Chapter 26

Floor 5 Summary (Hard)

Time Taken: 2:23:14

Rank: 43,245

Zombies Killed: 6 (stealth and speed bonus applied to experience gains)

Floor Boss Killed (Lesser Lich Argentos): Yes

Secret Locations Found: 1/43

Floor Puzzle Solved: No (Puzzle Destroyed)

Loot: Crystal of the Lesser Lich (Argentos), Amulet of Skeletal Manifestation, Book of Lesser Necromantic Arts, Eyeshades of Mana Vision, Lesser Healing Potions X30, Lesser Mana Potions X12, 56,000 Experience (total), 12,000 Contribution Points

Eli quickly assigned loot. Knowing that Jose was badly hurt, he quickly removed the experience bias that he’d applied against the Cook and reset it to default, hoping that maybe a level up would help save his friend’s father’s life.

Once his body returned to him and the safe zone notification appeared, the others rushed to finish recovering from the hectic battle against the Lich. Alaina had been so distracted by her husband being disemboweled that she hadn’t seen Luke getting run through, but Luke’s family’s shouted calls for her to tend to their son got her to finally pull her attention away from Jose and turn to the young mage.

Although he had been run cleanly through the abdomen, the mage had had the presence of mind to drink one of the small vials that the system identified to him as a healing potion, of which he’d been getting one or two every level so far. That potion had mostly stopped the bleeding, and although he felt, well he felt like he’d been stabbed in the stomach, he didn’t feel like he was about to die.

Eli stood nervously nearby as his friend was tended to by their medico, who pushed her abilities to the limit between the two casualties of the battle with the Lich. As the de facto leader of their party, he felt guilt over the injuries, even though he didn’t know how he could have prevented them.

However, he still took a moment to take in the environment. They were in a gymnasium in another school. He didn’t recognize this one, but judging by the “GO WILDCATS!” posters they were in one of their city’s nearby neighbors. The sports teams were rivals. Not that Eli particularly cared.

When it became apparent that everyone was going to survive the battle with the previous floor’s boss, he checked the conditions for victory on this next floor.

Welcome to Floor 6 SafeZone

Time until SafeZone Collapse: 119:56

Floor 6 objectives:

Solve Floor Puzzle

Or

Defeat 2 of 3 floor bosses

Or

Defeat 2000 Zombies

Or

Find floor Stairwell

Completion of any of these objectives will automatically teleport all party members to the next floor

Good Luck!

“Zombies again,” he said to the others. “The only difference seems to be that there are three bosses we can find, although we only have to kill two of them.”

“And we don’t have home field advantage this time,” Peter pointed out. “I don’t know where we are.”

“I do,” Erik said. He pointed at the poster. “We’re in Alexandria. This is one of their three high schools.”

“We should start with information gathering, like before,” Eli said. “Sophie, Elaine, can you scout the school?”

“Yeah,” Sophie agreed, and her mother nodded. They took off, going in separate directions. Sophie returned twenty minutes later with a newspaper and Elaine five minutes after that with a radio that worked.

Eli was reading the newspaper, frowning as he tried to figure out the solution to this floor’s puzzle. The Radio gave real time updates on the zombies’ movements, calling out streets and avenues as the mass of zombies moved about the city. But the newspaper gave a chilling history.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The zombies had risen from their graves like on floor five, but on floor six they hadn’t just congregated in one area. They were roaming about, and the response hadn’t been an orderly evacuation like in his hometown. According to the newspaper, the exit to the interstate had been overrun, and there were no hints of what direction the party needed to move in to find the stairwell and escape the floor.

The radio, meanwhile, was broadcasting the account of a journalist who had taken it upon herself to report on the movements of the great masses of zombies. She was vowing, in between her zombie traffic report, to remain in the air until her helicopter ran out of gas so that anyone in the city could reach safety. She neglected to mention where safety was, however.

After Eli had gotten a good idea for what the challenge of this floor was and had developed a plan to, if not clear the floor, then at least move forward, he went to check on his injured party members.

Luke’s abdominal wound had closed up and left a pink scar in the place of the gory hole where he had been stabbed. Jose’s wounds were likewise healed, although where Luke’s injuries had been a straight through-and-through, Jose’s abdomen had four crosswise slashes. Both insisted that they could walk.

“We should turn back,” Jose said. “The option to vote to return to the surface is back. If we—”

“You don’t get it Jose. The entire point of showing us this floor? The system is saying that it can make the surface like this, if it wants to. I’m not sure what the limits of its abilities are, but screwing around with dimensions and raising the dead seem to be part of them,” Eli said. “I’m sorry you were injured, but—”

“Whatever this is I know it’s a problem, but it’s not one we’re qualified to handle,” the man insisted. “I’m a baker, for heaven’s sake. I can’t fight a cursed skeleton! What do you expect me to do except get in the way? And my daughter—”

“Either come with us or stay behind, Jose,” Eli said flatly. “But I’m going to ask you to stop trying to talk us into going back. It’s bad for morale. In, what is it now, four days? In four days monsters will start spawning on the surface. Maybe we’ll have reached the bottom of this dungeon by then and we’ll be able to protect the weak and the vulnerable on the surface when we return. Maybe that’s the point of fighting right now.”

Jose frowned. “You really think the surface will be like this soon?”

“I think that the world is ending, Jose. I’ve thought that since I got the system installed in my head,” Eli said. “My only goal is to survive the coming apocalypse. Hopefully with my mom and as many of my friends as possible. Right now, that includes your daughter. And your wife’s role in the party is vital as our healer. But if you keep on turning my group against me, then it won’t include you. You understand?”

Jose turned paler. “Are you threatening me?”

“I’m explaining my priorities. You asked why I should be the leader. I’m trying to show you why. Right now I’m being transparent. If you want to level up and maybe find a way to survive, then you need to either learn to be a follower or figure out how to take command of a group of fighters while you have a useless class like Cook. Have you figured out a way of doing that yet?”

Jose went quiet, and his wife didn’t help him. She stood nearby, examining the other combatants for injuries that they might have missed in the adrenaline rush of combat. Fortunately everyone else seemed to be alright except.

Jose sighed. “I won’t leave my daughter behind, and she won’t stop following you. I’ll try to stop making problems, but I don’t think we should be doing this and I will not hide my feelings.”

“Then you can stay in the SafeZone and keep an eye on our supplies while the rest of us figure out this floor’s puzzle,” Eli said flatly.

“I’ll stay with him,” Lucy said. “I’m not much good in combat either, after all.”

“You’ve enchanted most of our clothes by now,” Eli said.

“And I’m going to keep doing that,” she said earnestly, “But I was nothing but a liability against the skeleton. Look, this SafeZone is supposed to be safe for days, right? That means that Jose and I can supply a fallback point where the rest of you can rest and regroup if you fail to find a way forward. So it’s not like we won’t be busy.”

Eli nodded. The truth is that he’d been hoping to assign her to such a position with Jose, but he was pleased that he didn’t have to phrase it as an order. At least not in her case.

Jose looked nonplussed, but he nodded. The rest of the party had been listening, and they turned to Eli to begin planning their strategy.

“I’m going to spend a while investigating this book,” he said, pulling out the Book of Lesser Necromantic Arts he’d gotten from completing the previous floor. He’d actually taken the amulet, the crystal containing what he assumed to be the Lich’s soul, and the Eyeshades of Mana Vision to himself as well. He hadn’t mentioned those items to the party yet, but he might after discussing matters with Gabri. “Maybe it will have some clues as to how to clear this floor. It makes sense that the dungeon would give us some hints, right?”

The others agreed. Junior decided to take a small team to the shop classroom to see if there were any tools he could use to improvise weapons, while John Sr. went to the parking lot to hijack the vehicles he found there. Both father and son were accompanied by half of their teams, since they were uncertain whether the SafeZone extended to the entire school or only the gymnasium.

For that matter, they weren’t entirely certain what would happen if they led zombies back to their fallback point.

Eli didn’t hope to learn how to summon undead from the book that he was studying, but he did see where he’d gone wrong on the previous floor. While the ritual he’d found was indeed responsible for raising the dead like he’d thought, simply destroying it wasn’t enough. He should have inverted the ritual by disrupting several of the runes and placing a few drops of living blood on the relic which empowered it, which would have been the phylactery of a lesser Lich.

When they had destroyed the chapel, they had destroyed the source of the necromantic energies, but not those energies themselves. It would have taken days for the zombies to run out of energy. In addition, they had woken the lesser Lich, which had been serving as a power source and would have been dormant until Junior set fire to the building.

They had still cleared the floor by defeating the boss, but it could have been easier and better done, Eli reflected.

He went through several of the other ‘easy’ reanimation rituals listed in the book and noted their signs and how to counter them. Then he emptied out his backpack and put the book inside it, intending to keep it with him as a reference. Once he’d concluded his study of the book, he went to find the other party members, who were all out in the parking lot.

John Sr. had hijacked one of the maintenance vehicles, a pickup truck, and attached the plow that the school used to clear the parking lot in winter to it. He was driving that, while his sons were in back and his wife in the passenger seat.

The Santos and Waters families both had their own sedans this time, while Erik Estabon shared a car with the Mathews family. After some discussion, they figured out the order of their convoy.

The maintenance truck would lead. The entire purpose of having Luke and Junior sitting in the back of the truck was so that they could unleash devastation without getting out; Luke in the form of his spells and Junior in the form of a growing collection of incendiaries.

Everyone else would follow behind.