As the joke went, we were not fleeing, we were rapidly advancing towards the rear. Or maybe we were running away, no shame in running away from an unknown threat, it was the way to preserve the lives of those around me. Even for me, dying would be a major hassle, setting me back a great deal, though I would come back.

The scents floating on the wind, as we were moving, told me a great deal, yet nothing at all. I could taste that there was a powerful being coming, the scent of death and decay, of rot and the lingering emotions of life overpowering. But that scent was all around us, the whole mountains were filled with the stench of Undead, only now, it was amplified by orders of magnitude. With the pace Rai was going, I needed to channel Blood Magic to keep up and even then, I could feel my stamina slowly draining away.

After running for about an hour, Rai slowed down from the earlier, frantic run to a fast walk, the rest of us following suit. Olivia and I started to try getting our breath back, barely cognisant of our surroundings, when Adra spoke up.

“What was that?” she asked, her voice subdued, as her head swiveled around, as if trying to find the source of the intimidating, magical pressure I was feeling. It was still there, almost like a wind blowing against my back, still urging me forward and sending shivers down my spine.

“I don’t know.” Rai admitted, looking back as well, “But I felt the dead around us shudder, as if a great predator was coming.” he shook his head, obviously not certain what to make of the feeling.

“There might be…” I muttered, trying to regain my breath, “a reason why this region is the way it is.” Pushing myself upright, I brew in a deep breath, forcing myself to talk.

“If you kill too many undead at the same time, or if you aggravate too many of them, or by some other mechanism, you draw the ire of the powers that be and they attempt to do something about us.” I explained, getting worried looks in response.

“That might be so.” Olivia agreed, shrugging as she drew in a deep breath. In my mind, there was a certain amount of logic to it, both from a realistic viewpoint and from a gaming-viewpoint. Realistically, if a bunch of semi-high-level beings could clear off the undead, even if they needed a certain affinity to the task, the place would have been cleared out long ago, if only to provide the EXP people needed to increase their powers. That was assuming that there was a way to disable their respawn, or to harvest it, but even without such a way, I would think people would constantly and happily grind them up, yet, we hadn’t seen anyone and that was with a quest that kept the EXP-reduction for repeated kills from occurring. Similarly, having a grinding-zone in a game was good, but only if there was a process that kept it from being monopolized, so having some boss, somewhere in the zone, that smacked people if they overdid their grinding made a certain amount of sense. It wasn’t the solution I would have chosen, but I only played games, I didn’t design them.

“Anyway, I think we’ve overstayed our welcome.” I decided, a part of me longingly looking back, wishing that we’d be able to grind some more. Yet, we had places to be and there would be more opportunities to gain EXP.

Once we no longer deliberately looked for enemies, our traveling-speed got up to a better pace, even if Olivia wasn’t using her magic to boost us again. She promised she would, but only once we left the dangerous area we were now in, which hopefully would only take a few more days.

Overall, travel became both more and less interesting, due to the fact that we stopped hunting the undead. The encounters with the undead had been a nice way to break up the day, especially watching them crumble to dust from Lenore’s blasts of Death-Magic or the way their bones scattered from hits by Sigmir, there was a certain visceral feeling to their destruction that was quite pleasing.

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But, on the other hand, ever since we had felt that powerful force reach out, a few, more powerful, undead were coming after us, not at the level of the Skeleton Lord that had almost killed us, but powerful enough to make the encounters challenging. Part of the challenge about them came from a rather nasty trait of theirs, namely a near-total immunity to magic, a dark shell that I desperately tried to understand and copy swirling around them, shredding any magic I tried to lob through it, be it a ray of dispelling darkness or a singular, conjured Icicle.

Curiously, that only affected magic projected at them, buffing Sigmir or Rai, or Rai and Adra using magic to empower their weapon-abilities worked just fine, only that sadly, I didn’t have any real, non-magical weapons. The Blades of the Northern Wind, bound to the crown as they were, weren’t something I was willing to test against their dark shell and while my Butterfly-Blades weren’t key to my combat, using them would get me into melee with powerful undead, not a place where I wanted to be. No, for once, I was relegated to purely supportive functions, buffing up Sigmir and Rai, healing their wounds, things like that.

And study that ability, to learn all about it, copy it and, if at all possible, break it and shove the broken shards down their throat.

Their appearance did something else, it added a great deal to my personal conviction that there was an intelligent force directing the undead, or at least keeping an eye on them and directing those Skeleton Hunters, as they were called, against us.

I couldn’t think of any other explanation why a single, powerful undead would find and attack us, every day, one attack during the late hours of the morning, an hour before noon, and a second attack later during the day, about an hour before dusk. For three days, they kept that schedule, bringing us to ever-greater levels of paranoia, as their ability to precisely schedule their attacks meant they had the ability to track and strike at us at will, and the repeated attacks of singular opponents, all within a ten-level range, meant that they were deliberately sparing us, while making sure we knew that they could wipe us out, almost at will.

Studying the dark shell every day was, in some ways, incredibly interesting, watching how their shell unraveled the spells we threw at it gave me all kinds of ideas. Were there ways to prevent that unraveling, maybe by binding the magic together more tightly? Would I be able to disrupt the shell by striking directly at the chaotic Astral Power that was swirling around the Undead to create the effect? Could I somehow mimic their ability?

So many questions to which I wanted answers, and Rai oftentimes helped me trying to get them. His own ability to detect and disrupt magic were growing by the day, the Skeleton Hunters giving him good, powerful targets to flit around and stab into and his attacks gave me additional information, both from watching him attack and from his reports on the sensation.

By the fourth day, I was wondering if we should attempt to remain in the area, simply so I could study that effect some more but when I dared to suggest so in the privacy of my own mind, Lenore was strongly opposed to the idea. When looking at it objectively, I had to agree but the siren’s song of new knowledge was strong, especially as their shells were something I wanted to be able to overcome. An almost direct counter for every spellcaster reliant on direct attacks? For me, that meant the only ways I could use were weapon-attacks or using the environment to strike, which required the right kind of environment. I had, for example, no doubt that using Ice Magic to cause an avalanche if there was enough Ice in the area would crush one of them, simply because the momentum I instilled with magic wouldn’t simply vanish, just because the magic did. I wanted to be able to get around those, if only to have a lethal surprise for any Travelers, who had figured that trick out, or gained it from their Class.

Sadly, by the fifth day, when we left the Dorrian Mountains and their infestation of Undead behind, I was still trying to figure it out and had no doubt that I would continue to do so, until I stumbled across some other effect that caught my attention, at which point I’d likely file the Anti-Magic Shell away for later research and try to figure something else out.

All in all, the crossing of the Dorrian Mountains had been quite lucrative, Lenore had gained that incredibly powerful Skull-focus and I had gained some valuable experience, one of the last Skeleton Hunters raising my level to 112, and a few skill-points in Blood- and Darkness-Magic, raising them to 79 and 67 respectively.

But the biggest winner of the whole ordeal was undoubtedly the happily teleporting and ghosting Rai.