Talia stalked through the forest, moving slowly. For her, at least. For anyone else, it would have been a dead sprint. With her incredible agility and dexterity, she was capable of cover hundreds of miles per hour, but she wasn’t interested in traveling the largest distance in the shortest amount of time possible. Instead, she was searching for a clue as to the whereabouts of Abraham Micayne, the necromancer responsible for her rebirth as a revenant.

By all rights, she should have been grateful for the man’s efforts. He’d inadvertently given her everything she’d ever wanted. Before he’d suspended her in that void between life and death and converted her into one of the undead, she had been caught a very different limbo – this one of her mother’s making. Back then, Talia had endeavored to become a fighter, training with Master Silas Martel until she’d mastered hand-to-hand combat. However, she had lacked the stats or skills to keep up, largely because her mother had insisted that she become a healer like her father.

Of course, her reasoning hadn’t been altruistic, as she had claimed. No – she’d wanted to remake Talia in her slain father’s image in the hopes of using that connection to bring the man back from the dead. It was an outrageous plan, and ultimately, it had been doomed by Micayne’s incompetence. And when Zeke had intervened, he’d saved her from the necromancer’s clutches.

Of course, Micayne had tried to kill them for their efforts, but ultimately, he’d failed and everyone had escaped. Yet, now that the man was free from his own quest to resurrect his dead wife, he’d turned his attention to getting the most out of his necromantic arts. More importantly, he’d unleashed an unliving horde on the Radiant Isles, and that army of zombies and other unthinking undead had swept across the main island, converting everyone it encountered.

That had doomed the entire subcontinent.

And ultimately, it had brought Micayne into conflict with Zeke. Or more importantly, Abby, who, at the behest of a goddess, had attempted to slay the necromancer. That, in and of itself, was not a bad thing. However, she’d chosen to act at a time that put Zeke, Pudge, and Talia in grave danger. In most cases, it would have resulted in their deaths, but Zeke had never been one constrained by the odds. He’d broken through, and unsurprisingly, he hadn’t been happy with Abby’s betrayal.

Still, they’d thought Micayne dead.

At least they had right up until the necromancer – who’d become a lich of incalculable power – had taken over the undead city of Darukar, enslaving its citizens and forcing Zeke into a confrontation. That had not ended well for Micayne, and he’d gone on the run.

Talia would have chased him to the ends of the Eternal Realm, but at the time, she’d had other priorities. Like saving Zeke. But now that that was done, she’d left the war with the Radiant Host behind in favor of hunting down the man who’d authored so much misery. Hopefully, she could kill him this time.

With that in mind, she stalked through the forest. She wished she had a stealth skill like Pudge or the kobold rangers – or better, like the Inashi – but she had to make do with simply being faster than everything else.

And she was.

Every now and again, she’d come up against something that could almost keep pace, but in the end, they all fell behind. And even those few instances were incredibly rare. However, there were plenty of foes that had mechanisms to counter her speed. Some did so via clever traps or slowing skills, while others took the same path as Zeke, meaning that they relied on insane durability.

But unlike most speed-focused fighters, Talia also packed quite a punch. She had a host of disease and rot-based skills, including her Path of Decay, which she’d recently upgraded to C-Grade. That made her a deadly opponent, even for those talented warriors who’d already reached the peak.

Was she on par with someone like Zeke? No. In her experience, few – if any – could. But she could keep up with just about anyone else, and for the vast majority of threats, she was more than a match. That was why she had no issues going off on her own and searching for the man who’d changed the direction of her life.

The reason she’d chosen to hunt him wasn’t due to her personal enmity with the man, though. Instead, she’d picked that path for two reasons. First, he was a menace that threatened the entire world. Despite being undead herself, she didn’t want the entire world turned. Darukar – and the Kingdom of El’kireth – was unique in that it produced sapient unliving. Every other version of undead were mindless, enslaved to the will of a necromancer.

It was an abomination.

However, the biggest motivator for her quest was simple revenge. She’d become attached to Darukar. She had found a home. Friends that were as close as family. And Micayne had destroyed it all, killing hundreds of thousands as if they were nothing more than fodder for his own goals.

The man needed to pay for that, and Talia intended to force the issue.

So, she ran, casting her senses wide as she crisscrossed the forest in a search grid. Over and over, she covered the same ground as she looked for anything that might indicate which way Micayne had gone. She knew the general direction he’d taken off, but after that, the trial had gone cold.

But nobody was perfect, and a man as steeped in death as Micayne would inevitably leave some sort of trail. Talia only needed to find it.

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The search had been ongoing for weeks, but she refused to give up. Soon enough, those weeks turned to multiple months. At times, she returned to the tower to report her findings – or lack thereof – and she heard tales of the war with the Imperium. During her last visit, she had learned that Zeke had gone into a dungeon in search of levels and a natural treasure attuned to disease, but other than that, everything seemed normal back there.

So, she had no excuses not to continue her search.

It was only after two months of nearly constant activity that she finally found a clue. It was just a piece of bone, but Talia could recognize the aura of undeath surrounding it. She knelt in place, leaning close without daring to touch it. For all she knew, it could be a trap meant to kill or convert an unwary passerby. She had no idea if such a thing was possible – especially from something so innocuous as touching a bone – but Talia knew better than to underestimate the wily necromancer.

After all, insane though he might have been, he was still an unsurpassed genius who’d managed to achieve true necromance – and lichdom, apparently – in the Mortal Realm. That made him the sort of person who could potentially the heavens. Even normal necromancers – if such a term could be applied to those sorts – were considered kill-on-sight in most civilizations. But an ascender who’d crossed that threshold in the Mortal Realm? He was a weapon of massive proportion.

And Talia wouldn’t allow him to reach his potential. She would succumb to true death before that happened.

After studying the bone – it was a human femur – for a few minutes, she surmised that it wasn’t inherently dangerous. So, she built a fire and burned the thing before moving on, expanding her search in a circular grid radiating from the site where she’d found the clue. She went over everything with a fine-toothed comb, slowing to a crawl so she wouldn’t stand a chance of missing anything.

And after only a day, she found her second clue.

The bits of flesh were gone and long rotted, but Talia could sense the subtle aura they had left behind. That led her to a few clumps of moldy earth that told her to the next indicator that undead had been in the area.

Over and over, she found various out-of-place details that told her a story of Micayne’s path. As a lich, the man was one of the undead, but he could keep himself together well enough to hide his own trail. The same could not be said for his minions, who were prone to rotting. They were kept upright via his magic, but in the end, he couldn’t forestall the inevitable rot that came with their nature. Eventually, they would be nothing but skeletons, devoid of all flesh and wholly reliant on his skills to keep them going.

At that point, they’d be almost impossible to track, except by those who could sniff out magic. Such trackers existed. Likely, the kobold rangers had such a skill, though communicating with them was frustratingly difficult. That was part of the reason Talia had foregone using them. The other reason was because she felt it necessary to do the job herself. It was a personal vendetta, and one she would entrust to no one else.

Except maybe Zeke or Pudge.

Nobody else understood what Micayne could do. Even her undead friends who’d survived the fall of Darukar were unsuited for the task. So, she continued on alone, traveling through the forest and eventually reaching a coastal plain. Because of her unerring focus, she wasn’t certain how far she’d gone. Maybe as much as a thousand miles, but no more than that. In any case, the territory was wholly unfamiliar, as were the dangers.

As she discovered when she stumbled upon a nest of human-sized, wasp-like creatures that burst from the ground with fury at her intrusion.

“Intruder!” one buzzed.

“Protect the nest!” another shrieked.

Talia tried to raise her hands and tell them she meant them no harm, but the creatures were upon her in an instant. More distressingly, they could fly and were armed with enormous, sword-sized stingers that they intended to use upon her. They’d also managed to surround her. So, she knew she would need to fight if she intended to survive.

Or maybe she just had a little frustration to work out after spending more than eight weeks following Micayne’s trail. Whatever the case, judging by the results of [Eyes of the Revenant], the creatures were powerful, but not so strong that she needed to run:

Verspiran Warrior – Level 78

Strength: Average

Endurance: Low

Agility: Very High

Dexterity: Very High

Intelligence: Low

Wisdom: Average

Resistances: Average

Most used Skill: [Agonizing Sting]

There were more than a dozen of the creatures, which meant that they would pose quite a threat. Or, in the back of her mind, she had to acknowledge that she hoped it meant that they would prove to be a challenging foe.

She erupted into motion, pushing her speed to its limit as she utilized [Death Claws], which was an evolution of [Calcification] that added an aura of invasive death to the expression of the skill. In addition, she used [Plague Strike] as well as [Chill of Undeath]. As always, she had [Inevitability] active, augmenting her speed even more than her base attributes would normally allow. Finally, she used [Frigid Claws] and [Plague Strike], wrapping her elongated claws in a swirl of green and white.

A second later, she was upon the first verspiran warrior, and her claws exploded through its thorax in a shower of viscera and chitin. The others had barely moved by the time she treated the second to a similar fate. And the third beat its wings in the hopes of escape. It only made it a few inches before she exploded through it as well.

Apparently, their low endurance meant that she didn’t even need her normal skills, so she let those fall away. Instead, with only [Death Claws] and [Inevitability] remaining active, she focused every thought on pushing herself ever faster. The queasiness and head high that came with those extreme speeds was familiar – almost comforting – but she knew that if she kept it up for too long – as she had in the past – she would need days of recovery.

But her goal was simple – end the fight before they wasps ever had a chance to respond. They weren’t strong enough to resist her. Indeed, they seemed like they were speed-focused creatures that normally played a similar role to the one she occupied. They were just inferior to her, and as such, they’d picked a fight they simply could not win.

Over the next fifteen seconds, Talia destroyed almost twenty wasps. Then, suddenly, the air went quiet, and she realized that she was all alone. There were probably many more of the creatures in their nest belowground. She could sense them, after a fashion. But they seemed to have had enough.

“I didn’t come here to fight,” she said. “I’m just passing through. I would appreciate it you didn’t make me kill any more of you.”

There was only silence in answer.

So, without further distractions, she continued on her way. She thought she was getting closer to her goal, and she didn’t intend to let anything distract her.