Facing him in the woods, was an undead of all things. And not a simple undead either, but an undead wearing a white mask and carrying a big machete in his hand. Where have I seen that before?
The death aura emanating from the creature was unmistakable for someone like Lucas, who also possessed one, but he had no time to consider that. Compared to Faruk’s undead, this one seemed way scarier and different somehow, and Lucas briefly wondered where the necromancer behind it might be.
However, he didn’t plan on sticking around to find out. The fact that he couldn’t see the creature’s level didn’t go unnoticed by him. This meant that it should be at least 10 levels above his own, not at all an opponent he could face head-on.
Without having time to think of anything else, Lucas started running towards the house and soon reached his top speed. After only a few seconds, he was terrified to find that the undead didn’t lag much behind him. While its speed didn’t quite match up to Lucas’, despite its higher level, it more than made up for it in sheer leg size. Every stride from that giant covered almost three of Lucas’, making it incredibly hard for him to gain much distance.
Just when Lucas was right in front of the door frame, he noticed, with a quick glance, the creature behind him raise the machete high in the air, ready to strike. Not wasting time, Lucas dodged to the side, lowering his body and sticking his leg out, tripping the rampant undead that was completely unaware he had been set up.
The undead didn’t even have a chance. Lucas’ movement was executed with perfection, and the undead fell headfirst inside the house with a loud thump, sliding across the wooden floor for almost ten feet before stopping.
According to Lucas plan, he was now supposed to close the door and get as far away from the house as possible, but something told him he shouldn’t wait a second next to that bomb. Perhaps it was the loud noise the undead made when falling or an ingrained paranoia, but the minute the undead fell, he was already back on his feet and sprinting towards the nearby woods.
At any second now… a huge explosion swept Lucas off his feet, and he went flying through the open field, only to fall a few yards away from the now-burning house. Fortunately, he didn’t injure himself in the fall, but he looked towards the house, surprised and a little bitter.
While he didn’t thrust the others, he kind of expected Maria to have his back. He knew he was being naïve, expecting something from someone he barely knew, but he still expected her to prevent the others from blowing up the house before he could leave. Unless…
Could something have happened to her? Was the knife not enough? Wanting to be sure before making any harsh judgments, Lucas started running around the house to reach the others.
Watching the house burn on the way, he felt a slight discomfort in the pit of his stomach. Would that suffice to kill it? If it was any other foe, he would have no doubts about its death; the explosion hadn’t been small, after all. But he wasn’t so sure when it came to the undead. Since he wasn’t the one to explode the cottage, he wouldn’t receive any notification either way.
A few seconds later, when he finally arrived at the spot the others should be, he saw what had transpired in his absence.
Sitting on the floor, with his hands covering his head, was John, and by his sides—corpses. Both girls had died, and their bodies were displayed on the grass. Lucas looked all around, trying to catch traces of the undead, but it was nowhere to be seen, and after a while, it became clear that John was the obvious suspect for these deaths.
Looking at Maria’s corpse on the ground, Lucas felt sick and incredibly sad at the same time. He couldn’t help but feel at fault for her death. Didn’t he already know this was possible? Then why had he left her with him?
The answer was obvious: he didn’t believe he had much of a chance to put down the undead without their plan, and she would only slow him down if she had followed him. So instead, he only offered her the knife and told her what he knew, washing his hands of whatever happened.
Despite all of this being true, and painting a pretty bad picture of him, Lucas really didn’t expect John to kill them outright. At the very least, he expected him to quit any attempts after the disaster of the house explosion and his girlfriend being killed, because that was sure to draw the police’s attention to the place, and so far no one had any real evidence of his participation in the matter.
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He had clearly misjudged the situation, however, because John didn’t seem to care about the police at all. Not only had he just burned up the place and killed both girls, but he also just sat there next to the crime scene afterward.
Feeling remorseful, Lucas looked at the sky and noticed the night wouldn’t last much longer. Then he turned his eyes back to the lonely figure amongst the corpses. Lucas, who had always been so cool and collected, never letting his emotions take the best of him, felt an uncontrollable repulsion towards the man.
Before he knew it, he was already running furiously towards him. John must have sensed Lucas’ approach because he immediately rose to his feet, an expression of surprise on his face. John’s face was red, and his eyes were wet; he had been crying. All those details were captured by Lucas as he dodged John’s shaky attack with a knife.
As expected, John was no match for him and fell to the ground only after a few well-placed punches, but Lucas didn’t stop. Climbing on top of the man, Lucas threw punch after punch, desperately trying to quench the rage in his chest, until his face became nothing more than a meaty pulp. Even then, he only stopped because he noticed a huge figure moving in the corner of his eye.
Turning his head, Lucas saw the same figure he had seen before, but now almost completely black from the fire. The mask had melted onto the undead’s face, making him look even more terrifying. Another detail he caught while raising from the unconscious John was that the undead’s machete was gone.
It should’ve been stuck under the rubble, Lucas thought quickly, finally emerging from the rampage from earlier. However, with the apparition, a new flood of emotions invaded him. I did this entire floor wrong, and now I’m going to pay for it, he thought gloomily, knowing he had no chance in hell to face the creature.
Even after so long, he had no clue what was going on. He didn’t know why Cindy had attacked him or why John had killed the others. He didn’t even know what the hell was an undead doing there, apparently detached from any necromancer’s control.
In those few seconds that went by as the undead slowly walked towards him, looking like a devil straight from hell, he considered restarting the floor altogether. If he did so, he could protect Maria this time around and get to the bottom of the whole mystery, hopefully preventing as many unnecessary deaths as possible.
However, just before he did so, he had an idea he hadn’t thought of before. What if he used his death aura?
His only previous interactions with the Undead were in the Dark Forest and when Faruk showed him his. He didn’t even know if those from the Dark Forest were really undead, considering how they disappeared after the mist vanished. But it didn’t matter because, on both occasions he hadn’t tried using his death aura and therefore had no idea if it had any effect or not.
Thinking it was worth a shot and considering he had nothing to lose, Lucas extended his death aura to reach the slowly moving figure. As it approached, Lucas saw details he hadn’t noticed before, like how the figure had various patches of skin sewn together and how abnormal and disproportionate parts of the body seemed in regard to others.
To him, that was a very clear indication of a Frankeinstein-esque experiment, where whoever made that creature had desecrated a bunch of different corpses and sewn parts of them together, creating something unique—a masterpiece straight from nightmares.
A few of the reports he had read back in the basement seemed to confirm this theory, and despite the creature’s gruesome appearance, Lucas was caught wondering for a moment what the benefits of doing something like this were. Assuming the necromancer responsible for it wasn’t merely an artist with a taste for the bizarre, could something like that really improve an undead? Besides, what was a necromancer doing in a place without the system?
All those questions and concerns were washed away from Lucas’ mind the instant his aura touched the creature. There was definitely some recognition there on the giant’s part, and it stopped, if only for a moment, before continuing to move forward.
Lucas didn’t feel dejected by this reaction. Instead, he spread his legs and prepared. When the attack came, he was ready and quickly dodged to the side, while the creature passed right by him a second later.
As expected, Lucas thought, feeling more confident than before. Mere moments earlier, he realized what his death aura allowed him to do: it allowed him to know what movements the creature would make before it itself had made them, almost like he was intercepting a message before it reached the intended part.
Even if the Undead was still faster in a race, he was far from being more agile, especially after taking so much damage due to the explosion. With a one-second heads-up, Lucas quickly became more comfortable in the exchange. He even tried to counterattack a few times before accepting the complete futility of the action. If an explosion of that magnitude hadn’t killed it, there was little a few punches could do.
A few minutes in, Lucas started to realize the problem with his approach as he watched his stamina being drained more and more by the minute. After thirty minutes of that back-and-forth with the giant monstrosity, he was already exhausted and almost failed to dodge the last two attacks. He knew exactly how close he had been to dying; one punch from the undead would suffice.
Now seriously thinking about quitting and feeling his legs tremble under his body, it was with open arms that Lucas received the first ray of sunlight, announcing the completion of his objective. He had survived the night.
In the very next second, everything grew dark again, and a notification sound popped into his mind. The third floor was finally over.