US, somewhere in the Midwest

Max took another sip from his newly made wine cup; skulls really made for excellent glasses once you filled up the right holes!

A skeletal servant brought some grapes to him and fed some directly to his mouth.

“Well, people, let’s try the monologue again, ahem!”

“Hi, Jacob, guess who has apparently come back to life. I’m not sure you know who I am, but let’s just say you killed me in another life. Now, I am going to kill you. But don’t worry, I’m going to make sure you will live for quite a bit before you actually die. And once you do, I’ll twist your little soul and cut ribbons out of—”

Max stopped and looked at his notes.

“I don’t like it. It sounds too scripted,” he scratched his head and got irritated at himself. “Come on, I need a speech before I go kill that bastard.”

He made a gesture to the side, where a ghoul was lying at the feet of a cross.

The ghoul jumped to his feet unsteadily and took a spear between his hands. The disfigured monster stabbed the chest of a crucified woman on top of the wooden cross.

A pained scream resounded in the villa.

“Uh, better,” Max nodded and lent his ear to the cries of pain and the begging.

“It really relaxes me a lot. It’s unbelievable. I wonder which neural pathways made it possible, uh. Man, I wish God existed. Imagine that fella goin’ like ‘I’ll make a couple of psychopaths who enjoy people suffering so much they can even get orgasms from it’, Ahah! Man, what a joker.”

The woman on the cross gave him a disgusted look and got another stab in return.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t get that much pleasure from just torturing little lambs like you.”

Max got up from his throne made of bones and strode toward the line of wooden crosses where tens of people had been hanged.

“No, I don’t soil myself in that way. I know people who even like doing it with corpses or dying people! Uh, imagine that! But I like my necromancer’s clothes spot clean, thank you very much.”

The woman mumbled something, and Max levitated up in the air a bit, bringing his ear closer to her mouth.

“Sorry, darling, could you repeat what you just said?”

The woman spoke with a heavy Spanish accent.

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“You will get killed!” she wheezed.

“Oh, man. It’s close, but not really. Spanish, Italian. Pigs all the same, I don’t care, see,” Max took her face in his hand.

“I’m trying to imagine the moment I will gut the bastard who killed me, and I tried finding some little lambs like you who could remind me of him. I need some practice, for God’s sake! But you poor little thing, you, you can’t even speak properly, come on!”

Max stabbed his hand through the woman’s chest and took out her heart. He gave a good chomp on it and channeled his Cultivation Technique.

“Man, I would like this Cultivation Technique to be a little less cliché. Come on, eating hearts? It gets tiring after a while.”

He moved onto a black woman on the side.

“You don’t look very Italian,” Max mused.

The woman had passed out from the stabbing.

“Oh, come on! She’s sleeping! Dude, she’s sleeping!”

Max screamed toward a revenant who hurried up the next second to stab the woman again. Nothing came from it apart from more blood on the ground.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Get the healer-guy!”

The revenant scurried off, and Max took the brief respite to check his speech once again.

“Oh please, please, please, don’t kill me! I promise, I didn’t do anything!” a man came pleading. He had a filthy nurse scrub on him and looked disheveled. He couldn’t even remember the last time he slept or ate anything.

“Uh, give the guy something to eat and drink, he looks like he’s going to drop dead any second now,” Max looked up from his troubling speech. “Heal the chick, please?”

Max pointed toward the black woman.

“Oh my,” the nurse dropped forward and started retching. Luckily for him, his stomach had been empty for a long time.

“Dude, you look terrible. But I need you to heal the chick before I stab you instead, pretty please?”

Lucas shivered and slowly got up.

The monster in front of him had slaughtered every single person he had been taking refuge with and made them into those abominations he carried with him everywhere. He had particularly enjoyed killing some more than others, even though Lucas hadn’t been sure why. He had been in the hospital close to start his night shift when the apocalypse had descended.

Max had killed off all the monsters who had besieged the hospitals, and then he had killed most of the humans. The filthy ones, at least. Most of them, to be honest. Not the one he thought might be Italian.

Then, Max had taught the nurse a Cultivation Technique and a set of Spells that were meant to heal people. It was extremely rare to find someone suitable for those things, and he had rejoiced in finding him. Now, tortures could go on for much longer than usual.

Heal

Lucas crossed his hands and pointed them toward the black woman. A faint light came from them and the woman. Her eyelids started to raise up sluggishly.

“What’s—” her voice got interrupted by another stab of the spear.

She screamed with a pitch so high that Lucas started crying.

“Uh, that’s the stuff! Finally! You know, nurse dude, few things are better than this. Dragons screaming, though, is the best. They all think they are so great. And then you torture them slowly, start whittling their soul away, grinding it leisurely until they become an empty shell!”

Max rubbed his hands.

“So, you were with the Spanish people, right? You a Latino too? And what’s the difference if I call you Latino, Spanish, pig, or whatever? Anyway, just keep being useful, dude; even a necromancer needs some company while cleaning up the place, aha! Oi, chick, I’m talking to you. Can you hear me? Any chance you are Italian? Aren’t some Italian black? I remember reading that somewhere…”

The woman’s eyes suddenly lost their light, and she died.

“Uh, pity. Well,” Max shrugged and went on, “you know, nurse dude, they are supposed to be physically resistant after living so many years in such terrible conditions. Instead, they bleed like everyone else. Oh, by the way, shouldn’t guys be doctors instead of nurses? What went wrong with you?”

Lucas, once again, was trembling. He looked at the huge swastika on the neck of the crazy necromancer and started crying.