Hot.

He felt like he was melting. He must have died in the fall, that's why he couldn't remember how he had gotten here, and now that he felt this hot, that he could think in the first place....

He had come back to life. There was no doubt about it.

But everything was dark anyway.

No, nothing like that. It wasn't the absence of light. It was simply that he was unable to see. Jonathan shuddered.

What was the matter, had his eyes popped out? Had they exploded, and not yet regenerated? He groped in the darkness, reaching out with his hands. He brushed his forearms with something.... He had no idea what, but it cut him deeply, going all the way to the bone. Jonathan bit his tongue to keep from screaming.

Finally he sank his fingers into a chunk of flesh in front of him.

He still couldn't see anything, but it was definitely flesh. He pulled it to either side, felt it slowly split, and the moonlight streamed in, washing over him.

Ribs. Jonathan crawled out... crawling like a worm.

Ribs.

His arms had been cut by broken ribs, their points sharp as razors. The ribs of one of his undead. And the flesh had been that guy's chest.

It had emerged from inside the corpse. Intact.

No, no corpse at all. Even now it possessed the ghoulish imitation of life he had breathed into it, writhing on the ground.

Jonathan swallowed hard.

He was shocked, but even so it didn't take him long to realize that this was not where he had "died," far from it. He was well outside the wall.

What had happened?

Jonathan laughed.

He had thought he couldn't sink any lower, but maybe he hadn't really lost his mind until now. It certainly made more sense that his sanity had finally and completely left him than what his eyes were telling him: the wall from which he had fallen, dying, was so far away that it was just a blur on the horizon. Much more sense than that suggested, that he had been transported for dozens of meters (at least) while he had been dead and had somehow ended up in the body of one of his undead soldiers, on top of it, emerging from it like a butterfly from its shell.

Yes, it was crazy.

He must have lost his mind.

He laughed and laughed, unable to stop himself.

——

If he hadn't lost his mind, he was in the process of doing so trying to come to terms with what he could rightfully call complete insanity, when his life had gone completely insane months ago.

But neither time nor enemies were going to stop for him.

They would continue their inexorable march.

Jonathan rolled on the ground, avoiding at the last moment the axe blow that would have split his skull in two. An axe not held by the Count's hands, so he would survive that, but it didn't mean it would be pleasant.

Instead of sticking in his skull, the axe was now buried in the ground. And the soldier was yanking, trying to pull it out. Snapping his tongue, snarling.

"You should never have come here! "shouted the soldier as he yanked the axe out and swung it at him.

"Oh, shut the fuck up.

Jonathan raised an arm, parrying the blow of the axe.

He didn't sacrifice it, mind you. The axe cut him, but it didn't cut through, which was quite another thing.

"I hate it when you look at me with that anger as if you were fighting against some kind of injustice..."

Jonathan spun on his heel, the axe still buried in his arm. Indeed. But still the spin brought him close enough to the enemy's neck to plunge the knife in.

"As if you hadn't been protecting a monster for years. Now I will free you. I will give you the courage to fight."

Stolen story; please report.

Jonathan dropped the knife. He tore off the axe and discarded it as well, he didn't need any other weapon when he still had that sword. It had come into his hands for a reason. It was what he needed to kill that monster.

It was the best sword he had ever wielded. And he had wielded many swords.

Its stats were a part of that. But so was the material.

What material? He had no fucking idea! That was precisely why it was so important.

The axe guy came back to life, now subjugated to his will.

Four or five more soldiers came for him, of course, but Jonathan sent the axe guy against them as he calmly opened the status panel.

Yes, what had happened to him was strange, terrifying.

But not inexplicable.

Now that he'd had some time to calm down (or at least think about something else), he'd come up with the alternative explanation to insanity. And it turned out that he was right.

No, Arise hadn't advanced to a new phase.

But he had indeed gained a new skill. Not a class skill, but a unique skill.

The Ways of Death

When you die, you can come back to life in the location of anyone you used Arise on.

The description was rather clumsy and misleading, but it was all there. He wasn't looking forward to going through it again, a macabre form of rebirth, but if he could learn to control it, it would be insane.

It meant, for example, that he could drop an undead one of his own on the other side of the world, slice his own throat and be instantly miles and miles away.

If he could learn to control it. If it was possible in the first place.

"Wow, wow. I just hope Adam can't do something like that." It was a unique skill, but unique was relative, in this case. A different effect or drawback could make it unique, even if deep down it was still more or less the same skill.

If the Count could do something like that, then he was well and truly screwed.

He could never reach him.

Though, come to think of it, Adam was too arrogant to take that escape route. Not until it was too late.

"One way or another, I won't rest, I won't stop trying."

Jonathan set off for the castle. He had already wasted too much time with second-rate obstacles and hindrances. He had come this far for one reason alone.

And if he did come to meet him, he would.

——

Since the party began, the Count had not moved from the balcony.

He simply watched the battles raging all over Dunwich; his town, although the Count doesn't give a damn about material possessions and even less about even more abstract things (what he wanted, he took, plain and simple) like land. Especially nowadays.

He had other priorities. And his priorities had come knocking.

So why was he still here?

Maybe he was savoring the atmosphere. The anticipation of the meeting.

"But I guess I've kept him waiting long enough." For that reason, and because the tower he was in was rather unnecessarily large, he wasn't going to climb the stairs.

The Count decided to take a more direct and quicker route.

He jumped over the balcony.

Into the void.

Well, not directly. He could have, but his boots scraped the tower wall, tearing off chunks of rubble and kicking up clouds of dust as he slid down.

At a slightly more prudent distance (he didn't want to break his neck) he jumped again, landing on his knees in front of the tower.

The Count sat up, starting to walk amidst the chaos his city was in. Jonathan could take all this with him if he pleased. As he had said, he didn't care.

He left behind a piece of ground covered with cracks and sunk inward.

——

"There you are!" That was exactly the same thing that crossed his mind. Exactly the same thing he thought as soon as he heard Adam's voice.

A soldier charged at him, but Jonathan simply grabbed his head and twisted it until he heard his neck crack. He tossed the corpse aside and kept moving forward.

Through the chaos that the town of Dunwich was in.

The chaos he had created that would consume everything.

The Count... hadn't changed, of course. He was approaching him fearlessly, smiling as if he had met an old friend. He didn't understand. He still didn't.

And he proved it beyond any doubt with the next words that came out of his mouth.

"Have you reconsidered my offer?" he asked, seriously daring to ask that. With his arms outstretched. As if expecting a hug.

Reconsidered?

"Don't you need just to look around to know the answer?"

"That?" Adam said, laughing, waving an arm around, wanting to encompass it all. That was all that stirred up the suffering of "his" people, evidently. "You say that as if any of this matters to me. If having the city go up in flames serves to take out your frustration, so be it."

What wasn't so obvious was that. That one word.

Frustration.

Jonathan had every reason to be furious with him, to not rest until he killed him, so maybe it was a little silly, but it made his blood boil even more. A single word.

One word that showed he didn't understand.

That he would never understand, even if he defeated him and was at death's door. He wouldn't understand. Because he simply couldn't.

"Frustration? So this is on the level of frustration, for you. You know nothing about the human heart."

Adam's expression changed for the first time since.... Well. Since I'd met him.

"I know enough about the most human thing. Desire."

Desire.

Especially desire for things one couldn't have. On that, at least, they could agree.

He wished and had wished for too many things that would never be fulfilled. Luckily, at the end of his life, he had found a burning desire from the bottom of his heart that could be fulfilled.

Even if it was only at the end.

Jonathan's life would shine before it was extinguished forever.