In the roughly two years that I had lived in Peninsula, I had survived nine respawn days
On my first, like most times, I had heard it coming before I saw it. I had still been new to the dangers of the city, but you only need to see one zombie to start taking them seriously. Although I was already well hidden in an office building, I wasted no time climbing into the space above the ceiling tiles. I hadn’t known what was coming, but I could tell it was going to be bad, While peeking through the cracks and windows to the streets outside, I saw the miasma thicken and the beginning of the madness to come.
Somehow the cursed had looked like living people again, and even their clothes had returned to a clean and well laundered state. It was easy to tell that they were not normal people though. They ran around like packs of hunting wolves, and even fought with each other from time to time. I still don’t know what causes it to happen, and I’ve never been stupid enough to try and find out. Sometimes, cursed cities are just bullshit like that.
I don’t know what I did to draw their attention, but it wasn’t long before they smashed through the doors of the building I was hiding in and began to actively search for me. If they had a full intellect they may have found where I was hiding, and I was glad that I had changed locations when I did. I was up in the ceiling for an entire day before the mist cleared and I was finally able fall back down to the floor.
My second respawn day was a much closer call, and I still have nightmares about that night. I had been asleep, and hadn’t heard the howling screams until it was too late. I was in an apartment building that I had just cleared earlier that afternoon, but it didn’t stay empty for long.
I woke up to the sound of pounding on the bedroom door, and barely made it through the window before they managed to get in. The next few minutes had been a deadly game of cat and mouse, with me climbing in and out of windows while they chased me. I finally lost them when I made it to a stairwell and dropped one of my shoes to the bottom floor. They had followed the sound downwards, while I crept up to the roof.
I’d have to check my journal to remember when it was that I actually realized that individual zombies came back, but it was probably around the fourth or fifth respawn day. Before then, I had assumed that the city just kept creating new ones, like it was an undead random number generator. I had only known that once the mist came, areas I had cleared stopped being so clear.
There’s a specific zombie that shows up near a library that I had raided a few times. It has on the gaudiest gold colored clothing that I’ve ever seen, and had a fairly memorable appearance. He had been an ugly bastard even before he became an undead. I laughed the first time I killed him. The second time, I thought it was a funny coincidence. By the third, I was sure. Even in a city that had once had over ten million residents, there was no way that there could be more than a single guy that dressed like that. Especially since I had killed him in the same general location each time.
After spending two years in Peninsula, I had found some of the patterns. I didn’t fully know why it happened or how all of it worked, but I knew what to expect. I knew the dos and don’ts for staying alive. Even something as small as closing an extra door or two could mean the difference between life and death. One of my rules was that, outside of my water tower, I never slept on the ground or floor. It was always in a crawl space or drop ceiling where I couldn’t be seen.
Sharing the bedroll with Haylen was the first time I had made an exception in over a year. In hindsight, it had been a mistake. I had thought the expedition was ready. I had thought that with all their strategies and tactics that they must have known a reliable way to survive.
But they didn’t. Somehow, for some reason, they didn’t even know that respawn day was a thing.
I didn’t wait for anyone to buckle up before I had the van going. I wanted to be moving as fast as possible as soon as possible, and for a brief second the screeching of the tires drowned out the sound of the city-wide apocalypse that was heading our way. How long had it been since the last one? A month? A bit less? Either way, it had come early. Much too early.
“Fucking Gregor If we live through this I’ll... I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do, but it will be unpleasant!”
When I had spoken to him that morning, he had seemed so sure that the expedition knew everything there was to know about their part of the city.
“My pale perfect ass you do! You don’t know shit!”
He had not so subtly hinted that if I could bring back confirmed information about the other parts of the necropolis, it would prove my dependability, and he would reconsider giving me a salvage permit. We had both been so focused on other parts of the city that I hadn’t bothered to question him about the necropolis as a whole. The fact that he could even possibly be ignorant of respawn day had never crossed my mind.
An expedition going a year or two without encountering it? Easy. A decade or two? Sure, I could believe that. But an entire century? Multiple centuries? Impossible. There was simply no way that they had never seen a respawn day before.
“How the hell do you not know about respawn day?!” I yelled while pounding on the steering wheel. “And put your sword away Corlo! It won’t do you any good while we’re in the van, and they don’t know we’re here yet. We’d have seen them already if they did.”
My original plan for this trip had been to take care of the looting today, and spend tomorrow taking them around to show off some of Peninsula’s more exotic forms of horror. Maybe piss off Snake by throwing rocks into his tunnels. Maybe trick a few of the slimes at the docks into drinking high content alcohol. Luring a pack of zombies into Tank’s territory always made for some good entertainment. Then we could jaunt on back to the expedition, and I could get a fancy piece of paper with my name on it.
Despite my usual paranoia, I had been confident that there would be at least another week or two before the real nightmare started. I had been caught up in a happy dream that I didn’t want to wake from. We could have avoided all of this if I had only taken the time to ask the right questions.
I had been sure that I could keep four people alive on a trip through the necropolis. As long as I didn’t let my guard down, I could hold my own against any single thing in the city. But respawn day was more than ten million things, and I was under no illusion as to my ability to fight back.
Four people on a normal day were easy to babysit, especially because these four people weren’t idiots and took my warnings seriously. Now, if I didn’t get back to the expedition and convince them to leave in time, I’d have to protect more than three hundred people, and I didn’t think I could do that. I knew I couldn’t do that. Not against what was coming.
Plans went through my mind, and were discarded one after another. Rage zombies, or whatever they could be classified as, weren’t nearly as stupid as they usually were, and hiding over three hundred soldiers plus their mounts would be impossible. A fight would be inevitable, and a fight would guarantee a horde. That horde would then last as long as respawn day did. As I killed them, the corpses would most likely disappear off to somewhere else, and the sound of the other zombies would draw them right back towards us. The only idea with any chance of success was to run.
“We need to warn the expedition and get out of the city. Anyone who tries to stay and fight will die.”
“Oh. So that’s why they don’t know about it. In order to tell people about respawn day, someone must first survive respawn day. And even if someone did manage to live through it, they’d then be trapped in a city full of undead, while the path to the exit was no longer safe. Chances were, most of the soldiers didn’t actually know where the exit was, and only half remembered the route they had traveled to the camp. They would be lost, and stuck in the city just like I was, but they wouldn’t be able to survive like I had.”
I shouted back and forth with the others as I tried to explain what happened on respawn day. Despite hearing it coming, they had trouble understanding just how absolutely fucked we’d be if we didn’t get out of the necropolis. Haylen and Corlo still thought they could defend the arena, and Mayra seemed to think that a scant six mages would be enough to turn the unturnable tide. Only Kearse had the appropriate level of fear and didn’t need to be told twice that retreating was the best option.
My language skills were doing well because I wasn’t thinking too hard about what I was trying to say, but my sentences grew steadily shorter as I began to lose my temper.
Yes, respawn day was bad. No, I couldn’t fight it. Yes, I could kill several thousand zombies. No I couldn’t kill several thousand zombies over and over for an entire day or more. Yes, the entire expedition would die. No, the defenses wouldn’t hold. Yes, the zombies are that much worse. No, we can’t fucking stay.
I pulled onto the highway, and drove as fast as I dared. The wrecked cars were only minor obstacles, and I swerved around them without thinking. The screams of the undead had receded into the distance as I outpaced the thickening miasma that brought respawn day with it. We had a small head start, but it was going to be close.
I knew the shopping mall we had been at was on the east side of the city, and if I remembered my map correctly, it was also slightly further south than the expedition camp was. Unfortunately, since the mist was also coming from the south, that meant that it was actually closer to the stadium than we were. The miasma moved slowly, and we had the advantage of speed, but it was going to be close.
I was sure we could get to the expedition before it did. The hard part was going to be convincing them to leave in time. If they hesitated on the decision, or tried to argue with me, the delay could cost us everything. They had no reason to doubt me, but they had no reason to trust me either. Everyone in the van had heard the sounds, but I was the only one who had seen what it was like first hand.
“I can hear it again,” Haylen said from the back. She had an ear to the window and there was a tremor in her voice.
Good. Controlled fear was exactly what I needed them to be feeling. The more worried they were, the easier it would be to convince Gregor and Damfeld. Also bad. It meant that we had less time than I thought.
“The zombies aren’t just zombies on respawn day,” I told them again. I needed to make it as clear as possible just how much danger we were in. “They look like living people, but they will fight like berserkers. And they’re smart. They won’t just try to flood the main gate. They’ll tear at the smaller ones until a hole is made, and climb over each other like fucking ants if that’s what it takes for them to get in.”
The rest of the drive along the highway was mostly silent. I wanted them to be afraid, but I didn’t want them to panic. I had just pulled onto the offramp when Corlo swore.
“Damn! The patrol! The baiting parties should all be done for the night, but there will still be a patrol out.”
He said that they would only be a single block out from the stadium, but that was still several kilometers worth of area that we’d have to search.
“Fuck! How do I handle this? Think Indigo, think! What’s the fastest way to do this?”
I didn’t know. I was in too much of a rush. Finding the best order to get everything done in would take too long, and I needed to make a decision fast. I had to wing it.
Picking up speed once more, I drove directly to the arena entrance. As usual, there were a few soldiers on body burning duty, and they retreated to the entrance when they saw the van racing their way. I ignored them, and skidded to a halt, just out of spear throwing range.
“Haylen, Mayra, Kearse, out! Go warn the camp, and get them packing. Corlo and I will find the patrol and send them back here. Don’t let Gregor and Damfeld wait for scouts to bring back a report before he makes up his mind. If the camp isn’t evacuated within the hour, we’re dead. If we’re not out of the city in two, we’re dead. And those are optimistic estimates, so get moving!”
Haylen was barking orders at the guards the second her feet hit the ground, and Corlo was still closing the door when I had the van going again.
“Check the south side first,” he suggested. “If they’re down there, we need to get them away from it as soon as possible.”
I had chosen Corlo to come with me because I hoped that his status as a paladin would work better than Haylen’s officer rank. We couldn’t waste time with the patrol when we told them to head back to the camp. Now I was very glad I had chosen him, because he was thinking much more clearly than me. I hadn’t even thought about which direction to search first. I just knew that they were patrolling in a circle, so I had only planned on driving around that circle until I found them.
We got lucky, and found them after only a few blocks. They were indeed on the south side. Corlo opened the door and leaned out as we approached. It was getting dark, and the headlights from the van made it difficult for them to see us clearly. Like the guards at the camp, they readied their spears, and even took a defensive formation. If we hadn’t been in such a rush, I would have complimented them for their quick response.
Corlo shouted something, and a human in heavy armor stepped up from the center of the spear line. His sword was drawn, but he recognized Corlo’s voice and came forward. Another man on a horse came with him.
“Paladin Relard! Commander Shafver! Turn your patrol around and get back to the camp immediately!” Corlo yelled to them. “Do you hear that?” he asked, pointing south. The sound that we had managed to outrun had caught up once again. “That’s the sound of death coming our way.”
“Dammit!” I thought. “My estimates really were optimistic. Even if it is distant, that’s still a lot closer than I’d like.”
My faith in the orc hadn’t been misplaced though, and the patrol needed little convincing to start marching back to camp. When I mentioned it to him, he reminded me that the patrol was meant to warn the expedition of oncoming threats, not act as a line of defense.
I drove off as soon as the platoon started moving. I needed to get back myself and make sure that they weren’t just sitting around. Almost immediately, five men on horses rode by us heading southwards, and I allowed myself a little hope that things were progressing smoothly. That the expedition was taking action at all was a good sign.
When we arrived at the gates again, the guards didn’t point their spears at the van, but still held them tight as we approached. Corlo grabbed his pack and jumped out, and I paused only long enough to retrieve my mana battery before running into the stadium myself. It still had most of its charge left, and I couldn’t leave it behind. The more time that passed, the closer the best case scenario started to resemble the worst case scenario, and we were going to need every iota of mana we could get our hands on for either one.
I wanted to cheer when I walked through the gates and saw the defenses nearly empty. When I passed those and saw the expedition pulling down tents, hitching horses, and loading wagons, I wanted to cry for joy. Whatever Haylen and Kearse had said to get everyone moving, it had worked. It was still going to be a close call, but this meant that we had options other than complete and imminent death.
I followed Corlo in the direction of the command tent and found the three leaders issuing orders to the commanders and paladins. Haylen wasn’t there, and I hoped that she was busy organizing her own troops. When Gregor saw us, he waved me over while Corlo went to Damfeld.
“I hope you’re right about all of this,” he told me. “We’re trusting you quite a bit here.”
“I don’t,” I snapped back at him. “I’d rather get in trouble for wasting your night than go through what we’re about to. We’ve got less time than I thought. The patrol could already hear it when we caught up to them which means it’s close. If we’re not ready to go by the time the scouts get back, then it will be too late. Even then, it won’t be without a fight. If it’s not absolutely critical for getting us back to Orlis than leave it behind.”
“You owe me a salvage permit for this one,” I thought, and was glad I resisted the urge to say it out loud.
If he had anything else he wanted to tell me, I didn’t have time to hear it. The expedition was moving, and that was all I needed from him.
“Verdis!” I shouted, interrupting whatever he was saying to one of the mages. “Mana!” I continued, and shoved the crystalline battery into his hands. “The mages are going to need it. Don’t hold back with the spell chucking. If it runs out, I’ll give you another one. If I don’t get them back, I’ll do to you what I did to the zombies at the mall. You can ask Mayra to tell you what that means.”
Before the archmage could make up his mind on whether he wanted to thank me, lecture me, or ask where I had gotten the battery, I moved on again and raised me voice so that everyone around could hear me.
“Does anyone have any questions besides, “How fucked are we?” Anyone? No? If you need me, I’ll be at the gates. Don’t keep me waiting, because I do not want have to explain to your empire why an entire expedition isn’t coming back.”
I wasn’t going to abandon them, but being a sole survivor sounded a lot better than being dead.
Most of them looked like they did have something to say, but none of them tried to stop me as I walked away. I was tense. I was on edge. It showed. There’s a fine line between speaking with a motivating lack of tact and acting like a total bitch, and I could only hope that I was giving the right impression.
I made my way through the entrance tunnel, and yelled at the guards to get packing. I didn’t stop to see how many of them left though, and continued walking outside. It wasn’t like I had any real authority over them anyway. I was just bossing people around because it kept me distracted.
I reached into my storage and pulled out the two guns from inside. My ball bearings used much less mana, but any weapon was a good weapon, and I didn’t want to fumble around for them later. I attached the pistol holster to the thin belt at my waist, slung the rifle across my back, and climbed onto the top of the van to wait.
When nothing happened after the first minute, I pulled out a few spare mana crystals and began to fill them from the larger one I had used at the shopping mall. Ammo was ammo. It was a simple process. I only needed to touch each crystal, and let the mana flow from one, through me, and into the other. Pull here, push there. I probably wouldn’t be using the guns for long, but I wouldn’t have time to recharge them in the middle of a fight if I ended up needing them.
The larger battery was practically empty, so I pulled the last of the mana into myself. It wasn’t much, but it felt good to have it ready either way. The other large crystals were left waiting. I didn’t need much mana to be combat ready, so it was better to let them wait for when the mages needed them.
Once the gun batteries were ready, I shoved them into whatever pockets I had available. The pistol holster had two small sleeves for that very purpose, but I had to give up trying to shove the rifle crystals into my vest pockets, and they went back into storage.
“Fuck! Why do all cultures have to give women’s clothing such small pockets?”
I really wished I could shapeshift my clothing. It would have made a lot of things so much easier. Truly this universe must have been designed specifically to make my life difficult.
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“I blame the patriarchy. Also whichever god dropped my soul into the “disposable waste” bin. It was probably their fault. And goddammit! What is taking them so long?”
I hadn’t even been outside for five minutes, but the calm before the storm was getting to me. I knew the expedition wouldn’t leave before both the patrol and the scouts came back. I had been in such a rush to get back, but now standing watch was about all I could do. The expedition knew how to pack up their camp better than I did, and if I went back in now, I’d only be getting in their way.
Sitting still was hard though, and I needed a distraction. A second distraction. Remembering the mask that I still had on top of my head, I pulled it down to cover my face and started trying to activate some of its functions. Most of its enchantments probably were just to make it wearable, but anything worthy of the name “Assassin’s Mask” had to have something more to it than just looking cool.
After a few minutes, all I was able to get out of it was a minimalistic HUD screen, and a rangefinder. That got my hopes up for use with my guns… until I remembered that the magical bolts weren’t effected by bullet drop or the coriolis effect.
“That would have been pretty serendipitous if these were normal guns. Except that it’d still be useless because I’ve never shot a real gun to begin with! Fuck you past life me! Because of you, I’m lucky I even know how the safety works on these things! Why couldn’t you have had useful hobbies?!”
I sighed and tried to refocus myself. Yelling at my past life for something that had nothing to do with the current situation wasn’t exactly helpful. He had been a nice guy too. He didn’t deserve to be insulted like that. I readjusted my position on top of the van and went back to my irritable and impatient waiting.
With night now fully upon us, visibility was lower than ever in the mist, and I heard the patrol coming before I saw them. I raised the mask, and waited for them to approach. They looked like they had been jogging the whole way here, but I still yelled for them to hurry up. This time though, I shouted a few words of encouragement. Now we were just waiting for the scouts and we could leave. If the expedition was ready, that was. I really hoped they would be ready.
I debated going inside to check, but held my ground. There were only two guards left at the gate, and I thought about talking to them, but they already looked uncomfortable, and I didn’t know what to say. The three of us waited in silence until the noise reached us. I was the first to hear because I was listening for it, but it didn’t take long for them to notice as well, and they both held their spears tighter.
“Hell,” one of them said. “That has to be the sound of hell.” In the darkness, I could see him turn towards me. “You’ve been here a while, right? How big is that horde?”
I wanted to lie to him, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell him that it was big, but manageable. The words wouldn’t leave my mouth. Instead, I rolled onto my stomach, and pointed the rifle towards the noise.
“As big as the city,” I finally said, “Be glad we’re leaving.”
After another agonizing moment, the sound of horseshoes on pavement reached our ears and I sighed in relief. We could finally leave. Then there was another noise, and I tensed again.
“You!” I shouted, and pointed to one of the guards at random. “Get inside and tell them the scouts are back. We need to leave NOW! The longer we wait, the more we’ll have to fight. Go!”
The soldier sprinted in and I went back to listening.
When the scouts came into view, they were one short. If what I heard behind them was any hint, they had gotten too close to the wall of mist and been spotted. That missing scout was my fault. The first death of the night was one I could have prevented. I had seen them riding by, and I had known where they were going. I should have warned them. I could have warned them. But I had been in such a rush that I hadn’t thought about it. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference. It was dark, and they’d need to bring back more information than just, “We heard noises,” so they would have had to get close anyway. Still, the guilt gnawed at me.
The scouts went straight for the gate and didn’t slow down. They rode like demons were chasing them, and that wasn’t far from the truth.
I took a small risk and opened my senses a little. I needed to know how close the zombies were, but it was too dark to rely on my eyes. The blur of wrongness in the distance was stronger than I had ever felt it, and it made my stomach lurch. Luckily for me, it was still distant, and I was able to pinpoint a smaller cluster of wrongness coming my way. My best guess was that there were about a dozen of them. Whether or not the scouts thought they had lost their hunters was irrelevant now.
Sensing presences was never clear enough for me to aim for individual body parts, so I didn’t try. The rifle’s bolt was powerful enough that even a shot to the chest could do enough damage to kill a zombie. Unlike the people of Mr. McPastlife’s world, the Ancestors had never considered their guns to be anything less than deadly weapons. When they hit, they hit hard.
With only feeling the presences to guide me, I took aim as best as I could and pulled the trigger. The gun made a rippling sound, like something moving quickly through water, and a hand length bolt of white light fired off into the darkness.
“I’m glad I don’t need ear protection, but a gun that doesn’t make a proper bang just sounds wrong.”
I had missed. Still, that had worked well enough as a tracer round, and I had a better idea of how to adjust my next shot. There was another ripple as I pulled the trigger, and the next white bolt was a definite hit. There was a distinctly human shriek, and I knew I had killed it. Lucky me.
I pulled the trigger again and again. Some of my shots missed, but most of them were hits, and most of those had been instantly lethal. The last zombie died just after it came into view. More would be running out of the mist wall soon, but they were still far enough away to be part of the blur.
“We can still make it. We can still make it,” I told myself.
I slung the rifle onto my back and refilled its crystal while I walked over to the corpse of the last zombie I had killed. It was a young boy, still a child, and probably only eight or nine years old. If not for fact that half his head was missing, he looked perfectly healthy. From the body alone, you’d never know he was an undead.
The Imperials called zombies “the cursed” and I understood why. By calling them zombies, I dehumanized them, and made them simple monsters in my mind. I ignored the rotting flesh, and only let myself see people shaped targets. To the expedition, to most of it at least, the cursed were their ancestors, warped by foul magics. The Imperials might not know how the world had been broken, but they would never forget that it had broken, because the cursed would always be there to remind them.
I had withdrawn my senses, but the body on the ground still made my stomach feel sick. It was too real for me to look at comfortably. But the clock was ticking, and I needed to get the expedition moving. The scouts were back, and if the rest of them hadn’t finished packing, so be it. It was time to go. I grabbed the corpse by the foot, and started pulling it towards the gate.
“Let’s see how fast they move once they’ve had a good look at this.”
The lone guardsman looked panicked when he realized that he was now outside by himself. The cursed boy’s body probably didn’t help.
“Go inside,” I told him. “We’re leaving.”
He didn’t hesitate, and took off through the tunnel. I didn’t think any of the soldiers inside would blame him. Dragging the body, I followed behind him and painted my path with blood. When I reached the other side, I spun, and heaved the body towards the assembled soldiers.
“Well what are you all waiting for? Get moving, because there’s a lot more where this came from!”
Most of the soldiers were in marching formation, and I had probably arrived mere seconds before they were about to start their departure. Murmurs started to spread through the ranks. If we hadn’t been in a necropolis, it would have looked like I had just killed a child.
Knight-Paladin Damfeld was at the front of the soldiers, and the blood splatter from the body only narrowly avoided landing on his horse. His eyes bulged at the sight, and he recognized it for the sign of danger that it was.
He stood in the stirrups of his saddle and shouted for everyone to hear. “If it’s not packed yet, then leave it! It’ll be here waiting for us next year! Expedition, move out!
* * * * *
I walked beside the Knight-Paladin as he rode through the tunnel and told him what I could.
“You can hear it yourself now, can’t you? That means the thicker mist is close, and more of the cursed like the one I just showed you are coming with it. You’re the soldier, so I won’t tell you how to do your job. Just be ready for a fight, and lead us out as fast as you can.”
He didn’t say anything, but he looked down at me and nodded. Whatever irritation I had caused him that morning had been put aside for now, and he was back to the stern half-frown that he wore when I had first met him.
Haylen’s platoon was the second in the line, and I fell back to walk beside her and Corlo. Kearse and Chad were a little farther back, and I gave them a nod. In the middle of the formation, the priests and mages were clustered together, and I could see Verdis trying to handle a horse and hold my mana battery at the same time. Gregor was riding beside him, and looked as alert as the rest of the soldiers.
We were walking northwest, but everyone’s heads turned south when they left the stadium’s tunnel. The screaming no longer sounded so far away, and they were all more than willing to pick up speed when Damfeld called for it.
“How long do you think it will take to reach the exit?” I asked. I had a rough guess based on my map and where I had seen the location marked, but it was still only a guess.
Haylen shook her head. “An hour if we can keep up this pace. But we don’t have an hour, do we?”
I looked away when I responded. “There will be fighting. It’s inevitable at this point. The important part is getting close enough that we can fight our way through. If the cursed manage to halt our advance…”
I trailed off before I started crushing anyone’s hopes. We could still make it out, but there would be losses.
We walked in silence after that. Or rather, we didn’t talk. The sound coming from our left was ever present, and it grew louder by the minute. The expedition carried no torches for fear of drawing attention to ourselves, but they made no attempts at moving silently. The din was more than enough to make three hundred marching soldiers seem quiet by comparison.
Every few minutes I would reach out my senses, hold back my vomit, and try to get a feel for how quickly the deeper blur of wrong was gaining on us. I hated the feeling of so many undead around me, but had to force myself not to leave my senses open. Otherwise I’d be like a deer in the headlights and freeze up until it was too late to react.
When the expedition had found me and I knew I was finally able to leave the city, I had imagined what it would be like. I had pictured myself proudly marching down the street with a bottle of liquor in hand while I drunkenly swore at every building we passed. I had not imagined getting chased out in the middle of the night with the horde of all zombie hordes at my heels.
I couldn’t count them, but there were regular cursed in the buildings around us as well. They were probably too well locked in to attack the expedition when it first came through here, but I doubted they’d stay that way once the fog reached them.
We were able to go thirty minutes before the attacks started. I had only just shouted a warning when half a dozen rage zombies rushed out of the shadows towards one of the rearwards platoons. They were no match for the wall of spikes, and the soldiers handled them the same way that they did the greater cursed. One soldier would immobilize it with a thrust to the chest, and any soldiers around him would finish it off with blows to the head.
The undead’s appearance disturbed the soldiers though, and the formation wavered.
“Don’t break formation!” Damfeld and I almost shouted in unison. “Don’t stop! Don’t slow down!”
I kept my senses open after that, and gave warnings whenever the cursed approached. The blur was close though. So close. Soon, any warnings I gave would be meaningless. I took potshots with my rifle, but rarely hit anywhere lethal. At best, the bolts of light only served to show which direction the next attack was coming from.
The packs became more frequent, and in larger numbers. They threw themselves at us with their usual lack of preservation instinct, and it was only their lack of true organization that prevented them from overrunning us. Morale was starting to drop as nerves began to fray, but if anything our pace increased. With every cursed we killed, our fear grew and quickened our steps.
The mages lit our path with magical spheres. There was no point hiding any more. Great flashes of light lit the surroundings as they threw balls of fire, and spears of lightning and ice. I realized that the illuminating balls of light weren’t there to guide us, they were to stop us from losing our sight as the combat magic flashed around us and robbed us of our night vision.
We were close. So close. We must have been close. If it was daytime, we probably could have seen the exit from where we were. But the miasma had caught up to us, and the expedition was about to get a hands on lesson in respawn day.
“It’s here!” I shouted. “The mist will be thick! Do not break formation! Do not lose sight of the person next to you! If you get separated, try to follow the sound of us, but do not go looking for anyone that’s missing.”
It hadn’t covered us yet, but the individual packs of cursed were now one continuous stream. There were no longer any pauses between one group and the next. The zombies leapt into the spears without hesitation, and their increased numbers made it harder and harder for the soldiers to kill them quickly.
We were running now, and not a minute passed without me hearing the screams of an injured soldier. I hoped that they were only injured, but I quickly learned the difference in shouts. The long screams were only injury. It was the ones that cut off early that meant someone was dying.
When the mist engulfed us in full, the darkness around us deepened, and it became impossible to see more than a few feet in front of us. The cursed however, had no such issues. The mages had to use closer ranged spells to avoid hitting the soldiers, and I had to put my guns away as well.
The rifle was on my back. I couldn’t use it in such cramped conditions and the ammo was spent. My pistol had followed soon after when it had drained all the mana from its crystals. Now, I was dashing up and down the line with a handful of ball bearings floating around my wrist. I couldn’t use all of them at once, not without hitting the soldiers. Instead I would launch them two or three at a time to take down whatever cursed came into my limited field of view.
Our pace slowed, but we pushed onwards, and didn’t stop moving. We knew we couldn’t be far from the exit, but to make a break for it now would mean getting torn apart from behind. It would mean trusting your life to your feet while you left others to die.
The expedition may have only been a militia, but they were still soldiers, and they held together admirably. The moment someone fell, another took their place while the people behind them pulled their wounded comrade back behind the spears. The cursed needed no such teamwork, and for every one that fell, there were a hundred more rushing to take its place. That we were still moving at all seemed like a miracle.
Our pace slowed again, and I began to make my way towards the front to try and clear the cursed that were blocking us when I heard Damfeld yelling orders.
“First platoon and paladins, guard the slope! Second platoon and mages, move to secure the upper road! Third platoon, protect the priests and wagons! Fourth and fifth platoons keep moving! We’re at the exit! Keep to the right, or the miasma won’t let you out!”
We were here! We made it! The paladins and the first platoon had gathered at the base of an onramp and formed a living barricade of soldiers and spears with just enough of a gap to let the rest of the expedition funnel through. When Haylen’s group reached them, Corlo joined the edge of the phalanx, while the rest rushed up the ramp to keep the cursed from approaching on the other side.
We had reached the exit, but the cursed were still increasing in number. The continuous packs were now a single massive horde, and they were pushing the expedition towards the ramp just as much as the soldiers were racing towards it. Rather than an organized formation, we were a small blob of the living surrounded by the dead.
Now that the formation had reached a choke point, I could pull out all the stops without fear of friendly fire. I pulled the barrel with the rest of my ball bearings out of my storage and it practically exploded as the metal rushed into the mass of undead.
Rather than have the balls circle around me and blend anything that got close, I shaped their movement pattern into an elongated oval and scythed it through the oncoming cursed like a chainsaw the length of a school bus.
A prismatic meteor shower of spells rained down around me from the mages on the highway above. Even if our attacks didn’t kill all of the cursed outright, we still slowed them down enough for the soldiers to regain some of their organization. The undead payed no mind to walking or climbing over the bodies and severed limbs of the others, but even they started to slow due to the increasing difficulty of the terrain.
But still they kept coming, and their numbers continued to grow.
“Indigo!” I heard Corlo yelling behind me. “Fall back! Everyone else is through!”
I didn’t respond, but started walking backwards, careful not to trip on the bodies around me. If it was anyone else, or even an entire platoon, the expedition would risk getting routed rather than being make an organized retreat. When I reached the ramp, the blockade of soldiers began to move with me.
The shape I kept the bearings spinning in was simple, and made moving so many objects at once much easier, but doing that while walking backwards up a curved slope and not hitting the people around me was getting increasingly difficult.
We reached the top and merged with Haylen’s platoon. I didn’t have time to look for Kearse, but I hoped he was alright. Mayra I saw with Verdis, and she was gathering mana from the battery I had given him. It was still glowing, but didn’t look like there was much left.
I wanted to give them another one, but I would have to pause my telekinesis to concentrate on pulling anything out of my storage space, and even that brief moment would be enough for the cursed to regain the momentum. Even as it was, some of them were getting past me to the soldiers, and the now widened road was making it harder for me to keep up with all of them.
The two squads spread out along the highway and we continued to back up slowly. Behind us, the mages were still throwing volleys of spells. All together, we were making progress, but the undead were endless and tireless while we were not. We had control of the fight at the moment, but if we couldn’t disengage now, they may even try to follow us out of the exit.
If that happened, they would wear us down little by little. No. If we didn’t stop them here, or if we faltered in the slightest, they would rush us and we’d be dead within minutes.
I needed to get the mana batteries to the mages. If they could direct enough damage to the highway, we could collapse it behind us and cut them off. But to do that, I’d have to get the batteries to all of the mages and explain the plan to them. There wasn’t enough time.
I had enough mana for a score of mages sitting in my storage space, but if I tried to get it to the others…
“Fuck.”
I had an idea, but it was going to hurt. I knew it was rushed. I knew it was ill-conceived. But it was all I had.
“Corlo! I need your help!” He was right next to me, but I still had to shout to make myself heard. “I’m going to do something stupid, but it will probably work, so it’s only mostly stupid. When I collapse, I need you to carry me.”
“Are you alright?”
“Yes! But not for long! Try to get the crystals too, if you can!”
I widened the arc of my bearings and gave a final large sweep through the cursed before I pulled them all back and fired them off like a claymore. With the scant second I had bought myself, I reached into my storage, and pulled out all five of my full mana batteries. I grabbed them with my mind, and floated them just above the ground by my feet. They wouldn’t be floating for long, and I didn’t want to break them.
I pulled mana from the crystals as fast as I could. It barely reached me before I began to shape it into one of the largest spells I had ever cast. It was a simple spell. Very straightforward. But I was shoving five full sized batteries worth of mana into it, and the result was going to be huge. I had used eight full batteries the last time I increased my storage space, but that spell had taken hours. This time I was using five to cast a spell in mere seconds.
No body, not even a magically attuned one like mine is meant to tolerate such large amounts of mana flowing through it at once. My nerves felt like they were on fire. Then I probably was on fire. My head hurt so badly, someone could have shoved a knife into it and I would have called it a relaxing distraction. I continued to channel the mana through myself and my mind, and when I thought I was about to break, I added more. My entire world consisted only of pain, and the spell.
Finally, I allowed myself to release it.
It was a simple spell, but the result was devastating.
A ray of iridescent light, as wide as I was tall, exploded from my hands. It was a beam of pure mana focused solely on the task of destruction. It moved through the cursed like they weren’t even there, and carved through the pavement just as easily.
The pain didn’t stop though, and neither did the mana. I hadn’t known how much I would need, so I had pulled all of it. The spell continued, and I directed it back and forth against what remained of the road in front of us. Still the spell continued, and I pointed it in the direction of the ramps leading to the ground.
I couldn’t tell if I was actually on fire, or if it only felt like I was. I could smell cooked meat and burnt hair, but didn’t know if it was coming from me or the cursed I had blasted into oblivion. I knew I tasted blood, but it was such a distant sensation that I could barely perceive it.
After what felt like ages, the spell finally stopped. My batteries and I were all entirely drained of mana, and I lost consciousness.
* * * * *
Some distance away, a being that most people would have mistakenly called a harpy landed on top of a streetlamp. It was an easy mistake to make. Thick skin covered birdlike digitigrade legs. Black feathers covered a wingspan twice as wide as most people were tall. The naked female torso was emaciated, and long dark hair fell all the way down to the tail feathers. Flock was most definitely not a harpy though, and any resemblance was merely superficial.
The entity named Flock watched the soldiers of the expedition gather up Indigo’s smoldering form and she tilted her head curiously as they retreated through hole that lead out of the city. Neither the darkness nor the miasma were any impediments to her sight, and she saw it all clearly. Flock had many eyes, and she saw everything.
They had left early this year, but that was fine. When the fog grew thick like it had, the feast always ended early. That the mortals had fled instead of dying made no difference to her. The flesh of the living wasn’t to her taste.
Flock was confused and slightly disappointed though. She had never purposefully tried to hide the exit from Indigo, but just as she hadn’t revealed her central form, she had never felt the desire to reveal the exit either. The girl had such potential in the necropolis, and Flock couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave in the first place. Surely the mortals knew the value of the city. They came every year after all.
If the homunculus had simply accepted her place in the city, if she had willingly become part of the necropolis, she could have thrived, just as Flock did.
Flock did not understand the concept of friendship, but she was a being of many bodies, and the idea of a mutually beneficial relationship made sense to her. Or at least, a relationship that didn’t involve attempting to kill each other made sense to her. Indigo had understood that too. She knew what was food and what was not. She knew when to fight, and when to pass things by.
For the first time since she had sprung into existence, Flock considered leaving Peninsula herself, and finding out what was outside. She quickly discarded the thought though. It probably wasn’t much. She had everything she needed right here. Indigo had been an interesting change, but she wasn’t so interesting as to make Flock abandon everything else.
She was Flock, queen of the undead skies, and her rule was uncontested. She had been part of the necropolis since its beginning, and she would continue to be part of it until its end.
The not-harpy turned and looked at the trail of corpses that covered the road. Already some were disappearing as they went back to where they had come from. Flock opened her wings once more, and glided down to the ground. The cursed always tasted better on days like this, and it had been some time since this body had eaten. Yes, Flock had everything she needed right here in the necropolis.
The mortals would return, as they always did. Would Indigo? Flock savored the mystery just as much as she savored the taste of the undead flesh. It had been so long since she had to wonder about anything.
Flock could wait to find out. She had all the time in the world.