Scourge Forty - Zombies

A quick head-count proves entirely useless. Some of these undead don’t even have heads.

Still, I’m guessing there’s about forty of them? Maybe fifty. I can’t quite tell the difference between a ghoul or a zombie, but some of these are weird monstrosities (and not the fun cuddly kind) made of various body parts sewn together, fused bones holding them in place.

Do we need a plan?

Right now, my friends and I are just standing in the entrance, with only a few monster wolves between us and the pack of undead. I can’t even tell how many might be hiding in the dark.

But they’re just simple undead.

Felix comes up with her own plan, and uses it right away. “Get aliven’t!” she shouts as she rushes into the fray, her staff--without the knife on the end--swinging around so hard and fast that it hums through the air. It meets the head of a zombie and there’s a loud splat, like someone dropping a watermelon. The spray is pretty similar to a watermelon being dropped too.

“Alright, I guess we’re fighting!” I cheer as I step up behind my wolves. “Go boys! Eat them up!”

The monster wolves don’t need to be told twice. They dart ahead with wild howls that end when they clamp onto the nearest of the undead.

I raise my arms, glance at the mess that Felix has made of her clothes, and use that as inspiration to get my disgust churning in my core. With a bit of focus I summon a dozen black lances of Dark magic which zip ahead and into the biggest of the undead.

Esme’s a bit slower to act, her magic taking a while longer to form, but when she’s ready, she swings her arms around and bolts of crackling lightning snap through the air and plunge into the zombies. She’s focusing on the bigger groups, where they’re grouped up and where her magic can chain from one undead to another.

I’m not sure how good electricity will be against the undead. Do they even have working nerves?

Judging by the way they shake and shiver and collapse with smoking eyes and ears, it’s not all that bad.

Bianca takes in a deep breath, holds it, then when one of the wolves is batted aside by a bigger undead, she lets it all out as a wash of fire that lights up the vault.

“Hey!” Esme shouts. “No fire in the vault! There’s books in here!”

Bianca stops, then coughs out a few little burps of fire. “Forgive me,” she says. “I’ll stick to using water, then.”

I unlatch my waterskin and toss it to her. She catches on right away and empties it onto the floor. Most of the water never touches the ground and instead floats around and turns into a spinning ball. Bianca thrusts a hand towards the nearest undead, and the ball streaks out and splashes against its face.

Not bad. But not fast and hard enough to really hurt something that probably doesn’t need to breathe. Still, she’s doing her part, and for someone who hasn’t had the training my friends and I have received from Mom, she’s doing pretty well.

I glance around the battlefield. The wolves are holding their own. They’ve spread out, so we have something of a cordon around us. Felix is past that, swinging her polearm around and beheading and bearming anything that gets too close.

I look further out. The bigger, scarier undead are still approaching. A lot of those are so deformed and weird that they can’t rush in the way the zombies have. That’ll be my priority, then.

With a bit more focus I start creating more dark lances, then I shoot them over the zombies ahead of us so that they plunge deep into the bigger nasties at the back. It takes a few fits to kill the first one, but it goes down and stops wiggling.

I focus on the next. If I can take them all out, then they won’t be able to stretch our battle line at all, and Felix won’t have to deal with them up close.

Esme doesn’t cast anything for a few long seconds, but I can hear her muttering under her breath the entire time. “Got it!” she shouts. “Felix, get back here, quick!”

Felix obeys, disengaging with the zombie she’s fighting with and rushing back to our side so fast that I need to turn my face away from the wash of wind that carries with her. “I’m back!” she says.

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Esme raises her hands over her head, and beads of sweat slip out from her hair which is starting to rize up and frizz even more than usual. I step back as a few electrical snaps buzz out through her hair, making some strands stand on end.

And then she lowers her hands down in one violent gesture.

The air fills with a scent, like burning oxygen, and I feel my clothes sticking closer to me.

“Close your eyes!” Esme shouts.

I do as she says, and not a moment too soon.

There’s a bright flash, so strong that I can see the dark veins that trace the insides of my eyelids. A loud crack sounds, and I feel a burst of air shoving me back a step. The noise echoes through the vault, repeating itself over and over again.

When I open my eyes, most of the zombies are on the ground, smoking as if they were just flipped off a grill. They’re very much aliven’t.

The bigger ones at the back don’t look much better, but some are still able to move. I’m not sure if their moans are the normal moans of the undead or actual pained moans.

“Nice work,” I say.

Esme grins, then wipes a sleeve across her brow. “Thank you! I need to work on the cast time for that one.”

“That was fast enough,” Felix says. “Lets pummel the last few down?”

“Sure,” I say. “Bianca, are you alright?”

Bianca nods. “I’m well,” she says. She flicks out her arm and her watery whip snaps out, the edge thin and fast enough that it cracks into the side of one of the bigger zombie’s heads and leaves a big gash behind.

“You’re getting the hang of it,” I say with a thumb’s up.

A few of my wolves were a bit close to Esme’s attack, and are looking a bit dazed. I should have called them back, or told them to cover their eyes. They’ll probably heal up in a few hours. Monsters are pretty resilient.

Mopping up the rest of the undead is an easy chore. They’re coming to us, and aren’t being stealthy about their presence. In reality, I think the average person is much tougher than the average undead. Messier to fight though.

I spear the bigger ones until they stop moving, then stab them a few more times just in case. Felix brains a few more, and Esme switches over to using wind magic of all things to slice off heads while she giggles to herself.

Using too much surprise magic makes her feel a bit... loopy.

“Only one left,” Felix says. “Anyone want the honours?”

I look at her, and at the last undead. It’s a rather pitiful ghoul, its legs... somewhere over there with the other bodies that got hit by Esme’s spells. It’s crawling our way though, so I guess it’s still got some strength to it.

“I’d rather you honour us by taking a bath,” Esme says. “You look filthy.”

“I smell kind of rank too,” Felix says with good cheer.

She raises her staff way up above her head then turns her face to the side before bringing it down with a hard crack.

I glance around, searching for movement in the vault. There are plenty of bookshelves and boxes still sitting in their spots. A few have fallen over and spilled their contents across the floor.

Someone’s going to have to go through all of those and figure out which papers go where.

“Hey, boys,” I say to the wolves. They turn my way, ears perking up and tails wagging. “Go look around. If you find anything dead, bark twice, then give it a bite or two, yeah?”

The biggest of the wolves gives me an affirmative ‘bork’ then he skedaddles off into the stacks and shelves, looking for undead that haven’t quite gotten the memo.

“So,” I ask, mostly to Esme. “Now what?”

“Now... I suppose we can gather up all the body parts and toss them outside to burn.”

“Not it,” Felix says.

“Why not? You’re already filthy.”

I shake my head. “We’ll get some monsters to do it. What about the vault? It’s clearly been attacked.”

“Yeah,” Esme says. “I... I don’t know what to do about it, but there should be a guide. We’ll need to find the vault’s Index. From there we’ll know what to do.”

***