Beam POV: Day 46

Current Wealth: 0 silver 27 copper

Leaving Solitaire alone in the city left me feeling more than a little unnerved, I told myself it was for the best, however. He was hardly in any danger, and giving him an extra day to heal was the best way I could keep him safe.

Still, it didn’t sit right with me. And I knew why. We were in this predicament because he’d been hurt, and he’d been hurt because I’d failed in protecting him. Again. The guilt hung onto my shoulders like an anvil, keeping me company for our entire march into the woodlands. I kept it to myself, not wanting to bother Xangô with such a triviality, and not knowing Argar enough to even discuss it with him to begin with.

Argar, the giant. He’d stuck to his word and come along with us, surprising me quite a bit in doing so. Somehow the man felt even bigger to walk alongside than he had to fight, towering over me by a full foot, giant legs eating the road with great strides. He didn’t seem to even feel the cold, despite not having furs nearly as thick as mine or Xangô’s, and he didn’t complain one iota as we made our way into the woods.

Perhaps we had something in common, then. Or perhaps he just didn’t see much to complain about. The man hardly felt unhappy to be waddling into the jaws of death.

“What’s the plan?” Xangô asked, once we were a fair distance from the city. “Rotters don’t really bleed, so arrows won’t do us much good this time. Nor will our daggers or the spear.”

“I can use my hands.” Argar shrugged, and the sheer size of each shoulder as it rolled upwards had me half believing him. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed.

“Let’s make like Solitaire and start picking rocks up on our way.” I suggested, scoring a grin from Xangô as I did. We both knew our friend would never shut up if he caught us mimicking his habits like that.

We kept talking while picking our way across the woodlands, eyes peeled for particularly deadly looking stones. I got two, myself, both a bit bigger than my fists, nice and jagged, angled things that looked perfect to stave in a head. Xangô only got one. When I turned to ask if Argar needed one of mine, I saw the big man had torn an entire branch off a tree and snapped it across his knee, fashioning himself a club that probably weighed as much as my leg. It would probably do just fine, I decided.

The forest transformed as we went deeper, air getting an unpleasant edge that had nothing to do with the cold, but still sent shivers running down my spine. Everything became darker for seemingly no reason at all, and an unnaturally grey fog began to congeal at the ground around our feet. Xangô was the first to recognise it.

“Necrotic mist.” He breathed. The term rang a bell in my memory. Death gas, essentially, also known as miasma. It was generated by undead, and generated more of them in turn.

Seeing it now meant we were closing in on where the action would be.

I noticed a couple of things as our walk continued. One was the smell, like an old folk’s home, but more important was the silence. Save for the wind, and our own footsteps, I couldn’t hear anything in this part of the wood. No birds, no rodents, not a damn thing. Even the insects were silent. It was like the whole world was holding its breath and waiting, waiting for something.

Well, I certainly was. I forced myself to exhale, performing the calming, rhythmic oscillation of lungs that I’d learned to steel my nerves before a match years before. We’d fought bears, we’d fought trolls. Whatever was ahead, it didn’t have anything on us.

That’s what I told myself, at least, but as we crept deeper in, the seeds of unease only grew. Undead had some particular essence about them that frightened the living on an instinctual level. Was that what I was feeling?

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Or did I just have better instincts than I thought?

Solitaire, I knew, would make fun of me if he knew I was this concerned about a gut feeling. Xangô wouldn’t, but he’d not take it seriously either. So I bit my tongue. Right up until the forest’s silence was disintegrated by the shrillest, gnarliest screech I think I’ve ever heard in my life.

We all looked ahead at once for the source, and it wasn’t hard to find. Five foot six, skinny as a ragdoll and lumbering towards us half at a sprint and half at a limp. It was maybe twenty yards away when we first caught sight of the fucking thing, and that gave us all the time in the world to get ready before it came.

A walking corpse, blood-stained, withered and snarling like a rabid dog. The sight of an enemy at last gave my fear some direction, at least.

I moved in to answer first, putting myself in front of Xangô with a reflexive grace. Then blinked, as Argar put himself further in front of me. The rotter was barely within arms’ reach of him when his giant log came swinging around like a battering ram, catching it fully in the chest and halting its sprint to a dead stop instantaneously.

The undead fell onto its back, jerking around, and I saw ribs jutting from a ruined chest. Argar didn’t give it a chance to shrug the wound off, closing in more than a metre in one great stride, then swinging his cudgel down a second time. It caught the lower torso, shattering hips and crushing the spine at its base.

And the undead’s legs stopped moving. So they could still be paralyzed if nerves and bones were damaged enough? That was useful to know, though not for now. For now, our enemy was a bit too mangled to do anything anyway.

I watched as it writhed around, trying and failing to claw its way to us as Argar stepped back, his lip curled.

“Never actually seen one this close.” He grunted. I’d never seen one period, but felt urged to keep silent about the fact. The man was big enough already, no need to further my inadequacies.

“Why didn’t you kill it?” Xangô asked him. Argar shrugged.

“Smash a ribcage in, usually, that does kill something. Didn’t know the rumours about undead…Being like this were true.”

I saw a slight quiver to his lip, as he said that, and it occurred to me that the big man actually was unnerved. Scared even, deeply so. It seemed odd, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. He hadn’t grown up on anime and video games, to him zombies weren’t just fodder to kill a few hours decapitating with virtual shotguns. God knew what kind of stories people as primitive as his told about them, but they probably bigged them up more than a bit.

To be fair, even Xangô and I were playing it safe with all our meta knowledge. There was a reason we weren’t hunting during the night.

“You need to smash the head to put a rotter down.” Xangô explained, then took a step forward to do just that, and hesitated. I could guess why, he probably wasn’t certain he had the strength, rock or no.

But I was. I closed in while the rotter hissed at him, brought the stone down and felt its skull change shape beneath the impact. Then I hit it a few more times to be safe. Brown blood was sticking to the rock like glue, by the end, and the reek was revolting, but the rotter died about the same as anything else would have. I straightened up.

“So, more hunting?” I asked the other two. Xangô was quick in replying.

“More hunting.”

The deeper we went, the more apparent it became that actually finding rotters wouldn’t be too much of an issue. They weren’t exactly commonplace, of course, but there were a lot more than just a few, and if you made a bit of noise you’d attract plenty to throw themselves at you. We ended up bagging about half a dozen within the hour. Twenty three within four hours.

But the sun was growing dangerously close to the horizon, by then, and it was that that finally put an end to our hunting trip. Reluctantly, we started trudging our way back to the city.

It made sense, thinking about it, that you wouldn’t find any undead close to the main seat of human habitation for the region. Guard patrols and whatnot probably kept their populations down like nothing else, and at worst all of the lazier, stronger mercenaries would be vacuuming them up by day.

Regardless, though, it was still an issue. We couldn’t afford to waste seven hours a day on transit if we were going to make progress from this, five coppers per pop meant that we’d earned ourselves just over two silver with the day’s work. Which wasn’t much better than three men our size could’ve managed with basic labouring. We needed to adjust our strategy.

And we needed more fucking money.