Chapter 29

They cleared the rest of the floor as a unified party, but the elite they’d encountered was the only monster to be found. When John Sr. examined the broadcasting room that it had been found in, he rubbed his hands in excitement.

“Always wanted to be in a broadcast room,” he confessed. “On television there’s always so many buttons and stuff. Hold on a moment and I’ll see if I can’t tell our eye in the sky that it’s safe to land.”

“Is it safe to land?” Elaine asked.

“We just finished clearing the roof,” Eli confirmed. “Right before we heard your gunshots. We came as soon as we heard the scream, sorry it took us so long to arrive.”

“It’s fine,” Elaine said. “I think we could have defeated it if we could have set it aflame, but its opening attack left us scattered. Between John and Luke we would have managed to burn it to death once we’d recovered and come up with a strategy. Was that your magic that allowed us to win?”

“Yeah,” Eli confirmed. The rest of the party knew, more or less, how his enhancement spells worked. Nobody had realized how effective they could be until they’d overcome DJ Rothead, as the kids were calling the boss monster now. “As soon as I saw them in combat I empowered their weapons. I didn’t expect it to be super effective.”

“Well, you saved us some time and effort,” she said, patting him on the shoulder.

John figured out how to broadcast, and a moment later he was talking to the reporter in the helicopter.

“If you’re in the broadcast room, that means you defeated the guardian,” the reporter said. “Is it safe to land?”

“We’ve completely cleared the building,” John Sr. confirmed. “Come on down and get a free T-shirt. We’re looking forward to meeting you.”

“Right. I do need to refuel to keep working. I’m sorry to everyone who is counting on this broadcast to survive, but you’ll have to get by without me for a while.”

She went on to say some on-brand things, but the party stopped listening as they went to the roof to wait for the helicopter to land on its pad. It arrived ten minutes later. Eli explained along the way that he knew how to disable the ritual empowering the undead, he just needed to find the altar.

For which he had a plan, but that plan required the help of the flying reporter.

They all stood back as the helicopter sat down squarely in place. The pilot got out first and ran to the refueling station, connecting a hose to the helicopter and pumping it full of fuel. Eli was reminded of the smell of propane and summer barbecues when he smelled it.

The woman got out next. She took off her helmet and smiled at the party.

Who all reflexively grabbed their weapons.

Her eyes were pure white.

“Don’t hurt me?” she said, smiling. “I’m not sure what happened, but yeah, I woke up this way the morning that the world ended. So did everyone else. Nothing is different except for the fact that all of those hours practicing my baleful glare or my ‘come hither’ eyes are wasted. Then later in the day the dead started rising, and, well, you know the rest. Or maybe you don’t?”

“Let’s say that we don’t,” Eli said.

She shrugged, and launched into the tale. It was a rather classical as far as undead apocalypse. The graves all emptied and zombies began overrunning everyone, each kill they made adding to their number. The zombies weren’t especially strong, being as fast and as strong as an average Joe, but they weren’t slow or weak either. They were slightly stupid, which is the only reason that the world hadn’t been completely overrun.

Presently she guessed that about one percent of the city’s population remained, while the rest was either dead of fled. She eagerly encouraged them to journey to the FEMA refugee point sixty miles northeast of the city, giving the party the first idea of where the floor’s stairwell was located.

But Eli had another idea to try first. He pulled from his backpack the Eyeshades of Mana Vision and watched as the flows of mana circulated through the city. He’d tried them on before, but they didn’t reveal much from the surface. From the top of this building, however, he had a better view.

There were two distinct types of mana floating about, one that looked like a soft green and the other a silver-blue. Where the two met, the silver-blue seemed to snap at the green, and the green retreated rather than engage in combat with the silver blue.

Eli didn’t know for certain, since the colors of mana weren’t consistent between the various skills and items used to view them, but he had a feeling that the green was natural mana and the silver-blue was the ritual that was empowering the undead.

Unfortunately he couldn’t see the epicenter of where the silver-blue was coming from. Not from this vantage.

He returned to the white-eyed reporter, whose name was Reba. “We need your help,” he told her. “I know how to kill all of the undead at once. But I need to find where the animating force is coming from. I need to fly with you in your helicopter. I can spot the convergence point from the sky and then the rest of my party can destroy it.”

She took a sip from a flask that he hadn’t seen her produce and sighed. “Yeah, okay kid. Whatever you say. Let me get you a spare helmet.”

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Eli’s eyebrows rose in surprise at how easy it had been to convince her, but didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth. Instead he turned to Luke. He pulled out the Book of Lesser Necromantic Arts and opened it to the bookmarked page.

“This is the ritual that’s being used,” Eli said. “Here’s what I need you to do to disable it.”

Luke listened for a few minutes, then shook his head. “Eli, there’s no way I’m going to remember all of this. We need to swap places. Give me those shades and tell me what I’m looking for, and you’ll be in charge of disabling the ritual.”

Eli frowned, but Luke had a point. Eli knew what he was doing with the ritual, and the only real reason to fly on the helicopter was that it would be pretty cool to do so. Finding the ritual was the easiest part of disabling it at this point, so it made sense to pass it off to Luke rather than expecting the mage to remember how to invert the ritual.

“Okay,” he said, and he gave the mage his eyeshades.

Luke put them on and muttered “Oh wow,” before he began asking questions about how how to identify the source of the necromantic energy and determine the direction that it was flowing from. Once that was sorted out, the party returned to the stairwell, leaving Luke behind with Reba and the unnamed pilot.

Their vehicles were still running, but they had to wait a few minutes for the helicopter to get in the air. Reba started talking to “All the fans out there” and explaining that she was joining hands with the good souls who had cleared out the radio station to try to put an end to the undead infestation.

She still called out the location of the undead packs, but she also allowed Luke to speak occasionally as he described the confluences of energy that he was witnessing from the helicopter. The convoy headed east, then south, and then east again as they tracked the energies to the source.

It was a park three miles from the radio station that Luke declared as the epicenter of the energies. Reba said that there was a gathering of three hundred zombies present, but Luke asked the pilot to get in close and then was heard chanting the incantation for his fireball spell.

He cast it four times in succession, and then Reba amended her estimate by seventy.

“That’s all I can manage for now,” Luke said over the air. “I’m out of mana.”

Fortunately, they’d planned for this. Susan, driving the maintenance truck, drove straight into the park. Using the winter plow of the truck as a battering ram, she drove straight through the groups of zombies while her husband and oldest son stood in the back of the truck, guarded by Maia, as they threw out their incendiaries.

They went through their supplies rather quickly, tapping on the cab of the truck when the last Molotov Cocktail had been thrown, but the damage they’d done to the enemy’s numbers was considerable.

They pulled out of the park, which was well and truly on fire, and back to the line that the rest of the party had established. When the zombies arrived, they had to march through a steady barrage of Elaine’s pistol and the other ranged fighter’s crossbows, including Sophie’s bow which was starting to pack the same punch.

Eli stretched his magic to protect his mother and enhance the blades of all of the melee fighters even as he himself joined them, having discussed the matter before hand. Until he learned to use his magic more proactively, there was no reason to restrict him to the backlines when his magic made him almost as deadly as a regular warrior.

Or so he thought until he actually fought beside them. Compared to Maia and Peter, Eli was slow and uncoordinated. Fortunately so were the zombies, at least compared to the fighters who had all increased their levels several times at this point.

More frustratingly, he had to hold focus on his enchantments to keep them from dissipating as he struggled to emulate just a tenth of his mother’s grace during the combat.

But with the numbers decreased, the party managed to emerge victorious after a moderately protracted battle. Eli wasn’t certain how long it took. It was a series of memories when he examined it later. Slashing the head off of one zombie. The arm off of another while he dodged the grasp of another. Hearing Gabri shout out a warning when one came up from behind him.

It was all strung together like the slideshow of someone else’s vacation pictures when he examined it later in his head. Someone’s gruesome, terrible, ugly idea of a Walking Dead themed vacation.

Then it was over, and it took him a moment to realize that it was over. He was hyper-vigilant for a few moments, breathing hard and looking for someone to attack to the point where he almost cut his mother when she stepped towards him.

“Easy Eli,” she said. “It’s done. We won.”

He blinked in surprise at her voice, and he looked around to realize that although they stood among a mound of gore, his mother was right. None of the zombies were moving. Or the parts that were moving were too small to be a threat to anyone.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

“Don’t be. I did the same to Erik a moment ago. I didn’t realize you were still in the trance when I came to check on you or I’d have been more careful.”

“The trance?” he asked.

“That’s what we’re calling it. You know what I mean, don’t you?” she asked.

He swallowed, and he nodded. “Think it’s from the system?”

“I don’t know. You’re the expert on all things system, remember? I’m just following my son’s lead.”

He considered for a moment.

“Not everyone is a born fighter,” he said eventually. “But what if there was a switch that you could flip in someone’s head to make it easier? This thing is already in our heads. What if it’s actively changing our personalities and making us more resilient to things like PTSD?”

“You think?” Mattie asked her son.

“It can teach us languages, Mom. It’s making us all hallucinate images in our vision. I don’t think tweaking a few hormonal responses is above its capabilities,” he said, growing more confident in his words.

“What does that mean for society?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But hopefully it means that the people who need strength will find it from the system.”

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