Jie sent out another twin chain finger of light attack and just like before, the enemy ninth star Expert blocked it with the very same undead. Or what little remained of them as whatever energy fueled their un-life had been snuffed out in her first attack... but that didn't make them any less effective as shields. Jie strained and struggled, trying to force her qi to chain to the next target, but the result was the same and once more her attack sputtered out uselessly.
Jie glanced at her friends. Each was holding their own though the skeletons continued to boil out of the pit. She didn't want to leave them to it, but the more powerful armored zombies could overwhelm them if she didn't...
Bones swirled around her feet as the skeletons she'd slain only moments ago reformed once again.
"They're reanimating!" Jie cried as she caught a skull and pulled it away from the rest of its swirling body. She hurled it down into the pit. Half its bones followed it down, pulled in the wake of the red energy attempting to reanimate them.
"Death is the inevitable end for all things. Submit and I will make it painless," echoed a voice down the hall. It was the same raspy voice that had made the cackle before. But it had an echoing feminine quality which sounded like the statues of the red woman speaking through something broken.
It's still just a test. Focus on doing what needs to be done, Jie thought, fine. If you want your pet zombies to block my ranged attacks... you leave me no choice.
Jie boosted off a lightning step platform toward the armored zombies. The crackling discharge of her platform blew apart two skeletons in the process of reanimating around her and incinerated the hands of another as it tried to pull itself above the lip of the pit. It fell back down the pit, snarling as it flailed at the air with smoking stumps before it crashed into the undead below. Jie paid it no mind as she raced down the hallway toward the enemy ninth star Expert and his minions.
It was the biggest threat here and she was certain it was raising the skeletons they killed.
Dragon lightning qi crackled over her as she ran toward the zombies. The two she'd killed that hovered in the air acting the part of lightning rods flew toward her on an intercept course.
Jie jumped into the air, making it look like she planned to go over them. As they corrected their trajectory and surged upward to meet her, she turned in the air, formed a lightning step platform at an angle above her, and pushed off with explosive speed. She zipped through the opening below the two corpses and landed with a roll before springing back up and continuing her run.
She heard and sensed the corpses drop like rocks behind her as the ninth star Expert abandoned them and his aura flared with some new technique.
Jie formed a dragonfist around each hand as she ran toward the ranks of zombies. A pulse of dark red energy coming from the center of their formation washed over the ranks of zombies and then got sucked into the zombies' bodies like smoke being suddenly inhaled.
The zombies surged with power and let out rasping, reverberating roars as the red energy suffusing them swelled. Their cultivation hadn't changed but the power surging from their auras felt like they'd all gained the equivalent of three whole stars of power in an instant. Suddenly, the army that she should've been able to walk all over became a danger even to her when there were so many of them and with a ninth star Expert among them.
I'm not even sure this is a necromancer and I already hate necromancers, Jie thought.
She'd been planning to smash into the front lines like a wrecking ball but abandoned that thought now the zombies had been empowered. The necromancer was the key. Without him, even if their power didn't immediately vanish, she could annihilate them without having to worry about what else the ninth star Expert was capable of. And hopefully, once he was destroyed, the skeletons would stop reanimating.
The zombies tightened their ranks, but Jie ran to the side of the hallway and up the side of the wall. From there, she finally saw him. The ninth star Expert. At least... she thought it was a he... it was hard to tell as most of his flesh had either rotted away or clung to his bones like dried meat.
He stood in the center of the empowered zombies, as safe as he could possibly be, a wicked scythe gripped tight in one mummified hand with large, curved blades on either end. The blades pointed in opposite directions, forming an S shape. Each blade was covered in hieroglyphs that burned with the same red energy as the necromancer.
The energy suffusing him was a deeper, richer red than any of the other undead. And, now she was closer, that strange feeling that he was somehow enhanced with unnatural strength only grew as his aura carried notes of profound power that went beyond an ordinary ninth star Expert.
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He wore no armor. Only a frayed hooded robe with runes that pulsed along its surface. He looked up at her. He had the hood of his robes up, enhancing his already sinister appearance and casting shadows upon the silver mask that looked like it'd been fused to his cat-like face.
In place of eyes, he had dark rubies that burned with the rich, red energy suffusing him.
Jie cycled twin dragonfists as she leapt off the wall, cracking the ancient stone beneath her feet with the force of her jump. The sound echoed through the halls as she lunged at the necromancer.
The necromancer stepped backward as he formed a cloud of dark red energy that engulfed him like smoke.
Jie plunged downward fist first but passed through only an empty cloud of his qi as her fist smashed against the stone floor in a resounding boom that fractured the stone. The shockwave of the blow dispersed his red smoke-like qi, revealing that the necromancer was gone. And she now stood in the center of the empowered zombies, unable to even sense a vague impression of the necromancer.
The zombies rushed her.
Jie side-stepped a clumsy swing and smashed her dragonfist into a zombie's hastily raised shield without even looking at it as she scanned for the true threat. Although she couldn't sense him, she didn't believe the necromancer was truly gone. Not for a second.
The force of her strike sent the zombie reeling backward into its fellows, knocking them down like a bowling ball.
A cloud of dark red energy formed above her, and the necromancer dived out of it, striking with his scythe, the sharp point angling toward her head.
Jie jumped up, avoiding the strikes of the zombies around her, and boosted off a lightning step platform at an angle. She twisted her body in the air to evade the necromancer's strike as she grabbed the wooden shaft of his scythe and wrestled for control of it. Jie and the necromancer spun in the air and the crackling blue qi armor around her hands screamed against the scythe's twisted power. Veins of red qi wormed their way into her armor and she burned through energy incredibly fast to hold it at bay.
They decapitated two zombies and diced up three others with the scythe as they spun and fell to the ground. Both Jie and the necromancer managed to find their feet even in the midst of their struggle. He was twice her height and loomed above her, trying to drive her down and twist the scythe out of her grip. But despite whatever power bolstered his aura and the fact he was a ninth star Expert, her strength far outmatched his and she didn't even move.
He snarled a hissing rasp behind his mask.
"Foolish girl," he said with a voice that was a mixture of the red woman's and something dead, twisted, and hollow, "you should never fight an enemy in their place of power."
His aura fluctuated and the closest ten zombies wailed as they broke apart. Dark red energy burst out of them and flowed into the necromancer as his strength surged. He drove Jie down to one knee and began to twist the scythe out of her grasp. The point of one blade moved closer to her head as the other scraped against the stone floor. The stone hissed, spat, and boiled like acid wherever it touched.
"That's such crappy advice," Jie growled from between gritted teeth as the zombies around them swarmed closer, their weapons raised and about to strike her, "this entire dungeon is an enemy's place of power!"
Jie triggered her qi armor around her foot and leg on the floor, allowing it to react with the cold dusty stone below her and propel her upward. The sudden, explosive movement overwhelmed the necromancer as she rocketed off the floor.
The instant she was eye-level with the necromancer, Jie formed a lightning step platform at an angle and stepped off it, bursting toward the necromancer and around him as she spun her entire body with the motion and twisted the scythe out of his grip.
She continued the lightning step boosted spin, whirling with the scythe in her hands. Its cursed properties screamed and fought against her qi armor as she sliced through the necromancer's back, cutting him in two while ripping through the closest zombies.
She kept whirling with the scythe, cutting the necromancer apart again and again even as the zombies rushed headfirst into her crackling blender as Jie sliced through everything around her in a shower of gore.
Dark red energy poured out of the undead she killed, and a ghostly, red image of the necromancer rose out of his corpse with a distant, echoing yell. He strained and struggled as though buffeted by some unseen wind that sucked him toward the statue of the red woman.
He clawed and scrambled, his ethereal fingers scrabbling uselessly for purchase on the stone floor as the statue drew his spirit toward it. He flew toward the statue faster and faster despite his desperate struggles and vanished into the crimson stone.
Jie staggered to a stop. The world spun slightly as her stomach lurched into her throat and body parts rained down around her with heavy, squelching thuds. She let the cursed scythe slip from her fingers, and it clattered against the stone. With it gone from her grip, Jie's qi armor quickly overpowered the foreign qi.
Only one zombie remained after Jie's devastating whirlwind. It thrust its sword at her from the side while she stared at the floor and tried to blink her dizziness away. Jie caught the blade of the sword with one qi-armored hand without looking at the creature and channeled raw dragon lightning qi into it.
Dragon lightning qi arced across the golden metal and into the zombie. It roared as Jie's raw power overwhelmed it and the sword glowed orange in Jie's grip. The zombie's aura flared and then snuffed out and Jie released the blade.
It and its owner fell to the floor, still smoldering. Jie took in deep breaths and tried to blink away the dizziness and nausea. The stench of burning, rotten flesh didn't help.
"Jie!" Pan Tian cried.
Jie looked up and saw her friends battling against enormous skeletons with auras far beyond the others. And they looked... wrong. Hideous amalgamations with far too many misshapen, mismatched limbs. Skulls where hands and knees should be and long, sharp spines like tendrils writhing out of their rib cages like hungry mouths as they forced Pan Tian and the others back.
Worse, killing the necromancer hadn't stopped the reanimation. If anything, it was faster now. With skeletons reforming before they'd even finished breaking apart.