Toren Daen

I peered over the edge of the rooftop, looking at the milling undead below. Their skin was sloughing off, all in various states of decay. Instead of bright, shining violet, their eyes were dull pinpricks of purple. They wandered about lethargically, dragging themselves without purpose.

Most had cuts along their spines where half-decayed red runes stood out, making my head swim with questions.

“So they just stay in the streets even after losing aggro?” I asked Darrin, who was crouched by my side.

He nodded, his eyes trained on the next building. “Once they pop up, they don’t go away until you cut off their heads or pierce their hearts. They’re unrelenting, horrid bastards, but most are easy to fool.”

I frowned. “Most?” I asked.

“The ones that chased us up the stairs back when I found you,” Darrin said, “Those ones pop up if the mages they’re fighting don’t die fast enough. They’re smarter, faster, and more deadly. You can avoid these grunts just fine by muffling your steps, but those ones will follow you even if you don’t make a sound. And they’ll compel the others to follow.”

I remembered the zombies that had tracked us so far, only letting off once Darrin and I leapt to the walls of the skyscraper. Their skin hadn’t been nearly as decayed as the other corpses, with most of them largely intact. What did that mean? Did these zombies lose their abilities as they decomposed? Or was it something else?

“So we stick to the rooftops,” I said, “At least until the store I saw.” I looked back at the striker. “How do you feel about being hauled through the air?”

Darrin’s sharp emerald eyes flashed with something giddy. “Like you did to get me to the skyscraper’s walls? I’d be up for that any day.”

—

And so we found ourselves hopping from building to building. I pulled Darrin along, the man whooping in the air beside me.

It was a noticeable drain on my mana reserves to hold a grown man in the air, made even more difficult by the fact that he had to keep watch on his own mana constantly. If he let his focus slip for even an instant, his natural defenses would lash out at my control, ramping the difficulty up exponentially.

The striker seemed to be enjoying the ride far more than I was. I looked down at a street, a few corpses meandering here and there along the decimated pavement. I held my arm behind me, suctioning my hand to the bricks. The soles of my feet lashed themselves to the wall, keeping me from falling. I hung there like a certain web-slinging superhero, watching for any of the elite zombies that might see through my sound-dampening.

I was close to the store I’d spotted coming in. The signs of my previous battle were all around me: scorched earth, cuts in the building where the wind had ground against stone, and shards of metal still lodged in the street. I spotted the metal pole I’d perched on, cut cleanly through near the base.

And then I finally spotted my quarry. A bright sign illuminated a dark storefront, a splash of color amidst the ever-present gray.

Trader Joe’s.

I looked down the street, keeping my eyes peeled for the elite undead who were smart enough to attack me on sight rather than sound. “See anything?” I asked Darrin. The sound barrier I maintained around us made it safe to talk, and it was always good to have a second pair of eyes.

“Can you float me around that corner?” he asked, pointing toward the edge of the building I was hanging off of. “We gotta check our corners.”

I obliged, willing the mana carrying him to shift him further. The control aspect of my telekinetic spellform didn’t have the same issues with power exertion over distance. The force I could exert with my pushes and pulls decreased linearly the further they got from my body. With absolute control, however, it was more complicated. The further the mana was from me, the harder it was to maintain: not in an easy-to-discern way like the other aspect, though.

It was a shame I couldn’t make myself fly with my telekinesis. Everything I controlled moved relative to my own body, so I couldn’t make myself simply hover.

Darrin peeked his head around the corner, swiveling his head. “We’re good,” he said, allowing me to draw him back. He followed my gaze to the Trader Joe’s sign. “Is that where we’re going? It doesn’t look special.”

“Yeah,” I replied.

I let us drop to the battered concrete, feeling an invisible weight leave my core as I released Darrin from my shimmering white telekinesis. Our feet touched down silently.

I darted toward the sliding doors of the whole foods store. I waited for a second in front of them for a moment.

“So, what are we waiting–” The doors opened as the sensor detected my presence. “For…” Darrin finished awkwardly.

I stepped in, my head darting left and right for the undead. The inside of the store was just as it might have been on Earth: a grocery aisle, one for dry goods, and more.

I was immediately struck by the smell. The odor of rotting vegetables assaulted my nose the moment I stepped inside, nearly making me gag. It wasn’t as bad as the Fiachran sewers, however. The source of the stench was quickly apparent: every single bit of produce left out was rotting, their deep brown juices soaking their stands.

“What the hell?” Darrin said, more taken aback by the smell than I was. “Is all the food here rotten?”

“No,” I said, stepping into the store once I realized there were no undead waiting. “Just the produce. It’s been left out for a long while, after all,” I said.

It made sense. Darrin said he’d been here for three weeks. All the perishable goods in this place hadn’t been rotated in nearly a month at least.

Darrin followed after me in a bit of awe as I navigated to the dry goods section. “I wondered how an entire civilization could feed themselves, packed in like sardines,” he said, his eyes tracing over everything. “But if there are a whole bunch of places like this, it makes sense.”

I grunted, not really listening. I knelt down in front of a bag of rice, turning it over. It was a good twenty pounds, labeled ‘Mahatma.’ “I’m going to grab all the rice I can,” I said, not looking back at Darrin. He still seemed to be in a bit of a daze. “You should probably get whatever you think your team needs.”

The piercing green eyes of the striker landed back on me as I inspected the bag. “Why are you focused on rice?” he asked, sounding a bit confused.

I sighed, then hefted the bag up to show him the back. “See this here?” I said, running my finger under the calorie count per serving. “That’s the amount of calories each cup of rice has. On average, rice has far more calories than any other grain of the same weight. Nearly three times for most.”

Darrin cocked his head, smirking slightly. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me here, Toren. You can read this font? And what are calories?”

“Yes, I can,” I said, sounding more venomous than I would’ve liked. “Calories are basically the energy you get from food. Just trust me.”

Darrin raised his hands, slightly taken aback by the snap in my tone. “Alright. I’ll see if there’s anything here they’d need.”

He sauntered off to inspect what this place had to offer, leaving me to silently stew. This would normally be the time I’d ask Dawn for her advice, or she would tell me what steps I could take next. These brief moments of silence after a conversation ended were when my bond and I spoke.

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Yet the silence between us yawned ever deeper, swallowing any chance of conversation. I looked up at the fluorescent lights above me as I stashed the bag of rice into my dimension ring.

I’d left the majority of my supplies back with the Unblooded Party, which allowed me to fill up on goods here. I grabbed gallons of water, rice, some flour, and other necessities. As I moved, I realized that I was probably showing too much familiarity with these systems.

The Alacryan alphabet wasn’t too far off from that of Earth, but there were still distinct differences. It wasn’t just different fonts: it was they were once one script but diverged a millennium ago. I had the advantage of growing up reading and writing both Alacryan and Earthen alphabets, so I wasn’t hampered by having to read these labels.

I had to remind myself that Darrin was. He wouldn’t be able to know what an elevator was, or even what calories were. Yet I acted familiar with all of these concepts.

Part of me wanted to act the fool, pretending to have simply guessed these things or use clever inferences to explain them away. Maybe I encountered something similar in another zone. Perhaps there is a prototype of a lift being used in Fiachra.

But another part of me was tired of pretending. I was more Earthen than Alacryan in my viewpoints and experience, and constantly having to suppress a fundamental part of myself left me drained. How long could one be in their hometown and pretend they were clueless to its workings when each and every street was memorized in the back of their minds?

My dimension ring was full relatively shortly. I’d probably grabbed a month’s worth of food, even accounting for the entire Unblooded Party. It wouldn’t be good food, but I wagered the mages would rather eat plain rice than nothing at all.

I found Darrin staring contemplatively at the self-checkout aisle. The screens displayed options for him to pay in big, bold letters. He seemed amused by that.

“Got everything you need?” I asked, trudging to his side.

He looked at me from the side of his eye. “Yup. I grabbed mostly canned food since the rest of the product here seems spoiled.”

“Good call,” I said. “Are you ready to–”

My words were cut off by the sound of a fireball detonating outside, the heat blowing through the windows. The glass rattled as mana flared, sending a shockwave through the ground.

Darrin and I were moving before I even registered what had happened. My first guess was that we had somehow been spotted, but the lack of undead around us quickly dispelled that hypothesis. “Did somebody else just pop into this zone?” I asked, keeping my eyes forward.

“Sounds like it!” Darrin said, smashing through the sliding doors. He didn’t even wait for them to automatically open, the glass bouncing off our protective shrouds. “Come on! We’ve got a chance to get them out with your help!”

I obliged, following the sounds of battle. The explosions and crashes, clear sounds of a fight, echoed from a block or so away. “How long do we have until the stronger undead start spawning?” I asked, trying to calculate the merits of rushing ahead of Darrin. I was faster than he was, after all.

“A minute or so,” he said. He must’ve seen the indecision in my eyes. “Go on ahead! I’ll catch up. You’re faster than me.”

I nodded, then slammed a push into the ground with a well-timed piston stamp. I silently lurched forward, speeding up as I moved toward the fight.

I could see the undead before I even noticed their target. They milled about weakly, chucking spells toward a central position in an almost lazy manner. But their numbers made up for their sloth: those spells quickly multiplied.

I saw something flash in the air, a quick glare of white before it retracted. Whatever it was, it was killing zombies quickly. The weapon scythed through their skulls like wheat until it was stopped by a conjured shield.

The weapon darted back toward its owner too fast for me to inspect it. I still couldn’t get a good look at who was fighting from the swarm blocking my sight, but I thought I had a good idea of where they were.

I focused on casting a sound spell. “You need to move to the south,” I said, casting my voice over the crowd. “You’ll be overwhelmed if you stay too long. More of these undead are going to spawn. I can help get you out, but I’m too far away right now.”

I didn’t get a reply, but I didn’t expect one. I held my breath, hoping my message had been received.

And then the direction of attacks changed. They abruptly shifted toward my direction, the person inside attempting to carve their way through.

Perfect, I thought, drawing Oath. I focused fire mana into the edge, concentrating it to a fine point. Then I looked up, gauging my foes. The undead hadn’t noticed me yet, as was to be expected: I hadn’t made a sound near them.

But that was about to change. I planted my foot back, holding my saber near my hip. Then I unfurled like a tornado, twisting my hip and lashing my arm out. My sword let out a horizontal cutting edge of fire, severing a dozen heads in a row before the zombies even realized what was happening.

The corpses dropped as I exhaled.

And then they turned to me. I was forced to use a telekinetic push to redirect a fireball, then use a slew of fireshot to knock a lurching zombie to the side. I parried the haphazard strike of a rusted sword, sliding my red-patterned saber along the edge and piercing the undead wielder straight through the eye.

Promise rocketed from its sheath, deflecting another blow that would’ve caved in my back. The little dagger twisted around, impaling itself into another skull.

Violet eyes went dark as my blades reaped bloody vengeance, but I knew my playtime was over when I turned aside an unexpectedly strong mace blow. The wielder wasn’t nearly as decomposed as the nearby grunts, and their eyes shone with explicit malice.

“Alright then,” I said through gritted teeth. I threw a testing telekinetic punch, simultaneously using Promise to ward off any normal undead that got too close. My telekinetic shroud resisted a dozen weaker spells as they splashed against it, the cost of dodging too wasteful.

The elite put its mace in the way of my blow but was unprepared to resist the force. Its arm twisted in a very unhealthy direction with a sickening crack. The momentum sent it stumbling slightly, but before I could finish it off, I was forced to deflect a whirling ball of orange fire, immediately followed by the rabid lunge of another elite undead.

The first creature wasn’t even phased by the destruction of its weapon arm, trying to claw at me with metal-coated fingers. I swung my hand to the side, the mana flowing through my veins and my telekinetic shroud enhancing the blow. The elite’s metal claws shattered from my knuckles, sending it to the ground. It snarled hideously, its rotting gums peeled back.

I caught the second elite’s skull with my palm, its arms too short to reach my body. I snarled, pumping fire mana through my hand.

A gout of flame burst from my palm, searing straight through the elite’s head and burning several lurching undead on the other side. I let go of the body, letting the headless corpse tumble. I stabbed Oath down into the body of my first opponent, relishing the blade piercing its heart.

Those burning purple eyes glared at me for a long instant, before the light vanished from it.

I distantly noticed punches of wind impacting the skulls around me, mowing them down fast. Darrin had arrived.

I spared a glance toward the north. That white flash was carving through the zombies like wheat, stalled for a few moments by elites that appeared to take their attention. But they were close now; only a bit more of a push and we would meet up.

I exhaled, then pushed outward with an unfocused nimbus of fire. The spell pushed away from me like the epicenter of an explosion, washing over the nearby undead.

This wasn’t one of my template spells. Its effects were noticeably weaker than my fireballs and fireshot, but these zombies barely had any defenses to speak of, besides the randomly conjured shield.

Corpses in a radius of several meters around me went up like dry tinder, snarling and screeching as they burnt away. Promise zipped about of its own accord, running itself through the chests and skulls of any undead that remained standing, ending them for good. The corpses littered the streets, a small circle devoid of enemies around me.

For a moment, I dared to think Darrin might be wrong. I could kill these things in droves, felling them like a woodcutter does a tree. I barely expended any mana doing so. Maybe I could stand my ground here, wiping them all out instead of having to run?

That thought was wiped from my mind very, very quickly. A dozen more hands punched through the already decimated concrete. Where before all the hands had been rotting, these were just a sickly gray.

All elites, I thought, calling Promise back to my hands. It took a good few strikes to take down the elites, and they tended to try and work together. They didn’t fall like chaff.

It was at that moment that a white flash severed the heads of a few standing undead. I turned, ready to greet the mage I would try and save.

And halted, my jaw growing slack. The white flash had been a long, white dagger, a ring on the pommel tied to some strange wire. But that wasn’t what made me feel a measure of shock.

The mage held his bone dagger in one hand, a length of that strange wire trailing from the hilt to a loop he held taught in his other fist. His teal green cloak seemed to float on his shoulders, and his windswept white hair was pulled away from his face.

Sevren Denoir’s sea-green eyes looked back at me, not mirroring my surprise in the slightest.