The miasma gathered and gathered and gathered into one final Monster, a slim and distended mockery of man. It would have stood ten feet tall straight, if it had uncoiled its spine from his wavelike hunch. Its skin was pale as ivory, and its hair was black and slicked back with oil. It wore an opera mask that obscured much of its face, yet in those pale cheeks was the echo of rich red, and in its eyes was a hunger born from wealth and ambition.

It looked like his father, if his father gave up all that he believed in.

It was an Undead Noble, yet that description felt wholly inadequate, too generic. For it was the Ghost of All Granavale, every noble who had died unsatisfied in this land, and so in this twisted afterlife had constructed an echo of their former glory. He glanced at Mercy to see her take, but she was wholly transfixed on it, watching its slightest movements.

It gazed scornfully down at them from the balcony of the twisted echo of Granavale Manor. Then, it raised a spindly hand. Three Gems materialized, rotating above its palm.

“Move!” Mercy shouted.

That was the only warning Archmund had.

He dodged left; Mercy dodged right.

An explosion’s shockwave blew him forward as it hit where they had been standing. His hands rolled against the thick layer of ovoid Gems that had dropped from all the Monsters they’d slain, and he slid forward three feet more than he’d expected. Miraculously, nothing was broken.

The place where they’d stood burned. The Ghost of All Granavale had launched a fireball. Now a charred-through patch marred the carpet, revealing the checkered tile beneath.

“Don’t just stand there!” Mercy shouted. “Keep moving! Hit it back!”

She threw her Topaz above her head and fired a quick, probing arc of lightning. The Ghost of All Granavale parried with one of its three Gems, a speckled grey cube that flew into the path, and split the electrical arc into a thousand fingers that splashed harmlessly upon the ground. It retaliated with a fireball cast through a red octahedron — a Ruby — but by then Mercy had already vanished, fleeing somewhere else.

Archmund gripped his Ruby so tightly its tetrahedral edges imprinted his palm.

The Ghost of All Granavale was focusing on Mercy, but in no way was it ignoring him. It was firing smaller bolts of flame at him every minute or so — easy enough to see coming, and easy enough to dodge. But the room was quickly become a field of fire as more and more patches of the carpet burned. Dimly he was aware of the heat and the smoke; dimly, he was aware that he was in grave danger. But much more strongly he could feel his magic in the Ruby flowing back into him and strengthening him — and resonating with the burning magic of the Ghost of All Granavale.

He ran and dodged, the smoke touching his nostrils and burning his lungs, yet he did not fall — not from heat exhaustion nor from poison. It was harder than he’d expected. All the Gems on the ground had become a serious hazard, and whenever he had half a second out of danger he swept them towards the walls.

And across the room was Mercy, light on her feet, resplendent, unleashing a constant barrage of white-blue lightning arcs like a human Tesla coil, more and more with every passing second. Each danced and struck at the Ghost of All Granavale, who easily deflected the bolts with its speckled cube, flying about like a hummingbird to its mere wrist twitches. And all the while it launched fireball after fireball at Mercy and Archmund both. It was a dance between two equal partners, a living lightning and a ghost of burning resentment.

And there was him. Just sort of there, leaping and jumping and stumbling through this echo of his ancestral home.

Mercy was enjoying this. Every few moments she unleashed a warcry, and her lightning glowed hotter and whiter. Yet soon it became clear that direct attacks were ineffectual. She somersaulted back to dodge a continuous gout of flame, kicking Gems into the air with every touch of the floor as if they weren’t there, before swatting the fire aside with her Shield Gem.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She was impressive. His training had brought him this far. It had helped him through the Dungeon. But it wasn’t enough to bring him to the level of Mercy Stirpstridecim de Omnio, or of the Ghost of All Granavale. No amount of push-ups, even with an exponential growth curve, could match the endurance training of military exercise or the endless listlessness of the dead.

Mercy didn’t give up despite the inefficacy of her lightning. She gathered her power into a thick, concussive blast that vibrated with the sound of thunder, a cylinder of lightning traveling like a wave. In the back of Archmund’s mind, in some small corner not hyperfocused on survival, he yearned to figure out just what science made such a thing possible.

The Ghost of All Granavale raised an onyx cube, which jittered wildly with the formless magic of the dead. Its defensive magic broke the concussive cylinder of lightning, shearing it into a come, which passed around its body harmlessly — yet thin wisps of black miasma blew off of its form.

Mercy clicked her tongue from across the room. She barely seemed winded, and if anything her fervor was renewed.

Archmund had some sense of how much of his magic he’d pumped into his Ruby; there was at least thirty day’s of normal power left. In twelve hours he’d burned through power stored in almost seventy days of training. He could feel spirit drawing on the power to sustain his body in this horrifically hostile place.

Mercy stretched out her hands.

“Down!” she yelled.

Archmund’s hair stood up as the air suddenly grew sharp and harsh with electromagnetic power. He threw himself to the floor, cold Gems pushing into his cheeks and palms. Metallic furnishings — the curtain rods, candlesticks, the chandelier, the handles on small tables and cupboards — all flew towards the Ghost of All Granavale, a sharp hailstorm.

He’d been able to keep up with Mercy in the regular Dungeon, when Monsters were just things to kill, but in a fight like this? Where the fighting wasn’t just magic against magic or sword against sorcery, but with the environment itself? It was becoming clearer and clearer to him how great the gap between them was.

The Ghost of All Granavale raised its own Ruby and was cocooned in swirling fire. Briefly Archmund thought that couldn’t possibly work, if the metal got melted you’d still be pelted with turning hot slag, but evidently the fire itself carried some momentum that buffeted and deflected the metal; burning slag splattered throughout the manor hall.

“Shit!” he heard Mercy cry. He felt the energies of the air shift, felt the magnetic flux change as she tried to seize control of the molten metal, but to no avail. Dimly, he thought she should save the effort. As metal heated up, it stopped being magnetic.

Then he felt a sharp pain as a tiny bead of molten metal landed on the back of his neck. Instinctively he slapped it off, and it cooled even though the air was quite hot, but it left a welt on both his neck and his hand.

He couldn’t keep defending or running. Even if he was weak, even if it was risky, he had to do what he could.

A hand was on his shoulder. Mercy had run over to him, shielding him from a fireball.

“I meant to kneel,” she muttered as she pulled him up. “You’re a sitting duck if you drop like that.”

He nodded dumbly. His reflexes had always been a bit questionable.

“Can you fight?” she said. “Or do I have to guard you?”

Her voice was torn between the kindred spirit and the battlefield commander.

He hated this feeling. That he’d been a burden on her. That she’d had to pull him along, doing all of the hard work of offense, as he danced and desperately tried not to die. Especially since this was all his fault, this noble attempt to save lives at the cost of his own. But all he could do was not die.

Sure, he hadn’t expected to face off against an angry ghost made of the grudges of all his ancestors, or whatever the Ghost of All Granavale was. But still.

“I can stay alive,” he said. “See, that slag didn’t burn me too badly.”

Mercy looked at his neck and his hand. “It’s blistering. It’ll hurt later.”

“But I’ll be alive.”

She didn’t like that, but she accepted it.

The Ghost of All Granavale had taken notice of their pause. It held its hands before itself, palms facing each other, its Ruby floating in-between. A fire sparked.

“I can wear it down,” Mercy said.

“You can?”

The Ghost’s fire grew larger, to the size of an orange, then a grapefruit, then a basketball.

She pointed at the ceiling. “Some dispersion into secondary miasma — that’s power that’s been sheared away, power that the Ghost can’t use. It’s mass without power. And whenever it uses its Gems it channels a bit of its essence affecting the physical world — and that’s power it’ll never get back, not without absorbing other Monsters.”

That was the advantage of life, Archmund supposed. As long as you were alive, you could grow, change, and regenerate. But the restless dead could only spend.

While they were speaking, the ghost had raised its spindly hands above its masked head, stretching its branch-like apart as the fireball grew larger and larger — like Atlas holding the Earth.

“Might be hard to dodge that,” Mercy said testily, “and it’ll hurt to block.”

Archmund threw his Ruby into the air, and it hovered, borne about the currents of his magic. He wouldn’t need to point to aim. He could aim with will alone.

“Infrared Lance,” he whispered, and an invisible beam of pure heat seared through the Ghost of All Granavale’s head.