Chapter III.VII (3.7)- Ghost Town

They planned to meet to visit Shimizo Roku later in the week. Shiroi insisted that Kizu first have a few days to relax and enjoy the palace’s many comforts. And, while Kizu was eager to meet with a lead to his sister, he didn’t argue too hard. The thought of just relaxing and not having classes first thing every morning was bliss. Especially once he collapsed on his incredibly soft feather futon. Mort was out exploring the palace’s hallways with free reign, the staff being told not to bother the familiar.

“Kizu,” someone hissed. “Wake up!”

Blearily, Kizu rubbed his eyes and looked around his bedroom. Then a rapid tapping on his window snagged his attention.

Aoi crouched outside on his windowsill. Clothed entirely in black with a black scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face. Kizu just stared at her.

“What are you waiting for?” she loudly whispered through the glass. “Grab Anata and let’s go!”

“Where?”

“Are you stupid? The ghost town! I told you. I need your help there.”

“Now?”

“Obviously. Why wait? Aren’t you just itching to check it out?”

He closed his eyes and sighed. He had agreed to this. At least this would get the commitment out of the way quickly. He walked over to the window and opened it, letting them talk more freely to one another.

“Why exactly do you even want me there? You know more about necromancy than I do.”

“I don’t. Want you there, that is. Not really. What I actually want is Anata to join me. But she’s not likely to run off to a scary town in the middle of the night without you along.”

“What? I am not bringing Anata with us. That was not part of the deal. Why would you even want her there? You’ve never even shown interest in her before.”

“I saw what she did to you while I operated on your leg. She held your soul in place. By all accounts, you should have died, but she had both enough soul perception and an ability to grasp it to be able to keep you from fading. With a perception like that, she’ll be able to help me discover necromantic lairs I can only dream of locating alone.”

“No.”

Then suddenly Anata stood beside him. But not in her physical form, instead a transparent version of her flickered in and out of existence. Only her red eye remained consistently visible. It glowed scarlet, her eyepatch not included in her spiritual form.

“Is that an astral projection?” Aoi exclaimed, clearly excited.

“You can see her?” Kizu asked. Before now, he’d thought he was the only one who Anata appeared to. He had assumed it was due to their blood relationship.

“Of course. I would be a terrible necromancer if I couldn’t pick up on an unshielded soul. But this is perfect! In this form she can scout around for us and we don’t even need to endanger her physical body! Problem solved. Great work Anata.”

Anata beamed at the praise, though her face blurred a bit, making it momentarily smear it into a dangerous leer.

Kizu narrowed his eyes at Aoi. She was attempting to butter up Anata to convince her to go with her, regardless of what Kizu said. And it would work, too. He needed to get a better handle on Anata’s obedience. But he didn’t see a way to do that here and now. Not without causing her to resent him. He needed to be tactful about this. Though an indecisive part of him worried that he was just too afraid of taking real responsibility or punishing her for disobedience.

“Fine,” he snapped. “Let’s go. But Anata, the moment I say retreat, you return to your body here. Do you understand?”

The projected Anata bobbed her head enthusiastically.

Aoi dropped out of the window and out of sight.

Kizu looked down to see her two stories below, having landed in a large bush. Kizu sent a mental note to Mort to watch out for Anata’s body before he jumped to Aoi’s side. He was amused to see her exposed skin covered in scratches from the bushes.

“You’re seriously going out in that?” Aoi asked.

Kizu looked down at his silk pajamas and then shrugged. It was comfortable and he didn’t plan on being seen by anyone.

“No Basil?”

“I’m letting him get his beauty sleep. The last thing I need is him dozing off in front of someone important. We all know from experience how that would turn out.”

Years ago, the two of them had first dated until Basil did exactly that in front of her. The Ooze Harbinger took on a gelatinous blob form while sleeping. It took years before Basil finally got the courage to approach Aoi again and explain what happened.

“How far is this ghost town?”

“Not very. Maybe a two hour walk. It’s an old hot springs tourist spot. Went out of commission about eighty years ago after an earthquake. There were talks about trying to reestablish it, but they decided it was too unstable and instead most of the remaining locals relocated to a different spot.”

“What direction?”

Aoi pointed.

Kizu put an arm around her shoulder and jumped. A two hour-long walk turned into about twenty minutes of short range jumps as Aoi continued to guide them closer. He had to resist Kyonaka’s beacon, but it only dragged him off by a few meters less than a dozen times. Anata had no issues keeping up either. Unbound by her natural body, she blinked forward, keeping pace with ease.

They stood at the foot of a mountain village north of the city. Steaming stream water flowed from inside the town. They stepped over a collapsed section of the gates. Kizu scanned the area with his spellsense, but nothing immediately stood out to him. Old dilapidated buildings lined the streets in varying levels of collapse. He poked his head in one and noticed it still fully furnished. There were rotting children’s dolls scattered on the decomposing tatami floor. Tufts of grass sprouted from the black flooring.

“I’ve been here a few times,” Aoi said, examining the town. “Children often dare each other to come up here. But after two went missing last year, my father put in more resources to keep people out.”

“Kids have gone missing?” Kizu didn’t like the sound of that.

He looked over to where Anata’s spirit bobbed in the street nearby. She was studying a burst pipe that was sending up a small arc of steaming water.

“It’s fine. Perfectly safe. The kids likely just ran off the normal trail and got eaten by a bear or slumbering magical monster. Like I said, I’ve traveled up here before with no problems. I’m just hoping that Anata might be able to spot something I missed.”

Kizu frowned but continued walking through the town, letting the moonlight illuminate his path.

It was separated into two halves, divided by a small gorge with the stream of hot water. Bridges spanned the short gap, but they were all rotting and missing several of their planks. He continued to look in old shops and homes, but he didn’t spot anything noteworthy in any of them. Most had been reclaimed by nature with trees growing in the windows and their decaying furniture now homes for small animals. At one point, he thought he spotted a magical creature, a small red and blue monster with horns, but it scampered into the shadows out of sight before he got a good look at it.

A cemetery loomed over them at the far end of the town. Kizu could tell that, more than anywhere else, interested Aoi. He wished they would hurry up and get there so they could then leave the creepy town behind and return to their beds.

A flash of green illuminated the town for a fraction of a moment, like mutated lightning. Kizu blinked rapidly and rubbed his eyes. Then he looked over to Aoi who stared, transfixed on the graveyard up ahead. Of course.

“This is a bad idea,” Kizu said.

But, of course, his warning fell on deaf ears. Aoi made a beeline for the cemetery with Anata floating alongside her. Kizu cursed as he followed after the girls. He ducked into an old garden, now overgrown with weeds and wild radishes, and followed a long abandoned path up the side of the hill.

Even the far outskirts of the cemetery was filled with graves. Hundreds of weathered wooden staves stuck out from the ground. They stood as tall as him, each with different names engraved into them, both in the Universal Script, as well as an ancient Hon alphabet. Those markers with failing enchantments had degraded to illegibility, but most letters remained crisp. A few of the wealthier people had small stone monuments erected for their families. Aoi crouched at one of the wooden staves, closely examining it and scribbling something in a notebook while Anata drifted around and peered into empty pits that lacked grave markers.

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Kizu examined the area with his spellsense. Almost all of the graves had enchantments, though few remained actively functioning. They looked like just preservation glyphs. But with no one performing maintenance on them, several had simply faded after a few years. It was more surprising that so many remained despite being completely exposed to the elements. One even still had ever-burning incense lit on it, a wisps of smoke curling up from the enchanted stick.

Nothing there looked able to flash brilliant green lights.

Kizu found an overgrown bench and took a seat while Aoi scoured the grave sites for signs of necromancy. He started to nod off a bit, dreaming of returning to his futon, when he felt something under him move. Jerking to attention, Kizu looked down at the bench. Only, now that he looked more closely at it, it was pretty strange for a bench. He had assumed the back had fallen off over the years of disuse. But, under the dirt and plants, it actually looked more to be a rectangular wooden box. A bit like…a coffin. He felt something under him kick again and his eyes widened.

Kizu jumped a stone’s throw away. And then realized maybe he should have remained sitting on the coffin, because the moment he removed his weight from it, the top fell off.

A zombie emerged. The left half of its body was rotted through, showing brown cracked bones with slivers of rotted flesh clinging to its skeleton. However, its right side remained as pristine as ever. Even the fabric of her kimono remained a vibrant shade of orange on her right side. An older woman stared at him with a milky white right eye and an empty right cavity. She stumbled toward him, tripping on her coffin.

“Aoi!” he called out. “Get over here!”

The zombie plodded in his direction slowly, but he kept his distance from it.

Aoi dashed over, vaulting over some of the smaller stone monuments in her excitement at the sight of an undead. Her attention was split between staring down at her grimoire and examining the zombie as she ran.

“You certain you want to be that close?” Kizu asked.

Unlike him, she showed no hesitance about approaching the zombie, barely out of arm’s reach as she smiled ear to ear at it. She ignored him as she snatched up a stick to prod the zombie with as it lumbered forward at her. It looked pathetic as Aoi continued to jab it and withdraw out of reach repeatedly. It took a couple clumsy swings at the princess, but never managed to get remotely close.

Anata floated up to Kizu and watched with him from his perch on top of a stone fence as Aoi started to read out loud from her grimoire. After she finished the chant though, the zombie remained unchanged. Aoi flipped through a few pages then tried again. And again.

“This is so interesting,” she said after her fifth failed spell. “It’s not like a normal zombie at all.”

“It looks like a normal zombie to me,” Kizu commented. “A mindless one with barely any soul attached.”

“No. I think it might have more soul mixed into it actually. It keeps its independence like a sentient undead. It is extremely resistant to any control I try to exert over it.”

“Does this mean you aren’t going to try dragging it off as a new pet?”

“Pet is a foul word. Dehumanizing.”

“They’re dead.”

“Mostly.” She ducked under a swing from the zombie and backed up a bit further. “Like I said, they still have some soul. This one a lot more than most mindless undead. It looks like its soul is shattered really uniquely. I wonder how. It doesn’t look like any natural occurrence I’ve read about.”

“Is there a reason a necromancer might do that?”

“I’m sure there are lots of reasons.”

“Example?”

“Well, if you wanted to make it really difficult for another necromancer to subdue them.”

“Remind me again why you want to meet other necromancers?”

“That’s just one example.”

“And another?”

But before Aoi could come up with anything else, three more zombies lumbered up to them through the darkness, descending from higher up on the hill. They looked like they were in even worse condition than their fellow.

At first Aoi looked excited, but that faded as half a dozen more shambled up from behind graves. And then more. In less than half a minute, the zombies flooded their corner of the cemetery and surrounded Aoi. Four of them lunged at her all at once and two managed to rake their nails against her skin.

Kizu jumped to her side, put an arm around her shoulder, and then transported them beyond the undead. But he was just a tiny bit off with his trajectory and stumbled as his foot buried itself in the ground. He yanked his grafted foot free of his boot and he and Aoi started their run back down into the ghost town.

Anata floated above the undead but they paid her no mind. The zombies moaned as they chased the living duo. Soon they were dashing and jumping past the town’s collapsed buildings.

“I think they want to kill us,” Aoi commented as they ducked through a shattered window.

“Oh really? I thought they wanted to give you a big hug.”

“They’re not supposed to come out of the cemetery. At least, I thought not. That much I was able to see in the inscription.”

After a moment of consideration, she rolled up her sleeve and raised an arm. She examined it closely in the moonlight as they dashed through an alleyway.

Kizu jumped them on top of one of the abandoned buildings. Their legs broke through the old thatched roof, but his monster foot gripped onto one of the supporting beams inside and he steadied Aoi as well so they only sank to their knees. The zombies surrounded the building.

“I think they’ve left some sort of soul mark on me,” Aoi said, showing him her arm.

Three red lines ran across it below the elbow. From when the zombies scratched her. It hadn’t even been enough to break the skin. He saw nothing from it when he examined it with enhanced spellsense, but if it directly involved souls, there was no guarantee it would appear. And that meant, even if he completely outran the undead, they’d continue following Aoi until either she died or they died…again.

“If we continue down the way we came, we’ll lead them straight into the city,” Kizu said. “The city’s guards can take care of them, right?”

“I suppose the constables and Elites will be alerted when we enter the city’s perimeter.” Aoi scrunched up her face. “I hate relying on that idiotic divination system.”

“Would you rather retreat straight back to your palace? You have guards there too, right?”

“No way! Do you know how much trouble I’ll be in if my uncle finds out I was involved in this? Plus, they’d all think we’re under some sort of invasion. It would be so bad for necromancy’s reputation.”

“Do you have a better solution?”

Anata popped up next to him, looking excited as she gestured over to a collapsed inn on the other side of the gorge. From afar, it looked like any other broken building. His spellsense didn’t show anything special about it, so he dismissed it. He doubted hiding in an abandoned building would help their situation much. But Anata was persistent as she continued to jap a finger in its direction.

A glance down below them showed that probably somewhere close to a hundred zombies had congregated at the foot of their current building. They’d begun to pile on top of one another, trying to reach them on the roof.

“Okay, let’s go,” Kizu said to Aoi. He set a hand on her shoulder and they jumped to the dilapidated inn’s front door.

The front door barely still hung on its hinges. Large chunks of the wood had rotted away, revealing a collapsed interior. He quickly slapped a hand on the building, hoping to maybe notice something abnormal about it while he leaned forward. He frowned. It was only barely noticeable, but his hand pierced through the building’s wall maybe two millimeters deep. Then he reached for the door. It was weirdly solid. His hand didn’t penetrate through the broken wooden boards.

He looked over at the hoard of zombies stumbling over the old bridges in an attempt to reach them. Several times he heard the crack of snapping wood and the splash of zombies falling into the gorge below the bridges. But far more successfully traversed over into their side of the town.

Kizu bit his lip, returning his focus to the building and trying his best to ignore the incoming undead.

The inn appeared entirely mundane. Both his eyes and his spellsense saw nothing unusual save for that strange inconsistency.

“What are you doing?” Aoi demanded as he continued to stare at the building. “Are we going in there or to another rooftop? Daydreaming is not a luxury we can afford at the moment. Or have you forgotten about the undead trying to tear us to pieces?”

“It doesn’t quite match up when I press my palm against it,” Kizu explained.

Instead of testing the practice physically, Aoi created an antimagic shield. Kizu noted that the bulk of her shield glittered slightly like diamonds, but the edges were framed with tiny translucent bones.

The shield tensed as it made contact with the wall. The dilapidated building flickered, just for a split second, revealing a normal inn with its windows lit up with warm light, before returning to the dark, decrepit outward appearance. The false door was nothing more than another wall.

“It’s an illusion,” Kizu said, staring at it in disbelief.

“Obviously! Now let's get inside!”

“Why can’t I detect it with my spellsense?”

“Because it’s interlaced with divination spells.” She made her way in the direction the real front door had momentarily been revealed to be. “All the best illusions are.”

His eyes widened. Suddenly he understood why the crone’s hut had been so well hidden. He had assumed it was just his illusions concealing it, but if she also interlaced divinations it made a lot more sense.

“That’s amazing! And if the entire building is enchanted to appear that way permanently, that’s three different disciplines of magic being used on a master’s scale. Enchantments, divination, and illusions.”

“It’s not that impressive,” Aoi said. She fumbled while feeling up the side of the wall, trying to find the invisible door’s grove. “I know several people who can do that.”

“You also know some of the most powerful mages in the nation.”

Aoi frowned, but conceded to his point as the zombies finally reached them. Kizu reached into his storage ring and grasped what he recognized by touch to be an earth acceleration potion. He’d keyed each vial to feel distinctly different to help him identify them for situations exactly like this. He smashed it into the ground in the alley in front of them. A massive boulder erupted from the ground where the potion shattered, cutting off the undead and buying a bit more time. He heard them as they started to ram themselves into it, smashing themselves into the obstacle with sickening crunches. He watched in horror as the first of the zombies summited the boulder, using its fellows as a macabre staircase. For a moment, he reached into his ring again and fingered one of his fire bomb potions. The same type he used on the bloodspawn. But if he threw one now, he risked setting the entire village ablaze.

The first zombie fell to the ground mere meters away from Kizu. He lifted up the fire potion as the zombie dragged itself toward him, unhinged jaw hanging agape by a few strands of flesh. Another one fell beside its companion. Then a third.

Finally, Aoi found the door and slid it open. She stepped forward and vanished.

Kizu shoved the potion back into his ring and dove at the wall where Aoi had disappeared, desperately hoping she hadn’t closed the invisible door behind herself. He felt his monster leg’s heel ram into the skull of the nearest zombie crawling towards him. He pushed off it, shattering the undead’s cranium and propelling himself forward.

Despite knowing it was an illusion, Kizu flinched as he slammed into the illusionary wall.

He crashed onto the ground and he heard Aoi slam the door behind him.

Throughout the inn common room, dozens of people turned to look at him.

Dozens of undead people.