I was frozen. I had the option of running towards the screaming - remembering the churning army of undead from just a few hours earlier made that seem unwise - or the option of charging away from the sound and into the darkness by myself. Before, I'd been in the middle of the pack and could just follow the group - but now I was ahead and off to one side where I would have to pick a direction and risk becoming separated from everyone or running into even more trouble. So for a moment I did nothing.

The others were moving, their lights darting around and making a million shadows. I couldn't see the threat or even guess at how many there were, but I could see that someone - presumably Cyne since I had heard him scream - was on the floor. I pulled out my knife, though I wasn't sure it would do much especially since nothing I'd seen down here had any kind of vital organs they cared about.

Something darted towards Mila and she swung a fist, resulting in a deeply disturbing sound like a baseball bat slamming into a side of beef - whatever she had hit ducked away from her, and on impulse I covered my light and stepped into an alcove I'd spotted nearby. The ghost vanished into the ceiling, dropping the light level further, and I saw something that was glowing a dim, pulsating red stride past me in the darkness right before a huge hand clamped around my neck.

Light bloomed around me, and I realized that the terrifying face in front of me was Sige. His normal friendly grin reappeared instantly as he released my throat, but I knew I'd never think of him as a Muppet again after seeing that look of murder in his eyes. "Fuck, sorry kiddo. Thought you were someone else."

"Uh. Something passed me. Red glow."

He glanced in the direction I was looking, but clearly didn't see anything. "Yeah, that's the fucker. Shit. Well... come on, huddle up for now. Can't be spread out."

I followed him back to the others, and we formed a perimeter around Cyne who was coughing up blood. "I'm alright," he managed to say between coughing fits, "though if we could... take a break..."

Nobody was eager to remain in that hall for the obvious reason, so Sige lifted Cyne up and we hurried down a few random passages until we found somewhere Mila could seal a door behind us. Cyne slowly recovered, and finally was able to sit up and drink some water.

"He stabbed me through the heart and one of my lungs, I have... quite a lot of blood loose in my body, and I suspect I will continue to cough for some time. Had he left the blade in place, or waved it around, I would be dead. Thankfully it was very thin, and he removed it instantly. Still... I need to rest and ensure my heart has healed properly before I risk straining it, and the healing has taken a toll on me in terms of exhaustion. Before I sleep, is anyone else injured?"

Everyone looked around at each other, shrugging. I nodded at Mila. "You okay? I saw whatever it was come at you."

She looked surprised, and then seemed to mentally catch up to the conversation. "Oh! Oh, yes, I wasn't sure what was going on but he seemed aggressive so I hit him. I hope that was okay, I wasn't sure if I had missed something."

Connie suppressed a grin, and Aestrid looked at Mila quizzically. "What did you hit him with? Do you even have a weapon?"

"Oh, no dear. I just sort of - " and she swiped a hand in a wide arc. As her fingers hit the stone wall they just scooped a lump out like it was mud, leaving a sizeable hunk of solid rock melded to her hand like a gauntlet.

Aestrid looked mildly stunned. "That's... well. Quite handy."

Mila gently put the stone back, smoothing it over so you could hardly tell she'd touched the wall in the first place. "You make do with what you have, my mother always said. So, who was that man?"

I, meanwhile, hadn't even been sure it was a man. A few had gotten a glimpse and the consensus seemed to be that he was human, not a corpse, had a long thin dagger, and was wearing some sort of odd thing on his chest that was glowing red in the center. That was about all that anyone could say.

"Well, the ghost is friendly. She tried to tell us to run right before the attack."

"Could be a victim of his," Aestrid suggested.

There was a general rumbling of agreement, but it didn't seem like something we could act on so after a moment we all just settled down to let Cyne sleep off his injury. I'd lost all sense of time since we'd been underground for more than twenty-four hours, which actually made it easier to fall asleep - I was tired enough from hiking down the pit and running from zombies that the only barrier would have been that part of your brain that yells it's not time yet.

I dreamed I was hiding from some people that were chasing me. I think they were the Sahrger - presumably I was thinking about how mad they probably were that I took those kids, but in the dream I was a kid myself. I was hiding in the catacombs but it was made of wood, and I was plotting how I would get back to my mother. Then something shifted, and I was dreaming about the Long Haul Hotel except it, too, was the Necropolis. Most of the guests were zombies, but they were just waiting in line at the buffet so it wasn't a particularly scary dream. Uncle Roy was there, alive and looking unfazed by the legions of undead, and he offered me a twenty dollar bill to buy some pizza.

"Aw thanks Uncle Roy! They don't have pizza where I live now. Although the food is pretty good overall, lots of good sauces and spices and things. And dinosaur, which is really good."

"That's nice, kid," Uncle Roy said, as awkward in the dream as he'd been in real life. "Uh. You have everything else you need?"

"Sure thing."

"Good, good. You uh, you got somewhere to stay? I know your mom... you know she means well, but..."

I watched the zombies trying to shovel scrambled eggs onto a plate, with most of it going onto the floor. "It's fine. I'm staying with some friends. We're in a sort of giant underground crypt right now but that's temporary."

"That's good. Well. Take care of yourself."

By then the sun was rising, and the light hit my eyes though I tried to sleep in a little longer. It was probably another thirty seconds or so before some little part of my brain reminded me there was no sun where I was sleeping, and I cracked an eye to look. It was the ghost. She was a few inches off the ground, and a bit more translucent than she had been.

"Hey there. Can I... help?"

She shook her head.

"Do you need something?"

She seemed to consider this, like she wasn't sure how to answer. I saw some movement and caught Sige very carefully waking up Aestrid.

"Are you... is there something you want me to do?"

She nodded, hesitantly, and then gestured to the door.

"Yeah, okay. Sure. Is it okay if we take a minute to wake up?"

The ghost drifted through the door without comment.

Everyone was up within minutes. Cyne had a sort of watch, and he said we'd slept for three hours. He was feeling rested enough to travel a bit more, and so we all gathered our bags while Connie tried to sound like she had a plan. "Okay. We're... going to follow a ghost for a minute here. Just on the off chance it helps us deal with or avoid that guy that tried to kill us. Sige in the front, Aestrid in the back. Cyne, stick to the middle since you're our only healer and make sure people stay clumped around you so we don't get picked off one by one. If she goes up more than two floors we're bailing, if she goes down... well that's the way we were going anyway."

Mila unsealed the door and Aestrid stepped out first, scanning for any movement. She gave the signal and the rest of us came out to the small courtyard area where the ghost was still waiting - it started drifting away without even looking at us as soon as everyone was outside the room.

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We were on high alert, but by the very nature of the Necropolis there was no way to be safe. There could be undead anywhere, and there was no way to guess if the path you were taking would lead to a dead end or an ambush. While the whole bizarre structure seemed to be - had to be - magically sturdy, there were plenty of random holes and cracks and dangerously leaning pillars. And of course there was, in the center, a massive bottomless pit. It was a nightmare from a strategic standpoint; the best we could do was stay together and keep our eyes open.

Eventually the ghost led us down a hallway made entirely of bones - it wasn't the first section like that by far, but with my nerves so wound up I kept picturing the walls themselves coming to life as some sort of massive building-sized bone golem and I had to really concentrate to stay calm. We reached our final destination just one floor up, probably close to where Sige had originally spotted the ghost. There was a room, somewhat hidden in a sort of corner, and inside was a disturbing sight.

I had tuned out the corpses, which hadn't been hard since most were reduced to bones or nicely tucked away. The zombies were a bit more grisly, but they were either mummified or very old so they weren't exactly... drippy. Plus we'd run into relatively few of those apart from the one gigantic horde, and anyway my brain had somehow partitioned "zombies" into its own category separate from "dead humans". But this room... this room had dead humans in it. Two were in sleeping bags, and one was sprawled on the floor by the door - there was a knife in that one's back, as if it had been sprinting for the exit but hadn't made it.

"Four sleeping bags," Aestrid said casually. "That guy that lowered us down here said they lost a group of four, didn't he?"

They weren't recent except in comparison to the rest of the bodies this deep in the Necropolis, but despite the state of decay I could tell by the hair that our ghost belonged to the corpse at the door. "I'm so sorry. The... the fourth one. Did he do this?"

Sige shook his head, then saw the ghost was nodding and did a double-take. "Fucking what? But these bodies are at least a couple months old, if that son of a bitch is the one that attacked us what the fuck has he been eating?"

Connie gestured at a mummified body in an alcove and said to me - in English - "Egyptian-style beef jerky?"

"Gross," I said, then turned to Sige. "He'd need water too, and... I don't know. Maybe magic? Could he use fabrication or transmutation magic to keep himself fed? Or some kind of healing magic to somehow keep himself healthy without food?"

"Fucking unlikely, but anything is possible. Normally you can only do that short term, or somewhere with lots of fucking mana." He hesitated, and then just shrugged. "Could be, though."

The ghost shook her head, and pointed to another spot on the wall. Connie and I came in close and there was some sort of box built into the area between two pillars. It opened downwards, so I lifted the lid up to see what it had looked like closed. "Well shit, that's camouflaged. I wouldn't have known it was there." I let the lid drop down again, and Connie held her light up to the inside. It was shallow but wide, and had an indentation with an odd shape.

"Like a... what, a heart with spider legs. I've got nothing."

Connie nodded. "Yeah. Some sort of treasure, presumably. Something important the people here wanted to be buried with."

"No." We looked over, and it was Mila of all people. She looked as distracted as ever, and didn't seem like she was going to elaborate.

"Mila? You um. You know what this is?"

She looked startled, like she'd already forgotten that she had said anything. "Oh! No, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt. I don't know what the thing inside was, but anyone can see it wasn't treasure. That would be on display, or with whoever here was most important. And the outside of the box was made to blend in, but someone like me could have just sealed it shut for real. Or at least someone could have locked it. But they didn't, it just flopped open - see? No latch. Which means it wasn't treasure, it was a trap."

Connie stared. "Shit, Mila. Yeah. Fuck, no offense or anything but sometimes I forget how sharp you are."

She patted Connie on the cheek. "Oh that's fine, I do too."

The ghost was crying again. "So this thing... it jumped out and got your friend, and then... he killed you?"

She nodded.

"Alright. Well. We'll... take care of it. Okay?"

And the ghost just sighed - this awful, shuddering, heartbreaking sigh that I could feel rather than hear - and blurred as it lost form and drifted downwards and through a wall - angling right towards the pit. Everyone was silent for a moment, but when the spectral light was completely gone I could hear a few of them finally releasing a held breath.

Sige very quietly mumbled something, and after everyone stared at him he reluctantly said it again louder. "That was kinda fucking useless, wasn't it?"

"Dude. We were helping a ghost."

"Yeah, fucking great. Not saying that's a bad thing just that... fuck, we're kinda busy, aren't we? And I didn't need to know who this fucker is or even that some old device took him over. Could have used a ghost fighting on our side maybe, or some secret weapon against him. If that's all we got this was a waste, and I wish we'd just focused on putting more distance between us and this asshole. In fact, now that we've poked around in the room that thing was protecting he's probably that much more eager to fucking kill us. I... shit, I'm glad the ghost got to do its thing. I am. But now can we fucking go?"

We searched the backpacks and took some supplies. There wasn't much of interest, but some extra non-magical light sources for emergencies were good to have and there were some miscellaneous tools that looked valuable. A small crate was labeled as containing explosives, but if it actually had they'd already been used or lost because it was empty. I wasn't sure blowing things up in a crumbling underground city was a great idea but I was still sad - I'd never gotten a chance to set off the massive bomb I made when I was a kid, instead just getting yelled at for ruining a whole box of fireworks. I still maintain it would have worked.

Our procession headed downwards once more, but after only fifteen minutes our attacker struck again. It happened in a flash - he swung out from nowhere on a rope, and stabbed at Aestrid's head right as I turned back to make sure she was still behind us. The thin blade slammed into her temple, a precision killing blow, and snapped off the hilt. Aestrid didn't even flinch - she spun like lightning and her fist impacted his head with ridiculous force, twisting it around to face nearly backwards with a sickening crunch. The body stumbled back, revealing the thing that had been concealed in the crypt which was, in fact, a heart with spider legs. The center glowed with a pulsing red light, and the spindly legs were made from some pale metal and dug in between his ribs. With a crackling noise his head rotated back to its original position, and he smiled - appearing to be completely unhurt. Aestrid shifted into a strange stance that I hadn't seen her use before, clearly ready to fight - but the thing just ran off into the darkness.

We didn't want to keep getting sniped at, but the hope was that getting far enough from its home crypt would cause it to forget about us or at least leave us alone for a time - and if the alternative was sitting and waiting for it, how long would we wait? Everyone agreed it was best to keep moving. At least we knew it wasn't able to harm Aestrid, so as long as she was careful we would be mostly safe.

With the mid-day nap and the strong incentive to keep moving, we made excellent progress. We had to be hundreds and hundreds of feet below ground, and the darkness had started to feel almost heavy somehow - but the dates were getting closer. We knew we would need to stop and sleep for the night soon, but our final destination was tantalizingly close and so we gave in to temptation and allowed Mila to fold the floor down into rough ramps for the next few levels rather than exploring and looking for proper stairs or pre-existing holes. Finally, the dates on the monuments began to match our target.

Connie consulted her notebook again. "Okay. Uh. Help me out, who knows which way is North? Okay thanks. Right. So... North as far as we can, and we're looking for red stone."

It took another hour, and I at least was regretting not stopping to sleep. But finally Katrin saw some red pillars, just at the edge before we hit solid stone. Following them, we came to a simple metal door engraved with a language I didn't recognize. Connie frowned at it. "Okay. We can't fuck up the walls in here, I need something from them. I think. Can you guys bust the door open... gently?"

Everyone took a turn looking, even me - I remembered how crappy some of the locks I'd seen were and had this brief fantasy of picking the lock with only the random items I happened to have on me. But those hopes were immediately dashed - there was no lock, or at least not one I could see.

There was a clicking sound, off in the darkness. We all turned at once, but with the echoes it wasn't easy to say what direction it was coming from. There was one thing clear about it - it was getting louder. As the clicking sound slowly increased in volume I became more and more certain that it wasn't just one thing. There was a stutter, like multiple feet hitting the ground almost - but not quite - in unison.

"It's coming from that way," Aestrid said as she pointed down the tunnel we'd come from.

"No, listen. It's down there," Connie said while pointing a totally different direction.

"Motherfucking shitsuckers," Sige offered, "it's both. Mila, fuck up the stone around the door. I'm taking the whole thing off."

She started working at the seams around the door, and the second she stepped away Sige grabbed the edges and yanked. After three tries it popped free, just as the first of the skeletal warriors came into view. They were armed and armored, and they were in fact coming from multiple directions.

We scrambled inside, and Sige pulled the door back into place behind us as best he could. Mila smeared some stone around it in a somewhat sloppy way, and then slumped back looking exhausted. "I'm spent. I'm out of mana, kids. Should get a little back if we're safe to sleep here, but it'll still be the long way to get back up."

"And... is it safe to sleep here?" Katrin asked.

We looked around at the room we had entered. No zombies, no skeletons, no skittering hearts on spider legs. Just a huge, empty cube with bizarrely tiled walls and a polished crystal sarcophagus in the center.

"This is it," Connie said. "We've made it."