Just as Fungus and myself were coming down from the mountaintop, about half way down the path all of my leg muscles began to cramp, and I almost sprained an ankle. I had pushed my muscles way too hard by staying into that bullet-time mode for too long during the fight, and I was now feeling the consequences. I had to ask for a piggyback ride from Fungus, as we continued to head down towards Lingfeng’s house so we could tell him about the Undead Templar. While we were going down the meandering mountain path, I took my time to interrogate Timmy about his capacity to play back sounds that were stored inside of my memories from Earth.
Timmy, how did you manage to play back that Wile-E-Coyote fall sound? Is there some sort of Media Player feature incorporated into the system that I do not know about?
Timmy: Your Intuition has unlocked a hidden System option.
You have unlocked the [Soulbound Media Player]
Description:
This is a Media Player for audio files provided by the System, or found within your memories. It usually acts like a Background and Boss Fight Music Player, but can be used in the many other ways that you might expect from a Media Player.
The background music provides no benefits outside of entertainment value, but it has the bonus of not interfering with your actual hearing because it is processed on a separate neuronal network than that of the incoming external sounds. Queue that Epic Boss Fight music before you go into the room for your next Raid Wipe, and don’t worry about the noise distracting you!
Damn...Awesome! Does that mean that you can play back all of my favourite tunes from Earth on that thing?
Timmy: Sure, but they will be played back the way you REMEMBER them, not the way they ACTUALLY WERE. Which will mean improperly understood or outright missing lyrics, musical dissonance, memory gaps, humming, lalala-ing, improper timing etc, you get the point. The frailties of human memory caused by the previous fleshy body cannot be avoided even after all of the data gets migrated directly onto the soul for across-Universes storage and travel.
Fair enough, I guess. Still, a huge bonus. Maybe I can teach Xibei or Liliam to play some of the Earth’s tunes properly. We’d make a killing plagiarizing all of the top hits. I probably have a lifetime’s worth of those things stored inside of my soul-memory. How does a Lightning Cultivator play the “electric” guitar anyway? Would he deliver a “shocking” performance leaving the audience electrified by the production? More likely half-dead and foaming at the mouth from the voltaic overstimulation.
Just as I was getting lost in my musings while riding Fung like a pack mule, we finally got out of the mountain’s forested area, and into the Sect. When we were about to head to Lingfeng’s house, the Sect’s Intruder Alarm began to yell again.
Immediately upon hearing the alert, we could see rows upon rows of Templars sporting both the tabards of the Sun and of the Flame rush out of every house, and converge upon a certain spot in the Sect.
Sure enough, another intruder had been caught, and was now trashing the Sect down near Badstreet where Jin lived. The demoniac scout had popped one of those weird items that transformed a person into a flesh behemoth the moment he had been caught, and was punching his way through the walls of a house.
God dammit! Not again!
Of course, the Flameboys were Leeroy-ing straight into the behemoth’s fists, and were getting turned into canned tuna inside of their platings.
Strangely, I saw even Jin among them, tossing fireballs at the transformed demoniac with a mad fervor in his eyes that had not been there before. I hoped that the flame Templars were not turning him into some sort of religious fanatic. At least he was fucking smart enough to stay out of melee range for now.
Soon, even Lingfeng and two other Elders showed up, and began peppering the behemoth from range with wind-blades, icebolts, and some sort of corrosive acid bolts. Not wanting to see any more people die, even Fung and myself had joined the fight, pumping arrows into the Mini-Boss.
While it had not worked on Senior Knight Fall, I was not about to give up on my attempt at trying to use a Lightning-charged spirit stone to shock a target to death. I summoned one Lightning spirit stone, then I told Fung to toss the thing at the demoniac’s head while I was pulling back an arrow on my bow. I had very few Qi to spare now, since I had had very little time to regenerate any when we were coming down the mountain in a hurry, so I could only stay in bullet-time for a very short period. Still, it proved to be enough. The Lightning stone flew, and the moment it reached between the behemoth’s eyebrows, my arrow pierced it, unleashing all of the Lightning charge stored inside.
Immediately, everyone in a two meter radius around the behemoth got shocked down on their arses, including the demoniac himself, as he fell to the floor spasming from the currents.
Timmy: Trina used Lightning. It’s Super Effective
I guess unprotected flesh is not that efficient at withstanding sudden voltaic charges, eh?
I then saw a huge shadow wielding a broken sword rush right past me, and plunge the remains of the blade straight into the back of the head belonging to the behemoth where the spine met the skull with a solid crunch.
Instantly, the demoniac stopped spasming, and breathed his last.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
"F..Fall…!"
How the hell did he get back here so fast? I saw him take that two mile plunge!
His armor still looked incinerated and twisted in all the wrong ways, and his bastard sword was a mere fragment of its former self, but otherwise he seemed intact. What the hell does it take to get rid of this guy?
"STAY BACK EVERYONE!" I yelled.
"SENIOR KNIGHT FALL IS UNDEAD AND I CAN PROVE IT!"
Silence suddenly dropped over the battlefield for a mere second before all of the Templars began to hiccup like they were holding back some serious cringe.
*PFUAHAHAHA!*
All of the Templars then burst into laughter like they had heard the best joke of the year.
Ok...WHAT...THE...FUCKING...HELL!!!
Everybody was looking at myself and Fung like we were some sort of cretins.
"Well of course I am." Senior Knight Fall took off his great helm, revealing a totally black skull adorned in a myriad of yellow-glowing runes that had been carved straight into the bone which kept pulsating rhythmically.
"What did you expect out of one of the Senior Knights of the Temple?"
Lingfeng was facepalming himself on the side. Ok...so I was missing some sort of secret-but-not-so-secret common knowledge that everybody knew around here.
"Trina, girl...come over here. I need to tell you a few things." Lingfeng pulled me over.
After a brief explanation from Lingfeng and a couple more of those thick-ass books that were passed onto me once I got back home, I finally found the answer why nobody had been surprised by the appearance of Senior Knight Fall.
The Empire of the Sun was the only necrocracy in the world and all of the Senior Knights of the Temple were called Sacred Undead. They were the only entities in the world to wear that label, and they were the creation of the Immortal Emperor of the Sun himself alongside with the “Eternal Army” of the Empire which was made up out of everybody that had ever died within the borders of the Empire of the Sun.
This was also the reason the Empire had never been conquered, because the Eternal Army had beat the shit out of any invaders.
The Emperor was Immortal for real, because his body had been destroyed a few times down to the last atom during the whole history of the Empire, but he had still remade a new body for himself out of the very earth with practiced ease. He could also not be soul-trapped in a gem just like the Gods, Angels and Demons or Devils, which made me certain that the dude was either a System Game Master or Pay2Win account.
There were a set of agreement papers that everybody who passed through the borders of the empire of the Sun had to sign. It was a small legal agreement which stated that unless you otherwise had arrangements for your body to be shipped away to another country, if you died within the borders of the empire of the Sun, your corpse would automatically become the property of the State, and the State could do whatever it pleased with the meatbag and bones. Usually, the body would get boiled, the meat would get peeled off the bones then used as animal fodder or fertilizer, and then the remaining skeleton would get shipped off for reanimation, to join the ranks of the Eternal Army.
Compared to the more hideous reanimation methods that most of the necromancers used world-wide, which involved trapping the soul of a person inside the reanimated skeleton for it to be able to function independently, the reanimated skeletons from the Empire of the Sun did not have any souls inside of them. They were more akin to golems made out of bones rather than being necromantic constructs. The skeletons functioned based on a very complex set of runes and spell circuits that got carved directly onto the bones when they were initially “processed”, which basically transformed the skeletons into independent and self-sustainable automatons that were capable of following complex military commands, but remained only that, an automaton incapable of conscious thinking or any sort of suffering, making the skeletons easily disposable pawns in case of emergency, yet fierce opponents when in huge numbers. And “numbers” was the least of the problems of the Empire of the Sun.
Many had tried to duplicate the runes and circuits that the Empire of the Sun deployed for their Eternal Army, but none had managed to create a successful copy. Only the Emperor himself and a handful of his most trusted underlings knew the secret to the proper reanimation procedure, since the reanimations were done in huge batches of thousands at a time, rather than one by one.
As far as the Undead Templars were concerned, they had voluntarily chosen to have their souls grafted directly onto their skeleton bodies, which had been magically adjusted to act similarly to a soul stone instead of just using the basic AI runic configuration, allowing for the soul of the deceased person to get bound directly to the bones and gain a semi-immortal body that could continue on leveling. From a physical standpoint, there were very little drawbacks to the conversion, but it was a terrible emotional burden to be carried by the converted person, since they would basically forever become trapped inside of their unfeeling, unflinching bony bodies for the rest of eternity, or at least until their bodies got completely destroyed during their quest for justice.
Saint Drawn Mortdecai was even rumored to be the Emperor of the Sun himself, a hidden alt identity that the Emperor used to “go out and have fun” with.
All of the holiest of the old Templars were Sacred Undead, and they had all been named after the way they died, contrary to what I had previously thought, which was that they had given themselves weird names to intimidate their enemies. Sord Kai had died from sword wounds, Fayur Everburn had died in a fire, Harrow the Silent had died from an arrow piercing his skull, Martel Moreton had had his head caved in with a martel, Trapp Ackerman had died in a spike trap and Gravitas Johnson had also pulled a Wile-E-Coyote similar to Fall.
Just imagine a bunch of never dying, never stopping, never tiring holy instruments of divine wrath, and you would get the Senior Templars.
And what separated these guys from the rest of the clergy was that they were not a bunch of fanatics. They knew how to see in shades of grey, because they had known, or had even been evil themselves at some point, and could tell apart what was truly right and what was truly wrong, unlike some of the more indoctrinated clergy of the other Temples or the Western world.
To the uninformed, most of the Senior Templars seem to take a vow of silence. They also seemed to never take their armour off. And even when some pieces would fall off or get damaged during combat, they had a full body illusion formation sculpted right into their bones that made them look like living people to anyone gazing at them. Very few commoners knew of their true nature, but most merchants, adventurers and nobility knew very well what they were. Seduction would not work on them because they were dead, similarly any type of mind control, fear or will altering spells would also fail to take hold. They would not stop in their pursuit of Justice until their bodies would be literally turned into dust, which was quite admirable. The only problem with the Senior Templars of the Temple of the Sun was that they would rarely leave the borders of the Empire of the Sun together as one unit.
Only if some major demonic invasion or some undead plague occured in some other countries would you get to see them there, and usually on the front lines, since “fear of death” was not in their vocabulary.