Horde

  “What did you do?” Marcus said, rushing to the surrendering mage, hammer raised.

  “Alex, dear, please tell me you figured it out at least,” Jea said. Blood had drained from my face and my fingers were cold. In other words, I had figured out what she had done.

  “The bodies. It was always a strange tactic to send only marginally competent monsters at us over and over again. Hell, I bet our attrition wouldn’t have been much better if we’d spent our time clearing dungeons and killing wild mobs,” I said, pacing around in front of her. The monsters that Zack, Marcus and the rangers had killed were still dead on the ground in a circle around the position where they’d defended me, but that was outside of her circle. Her elk mount lay broken by massive force in two parts nearby.

  I looked over at the smiling, bloodied woman in a torn and burned dress and realized that she was still very much a threat. Just because she was unarmed and without obvious implements didn’t mean that she couldn’t cast spells with the standard procedure. I strode towards her, and ripped at the amulet around her neck. She made a strange growling sound when I did, but I ignored all of her communications for now, smashing the amulet against a stone on the floor, then crushing it with my foot.

  “If she starts chanting kill her, you’ll have less than a second,” I said.

  “Out of mana, dear,” Jea said. She sounded awful, her throat was clearly ripped apart from both screaming and blood magic, but she powered through without changing the pattern of her voice, the same proud and haughty syntax as befor, “Finish your story, you know you don’t have much time.”

  “Fuck. Right, she didn’t care about the casualties. I thought it was just because it was the best she could do and that it was not like she had limited forces. Eventually it would have worked,” I said.

  “No it wouldn’t have. Levels,” Jea said.

  “Or, maybe not. Everyone on the walls kept getting stronger from killing monsters, so eventually they’d be too strong for any number of conjured creatures to threaten us,” I said.

  “I’m too drunk to figure this out, but the plan is zombies?” Zack said.

  “All of them at once. I don’t know what ritual she did, but it was major. Probably took days to set up. And now everything that’s died in this circle around Checkpoint is coming back to life and attacking all at once,” I said.

  Marcus changed from his stance over her with the hammer ready to cave her head in into getting ready to sprint all the way back to Checkpoint.

  “What did you do with the bodies?” I said. I’d seen the thousands of corpses around Checkpoint’s walls, which would be bad enough, but unless they’d burned the rest…

  “Buried them in a big hole for the first few days, just long enough walk away so it didn’t stink. A couple of days back we couldn’t keep going with it. Barely had time to bury our own,” Zack said.

  Jea coughed, and spat blood.

  “Pretty good summary, all in all, a solid B+, Alex. Points off for the very bold guess that everything would come back to life. It happens to be true, but there was no way you could have known it. And, you missed when I said necromancy was my specialization. I conjure decent warriors. I create monstrous zombies. Your little town is dead. As a reward for defeating me you can take me and run away in another direction,” Jea said, and tried to laugh, but there was just not enough of unburned larynx left for that.

  “Kill her?” the ranger said. He was stumbling and dazed, still clearly under some effect of her ritual, but he was talking clearly, even if he was standing unsteadily.

  “Would probably be smart,” Marcus said.

  “We’ve killed less evil people,” Zack said.

  “But I’m just a poor, harmless captive. And I’m a girl too,” Jea said, with an obviously false high-pitched voice.

  “Take her with us. Maybe she’ll be more motivated to come up with a way to stop the zombies when she’s about to be eaten alive by one.

  “What’s to stop her from using magic the moment we aren’t paying attention to her?” Marcus said.

  “A gag would work, probably,” I said. I didn’t like that idea much more than simply killing her, but it really was one or the other.

  And so we found some clean cloth and tied her mouth shut, like we’d seen in movies and not done ourselves before, but it did seem to stop her from being able to speak. Zack then took her over one shoulder, and the wounded ranger on the other.

  “We go for the mass grave. Most of the defenses of Checkpoint are still focused around the walls, so that’s where we will be least needed. If we can cut off the reinforcements from there, we will do the most good,” I said, getting my bearings. My mana was more or less spent, but I’d taken only about half of my hitpoints in blood magic damage and my mana would regenerate naturally as we ran.

  “I know it. Intercept anything going to Checkpoint or avoid them?” the junior ranger said.

  “Avoid. We’ll need to conserve resources and we don’t know what those zombies will be capable of. Gonna have to hit them as hard as we can,” I said.

  And we moved out, following the ranger with Zack carrying our wounded and captive in the rear and Marcus ahead of me. I was thinking of good spell combos- we were once again in a position where we’d be outnumbered and underpowered, but on the other hand I had chronomancy and the spellrod back. I decided against casting the latter, since my mana might be an issue, but stasis field would be a major advantage in just about any sort of a fight.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  What followed was much the same sort of desperate flight through the woods that I have described several times by this point. The only notable difference in his case was that I was focusing on as much meditation as I could in order to restore my mana, which meant that I could pay less attention to my surroundings and left my allies to do that. By the time we reached the edge of the woods and felt the stench of death long before we saw the overturned dirt under which the bodies were meant to lay.

  “It’s here. Strange, doesn’t look disturbed,” the junior ranger said.

  “Be careful. You don’t know what’s going on here. They may be controlled, may be programmed, or may have a rudimentary intelligence of their own,” I said, slowing down and staying several steps clear of the obvious earthen mound that was clearly the site of a mass grave.

  “Or she was lying,” Marcus said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “She tricked you. Again. Whatever that spell was about, it wasn’t about raising dead. We didn’t meet any on our way here. Maybe instead of a zombie horde she just wanted to trick us into coming the wrong direction,” Marcus said.

  “Still doesn’t make sense. That ritual did something. It would have had to have been something big, otherwise why spend a week setting it up?” I said.

  “One person would know,” the junior ranger said.

  “Terrible idea,” Marcus said, but he did take steps towards Zack, “For all we know this is all a part of her plan. She has that monster brain thing all you casters have by now.”

  “It’s probably worse. There is one thing I can do first though,” I said.

  I sat down and flipped open the Journal, skipping over the several pages of updates to my Log all the way to

  Chat

  Alex? Alex? What happened? Why the fuck are they all coming back to life? -Artemis

  Fuck. I thought we were handling it. Can you hold out? -Alex

  Can’t talk. Situation dire. Help ASAP. -Artemis

  “Well they are coming back to life, I just don’t know what’s going on here,” I said. I dropped my backpack on the ground and leaned over so that I could throw the Journal in it. I wasn’t going to be checking it much tonight. I raised my eyes to Zack and saw that both of the people on his shoulders were just about hanging limply.

  Except…

  “Zack, throw her, now!” I yelled. I’d seen her left hand extending in a way just barely too far to be natural towards the bloody stigmata like wounds on the ranger’s hand. She couldn’t cast spells, but she had abilities and spells she’d cast before may still have effects.

  Zack didn’t think, just dropped her from his shoulder to holding her by the scruff and threw her. It looked almost cartoonish. The woman flew in an arc through the air for dozens of feet. And a scarlet helix of blood followed her. It was thick, vital this time, and with the force and distance of the flight, the last of the blood in the head ranger’s body was pulled out.

  He died instantly.

  And as soon as he did, he snapped to action, and bit down on Zack’s back with unthinking force, latching on even as Zack began swinging around in a shock. While that was happening, she chanted a spell, while at the same time raising her left hand from her waist into the air, as if she was lifting some great weight.

  “The ground! Watch out!” I yelled. Marcus and the junior rangers reacted in time as the ground underneath our feet began to bulge and deform, leaping away and onto rocks and roots, but Zack couldn’t do it while being grappled by a freshly undead zombie and I couldn’t do such athletics period. So when the hands burst out of the ground beneath us, they grappled the both of us to the earth and began pulling us down.

  If you are not terribly familiar with physics and/or the consistency of earth, we were at no risk of being buried, so that was nice. Instead we were at an immediate risk of being crushed as the supernaturally powerful hands brought us first to our knees and then kept grasping for our clothes and pulling us down further to the earth. Zack was busy, but he was much stronger than me, straining and pushing against the enemies beneath and on him both, getting back up from a half-kneeling position several times, even as I was getting dragged to my hands and feet.

  But I wasn’t going to just let it happen either and began casting at once. The fire resistance spell took me barely more than a second, and then a torrent of flaming oil followed. The undead were never particularly fond of fire, and as their flesh melted away from their arms, strength left them too. Now they were crawling out of the ground, twisted monsters and heroes both, but that was a much slower maneuver than grabbing at us from below, and so I had a moment to run.

  I ran towards Jea. I was quite mad at that moment, you see, and very much wanted to kill her before going down myself. A spell that I’d almost forgotten came to my mind, one that I’d only given Hannah to use to get control of herself all those weeks ago when facing the first apprentice I ever met. I took control of the undead ranger on Zack’s back. It was a nasty feeling- like taking something from someone that had nothing, profoundly immoral on a metaphysical scale, but irrationally so. I had him rush over to Jea and hold her down, and while she’d clearly restored a lot of her mana and blood magic, it is hard to cast with a fist in her mouth.

  Even so we were being overwhelmed- hundreds, thousands of zombies rising up from their shallow graves. All I cared for at that moment was to hurt her for her betrayal. I didn’t see how we would survive this, but I was pretty sure I could make it so that she didn’t either.

  By the time I reached her, there were two smaller zombies holding on to my back, and the ranger distracting and brawling her, and in the end we all ended up in one pile, ten hands all grasping for the living to squeeze the life out of.

  Then, I felt the control slip on my hold on the ranger, and suddenly it was gone, and it was four against one. Jea cackled, as I was easily pushed down to the ground, and rotting teeth and nails froze for a moment above me, just so that she could savor my last moments.

  And I saw the shrubs and trees behind them shift, in a way that was anything but natural.