continued for some time.
Korth'azz, it should be noted, looked happier than he had all day.
❖
[ Timeskip — Brought to you by a chibi Ezekiel pressing his lips to the hand of a crimson-cheeked chibi Alpha, while a chibi Shalltear invents increasingly elaborate schemes in the background. ]
—— 3rd Person P.O.V. ——
Inside the storage house, the silence had the particular density of held breath and barely-suppressed dread.
The villagers sat in the semidarkness with the collective stillness of people who have agreed, without discussion, not to move until something outside told them it was safe. Children pressed against parents. Hands found other hands. The small house held thirty-something lives the way a cupped palm holds water: carefully, and not without effort.
Nemu broke from the group and ran to her sister like a stone finding the bottom of a well — fast and direct and unable to stop once started.
Nemu: "I'm scared."
Enri pulled her in without a word, one arm wrapping around the smaller girl with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this for years, through storms and nightmares and ordinary darkness.
Enri: "It's going to be alright. I promise."
Ezekiel watched them from across the room.
[Ezekiel]: I have sat with kings. I have stood at the threshold of the Frozen Throne and felt the weight of ten thousand conquered souls. I have wielded the sword that ended dynasties and raised armies from the ruins of nations I once loved. And none of it — not one fragment of it — was as honest as this. A girl holding her sister in the dark, saying it's going to be alright without knowing whether it is.
He reached without thinking into the shadow-space at his side — the small dimensional fold where Arthas had once kept things that mattered — and produced a small stuffed bear, worn at the seams, its button eyes reflecting the low lamplight with the patient warmth of something that had survived a great deal by simply being soft.
He crossed the room. Crouched. Tapped Nemu on the shoulder with one frost-pale gauntlet and, when she looked up, held the bear out to her with the same gravity he would offer a treaty to a king.
Ezekiel: "Here. For good luck. The best kind doesn't come from skill or strategy — it comes from having something to hold when the dark feels too large."
She stared at it. Then at him. Then at the bear.
Then she took it and pulled it to her chest with the absolute conviction of a six-year-old who has decided that this is now the most important object in the world, and that is simply how it is.
Nemu: "Thank you, mister."
Ezekiel: "Nothing is going to happen to you. I gave my word."
Enri looked at him. She was a young woman who had just lost her parents and survived a raid and was sitting in a storage house while the sounds of something she would never fully understand carried through the walls from the field outside. She looked at the dead king kneeling in front of her sister and she didn't say anything.
She smiled.
It cost her something, that smile, in the particular economy of grief. But she gave it anyway.
❖
3rd Person P.O.V. — The Great Tomb of Nazarick
The throne room of Nazarick received them in silence.
Not the silence of emptiness — the silence of fullness withheld, the silence of a hundred beings standing in absolute stillness because the two figures who had just returned to them were beings around whom stillness felt appropriate, the way thunderstorms produce their own quiet just before the lightning.
Every Guardian. Every maid of the Pleiades. Kneeling. Waiting. Eyes raised.
Ezekiel and Ainz stood side by side at the center of it, as they had stood in the village square, as they had stood before the High Priest's army, as they had stood in guild halls and raid corridors across years that now felt like the history of a different world — which, of course, they were.
Ainz raised one hand.
The seal of his emblem — the sigil he had carried since the first days of the guild, since before Ainz Ooal Gown was a throne and a name and a legend in waiting, back when it was simply a mark between friends — flared once and burned to ash.
The silence deepened.
Ainz: "I owe you all an accounting of what has passed, and you will have it. But first — there is something that must be established, and it cannot wait."
He let the ash settle.
Ainz: "The name I carried into this world is a name that belongs to the past. It was mine — given, not inherited — and I wore it as long as it fit. It no longer fits."
A pause like the space between a sword raised and a sword fallen.
Ainz: "From this day forward, I will be known as AINZ OOAL GOWN. That is not the name of a man. It is the name of a kingdom. A creed. A promise to every soul in this tomb that what was built will not be abandoned."
Ezekiel turned to the assembled guardians.
Ezekiel: "If anyone in this room has an objection — stand up. Speak now. I will hear it."
Nobody stood. Nobody would.
Albedo raised her eyes to her lord with the particular intensity of a person who has decided that love, in its fullest expression, is not a feeling but a function — the reason they get up in the morning, the reason the world continues to operate, the weight that gives all other weights their meaning.
Albedo: "We have received your name, my lord. We hold it as we hold all things that are yours: with our lives, our purpose, our unbroken will."
She looked out at the assembled hall.
Albedo: "GLORY — TO LORD AINZ OOAL GOWN!"
All: "GLORY TO LORD AINZ OOAL GOWN — ALL HAIL!"
The sound filled the throne room the way light fills a room when the doors are thrown open: completely, instantly, driving out every shadow that had occupied it.
Shalltear: "We give ourselves to you — utterly, without reservation, without remainder."
Aura & Mare: "To the mightiest of all Supreme Beings!"
Demiurge: "Every soul in every corner of this world will come to know your greatness — and tremble — and call it justice!"
Cocytus: "Our king. Who endures. Who commands. Who will not end."
The Pleiades & Shalltear: "And to the Wrath Knight — to whom our hearts have never ceased to belong!"
Albedo: "GLORY TO THE OVERLORDS! THE SUPREME RULERS OVER DEATH AND DOMINION!"
Ainz drove the base of his staff against the floor.
The sound rang through the stone like a bell struck in a cathedral — clean, final, irreversible.
Ainz: "This is an absolute command. Make the names Ainz Ooal Gown and Ezekiel Douglas into something this world has never known and will never forget. Not in legend. Not in story. In "
fact.
The throne room roared.
And above it — above the stone and the deep roots of Nazarick, above the fields where the Theocracy's finest had been reduced to a cautionary tale, above Carne Village where a small girl slept holding a stuffed bear that had once belonged to a dead king — the night sky spread itself out in the patient, indifferent manner of a canvas that has not yet been painted.
It would be painted.
The names were already moving.
Like frost across still water — slow at the edges, then suddenly, unstoppably, everywhere.
Like a plague that had decided, this time, to be something better.
Across every border. Past every wall. Into every city and village and tavern and throne room from the mountain range to the southern coast, the names would come.
Ainz Ooal Gown.
Ezekiel Douglas.
And this world — this new, uncharted, beautifully ignorant world — would not know what to do with them.
Not yet.
But it would learn.
For this day —
This day belonged to them.
This day belonged...to the Lich King.
❖
(Marathon chapter, delivered. The literary theory department would like you to know it filed several complaints during production but ultimately came around. The chibi department submitted no complaints whatsoever. See you in Chapter VI. PEACE!)