Chapter 83 - It’s Coming

I hit the ground hard, the breath knocked out of my lungs. Something snapped in my chest, sharp pain stabbing along my right side. I gasped, barely able to suck in air. Stars flashed in front of my vision, and I blinked, trying to get them to go away.

It hurt! I couldn’t recall ever hurting so badly. The pain was intense and kept coming at me, so strong that I couldn’t move beyond curling up around myself. There was no breath left for a scream or shout. It was all I could do to take in even the smallest bit of air.

Sue’s foot came down a meter from my head. The dinosaur roared—the volume was epic, penetrating even my dazed state. I managed a smile at that. Sue’s roar had a way of making anyone facing us think twice, and I envisioned the undead horde stopping in their tracks. The dino spat a Fireball, too. The spell sailed over the heads of my other undead, vanishing somewhere past them.

I tried to get up but still couldn’t move that much. My right arm was hurt, too. Broken? Sprained? I couldn’t tell, just knew I was in rough shape. Falling twenty feet onto my back and side wasn’t a great time. I hadn’t had a chance to tie myself onto Sue’s back, and oh man was I regretting that now!

All of a sudden, Kara was there in the dirt, next to me. “Selena! You’ve got to get up!”

At first, I wondered if she’d fallen off, too. But she seemed okay to me. Unhurt, anyway—she was pretty upset. I couldn’t think straight. She wanted me to do something, but what? Get up? Why?

Zombies curled around the left flank of my undead force, attacking them from the side. Sue bit one in half while my skeleton mages zapped a few more, but they didn’t stop. They kept coming. One of them slipped under Sue’s feet, shambling toward us.

It was right behind Kara, about to fall on her with claws and teeth. I opened my mouth to gasp out a warning, but I still had no air in my lungs. How was I still not breathing? There was no way to warn her in time.

Instead, I reached out with my left hand, and almost by reflex I released the power behind my Drain Life spell. Black fire splashed from my fingers. Kara’s eyes went wide as she saw the spell. She started to turn toward the threat she knew had to be behind her, but before she could, my spell blasted free of my hand, burning through the night toward the offending zombie. It was wreathed in my magic.

The zombie dropped where it stood, and its vitality flowed back into me. The bones in my ribs and right arm knitted themselves back together, bruises healing in rapid fashion as well.

Let me just say that resetting broken bones without any pain medication hurts like hell! This time, I managed to find the breath to scream.

“You all right?” Kara asked.

I nodded. “Will be.”

She levered me up to a sitting position. Everything still hurt, but the worst of my wound were healed by my spell. Kara put a shoulder under my arm and guided me back to a standing position. She was just in time—another zombie had slipped past Sue’s teeth and was rushing us. I took it down with another Drain.

The healing from that spell pretty much topped off my health. While I still felt the lingering aches from the fall, the injuries themselves were gone. I snapped Kara another nod, this one sharper and more together. “I’m good now. Thanks.”

“Well, you save me, I save you… It all evens out in the end, I figure.”

We needed to get out of there, or we were both going to be beyond saving. My little line of undead were slowing the zombie advance, for the most part, but only slowing it. Already they were pushing hard against the left flank. One of my tier three zombies went down, then another. Another minute or two and they’d shatter the shield wall entirely, and be all over us.

Two beams from Harm spells slammed into Sue, wounding the dinosaur badly. I grimaced. I was almost certainly going to lose the majority of my undead to this debacle, but losing Sue wasn’t an option. We needed the T.rex if we were going to have any serious chance against the horde and whatever was leading it. I cast Heal Undead on Sue, repairing some of the damage.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Come on!” I told Kara. “We’ve got to motor. Are the ratkin clear?”

“I don’t know!” Kara replied. She was already climbing Sue, scaling a rope dangling down the dinosaur’s side.

I glanced around, not seeing the ratkin, and had to hope they’d gotten away. We could still buy them some more time, but there was only so much we could do against a mass of undead like this. I grabbed the rope behind Kara, using it to help scale Sue’s bones. I was only halfway up when my shield wall broke entirely.

My undead went down so fast I barely saw it. One moment they were holding hundreds of zombies at bay. The next, the shield wall broke and my undead were just dying, one after another. In under a minute they were all gone, the enemy horde rushing Sue, planning to tear my dino’s bones apart to get to the tasty treats riding up top.

Wasn’t going to happen.

I wrapped the rope around my waist and arm, hoping that would keep me in place, then ordered Sue to run for it. Sue took off at high speed, running east through the woods at something like twenty miles an hour. It wasn’t the fastest pace they could manage in the open, but within the confines of the forest it was top speed.

That left me dangling halfway down a rope off Sue’s flank, bouncing hard against T.rex hip and rib bones with every massive footfall. If my ribs hadn’t just been healed, there was no way I could have hung on. As it was, it almost felt like I cracked something all over again. Not my idea of a good time.

Another black beam shot out of the night, slamming against Sue’s side. I hit the offending skeleton mage with a Drain, taking it down. Those were the big threats to Sue, so those were my priority targets.

Somewhere out there, a howl shattered the night, stunning the zombies nearest to us for a valuable few seconds. It was Hope! She’d survived, somehow, and was running with us. I glanced down, spotted my dog, and passed her mental orders to stay clear from the main horde. I’d already lost almost all my undead. I didn’t want to lose her, too.

Then Kara was pulling the rope, dragging me higher. I helped, pulling myself up the rope as she dragged me onto Sue’s back.

When I was finally up top, panting for breath, she flashed me a grin. “Finally! Now what?”

I kept my head low to avoid being targeted by more Harm spells and took in my surroundings before answering. Except for Sue and Hope, my undead were all gone, destroyed by the horde. The zombies had fully surrounded the fort walls and were pouring into the interior space. Anyone who hadn’t gotten out while we held them off was either dead or soon would be, but I knew at least most of the ratkin had escaped. They’d run north, directly away from the horde.

A trickle of zombies moved in that direction, probably following whatever trail the ratkin left behind. Most of them were either trying to get through the gate into the fort or chasing Sue, though. That was the idea, after all.

“Now we lead these assholes on a merry little chase,” I replied. I ordered Sue to dart another twenty meters away, then turn.

We had some fighting distance now. The zombies were still coming at us, but they couldn’t encircle us anymore. There was no easy way for them to cut off our escape. We were finally back in the same scenario as the mall parking lot, where I could run, then blast a couple of times, then run again.

“What did you call it, fighting then running?” I asked.

“Kiting!”

“Yeah, that. We’re gonna do that.”

Sue spat another Fireball. It exploded in the front ranks of zombies, blasting them to pieces. More filled in right behind them, of course. It seemed like the flood of undead was unending, but I wasn’t trying to kill them all. I was only keeping them distracted for long enough that the ratkin escaped.

We got off two more Fireballs before the zombies started getting dangerously close to us. At that point, I had Sue run another couple dozen meters, then turn back around again. Would the zombies be smart enough to realize they couldn’t catch us, and stop chasing?

No. No, they were not.

They kept coming, and we hammered them with spells and arrows. Kara was firing shot after shot, taking down a zombie with each arrow as often as not. My Drain spells killed a zombie in a single hit, and even took down the tier two skeleton mages in one shot. Sue’s Fireballs, of course, were even more epic.

We strung them along for another fifty meters, cutting down tons of the damned things. But then I felt something that chilled me to the soul. You know those stories that talk about blood freezing in your veins? Yeah—this felt like that. The sensation of cold was everywhere, the chill sinking so deep I wondered if I’d ever feel warm again.

I knew that sensation. I’d felt something close to it before, back at the mall. That feeling of malevolent intelligence coupled with enormous power was the same I’d sensed emanating from somewhere deeper inside the shadowed interior of the complex.

Now it was here.

I glanced at Kara. Her pale face told me she felt it, too. Whatever the leader of this army was, it was climbing the hill behind its army, making good time toward us. I already knew what was going to happen when it got here—I felt its raw power as it grew nearer. This wasn’t a foe we could beat. Not now, anyway, not at night, with all its forces in play, and our fighting force as weak as it had ever been.

“Selena… It’s coming,” Kara whispered next to me. I felt her shiver.

“Yeah. It’s time for us to go.”

I ordered Sue to launch one last Fireball, and I dropped another skeleton mage with a Drain spell, but those efforts were like spitting into a waterspout for all the good it did. The horde continued, unfazed, and their leader was growing nearer by the second. If we stayed, we died.

Without a word, I sent the mental command to Sue and Hope, and we fled north and east, running as fast as skeletal legs could carry us.