"Alright, it's clear," Illusionist announced. He stood at the bottom of the ship's ramp where it had run aground on concrete shores. The sea had egressed here, up onto the ruins where they landed. The waters were treacherous with rubble, but the obsidian hull could take it, plowing through the forlorn tops of buildings beneath the murk until the slope increased.

At last, the landscape had risen enough for them to make ground. Beyond, it was a scorched and hilly countryside half-paved by the slums of the old Eastern Bloc. They had arrived in the Lich's outer territory.

As they stepped out, Avenger warned, "Remember, just ‘cause we're invisible from above doesn’t mean it’ll save us from what roams here."

"Comforting," Dupe said, eyeing the dark waters as he made his way out into shallow pools.

Ironbolt deeply agreed. Though it had been many years ago, he had done a tour in these parts. Back when Seraph was still running major operations against the Six Kings. Something he realized in hindsight was no more than a means of thinning out their Hero population. The upper echelon technicists got antsy if there were too many ‘Powered Patriots,' as they were called. Brawny military men who swallowed the propaganda made the leaders anxious... "I'll scout ahead," he decided. Just to make sure the Wards would be safe. 

Some of the best men he'd ever known had soaked their blood on nearby soil. No offense to the Wards, but they were hardly so strong. Yet they knew the risk when they joined.

With Avenger's nod of acknowledgment, the speedster was off in a flash, only a spray of water in his wake. This left the Wards to awkwardly find their place among the tightly organized squad of fighters that descended. In the end, they were placed for safety in the middle, looking just a little useless.

Ironbolt saw this from his perch on the horizon, looking back from beneath a withered tree. His visor’s magnification could run unimpeded for miles here in the open, and as he turned and crested the next hill, he saw what was ahead.

Just past a wretched bog, over miles of felled forests and ghost-town, the Great Storm of the Lich King swirled with angry purple gloom. Its impenetrable wall was a constant low rumble of sheet-lightning. Though it almost looked benign from this distance, he knew that just past its uncanny edge, the razor winds would tear flesh from bone. None would survive.

This would not be their only challenge, he knew. They had to penetrate deep into the very heart of the Lich's territory, to Moscow itself, in order to reboot the old Rift Gate there. But at the very least, first had to come first. So, he would have to think this through, one step at a time.

Avenger's plan, as it stood, was a nightmare waiting to happen. It was a route that many had attempted before, all ending in gruesome death.

He lacked a shield generator powerful enough to slog through the Storm. So, he had brought an Elementalist Type to bend the earth and give them access to the old Hero's tunnel network. The portion that was not collapsed, at least.

"God," Ironbolt put a hand over his face, trying to block out the world and think even faster still. He'd had time to memorize the city layout on the ride. He had run every scenario through his head. Yet, all roads led underground.

Using the screen at his suit’s wrist, Ironbolt sent the GPS route that he had scouted out back to his comrades for safer passage through the city. With a little caution they could pass easily around the thralls he had been nothing more than a blur to. Smooth and painless.

Meanwhile, he went on ahead. With a quick sprint, he zoomed down the slope and to the edge of the bog. Now behind him was the previous hill and the ramshackle of a town. For some reason, this bog cut the landscape in half. It was unnatural. Clearly the work of Powers, rending up the land to form a thicket of stinking, twisted trees. 

About a hundred yards off, something enormous was stirring beneath a particularly open clearing, among the muddy, rotten woods. Not one something, he realized, but a lot of something's.

His presence had summoned forth from the old swamp a horde of the dead. The real terror of the Lich King had never been his hand-designed Frankenstein Monsters, but the millions upon millions of dead that he commanded to his hand with a single wave.

All across the ruined landscape they lay dormant, waiting to strike from around every corner.

Subsequently, the force that began to come lurching from its slumber numbered easily in the hundreds, and that was just the first wave. They came crawling, oozing and groaning, lined with worms and blight yet somehow held together, as if by magic. And they were not slow.

Even to Ironbolt's eyes, they were not slow...

Whether the corpse was donated by a bedridden glutton or a top athlete, it was all the same. Every muscle in their body functioned with perfect efficiency, and they rushed screaming with the same supernatural hunger. Able to overpower any normal human, each a Class Five in strength and tenacity.

Still, Ironbolt had time to swear to himself. "Shit." To some degree it was inevitable. Still, this would prove a problem.

He had to move back a quick half-mile and get a better look at the size of their enemy. Immediately, he understood just how right he was. The same magnitude of thralls was rising from not just one, but every space of the bog in which they might have been stowed. The countless inhabits of this very fallen city, he knew. Enslaved as undying weapons of war.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

It was moments like these that he wished they could have just flown over. But it was the ever-present sight of the small black figures hovering above the Great Storm that reminded him. They were out of luck on all fronts...

In just minutes he had caught back up with Avenger, his crew, and the Wards. In a rush of words, he explained to them, "We’ve got about a million dead pouring out of the ground, just two klicks ahead. They’re chain reacting."

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Avenger asked.

"Unfortunately, yes." While they had been planning to go straight for the mountain tunnel route that Seraph had bore years ago, to the southeast, they had no choice now but to swing north for the urban metro system. The latter had been the first-ever means of attack by a Western Power on the Lich, and many of the casualties still lingered there. Just like a living Super, however, they grew in Power with age.

Some would be in their eighties and nineties now. Just another one of the Lich's trump-cards.

"You're sure your Elementalist can't dig us a completely new tunnel?" Fortitude begged. She had heard the stories and she knew where they were going with this.

"No," Avenger snapped. "He's only got a good thousand feet in him on a given day. And we sure as shit wouldn't want to be underground in this part of the world for more than three days."

"We haven't got long until the Lich's Oracles realize the severity of the mission we’re running," Ironbolt added. Then, trying to reassure both his Wards, "but don't worry, we've got a strong team and we're here to win. We can survive the tunnels if we keep tight."

"Yes," agreed a small voice from the back. A mousey kind of man spoke from behind a thick and nondescript helmet and mask. He clutched a suitcase in both arms, with the biggest beef of the entire squad manning his left and right. "I only need to get my hands on the old white-hole reactor. Then, I connect it's dead heart to the dead heart we contain back home... Easy."

"See?" Illusionist said, a grey and fatherly figure, "there ain't a thing to worry about."

Each of them stopped talking after that, as no one had the heart to make the obvious retort. There was a giant mass of zombies moving their way and the plan just got worse.

Heroes were trained to keep a smile. No matter the situation.

And so, they rerouted North. Walking along the ridge of the same hill that Ironbolt had first stopped to look back on, they could follow that all the way to the beginnings of the old city. But not without a single scrape. There were traps laid all along the way. It was simply inevitable that they should cross one, despite Ironbolt's best efforts.

Standing out up ahead was a lonely old set of apartment complexes, seemingly in the middle of the hillside. Structures so rickety and so rusty that they might as well have been from Stalin's era. The good old days of early Powers, when grandiose ideology still kept its shining face.

As they drew closer, they began to wade through tall flora. Weeds had grown up over old and rusted playgrounds and walking trails. The roads themselves were not discernable as anything more than a patch slightly sparser than the rest. But they pressed on.

Once they had moved into the building's midst, they were surrounded on all sides by the towering structures. There, Ironbolt could see in all the windows, pale faces beginning to appear.

Slowly, a ghost came to occupy every single open frame.

"Heads up," he warned Avenger.

"I see them," they responded. "They're not attacking yet."

"W-w, why the hell not?" Dupe asked, attempting and failing keep his voice low. "I thought they were all out to make more dead?"

Ironbolt shook his head. "No... They're programmed with specific commands. That's what the Lich does. He may not be able to keep an eye on his thralls like many Master Types, but no Master could control the numbers that he does anyway. The horrifying trick is that they're still intelligent and capable of interpreting commands. They're just not creative, so they can't improvise. They wait. The ones I saw in the bog, for instance, were set to lay in wait until someone approached. And these ones are just... watching."

"I don't like that one bit," Avenger hissed. "It could be an alarm system."

Ironbolt didn't think so. He had read the entire history of the area's conflict. "More likely that their parameter is somehow not being met. This is not the kind of place for warning bells. We're far outside his territory, out in the minefield meant to deter visitors. A scavenger's grey zone, where lesser baronies sometimes appear. Not an area he cares a lot about or with any real strategic importance."

A woman in all black spoke up from near the front of the crowd, reshouldering her rifle as she did. "Besides, we could take these numbers. It's nothing to get hung up on."

"I listen to my feelings, kids," Avenger ominously warned. "And they say trouble."

Like clockwork, just as soon as his words went out, a roar began to sound.

It was the crackle of intense flame beginning to rise. Walls of orange light that appeared between the gap of each apartment building. Slowly but surely, they created barriers to form a complete circle around the courtyard, sealing the team in.

"Behold!" someone started shouting. High up on the top of the frontmost structure, a young man appeared and screeched out at the top of his lungs to be heard. "I am Inferno, the Dread Servant of the Dark Lord!"

"Oh lovely," Avenger sighed. It was some Power Cultist here to give them trouble. He waved his hand to take care of it. "Farsight, shoot him."

The woman with the rifle didn't hesitate to let off a shot with perfect accuracy. As the crack of the bullet went out. Ironbolt could see the effect.

It had hit a field of heat around this teenage looking bastard on the rooftop and turned to molten slag. The kid wiped the glowing hot metal away indignantly, bellowing, "How dare you try to kill me!"

They kept going off, but Ironbolt simply turned to his Wards. "He's a sublet."

Nervously, Dupe chuckled. "Like a minion with a little territory of their own? That's a real Baron? How edgy do you have to be to seek out working for the Lich King?"

"ATTACK!" the hoodied youth called, ordering the hundreds of dead to leap from their perches.

"About that edgy," Fortitude replied.

Predictably, more than two-thirds of the dead landed and instantly severed their spinal cords, becoming useless piles of gore. The rest achingly pulled themselves together and started to move.

"Nice trap, asshole!" one of the soldiers jeered.

With an increasing sense of grim impatience, Avenger ordered the problem handled. "Jumper, Almond, take care of it."

Ironbolt saw two soldiers vanish from their crowd and heard the scream a second later. To be honest, he almost felt bad for the kid. It was clearly his first time in a fight. He'd simply drawn the wrong opponent. 

A short drop later, the body impacted the floor of the courtyard, disappearing with a thud into thick shrubbery that subsequently caught fire. The remaining hundred or so zombies that attacked were handled by one succinct move of the team's Elementalist.

A moat opened up in a perfect circle around their group, swallowing the attackers. Then, it closed a second later. The problem was solved.

"Easy enough," the young-sounding earthbender joked proudly.

"Almost anti-climactic," Dupe said, beginning to relax a little.

"Just don't get cocky," Illusionist warned. "The worst is yet to come."

Ironbolt knew they couldn't get comfortable. The very fact that someone as weak as Inferno had been surviving out here was living proof. They hadn't seen a damn thing of the Lich's domain yet. Not by a longshot.