“Are you sure you know where we are going?” Larry asked.

Melissa was leading the group of three through the forest. They had been walking for the better part of the day, and Larry’s feet began to hurt. The male mage had had ridiculously small feet, and Larry’s toes were pressing against the tip of the boots he had taken from the mage’s corpse. At least the robe was comfortable.

Larry had pulled the hood above his head, the edge of the fabric hanging just above his line of sight. If he wanted to, he could lower his head a little, and his face would be safely hidden from any outside observers. In case Melissa actually knew where she was going, and they ever found their way back into civilisation, Larry imagined the hood will come in handy, obscuring his burned face from the masses. After all, if Larry saw a man with an heavily scarred face, who did not breath nor had a heartbeat, he too would find it suspicious. And if they discovered he was an Undead Parasitic Human… Larry wondered how an average person in this world would react if they found out about this. Hell, he hadn’t even told Jorg about the Parasitic part yet, let alone the Undead fiasco.

“Yeah,” Melissa said, “I am sure we are going the right way. Richard, the guy your friend Jorg killed, and me walked here just a few days ago. Some of the trees are still burned from when I got bored and threw around fireballs.”

Larry wondered if she missed Richard. He couldn’t imagine talking about a dead friend this easily. Especially not with the murderers of said friend. Melissa guessed what he was thinking.

“Don’t worry,“ she said, “I got used to the death of the people who are close to me. Mostly because I’m the one that usually kills them.”

“That’s reassuring,” Larry said.

“Also, Richard was kind of an ass. He always told me I should stop lighting stuff on fire. I mean, why do you think I fled the city in the first place?”

“Because you lit stuff on fire?”

“Exactly. And because I’m still planning to light stuff on fire.”

“So that’s what you were doing in the forest? You are planning to put this place on fire. You can’t be serious.”

Jorg stepped forward from the back.

“This forest is massive,” he said. “If you light it on fire, who knows how much destruction you’d be spreading.”

Melissa giggled. Larry could see the happiness in her eyes.

“I know right,” she said. “The fire would burn for at least a thousands years!”

“Ok,” Jorg said. “That’s a little over the top. More like ten years tops.”

“Ten thousand years!”

“She isn’t listening at all,” Jorg said, shaking his head.

“No, she is,” Larry said. “She just chooses not to hear us.”

They continued walking. Larry remember he still had two Stems left, so he touched his head and opened the information tab. He looked at his stats and wonder what to increase. He hadn’t really noticed any difference from increasing Intelligence after his fight with the beast, but that could be because intelligence was such a vague thing to begin with. Agility on the other hand, he had noticed, had helped him a great deal in his fight with the Bone Knight. Of course, there was also Senses, and while it did sound like a very useful stat, Larry felt he needed to focus more on combat stats, currently.

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Would Senses also increase my sense of balance? If so, it might be more of an combat stat than it sounds like. It does seem extremely versatile.

He could also raise Strength, but since his Undead ability had given him a boost to it already, he hesitated.

He threw a brief glance and Jorg. Jorg had said that everyone was gaining different amounts of usefulness from their stats. So Jorg gained more strength from his Strength stat than Larry did, apparently. And Melissa might gain more out of magic related stats, if he had to guess. Larry wondered what his most efficient stat was.

If he had to guess, he’d say Regeneration. Two of his species-mutations were related to that stat, after all. But even if it was his most efficient stat, he wouldn’t put his Stems into it. It only worked for half of the day, at night. He decided that he would increase Intelligence. Being smarter sounded nice, and magic was something he definitely wanted to look into. Assuming Intelligence was related to magic.

Earth didn’t have magic, and now that he had the opportunity to learn about it, he wouldn’t ignore it. The only problem was, he had no idea how magic worked. He looked at Melissa's back.

Oh, I’ll definitely regret what I’m about to do.

“Hey Melissa. Could you teach me magic?” he asked, cringing at how weird it was to ask his enemy from the day before to teach him. Melissa chuckled.

“Now that’s a really bad idea,” she said. “Count me in.”

“Why’s it a bad idea. I’m not the one who’s planning to set this forest on fire.”

Melissa started walking slower, waiting until Larry caught up to her and they could walk next to each other. She moved closer, whispering into his ear. 

“Because of your thing,”  she said, giggling. “You know.”

“What?” Larry whispered, contemplating all the different ways she could have meant that.

Melissa looked behind them, and Larry turned his head to see what she was looking at. Turns out it was Jorg. The man was walking some distance behind them, and gave Larry a funny look. Larry shrugged his shoulders, signalling Jorg that he too, had no idea what Melissa was up to. Melissa whispered again, her face uncomfortably close to his’.

“Your thing, man,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about. The big cloud that’s been hanging above you since your fight with the Bone Knight. You are dead. You are a walking, talking corpse, and I gotta say, you are taking if pretty well.”

Larry shuddered. She knew. He looked back at Jorg, but the man had a finger to his forehead, checking out his Status. Hopefully Jorg hadn’t heard Melissa.

“How did you know?” Jorg asked. “I never told you.”

“I’m a rogue mage,” she said. “Undead are right up my alley. Admittedly, it was even further up Richard’s alley, but I know a thing or two, about Undead too. Two, too. That rhymed. Funny.”

Melissa giggled again. This girl had clearly a few screws loose. If she knew about the Undead part of his species, did she know about Parasitic too? He wouldn’t asked her about it. If she knew, she knew. But if she didn’t know and he asked, well, then she would definitely know.

“So why is my problem stopping me from learning magic?”

“Because,” Melissa said. “You run on magic already. You are fucking Undead, man. How do you think it works?”

“Wouldn’t that just make it easier for me to use magic?”

“Well, it does make it easier. But that’s not a good thing, not for you. Magic powers your body already, so using it for something other than yourself, will chip away at the power that keeps you alive. It’s like you are trying to light a fire by using yourself as fuel. Not the smartest thing to do.”

Larry ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch. If being undead denied him the chance to try some magic, he’d definitely have to become alive again. The problem was, the only way he could imagine himself coming back to live, was through magic.

“Ok,” he said. “But magic won’t kill me the second I use it right?”

“Probably not,” Melissa said. “But it’ll weaken you a lot more than it normally should. Of course if you overuse it…”

Melissa drew her finger along her neck, sticking her tongue out and crossing her eyes. She made a “Ugh” sound.

“You’ll fizzle out,” she said. “Like a candle that ran out of wax.”

Magic was dangerous, Larry knew. The wooden staff he had used to kill the beast, the fire from Melissa’s spells and male mage’s Bone Knight, they had all been extremely powerful. Physical strength had its advantages too, he realized, especially after he saw Jorg fight the male mage. But Larry knew that he’d have trouble catching up to people who simply had a natural advantage in Strength, like Jorg. If Larry wanted to survive, he’d have find a way to make magic work for himself.

Fizzling out is a risk I’m willing to take, Larry thought. A risk I have to take.

----

Mattlean fiddled with the new staff he was creating. It was a beautiful piece of wood, dark and elegant, with symbols on it which would drive lesser men insane, if they could understand them. Of course, if someone would be able to understand these symbols, they weren’t lesser men to begin with. He finished carving the last symbol, and a blue glow flowed across the staff.

He took one of the crystals he had created a while ago, and put it into the staff. It melted, the liquid infusing the staff with power. These crystals stored only a fraction of Mattlean’s own power, but they could be used by everyone, and without any mental strain at all. He had given one of his weaker staffs to his daughter too, so she could protect herself with it, just in case her own magic wasn’t enough.

He pointed the staff at a nearby wall. A bolt of lightning shot out from the tip, hitting the wall and ripping a hole into it. He smiled. He could pay for the repair of the damaged wall with a small portion of the gold he would get, once he had sold this staff.

For now though, he enjoyed the cool breeze.