Sera shivers in place, struggling to get a hold on her breathing as she watches the men close in on Vey. She wants to scream at them to get away, or to get up and try and help, but finds that her legs and arms won’t move. She hears Vey’s voice shout something to her, but doesn’t register what he’s said. Her eyes drift from corpse to corpse, each one before Vey’s feet differently mangled or brutalized, and she barely manages to swallow back down the bile rising in her throat. Sera finally manages to focus on the last corpse, or, not corpse, he’s clearly still breathing, his chest expanding and falling in an uneven rhythm. She traces the trail of blood from his side, sees what looks like pig guts spilling out of a large rent stretching from the man’s abdomen to just before his back.
She desperately tries to focus on something, anything else, but only manages to look down at the sword in her hands, and the blood slowly running off of it forming droplets spilling onto the stone floor between her legs. She hears a sound like metal grating against metal, and looks up at Vey, the realization that she’d not checked if he was winning, or ok, or…
She looks up to the source of the sound, and freezes in place, not even breathing as she spots it. A large crack in the back of her bondmate’s skull, and for a moment she wonders if she’s to go back to that with these new awful men, when she realizes. Vey’s still standing. No one else is. Her eyes drift downward again, and she spots what looks like the sword the man who’d come after her had been holding, covered in blood and gore and bits. She sees one of the other men-the one that had shouted he’d kill Vey-is still alive relatively intact. At least that is what Sera initially sees, when her eyes focus harder, she sees his hand finally go limp, and finally connects the action with the pair of legs separated from a body on the ground next to the man.
She curls up her legs into a ball, and tries to shove her face into them, covering her ears with her hands, but forgets the sword she had been holding. Thankfully, some sort of bluish-purple force prevents her from cutting her thighs open on her own weapon, but it also prevents her from properly hiding herself. She spots Vey turn to her, and registers hearing some sort of sound or words from him, but still can’t focus enough to understand them. However, she does feel… tired, now… perhaps she’d feel better if she just-
Vey looks down at his feet after casting the [Sleep] spell. He hangs his head for a moment before looking around. He does a quick head count, both of the living attackers still bleeding out on the ground, and of the undead that survived the encounter. Only two of the skeletons he and Sera had been working with remain, which means only six undead of the original twenty-nine, and all that are left is four ranged skeletons that hadn’t been up here and those two remaining skeleton spearmen. Vey curses at the air as he walks over to one of the men-one of the men had shouted ‘Mace’, when he got hit, so maybe that was his name-still breathing, though with a nasty looking wound in his shoulder. Vey crouches down, and brings his face close to the dying man’s. He inspects the man’s physique, garb, and hygiene idly, and compares it to the rest of the attackers, before deciding that none of these men have any value to him alive. He drags a claw down the man’s wound, enlarging it, and spreading it to his neck to ensure that if he survives the blood loss, infection will still take him.
He repeats similar actions on the two others still technically alive, but for the one Sera cut, he simply rips out the exposed intestine and leaves the man’s own body to do the rest of the work. Vey looks down at his own hands, covered in blood and bits of viscera and brain matter, and then at Sera, and her slumped over, sleeping form, and then back at everything around him. He feels the injuries he sustained in the fight, a crack from a spear in the back of his skull, a couple more on his arms and ribs before he managed to finally cast his own [Mage Armor], but nothing serious enough to really hamper him. Vey flicks his wrists to either side of his body, trying to fling off as much of the blood and gore as possible, as he walks to Sera.
Encounter Ended! You have leveled up!
After your most recent encounter, you are now ready to level up a class of your choosing.
The notification pops up, and he dismisses it immediately. No time for that. He picks her up by putting one arm underneath her knees and the other in the center of her back, and balancing her across his arms, and heads for the ritual room and fountain. He ‘asks’ one of the skeletons to drag the corpses into the corner, and for another to do the same with the weapons. Vey looks down at the girl in his arms as he reaches the door to the ritual room, and counts down the remaining time before the magic will wear off and she’ll awake as he pushes through. He sits down next to both buckets of water, with Sera held in front of him, between his arms and legs, trying to imitate the way she does to him when he gets too focused to notice her sneaking up.
--
She wakes to a system notification she doesn’t read-can’t read-with how chaotic her mind is. She just looks around in shock for a few moments before she registers the now-familiar feeling of Vey’s arms around her. She looks down, and sees that said hands are still covered in blood, and that her own clothes have a fair amount on them too, and starts trying to work through the memories while holding back the tears in her eyes. She’s doing a terrible job, probably, because the moment she starts breathing too erratically, Vey’s hands leave her midsection and each drift to her own hands, and she feels the skeleton’s boney rib cage shift against her back. She turns in place, and looks up at the skeleton with blurry vision.
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“Are you injured?” Vey’s voice asks her, in a tone she immediately recognizes from when she was actually injured… however long ago it was. Sera just shakes her head, and then presses said head into Vey’s collar to rest. She feels Vey’s left arm start stroking her back, something she’d had to teach him to do, but that she was very thankful for now.
“Did… Did I kill that man? The one you told me to…” Sera whispers the question into him, and feels Vey’s arms stop moving along her back, and she can practically hear the answer even without him saying it.
“Yes. You did good, Sera, you’re alive, that’s all you need to care about now.” Vey pets the back of her head, and the brief distraction of wondering if he’ll get blood in her hair is quickly replaced by the comfort of the gesture.
She lets herself get lost in the embrace for a moment, trying to push it all out of her head, the blood, the gore, the smells, the threats, all of it, but fails to find a way to stop thinking about it. It had all been so quick-the men bursting in, the brief moment of shock at seeing another person for the first time in… months… the shouting, how quickly Vey had managed to take command. How Vey had-
“Why… Is it… no… Are all fights like that?” She finally manages to whisper out the question after a few minutes of trying to collect herself.
“Yes. I know you think it’s cruel or unnecessary, but yes, that’s how it is. It isn’t like hunting or slaughtering animals.” Vey’s words make sense to her, but the feeling of cutting into that man with her sword, the shock, fear, and chaos that followed, Sera wonders if that's something men like the attackers just get used to over time. She knows Vey was created to not feel those things at all, but she kind of wishes she was too.
“I… I didn’t know… I thought I wanted to help you with that…” She holds onto his body tighter for a moment, trying to stifle herself from crying. “Are you hurt?”
“Yes, but not permanently.”
“Where?” Sera pushes away from Vey, and starts with her arms on his shoulders, staring into his eyes as she feels about his body for all of his potential injuries. She finds the crack on the back of his skull quickly, and as she feels the small wound, Vey’s hand catches hers.
“I’m not made of flesh, like you. It will fix itself as my body absorbs negative energy from the air around me. You don’t need to try and care for me like I did for-” Vey starts trying to protest her poking at the injury, but she cuts him off.
“No going outside till you’re healed.” Ignoring him completely, she voices her demand, but Vey pats her head with one hand and presses a bloody finger to her lips with the other.
“They didn’t trip my [Greater Alarm], meaning they didn’t come through the entrance. We need to know how they got it.” Vey reasoning makes total sense to her, which causes her to stop focusing on his injuries for long enough to start thinking about everything else. Sera pulls away from the skeleton, and sprawls her legs out on the floor, before she curls up again, looking around for the buckets of water to clean herself with. “Would you be ok staying down here while I go look for how they got in?”
“No. You’re staying with me, and when you go, I’m going with you.” She tries her best to sound authoritative as she reaches for one of the buckets of water, setting it down in front of her as she starts to stand up.
“Sera-” Vey stands up as well, and puts a hand on her shoulder before she fully rises to her feet. “How much hp do you have right now?”
“... 5…”
“I have 36. You’d be dead if you took the type of damage I did. You might not like it, but I’m not going to risk that.” Vey takes his arm away, and dips his hands in the bucket, then flicks the water and some of the blood off in the direction of the drain. “I’ll be back the moment I figure out where they came from, and have made sure there won’t be more, ok?”
--
Vey steps back into the chamber still covered in blood and bits, the two skeletons he’d set to work still working. He picks Sera’s sword out of the pile, and places it near the door to the stairs to remind himself of it later. He traces the path of opened door up the dungeon, making sure to check each room along the way for potential secret entrances he just didn’t know about before, but when he finally gets up to the chamber before the entrance hallway, it becomes immediately obvious to him when he sees dirt on the floor, and the open barracks room door.
Of course, the caved-in passage… Vey thinks, and sure enough, as he rounds the doorway and checks, he sees the dug entranceway through the rubble. He peeks through the hole, and looks up at the tunnel beyond, no light in sight, and wonders just how far it goes before it reaches the surface, since the attackers must have come from the surface. He decides it doesn’t really matter right now, and casts a [Greater Alarm] on the entrance, before stepping back out and closing the door to the barracks room. He commands the remaining skeletons to bring up the stone table from the old alchemy lab, to use as a brace for the door. A crude solution, sure, but at least it will work for now.
A gaping hole in my dungeon’s defenses… less than half of its undead defenders remain, and yet now more than ever are they actually defending something… Vey ponders the problem to himself as he starts pacing, waiting for the skeletons to bring up the table, when he gets some feedback through the command bond. The skeletons aren’t strong enough to actually lift the table, without the zombies helping anymore. Vey turns, and looks at the entrance to the tunnel the men dug through the cave in, activates Alacritous Cogitation, and starts running some numbers. After less than three full seconds of crunching the numbers on every possible method of safely re-collapsing the ceiling, Vey gives up, and resolves to just do it after he levels up, preferably after Sera has as well, he’s pretty sure that fight would have gotten her to that point.