“So you learned the ability to speak again from a level up?” Rissah said, astonishment written all over her face.

The follow up to her finding out I could speak had not gone like I expected at all. She’d come at me hard, zeroing in on my answers like an expert detective looking for inconsistencies. Rissah had deftly thwarted all my previous attempts to change the subject, fixating on the complexities of my situation.

And it made me uncomfortable.

From what Oran’s memories told me, my case was far from usual. My soul was in a corpse that a high level monster had animated, giving me a monster core. There was no such thing as a sentient monster. To a letter, the prime hallmark of a being with a monster core was an insatiable and mindless desire to eat anything with mana. Opening up to Rissah about my unique condition would paint me as a freak, and I just didn’t want that. Even she had a standard mana core; the difference between us being that she’d just changed her race to undead, whereas I was an undead monster. Also, the harder she pushed the issue, the less I wanted to talk about it.

Not that I wanted to con Rissah. Though, telling every stray ghost I met in an ancient evil tower, my personal secrets wouldn’t be a long-term winning strategy. Especially when I didn’t fully understand the implications myself. Furthermore, I had no obligation, and I barely knew the wraith. I have to admit, if I hadn't already unburdened my soul on the demon lord Shal'Kagor, I might have felt tempted to share everything with her.

“What is your class, anyway? Are you a necromancer, off-shoot or hybrid?” she pressed.

This didn’t feel like her wanting to get to know me. Instead, I was a puzzle that she decided to figure out. That said, I had some empathy for her situation, and answering this last question was only fair after how I’d pestered her with my pantomiming for so long. She’d been away from others a long time too, and this line of inquiry was common ground for those with classes. People from Oran’s memories talked about classes and advancement as they spoke about sex, the weather, and politics. Given the unique nature of the Naram-Sin catering to the individual, the quirks of the codex never stopped fascinating society.

But what could I plausibly say to convince her? I knew of no class that would account for my eclectic abilities, which meant I had to make one up. Trying to look at things from her perspective, she’d have noticed I was great with a sword and I could animate undead minions. If she was perceptive, and I guessed she was, then she’d also picked up that I didn’t make any noise when I moved and I didn’t stink. Even covered in ghoul guts like I was, there wasn’t a whiff of smell.

Oran knew about a lot of different class types. There were names like Ravager Druid to Occultist of the Weepy Eye. Generally, the more esoteric the name, the more specialized the power set. I knew I needed to go with a label that sounded impressive, but not too long.

“I’m a, uh, D-Deathmaster Ass-uh-Assassin? Yeah, a deathmaster assassin.” I said, flicking gore off my armor and studiously trying not to look at her face.

Nailed it.

“A deathmaster assassin? I’ve never heard of this class before. Did you have to join a death cult to achieve it? To whom do you owe your allegiance? Obviously not Thalzaxor.”

Of course, that sweet ass class name would not be enough for her. The tangled web would only grow, so I switched strategies to a topic we really should have been discussing.

“Hey, Rissah, I, like, totally want to talk about classes and all, but can we discuss the dead city behind us?” I pointed behind her to the imposing structures.

The handmaiden slowly turned to face the black ziggurat encircled by enough crypts and mausoleums to create a small town. Stone edifices the colors of blood, bone, and onyx twinkled under green braziers scattered around the district. A mana vent ran down two principal streets and up the center steps of the ziggurat to intersect. Four quadrants separated by the two streets contained the tombs and other buildings.

Symbols of Thalzaxor adorned some structures, while others had an imprint of a bleeding rose, a skeletal hand, or a barbed crook. There could have been others, but I hadn’t spotted them.

From reading one of Pollina’s books, I knew two of the four symbols. Thalzaxor, the devourer of knowledge and his ghoul with a mask, was obvious. The bleeding rose was the symbol of the blood cult of Kisharu, a vampire goddess. Apparently, she’d been in league with the rebels when they overthrew her father Valmmuz, the Darkheart Alchemist, creator of vampires. Like Thalzaxor, the other two were beings that ascended to demi-godhood.

My Sense Undead spell picked up nothing nearby, but I believed that, were we to move closer, I would surely get a ping. As it was, the dead city was as still as the grave. Quiet and full of dust along every rooftop and alley.

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“It’s a necropolis,” Rissah said. “You’ve never seen one?”

“Nope,” I replied, refusing to elaborate. I didn’t want to open the door for more questioning.

Thankfully, she let the matter drop, staring at the imposing architecture in contemplation.

“These sub-cities were the actual power of the Zu-Rakan empire. All the most powerful undead and necromancers ruled from one just like this,” Rissah explained, picking back up on what I’d thought was a forgotten conversation.

“Should we be worried?” I asked. She didn’t look worried, but I was. There was a homicidal skeleton knight roaming the depths behind us, and an ancient capital city of unholiness before us.

“Hmm? Oh, I don’t think so. No guardians have approached, and if there were any, they would have sensed us as soon as I opened that door. The mana vent here is also very weak, just like in the garden. I thought they’d done that intentionally, but now I’m not so sure...” She trailed off again, and her pupils dilated.

Why couldn’t she do that during my interrogation?

Rissah was occasionally off, and I couldn’t articulate why. I didn’t hold her strange appearance against her, given that she looked like a hologram of a 1950s black and white movie. Her bright white, pale skin and flickering dress of shadows made her look illusory. And, like an illusion, she didn’t seem to be always present. I’d caught her staring off into space more than once. Whether she was still recovering her mind or her imprisonment had broken her, remained to be seen. I knew next to nothing about wraiths, save that they were infamous for stealing mana away from the living. Maybe that was all it took to fix her. Either way, her mercurial focus gave her a sort of “glitchy” disposition, for lack of a better word, with a dash of dementia to spice things up.

Pulling my thoughts away from her, I tried to extend my senses to the metaphysical to see if I could understand what she meant about the mana density. I came up with nothing. It was something I would ask her about at another time, hopefully when she was more focused on the present.

“What does that mean? You thought they were trying to weaken you on purpose?”

“Yes, initially. But now I’m not so sure. For there to be so little death mana present… Things must have gone badly for the rebels.”

“Rebels? The ones who overthrew the vampire queens, you mean? Aren’t you one of them?”

She scoffed.

“Oh, yes, I could technically be considered one. I opened the door, after all. But then they threw me in that tower next to my master and locked the door. So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t feel particularly attached.” An expression of indignant anger accompanied her words.

Bit touchy about that, but I can’t blame her.

“So,” I gestured toward the ziggurat, “what do you think we should do?” Redirecting her away from memory lane. If such a thing were even possible.

I knew what I wanted to do. The corners of that topless pyramid had sweet slopes running from top to bottom. And I’d be damned if I didn’t take a crack at surfing down the side. I’d get to test out my new agility and have the ride of my unlife at the same time! It was going to be awesome.

Y’know, assuming tomb horrors didn’t boil out of the ground and rip us apart, or what have you.

“Have a look. Either this place emptied long before now, or the residents are so weak we’ll have nothing to fear,” Rissah said with a shrug. “If it’s the second one, then we can take their belongings. I’m not expecting much. Enchants need mana, too.”

“Sounds good!” The promise of magical loot always put me in a better mood. Aside from my belt, everything I’d gotten was combat related. And if you count the belt, then peripherally related to fighting. I was sure there had to be awesome stuff out there that made life better. Oran had memories of rings that let people breathe underwater and shoes that always fit perfectly. Surely there was a back to the future two style hover board out there for me somewhere. What was the point of a world with magic without things like that?

It became awfully clear that the residents of the necropolis hadn’t left. Something, or maybe someone, had smashed down the crypt doors and ripped open the coffins, leaving nothing but obliterated remains in their wake. I was sure many of the different corpses had been varieties of undead I’d never seen or heard of before, but in their final death, they all looked the same. Rotten yellow bones in scraps of cloth. None of which had any practical use for my Necrometry, being so brittle. I suspected that the humidity from the nearby cavern had crept in, hastening the decay of the flung open tombs.

Several hours of exploring proved as unprofitable as it was boring. Rissah and I stayed together as we searched each quadrant but remained clueless about what happened. The forensic evidence of the destruction had long since vanished under the unforgiving march of time.

“What do you think happened here?” I said, breaking the silence between us. I doubted she would have an answer, but the impulse to carry on a conversation on my terms was too strong to resist.

“A team of classers would be my guess,” Rissah said right away. The question, apparently, was at the forefront of her thoughts, like my own.

“Not a monster?”

“Doubtful. Whoever did this was too thorough. They didn’t leave a single building untouched. There are no traps still armed. More than all that, where is the gold? Monsters don’t need gold and jewels.”

I’d noticed that too, but I wasn’t sure if the observation was relevant. Stacking wealth in your tomb was as popular on ancient Abatur as ancient earth, it seemed. None of the sleepers expected to wake up to find out that their currency was severely outdated.

“Well, I guess there is only one place left to look,” I said, pointing toward the imposing temple at the center of the cavern.