The enemy was still distant yet, so I got my priorities in order first.

And by priorities, I mean I took in the situation and spotted Anna.

The moment I spotted her next to her brother, who was face first, writhing on the ground, the thing on the tip of my tongue came to mind, and I immediately went to Anna, who was beginning to clutch at her chest in pain. I held her head in my hands and gave her a nice big hug, lifting her up and moving her as far from the incoming undead as I could.

I gave the idea of running away with Anna for a moment, but only a moment. If the undead killed everyone here, I didn’t believe I could forgive myself. I didn’t believe Anna would accept it either, not if I could save them.

It didn’t do much; I knew it wouldn’t, but I deposited her on the ground in the opposite corner, kneeling down to lay her against the wall.

“Just hold on Anna, I’m going to deal with this as fast as possible, ok? Just hold in there as best as you can.”

I could see her eye me, tears growing in the corners of her eyes, as she seemed to mouth, ‘What,’ but couldn’t bring herself to the next as she flinched.

“Hang in there, ok?” I asked quietly.

She opened her mouth, and I could hear, just audible, “Oh-Kay,” and I took to the things I would need to do, but only after gently depositing Selly, who looked like she was fighting some manner of rodent, on Anna’s chest where she wouldn’t roll.

It was crude, but there was only so much I could do for her.

Every moment the guards began to drop, the only one that could properly stand was the Butcher, who managed to hold himself up, teeth grit, neck pulsing as his heart pounded.

I ran past him and said, “When you can move, check on the clown.” Ignoring the only man screaming like a daemon held him in torture, I made my way to the barricade. If it were a less serious moment, I might have stepped on his foot for using his skills on me; I was growing to hate it, but now was not the time.

The guards by the checkpoint closest to the incoming undead were wincing; whatever the numb, soul-deep pain did, it hit some harder than others, and the guards were no exception; their bodies slumped over like sacks of grain.

I grabbed ahold of them and, one by one, dragged them away from the rubble they had intended to use as a choke point.

I left them to writhe and moved to the choke, looking down the road.

Nothing.

“Ok… So I have time to think… Good.”

Now… What to think about.

What was I going to do? Sit here and let them come? Let them cut through with numbers and gobble up the incapacitated people within?

I couldn’t guarantee they wouldn’t, not with the cultists alive.

It was really all about the cultists.

The undead seemed to come with cultists or, rather, the other way around. Each cultist seemed to increase the amount of undead. I couldn’t be sure of the number, but it was sizeable for each one, and each extra just meant that many more undead.

So the question wasn’t how many reinforcements were there, but how many [Cultists] came with them.

After all… without the cultists, the undead would file towards me in ones and twos, lining up for me like I was here to give them milk and biscuits, not shuffle past and rend the life from the others.

That was a plan of the living, not the un-dead, whose corpses worked on dark mana, not the verminous intellect of the fallen creatures.

So how could I find out how many were coming? I got up on the roof and made my way along the street until I could see the force.

I had seen what six [Cultists] worth of undead looked like, and what two [Cultists] worth looked like, and I would say that there might be three [Cultists] worth.

The only question was whether there were three or four, and so I slunk past the dead.

Amongst them were two familiar skeletons, dressed in old robes, flames in their eye sockets. They were dead on the same as the ones I had fought down in the crypt.

Or they were at a glance, and at a second, there was a slight difference between them. One wasn’t the right colour.

It was hard to tell in the light, but it wasn’t the right colour of white. It was not bleached by ages but seemingly fresher and yellowed. I had no idea what that meant, but I noted it and moved on.

I skulked quickly over rooftops, scuttling over the scutes of houses and seeking the shadowed forms so easily hidden among the buildings until I came across the form of one small creature hiding near the rear of the undead.

I took a few seconds to ready myself, taking deep breaths before I dropped down, not striking the figure, but readying a swing for when it turned to face me.

It did so promptly, kindly turning its hideous, scabby face to me and snarled, quickly reaching for its dagger.

I didn’t give it the fucking chance. Putting my back into it, I reinforced my strike and cleaved through it in two rapid strikes, one cleaving into its ribs before the second slammed down through the shoulder, ribs and spine, cleaving the thing in two.

It also got one good swing at me as I did, its arm shooing out, blade aimed at my neck.

Quickly, I interposed the haft of the spade between the blade and myself like a very thin shield. The blade contacted the haft, and I spun the shovel, knocking it away while pulling the blade up.

Then I kicked the Gremlin, sending its haves slapping to the ground in two great heaps of meat and foul ichorous blood.

Now, I had to find the others before the undead found the-

The iron ball thunked into the ground, drawing my eye, and I found myself staring at it.

A new idea spun into my mind, and I carefully picked it up before skulking on my way back to the roofs.

As I did, I gave it a once over.

After all, I did have [Magical Tools], a skill that made my tools magic, which worked with my [Tool Proficiency]’s. Why not give a few moments to trying to hijack the undead?

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I could do a lot of work with that, cluttering the undead with my undead to get the skeletons taken care of.

So, I tried to affect the ponderous orb, tried to affect it with my skills.

I got a little traction and could tell if I spent some time with it, I could attempt to control them, but I had no idea how much time it would take. Looking at the orb, I hurled the worthless prop out into the street, away from the undead and the other cultists who could possibly use it.

I kept sweeping the crowd of undead for the small forms of the Gremlins right up until they got in the line of sight of the barricade and moved in to wait for them.

Step two was hold them for a bit.

It was the kind of iffy part of the plan that would have gone better if I had found the rest of the [Cultists].

So I stood to wait, and they graciously came. The first stepped up, and I struck it down, then the next and the next. If the gremlins found it suspicious, they didn’t act on it, only trying to get a few undead past me, which I quickly cleaved, smashing their bodies back into the gap.

I could tell from the pressure of the scream that the skeletons were closing in on me, and so I waited for the right moment to spring my impromptu trap.

Waiting until I could feel their forms move into sensory range, the noose tightened, and I reached into the earth, slamming my spade between the paving stones and, with a magical shove, shifting the earth beneath the rubble. The piled rubble first swayed, and I dumped even more into the earth, feeling as my precious mana emptied into the earth, but it worked, and the unsteady rubble fell upon and amid the stacked undead and the still animate alike.

Body’s had this awful tendency when struck with a ton of loose debris to get trapped under and amid it, after all, so why not use it on the undead. I stared at the rubble, and I couldn’t help myself when the corner of my mouth turned up in a tiny grin.

The horde was pushed up against the other side of it, nearly unpassable and cornered. If they were people, they would turn and perhaps flee, but they were not people; they were magical constructs, some kind of spell in a dead body, and so they would continue to press into it, leaving the [Cultists] on the back lines exposed.

I scaled up the pile, using the spade as an aide to rapidly climb up before hooking it on the tiles of the rooftops and pulling myself up.

Moving past the undead, skeletons included, I moved to find the [Cultists], only to spot a tiny form staring down the road toward the barricade.

“Perfect,” I muttered before I slid down the roof and into the road.

I landed my legs taking the strain and getting rather fed up with it protested but they would damn well keep working and shut up.

The robed figure turned to me in shock, dropping the orb before hastily reaching for its wicked blade; I cleaved through its wrist, not letting it get so far as the last one and into its flesh.

I was stopped from dealing a finishing blow by its two unseen allies behind me as they jumped me, teeth and blades and nails penetrating flesh that slammed into me from behind.

I stumbled, dropping the shovel atop the wounded vermin while blades cut into me, parting cloth and drawing lines of razor-sharp pain along my sides.

I shook, trying to throw them off, but only for their claws to sting my back and sides, digging in. They shouted in their harsh chitters, more like animal laughs than spoken words, and I was hit by the knowledge that I didn’t know how to deal with this.

I didn’t know how to deal with two animalistic tiny forms tearing at me… But I knew something that I did know how to deal with it, and it lived in my head rent-free.

My instinct, snarling from inside of me, did, and pausing for a moment in an instinctive panic, I pushed through my hesitation and let it run free.

It took me, and I hurled myself onto my back, slamming the forms upon the cobbles before lithely spinning onto all fours. One came free on the cobbles, only to be slammed as I rushed across the street and slammed myself into it.

The second let out a shrill cry, its voice cracking in pain and fell only to find my claws tearing into it, into its eyes and neck and face. My mouth shot forward, and my teeth clamped upon its neck, and I felt it tear and pop as I crushed its windpipe.

My ears flicked, and my vision fell upon the rising form of the gremlin. My hair began to stand on end as I let out a snarling chirp-bark that was both inhuman and not mistakeable for a dog of any breed that had ever walked the world.

It stared at me and saw the warning signs of a predator, an animal warning it. I saw only prey.

It turned to run, and I pounced on it, slamming it face-first into the ground. Its bleeding spurred me on as I tore into it, mauling it for all I could, reducing a vaguely humanoid form to so much minced meat; over twenty seconds, I converted it into a mass of meat so mangled and bloody it was visually as unappealing as it tasted.

My body panted, short and quick breaths as my heart beat in my ears.

I heard another noise and turned to see another small form.

I could feel my muscles clench, but I drew myself short as I stared into human eyes or human adjacent eyes.

My instinct faded, and I stared very awkwardly at a tiny furry wolfish Beastkin who returned my stare with big eyes, shivering and pained.

She was tucked behind where the gremlins had been and dirty.

I looked towards the undead, who began to disperse, and I shooed her.

“Go on now, hide in a house; I’ll call you out when it's safe,” I told her low and quiet.

She simply shivered.

And then I realized that she wasn’t shaking from just looking at me and chided myself for my stupidity.

I stood and slapped my head, moving to grab my shovel before lifting the crying girl and safely depositing her into a house where she might not be mauled, and closed the door.

Steps one and two were done, albeit out of order; next was step three; it was time to wack the bones into powder, or more specifically, the jade slips in the bones.

There were only two of them, the new and the old. My body wanted to just give in at this point and fall asleep, so I wasn’t going to deal with all of it, just enough to take out the screaming, and without the jade, they were just bone and black magic.

I felt toward them, finding the familiar confluence of the jade in the elder skeleton ribs near where a heart would be, and for the younger, it lay in its pelvis, of all places.

I found my feet and moved toward them, pressing toward the prickling pins and needles of their screams; the closer I got, the more it started to sting, and then the prickling began to hurt a little.

They moved and pulled like marionettes toward me, their inhuman gate expected because, unlike with the new zombies, I had fought this kind of undead before, and they didn’t surprise me.

I waited, waited for the first to enter my range, and hooked it with the flange of my spade, hurling it into the ground before quickly pulling the spade back and around into the second elder skeleton.

Quickly, I began to break through the ribs, batting a zombie away before delivering a set of strikes straight at its ribs, snapping the bone but not freeing the ribs enough to reach in.

The second skeleton reached around and grabbed onto my ankle, bone creaking as its grip tightened on my ankle.

Acting quickly, I pushed the elder back and turned on the ankle-biter, slamming the tip of the blade down at the arm.

It broke, but it kept griping, even as it bled dark magic into the air from the stump.

I turned, lining my blade to the ball joint of the legs and struck, separating each from the pelvis, [Rapid Action] pulling them off with the effort of shucking an ear of maize before I started working on the spine.

Expecting the skeletons to start regenerating, I ignored the undead moving toward me, letting them grab and claw at me in exchange for separating the pelvis, but the young skeleton didn’t regenerate. Its eyes winked out, and it just kept moving like a normal skeleton.

The bone even kept griping my leg, though its grip did loosen.

I scooped it up and tossed it back and away from the undead before I pulled away from the undead that shambled toward me.

The skeleton moved faster than I did, and it managed to claw me across the arm, loosening my grip, but I got my distance and hastily raised my weapon.

Breaking away from its fellows and scrambling towards me, its ribs flexing like writhing tendrils as it tried to close the distance between us, I did my best not to let it. Jabbing and backstepping away from it as it kept pushing through my strikes, pushing me back.

I didn’t let my eyes close, looking for an opening, until I landed a strike that broke the ribs wide, and I planted my feet, letting it ram into my spade, its own body weight impaling it from rib to vertebrae, snaping the jade slip and halting its momentum.

Pulling myself out and free, I backed off as it flailed, freeing the soul as I ran I kicked the pelvis up, its ephemeral scream still rending the air until I silenced it, breaking the pelvis clear in half mid-air, catching the soul and freeing the jabbering reck from this particular form of hell.

The night went blissfully silent, except for the cries of the living and the not-quite silence of the dead behind me.

Breaking the still gripping hand around my ankle before it broke me, I made my way to the house, scooped up the confused crying fur baby who desperately tried to get away from me and started making my way back to the square, around the side streets until I made it back to the main road.

The [Butcher] of all people had remained standing and was now checking on Strause, who was still letting out stressful cries of agony.

I ignored it all, making my way to Anna, who was deeply breathing like she was still recovering from the fight of her life.

She looked up at me blearily, and I passed her the child before promptly passing the fuck out, my eyes closing before my legs could even finish falling out from under me.