So, we had blunted the attack here, and dealt with those cannons. But I immediately noticed another long range problem. There were three snipers atop another hill in the distance. Well, when I say I noticed them, it’s because one of their bullets rebounded off my chest. It probably wouldn’t have killed me anyway, with the strength enhancements I had. But, thanks to the thin, jumpsuit-like armor we had found in the tower that I was wearing under my clothes, it didn’t even hurt that much. It was just a slight sting. And it immediately told me where those people were as my eyes narrowed that way. With a word as I touched my side, I activated the object-slowing Kevlar spell I’d learned the year before. Between that and the suit’s own defenses, I would be safe from their bullets. Or musket balls, whatever they were using.
Unfortunately for those guys, they weren’t safe from me. Even as a few more shots rebounded off me or whistled past my ear, I was already raising my staff and pointing that way. No, I was pointing slightly above them. The men seemed to realize their attacks weren’t doing anything, and scrambled backward while looking up to see what I was pointing at. With two short words, I activated a new spell on my staff. This one wasn’t a wind blast like the last. Instead, it summoned a coffin in the air above them. Yes, I didn’t have to use a coffin for this, but Laein had talked me into it with puppy dog eyes. She really wanted me to have a little style.
The men had just turned their guns toward the coffin when it crashed down into the ground between them, shattering apart. That revealed the figure inside. At first glance, it would look like any other zombie. Well, a child version anyway. Her name was Penny, a young brunette girl who had been around eight years old when she died of pneumonia about a month ago. Her parents took her to Gaia for help, but it was too late by the time they got there. I had done what I could for them, bringing her spirit back to tell them goodbye after Gaia used a potion to temporarily remove the Bystander Effect. Her parents were able to see her one more time, and had asked me to give their daughter’s death meaning. With their permission, her ghost was now part of my group, and I had done a little something extra with her body.
Even as the men turned their guns on her, they would find out she wasn’t an ordinary zombie. She leapt at the first man, her strength taking him to the ground instantly even as she viciously bit into his neck, sending a spray of blood over her face that made her look even more wild. The men shot at her, but the bullets did little. She was an enhanced golem, technically being directed by Fathom as her body proceeded to rip through the snipers. They did their best, but she was moving too quickly, running between their legs on her hands and knees, using her greatly/enhanced strength to rip their weapons away, break their bones, and shatter their knees to put them on her level so she could finish them off. Fathom moved her around like a possessed, possibly rabid wild animal.
Just like that, it was over. The golem would return to the coffin, which would repair itself back to pristine condition and allow her to regenerate.
I was already putting that out of my mind as I turned a corner in the town, my gaze snapping over as a sound reached me.
To my left, I saw a figure in brown leather armor holding a large sword as he raised it up to bring down into a cowering figure I recognized as Rakel Baustuf, a simple Relukun (the wood people) carpenter who had helped put the surrounding wall together in the first place. Just before the man standing over him could drive the sword into his chest, I quickly summoned a portal in front of me, positioning the other end just to the side of the man so I could shove my staff through. His blade collided with my weapon, taking him completely by surprise.
Before he could recover, I froze my staff in mid-air, leaving it there as I teleported myself directly behind him. My right hand caught the back of his neck, as I used my muscle-spasm power to make him jerk and drop his sword. “What’s the matter,” I snapped, hearing the rage in my own voice, “didn’t expect your victims to fight back?”
With that, while the sword was still falling, I summoned my staff back to my hand, dismissing the portal as I spun in a quick, full three-sixty. In the process, the staff collided with this fucker’s chest, and I triggered the charge on it. The blast of kinetic energy lifted the man off the ground, sending him hurtling backward away from me (and, more importantly, away from Rakel). He collided with an overturned wagon, crashing loudly through the crates scattered across the road.
The man recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. Even as he started to heave himself back to his feet with a bellow of anger, he found himself held in place by several translucent hands that reached up out of the ground. More ghosts. I had summoned six of them, all keeping the man down as he struggled to escape their grasp.
Holding up that blue gemstone I’d received in that message from Ehn, I peered at the struggling man through the thing. He didn’t glow, which meant he played no important part in the future. Maybe because he had always died here. I wasn’t sure. “Finish it,” I snapped, already turning to walk away from the man. Behind me, I heard Seth’s voice as the ghost appeared standing over the struggling, cursing figure. “Hey buddy. How do you like being on the other end of it?”
The man, whoever he was, didn’t get the chance to respond. Because Seth had a very solid knife, holding it in his own ghostly hand as he drove the blade through the fucker’s throat. I didn’t see it happen, already moving away as I dismissed that particular piece of shit from my mind. But I heard him die. And I felt it. The rush of death energy went flying around me, then into me as Seth sent it my way. I absorbed it, absorbed his essence, his power.
He was a Heretic, that was for sure. The rush made me stagger, a gasp escaping me. Power, he’d had several powers, I could tell. There wasn’t time to focus on that, but it was obvious that this would’ve been a much harder fight if I hadn’t taken him completely by surprise. Before he knew anything was actually happening beyond exterminating some helpless villagers, I had stripped his weapon away and knocked the wind out of him with that blast from my staff. Then he was held in place by a bunch of ghosts.
He wasn’t exactly a top-tier Heretic by the standards of what I was accustomed to seeing in the present. But he wasn’t weak either. Which meant that these other people he was with were probably along the same lines. These were Heretics, Crossroads people. They had found Laramie Falls, and were trying to kill everyone in it. No questions, no hesitation, no negotiation. They came to kill everyone.
Unfortunately, I still didn’t get any memory uploads. Bastet had said that those could be spotty. Some I would get another as I wouldn’t. It was kind of a crapshoot. Which meant I didn’t get an easy answer to the number one question I had right now.
What the actual fuck was going on?
No sooner had I wondered that, than the sound of a voice bellowed through the air from off in the distance. “None escape! None leave! Our investigations have made it clear, the Necromancer calls this place home, and these people allies. They all die tonight!”
That revelation hit me like a truck. Me. They were here looking for me. No, not looking for. They were here to kill me, and everyone else who was my friend. They had found out about some powerful Necromancer who ‘called Laramie Falls home.’ Of course I called it home, they didn’t know any of the details. They didn’t need to. All they cared about was that I was a Necromancer and they were here to destroy the town and kill everyone who lived here.
Stolen story; please report.
Well fuck that, Fathom snapped inside my head. Let’s show these assholes why fucking with the people we care about is a very bad idea.
Yeah, that sounded good to me. And I knew just how to start. Well, aside from having already killed some of them. Which, to be fair, was also a pretty good way to start.
But no, what I had in mind was more broadly effective. Clenching one hand into a fist, I snarled, “They want a Necromancer, we’ll give them a Necromancer.” And that was exactly what I did. Standing there in the front area of the village near the still smoldering gates, I focused on more of my ghosts, a lot more. They emerged from the air in front of me and began to spread out in every direction. A swarm of several dozen were suddenly in play, searching through the village for threat and friend alike.
Even as I was doing that, I felt a tug along my Necromancy sense. It came from one of the ghosts I had already positioned overhead. There were several up there, invisible to the naked eye. Whenever they spotted anything I needed to know about, they would let me know, just like this one did. I got that tug and a general impression of what he was saying. That came courtesy of a spell I had set up on each of these spotter ghosts before any of this even happened. It was similar to the spell I used to manually see through their senses, but this one could be triggered by them putting just a little of the energy I gave them into it.
That was a whole system we had set up over these past couple months. Anytime I went into any fight or anything that could end up badly, or even if I was just dealing with a bad feeling, I sent my spotter ghosts out. If they saw anything, they would send an image straight to me of what they were looking at. Even that probably would’ve been too distracting in the heat of battle, but I didn’t have to deal with it immediately. Whoever was copiloting, Fathom in this case, would react to the alert first. If it was something that required an immediate reaction such as dodging, they would take over to do that.
Yeah, it was a fair bit of work to set up, and required someone to have a copilot in their head, but hey, anyone possessed by Seosten could do that. And it worked even better than my item sense in some ways. It was several more sets of invisible eyes hovering up in the air for a birds eye view all around me. Which made me harder to ambush, as Percy, Laein, Eurso, Laein, Cerberus, and Laein (she was really determined to pull it off) could attest from training matches we’d had.
In this case, it was a warning that there was a man in a cloak with a bow and arrow creeping carefully around the side of the nearby building. He was far enough away to not set off my item sense, and almost invisible himself in the clearly magically conjured darkness. Fathom made sure I knew about it as he nocked an arrow and leaned around the building. There was a very faint glow on the arrow itself, so it was clearly magical.
Even as he sent the arrow at me, my hand snapped out. I wasn’t looking that way, still seeing the man through the ghost vision (it was sort of like having a view in the corner of my eye that I could see if I squinted that way). The arrowhead barely left his bow before I focused on it with the power I’d gotten from that Fomorian crocodile monster. Suddenly, the arrow’s resistance to being moved skyrocketed. It hit the ground after only going halfway to its target, me. As soon as it did, the arrow vanished, and a bunch of glowing chains sprang into the air around where it had been. So either they wanted to capture me alive, or they thought it would be easier to kill me if I couldn’t move.
The man was already nocking another arrow, cursing about losing what he thought was the element of surprise. I turned to face him and took a couple steps that way. In the process, another man came rushing out of an open doorway where he had been lurking. He swung a club at the side of my head, but I had been expecting that. Before he could get even halfway through the swing, a ghost materialized to one side and stripped the weapon away smoothly. He was sent stumbling off-balance, which another ghost took advantage of by slamming bodily into him. The now-disarmed man hit the dirt in front of me with a grunt, and Fathom was already using my foot to lash out and hit his face. The impact knocked him onto his back, where he lay mostly still, groaning in pain.
I stepped over the fallen man as those ghosts focused on holding him down just in case he was faking. The man with the bow had finished taking aim, which I thought was adorable. Just as he went to launch his next arrow, I used my object pausing power on the string of the bow. He released it, expecting the strength to snap forward and send the arrow flying. Instead, the string stayed exactly where it was, and the arrow fell to the ground, where it exploded into another bunch of chains. Those chains latched onto the nearest target, the man himself. Immediately, he was trussed up tightly.
This was too easy. Either these guys weren’t Heretics, or they were very young and inexperienced. Maybe they were just the advanced foot soldiers, meant to kill the easy riffraff and build up new powers for themselves?
I wasn’t sure, but what I did know was that these people had been in here attacking and killing people I happened to care about. Summoning that gemstone back to my hand, I held it up to look at the man my ghosts were holding down. Damn, it glowed. He was too special to kill, as was the man who was tied up by his own bola arrow. Apparently both of them would either do something important, or have important descendants who needed them to be alive right now.
Just as that thought was crossing my mind, something erupted out of the ground right beneath my feet. No, it was the ground itself slamming upward. A pillar of rock and dirt launched me into the air. It lifted me just above the height of the nearest building roof, where I caught a glimpse of what had to be fifteen or twenty small glowing orbs. They were about the size of baseballs, flying straight at me while expanding, flames growing on them. Fireballs. There were a whole bunch of fireballs flying right at the space I was being shoved up into.
Reacting instinctively, I flung myself up and backwards away from that spot, using a charge from my staff to boost myself even further, just as those fireballs blew up in a spectacular explosion.
Unfortunately, that was exactly what my attacker wanted. I crashed into a bunch of nearly invisible wires that I hadn’t even sensed. As soon as they caught me, the wires ignited with a powerful jolt of electricity. It probably would’ve killed me outright if I hadn’t had that electrical resistance power. As it was, it shocked me enough that I was completely dazed and began to fall limply back to the ground.
However, just because I was dazed didn’t mean Fathom was. She took over and righted our body as we fell so we landed smoothly on our feet.
There was another man there, the source of this whole attack. He brought a metal-armored fist straight toward my face as I hit the ground, intent on punching through my face.
But while I was still recovering, Fathom was in full control. She made our head jerk to one side, allowing the fist to sail past us. Immediately, a sharp spike emerged from his extended hand. It would’ve cut straight through our throat, but we were both on the job. She continued our ducking and twisting motion, pivoting on one foot. At the same time, I used that object movement resistance power to slow the spike’s extension. It technically counted as an object.
Between both of us, we survived. The spike was slowed just enough for our twisting and ducking motion to send it a couple inches in front of our throat.
Before my attacker could do anything else, I brought my staff up and snapped two quick words to send another tornado spell right into the man’s chest. He was lifted off the ground and sent flying a good thirty feet to slam hard into the wall surrounding the town.
Even as he was rebounding off that, I quickly created a couple more portals, sending my fist through one to reach out of the other so it could collide right with his face as hard as I could manage. I put everything I could into that punch. It hurt, but I felt the satisfying impact and knew I had broken his nose at the very least.
Quickly snapping my hand back out of the portal before he could retaliate, I took a step that way while the man himself touched his face and then stepped away from the wall. I saw him for the first time as he glowered at me. Now, I didn’t need to use the gem to know if this guy was important to the timeline or not.
And hey, I also knew how Ruthers got that broken nose.