The lift platform had been built on a rise with a steep drop of about twenty feet down to the floor of the mountain terrace. Cole reduced his fall speed and slid down the side of the rise ahead of the rest of the group to range ahead, eyes and ears peeled for any hint of trouble. For several hours, they picked their way across the steep terrain until finally their path intersected with the outermost walls of the castle. The construction wasn’t brick-by-brick with mortar, as Cole would have expected, but stone slabs bound together with gnarled vine and mud slurry as hard as any rock, and it wasn’t immune to the corruption.
Orange-tinted tendrils snaked the grid pattern between the stone slabs as Cole scouted ahead. A few fungal zombies meandered outside the walls, but hearing them well before he saw them, the creatures were simple to dispatch with his spear alone.
Just a few days before, Cole had been terrified taking on just a handful of zombies. But now he was twice as strong and more than twice as fast. It was like dancing around monsters moving through molasses. Even though these ones wore rusted armor and carried spears and swords themselves, one quick thrust to the back of the neck put each of the miserable creatures into the dirt and gravel of the mountainside.
A kilometer around the wall, meandering outside where Morganstern had said they’d find the sally port, Cole came up on a group of zombies carrying simple firearms. Empty-eyed specters held long-discharged pistols and arquebuses that their users had long forgotten how to load and fire. By sheer muscle memory, they held them as if they still worked, and Cole ducked back behind cover as the muzzles swung his direction. Many of them were otherworld armaments, as well. It was easy to spot the difference between man-made and LF-given, because the latter seemed nearly immune to tarnish and rust, whether sword or firearm.
Once it became clear the weapons were non-functional and he wasn’t about to get ventilated by a half-dozen musket balls, Cole moved up and started weaving through the group, dispatching individuals with his spear. These must have been soldiers who had fought alongside Bricker to reach the castle. They’d died once on its doorstep, and Cole felt like he was laying them to rest once again. They thanked him by dropping ammunition and a new front plate—and also their otherworld armaments. He picked up an arquebus and tried using his Field Strip ability on it.
The primitive firearm dissolved in his hands, leaving a barrel, but also a powder pan and wheel lock mechanism. Well, he wasn’t about to change his otherworld assault rifle into a muzzle-loading wheel lock, so he dropped that part. Peering into the barrel, he was surprised to see the interior at least had the grooves of rifling. While he waited for the others to catch up, he pulled out his analyzer and tapped the barrel.
Increasing recoil by 8% was substantial on a 7.62 NATO cartridge. But his new rifle had inherited the buffer spring recoil system of an AR-10, which was about as soft-shooting as you could get such a heavy round as 7.62 NATO. But most of the enemies he’d encountered on Curahee had been undead and he saw no reason to expect that to change. He concentrated, encountering a wall of resistance that took all his focus to push past. He grunted, feeling his own face turning red with effort, and melded the new barrel with his weapon. Silver veins crept through the material of his rifle, and the whole thing shimmered as Tinker completed the build. He stood, breathing hard and sweating. Seemed like each successive Tinker performed on a single armament got harder, and he could feel the weapon pushing almost to the breaking point while he was combining the parts. He checked his own stats, as well.
Strength: 2.4
Dexterity: 2.8
Acuity: 3.8
Resilience: 2.1
Speed: 3.1
Intelligence: 2.8>
The zombies were nudging his level progress very little, but he was only fifteen percent or so from level eight. The LF analyzer predicted his next class evolution at level ten.
One of the other fallen Curahee soldiers had dropped a front plate for his battle rattle that matched his side plates. He took a minute to doff his vest and swap the new insert for his old back plate while the others caught up. Even with the anti-fungal tablets, it seemed wise to stack as much resistance as he could. Making the swap gave the rest of the tryouts enough time to catch up. He looked at the old plate, considering, before tossing it over the edge of the cliff, down into the mists and the forest below.
Morganstern no longer needed to be carried, but she leaned on Roxy heavily when they stopped, and her breathing was fast and ragged from the kilometer hike over gravel and rocks. Morganstern looked at the quickly evaporating bodies. “Area cleared?”
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“Out here, at least,” said Cole.
“Well when you’re done dicking around with loot, see if you can get that sally port open.”
Cole burned one of his Meteoric Leap charges, skimming up the side of the stone wall and clearing the thirty-foot crenelations with height to spare. He landed on the rampart with a small puff of air and spores that spread out from his landing. The growths up here were definitely worse than any he’d seen in the valley. Thick pustules pulsed in time as though connected to a massive heart. Two zombies were so grown over with spore matter that they couldn’t even raise themselves from the rotted wooden floor in order to challenge him. Ignoring them for now, he looked over the inner rail at the courtyard, where an orchard had gone untended and wild. The rain had trapped thick mist in the cool air of the castle. The last few seconds of his enemy detection showed a huge mass of red in that misty expanse.
Cole shook his head and unslung his pack. He pulled out a reel of braided paracord and dropped its end over the wall. Roxy caught hold at the bottom, and Cole braced his foot against the crenelation and pulled her up as though she only weighed seventy pounds in all her gear instead of close to one-sixty. He extended his hand as she crested the edge, and she took it so Cole could haul her up over the threshold, where she quickly drew her shield and looked around.
“Gross,” she muttered, turning her nose up. She walked to the inner side of the wall and looked out over the courtyard. Cole joined her and pointed to a recently opened cocoon at least twice the size of any he’d seen. “What do you think came out of that?” she asked.
“One of Morganstern’s big nasties.”
Beyond the courtyard, a second set of walls loomed, built into a higher tier of the mountainside terrace, and a keep rose from within, ringed with black spires of stone and gnarled root, dripping with orange filth.
Cole nodded to an open doorway at the end of the rampart and drew his sidearm for the cramped quarters of the interior of the rampart. Roxy advanced first, shield up. She brought her combat shotgun around in the sling and pinned the stock between her hip and elbow to use with one hand. Cole followed off her right side. Within the battlement, stairs spiraled down to the right and up into a tower to the left. They took the right-hand path down. Beyond the first curve it was too dark even for Cole’s high acuity. Rather than breaking out NODs, Roxy clicked on the white-light on the side rail of her shotgun. Cole did the same with his sidearm.
At the bottom of the steps, the passageway widened out into a squat hallway built into the base of the wall. A dark shadow at the other end reacted to the light, twisting. It looked like a mass of fungal pustules had grown legs, tentacles, and a mouth. It shrieked and bounded toward them on fibrous legs of uneven length. Roxy’s shotgun blasted, taking a huge chunk off the thing. Cole fired over her shoulder with his pistol, hitting it several times before it slammed against Roxy’s shield. The shield flashed, and Roxy fired again, this time with a blast of blue vapor. Her ability at work reloading it with shells of condensed kinetic energy. Handy skill.
The point-blank blast of energy forced the thing back, popping one of the liquid-fueled pustules and causing the creature to drain and deflate, losing some of its mass. Roxy dug in and used the leverage to shove the thing over with her shield. Then she reared back and slammed the rim of it into the thing’s open jaws. Barbed tentacles scraped across her back plate.
Cole wasted no time in picking out several more of the weeping pustules and putting a bladed pistol round into each of them. With each drained, the creature slumped more and more, shrinking back down to an emaciated, slightly more humanoid form. Roxy shoved it back again, then cycled her shotgun and put one more round into its now-visible ribcage. The advanced fungal creature fell back, writhing on the ground and beginning to ablate. The cold flash of a level-up washed over Cole.
Roxy shivered ahead of him and then grinned. “I think I just hit level seven.”
“Eight, for me,” said Cole.
“It’s not a competition.”
“You’re only saying that because I’m ahead.”
Without even dropping the shield, she cycled the spent shell from her chamber and topped off her internal magazine. Cole covered her until she was finished, then swapped his own pistol magazine for his spare. Roxy put the toe of her boot in the decomposing creature, nudging it until a soft glow revealed itself.
“Aw yeah, finally,” she said. She reached down and pried open the rest of the creature’s ribcage, not content to wait for it to evaporate enough to liberate the loot within. She pulled out an otherworld gun with a wide bore and four short, stubby barrels. “First one I’ve seen drop that wasn’t single shell break action or muzzle-loaded. Curahee keeps trying to give me blunderbusses.”
Cole looked at the weapon. Unlike the guns from the fungal zombies, this one was veined with red and had open, weeping sores. It was shorter than hers, with a pommel-grip perfect for close quarters. The handguard was static as well, so it must have been break-action like a hunting shotgun, but both side-by-side and over-under. With its quad breeches, its ammo capacity wouldn’t be as large, but her passive ability made up for that.
“That is disgusting. Want me to Field Strip it and put the parts in your old one?” Cole teased.
Roxy cradled the unsightly otherworld armament like a newborn and twisted it away from him. “If you melt my new gun, I will fucking end you!”
Cole chuckled and got his residue collector out to siphon up the goo spreading on the floor. That stowed, he swept his light around the outer wall to reveal their target. The sally port had a thick metal rod in a bracket between the door and the wall. He put his shoulder underneath it and heaved the rusted relic up out of its bracket with a shriek of old iron. It took him and Roxy both pushing to budge the thick door, choked as it was with fibrous residue. Sunlight spilled in through the crack, and two sets of gloved fingers wrapped around the edge and pulled from the outside.
“Having fun, yet?” asked Howie, face peering around the door.
Roxy proffered her new gun with a grin. “We are now. Shoulda seen what I pulled it out of, though.”
“I don’t think I want to,” said Howie, eyeing the dripping organic matter.
“I doubt we’ll have the choice,” said Ken, helping Morganstern across the threshold. “You’re making enough racket in here to wake the dead.”
“I’m pretty sure they were already awake,” said Cole.