28 – Fifty shades of decomposition

  Following Nura through the village, Elanil tried to figure out what could be going on there as she ran. The last construct? She opened her inventory on the run, the action which almost cost her tripping and tumbling into the nearest canal. But she managed to stay on her feet and even maintain her speed.

  Elanil glanced at the artifact. They’d recently figured out its functionality and knew how to detect whether there was a construct nearby. But the artifact showed no signs of activity. So, what awaited them ahead? The answer, however, was already close. Meanwhile, the village around them was growing agitated, like a disturbed anthill.

  All the grace of the morning harmony seemed to have dissolved in the fog, which now wrapped everything in an ominous white shroud. Even the lighting seemed to have changed. Just a few minutes ago, it had been a pale, milky color; now it gave off a sickly grayness with a hint of swamp green.

  Nura and Elanil had almost reached the place from where the screams were heard. A woman was running towards them, her hair disheveled, her eyes wide with terror. Seeing Nura, she flinched from initial fear. Realizing she was one of those who had caused such a stir the previous day, she rushed toward her.

  “Help!” she pleaded. “Something terrible is happening out there!”

  “What? What happened?”

  “My grandma’s back!”

  “Your... what?!” Nura exclaimed with a mix of surprise and indignation in her voice. “Madam, if you have a problem with your ancestors, don’t shout about it like that!”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” the woman started gabbling. “She’s back from the dead! Two months, since she died. And here she goes again... I just went to take the ducks out to graze in the morning. My house is right on the edge. There’s good grass in the meadow between the village and the cemetery. It’s just the right place for them to graze… I see someone’s coming from the fog. I say hello… No answer. And then I look—our granny! I recognized her first by the dress we buried her in. And then her face... Oh gods, you should’ve seen her face! That’s not my granny. This is some kind of evil curse! Please help!”

  “Okay, I understand everything…” Nura shook her head. “No, actually I don’t understand anything! But we’ll figure it out.” She patted the frightened woman on the shoulder reassuringly. “Run to the village and warn everyone. Tell the women and children to lock themselves in their houses.”

  “The men too,” Elanil added. “They’re just helpless oyster farmers after all.”

  “Right,” Nura nodded and turned to the woman. “Why are you still standing here? Run, do what I told you!”

  The woman shuddered, nodded, and ran off.

  “The restless dead woman, huh?” Nura grinned. “Shall we go and calm grandma down with an axe?”

  Elanil nodded, demonstrating her fighting spirit. But inside, everything sank.

  “The living dead? So early and in the Valley of Ringing Springs? Neither was supposed to be in the plot! Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

  Speculations about what and why was going on raced through Elanil’s mind so fast that they merged into one clump, so that she couldn’t even separate them. She only realized it was more like a panic attack than a helpful thinking process. And, as if that were not enough, the feeling of torment over her indecision about her build returned.

  Elanil decided she should do something now or the panic would paralyze her. So, she took a deep breath and exhaled. The next moment, after swift calculations, she did something she thought she might regret later. If she even survived the coming battle.

  [System Notification]

  Elanil spent 1 point on Constitution

  + 0.75 Physical Attack,

  + 0.25% Physical Attack Resistance,

  Moderate Health Increase

  [System Notification]

  Elanil spent 1 point on Dexterity

  + 1.75 Physical Ranged Attack,

  + 1.75 Magic Ranged Attack

  + 1.5% Attack Speed,

  + 0.4% Evasion

  [System Notification]

  Elanil spent 1 point on Intelligence

  + 2 Magic Attack,

  + 0.5% Magic Attack Resistance

  [System Notification]

  Elanil spent 9 points on Cunning

  + 9% Cooldown Reduction,

  + 9 Poison,

  + 4.5% Poison Resistance

  [System Notification]

  Elanil spent 15 points on Charisma

  + 3% Ability Multiplier,

  + 15 Persuasion,

  + 7.5% Luck,

  + 7.5% Chance

  + 3.75% Concentration

  “What was that?” Nura asked.

  All of this, including the storm of emotions that preceded the point allocation, took a few seconds. Elanil hoped Nura hadn’t noticed—she peered intently into the fog and turned just as Elanil’s last notification window vanished.

  “Nothing, just checked my stats one more time,” she told in her most convincing voice.

  If her calculations were correct, Elanil now had a perfectly rounded build: all her primary stats should be at 24. Reckless? Perhaps so. But the most important thing was that she had finally made a choice after so much indecision. And it must be noted, it brought her noticeable relief and even—she was surprised by the rapid change in her mood—battle fervor. Pulling out her poignard, Elanil tossed it from hand to hand, weighing its weight.

  “Can’t wait to try this thing out in combat?” Nura nodded to the poignard, her own axes ready for attack. Elanil nodded. “Don’t worry, the opportunity will present itself soon.”

  As if hearing her words, first a silhouette and then the zombie grandmother herself appeared out of the fog. She was a large, elderly woman in a faded polka-dot dress. At first glance, Elanil wouldn’t even be able to tell that the woman was deceased. She did have a sickly gray skin color, turning in a few places into large black spots. But it was not the disgusting sight of peeling pieces of flesh revealing bones or rotting intestines. For a deceased woman, grandma looked quite healthy. The cheeks sagged, the mouth half open, as if she had been about to comment on something mundane. Her eyes, clouded and unfocused, could only mean that she had advanced cataracts.

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  “It’s not what I expected, to be frank,” Nura admitted. “I even feel weird beating up this old lady.” Meanwhile, the corpulent semi-decomposed woman was approaching them slowly, swaying from one foot to the other like a duck. “I wasn’t taught to treat the elderly like that.”

  Nura’s almost comical hesitation in the face of the walking dead woman somehow amused Elanil. “Why am I suddenly so untroubled?” she thought. “Maybe I spent too many points at once and it has some side-effects?”

  “There is no shame in beating up old people, if they’re walking corpses.” She drew her arrow and shot the dead old woman between the eyes, setting an example. The zombie staggered, took a few steps back, and shook her head in confusion—the fletching of Elanil’s arrow gracefully streaked the misty air like a pendulum. Then the granny resumed her slow but relentless advance.

  “Perhaps it’ll console you that they don’t feel pain,” Elanil shoot one more arrow at the second walking dead, which just appeared in the distance. “And they don’t have any tender feelings for you either.”

  “Fine,” Nura grumbled. “Damn, an elf lifting an orc’s fighting spirit! If any of my clan find out, they’ll laugh at me,” she snorted, moving briskly toward the old woman, twirling the axes in her hands.

  Seeing the approaching living flesh, the old woman extended her arms toward Nura and, with a guttural gurgling sound, opened her mouth, revealing rotten teeth.

  “Urgh, granny, you should’ve eaten less sweets when you were alive,” Nura wrinkled her nose as the stench from the rotten throat hit her. She spun around and slammed her axe into the old woman’s open mouth. Nura tried to pull the axe out, but it was no use. The blade had sunk deep. But this apparently didn’t dampen the old woman’s appetite for human flesh. She reached for Nura with her hands, trying to cling to the edges of her shirt.

  Elanil appeared behind the zombie, like a ghost materializing out of the fog. Nura shuddered at her sudden resemblance to a seasoned Assassin. Without hesitation, Elanil plunged the poignard into the old woman’s back. The shock coursed through the big body in few waves, and the corpse jerked convulsively as if electrocuted. The granny went limp and sank to the ground. Nura’s axe finally came free from the corpse’s mouth with the sound of a finger being pulled from the bottleneck.

  “When did you develop such celerity?” Nura exclaimed respectfully.

  “Picked up by watching you two, rogues,” Elanil chuckled, sheathing her poignard and picking up her bow again. Two successive shots fired, and two zombies emerged from the fog, staggered; one even lost its grip and fell to its knees. While it was clumsily rising, Nura caught up with it in two strides and, with one heavy swing, severed its head with her axe. It rolled like a ball across the damp grass and disappeared into the curtains of the fog.

  It turned out to be far less of a difficult battle than Elanil had expected. Not the least bit like the Undead Legion, which she dreaded would emerge from the fog. The local walking dead were clumsy, easy targets, weak in attack, and weakly defended. But what could one expect from deceased peasants? Their long-term plan was to lie back and enjoy their eternal peace, not to fight an elf and an orc.

  “If we even survive the coming battle… how dramatic!” she smiled at her recent panicked expectations.

  “Someone feels frisky today, I see.” Nura noted.

  “I’m just enjoying the change of scenery. After fighting angry constructs and a mischievous dryad, this feels refreshing.”

  “Except for their breath. Oh, I take it back. This one shouldn’t stink,” Nura nodded at a skeleton that just appeared from the fog. Swaying on its bones like a puppet on threads, it purposefully walked towards them, its arms with bare fingers stretched forward.

  When it got closer, it suddenly sped up, almost darted. Nura responded with a horizontal cut. The bone ribs cracked, and the skeleton withdrew, circled, then lunged again. Nura lunged, too, and chopped through the neck. The skull rolled away, but the body kept advancing, its arms flailing with reduced aim as if blind. Nura undercut its left knee with an axe and it lost its balance. The whole structure collapsed into scattered bones as if a house of cards.

  “Look at him, what a nimble fellow,” Nura nodded respectfully at the pile of bones.

  “I see their numbers have grown,” Elanil pointed to more and more silhouettes appearing in the thick fog.

  “As if the entire cemetery broke out from their graves. Maybe you should burn them all with your [Explosive Arrow]?”

  “Let’s avoid serious destruction for now,” Elanil suggested. “We need to figure out why, out of the blue, the entire village cemetery has risen from its graves.”

  “To figure out what’s going on here is certainly a good idea,” Nura nodded, swinging her axe at three skeletons already rushing toward her. “But isn’t our primary task to protect the villagers from their deceased relatives?”

  A few quick axe swings, sweeps, a forehead thrust to the skull, an elbow to the sternum—and two skeletons crumbled into pieces, while the third crawled on its four across the meadow, groping for its lost skull. A kick to the ribs from Nura sent it flying far away, and it disappeared into the fog. The muffled sound like a rolling dice came from there.

  “So far, we’re successfully holding them back,” Elanil remarked, sweeping and plunging her poignard into the zombie’s thigh bone like a sting. The body tweaked with electric shock and collapsed limply into the meadow dew.

  “You’re hard to please,” Nura laughed. “First, you say—no mercy for these dead bastards! Now you’re asking me to be gentle with them. Take a side already!”

  Nura suddenly found herself surrounded by a group of four undead: three skeletons and one hideously disheveled, half-decayed man. The skeletal enemies were wielding shinbones like cudgels, probably from their comrades in misfortune Nura had scattered earlier. This, however, didn’t help them much—she quickly scattered these ones across the meadow too, already knowing their weak points, where just a slight pressure would cause the entire skeletal structure to collapse.

  The zombie took a little longer to deal with. As large and corpulent as the first cemetery dweller they’d encountered, this fat man turned out to be more agile. He even managed to block several axe blows with his thick arms, from which the remnants of his burial clothes hung in tatters. One of the axes got stuck in the dead flesh again, but this time Nura used it as leverage, tossing the zombie away from her body and chopping off its head with the other axe. Not in one try though; its neck turned out to be thicker than the granny’s.

  “See! You can be both merciless and gentle,” Elanil commented as Nura finished the group. “Besides, as for my [Explosive Arrow], you do know that in the Imperial lands, cremating the dead is considered sacrilege, right?”

  “Right, mum told me about that,” Nura remembered. “Northern barbarians! What’s wrong with returning the soul to Father Sky?”

  “Orcs, I assume, only cremate the bodies of their dead?” Elanil inquired, kicking a skeleton, one of those she’d already shattered, but which had managed to piece itself back together. The skeleton tumbled across the meadow, becoming a pile of bones once again. Elanil bet that if it possessed speech, it would be cursing the unbearable elf all the way it flew.

  “Both ways,” Nura corrected. “It is the dying one to decide which ancestor to return to, Mother Earth or Father Sky.”

  “How sweet,” Elanil smiled. “Anyway, to the pressing matters. There’s one more thing with our unrest-in-peace fellas which bothers me. We had no quest notification so far.”

  “Huh, you’re right! That’s odd.”

  “And the way our amulets behaved just before it all had begun—”

  “You think, it’s related to their—”

  “I don’t know, I just didn’t expect all this mess with walking corpses so early.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll explain later. First, we need to pacify the cemetery.” Elanil looked around. Despite all their efforts, the undead kept advancing, slowly but inexorably.

  “Easy to say,” Nura grumbled. “Our kicks and beheadings only delay them for a while, but don’t stop them. We’re holding our ground, but for how long can we do that? Unlike us, they have all the time in the world.”

  “Hey, you two!” They both turned around at the angry shout. “How dare you not wake me up when there is such fun all around?” From the village side, Gaspard appeared out of the fog, his daggers already drawn.