My third blessing was a truth spell, of sorts. It was more of a deception detector.

Lying was Archina’s domain, the webs the spider weaved.

All lies were hers in a way. You could not hide that from her.

I looked and saw the lie. In the midst of battle, there was a dark spot. It was a beacon of blackness and when I glanced over the area, I saw a zombie.

“Should we attack?” Velin offered.

“Nope, let's see how many we can kill from a distance. Niff and Darvind seem to be doing just fine.”

He had asked if we should attack the anomalous zombie, but I had replied as if he were referring to the zombie horde as a whole.

Now that meant one of two things, either I had misunderstood or, it could hear us. He knew about my third blessing and it would be stupid to assume I hadn’t seen the creature.

Velin picked up on that quickly, giving me nothing more than a nod, and kept firing.

I was fairly certain that it could hear us. Velin and I were long-distance support. Niff and Darvind were on-the-ground combatants.

While the horde approached Niff and Darvind, we, mainly Velin, filed down the stragglers and the particularly powerful opponents.

The power of the zombie depended on its form and ability. More specifically, its species. Humans were common and easy. They were a basic sort of creature. They had no leanings towards any natural magical abilities, but that lets them choose how to implement their mana.

Niff’s species would always have some mana spent on enhancing their speed and awareness. Elves would always be more adept at using their mana outside of their body, rather than within it, but humans were plain. They had no leanings for magic and while that meant they lacked natural magical talent, they were highly adaptable to any place.

But more powerful races meant more powerful zombies. A minotaur got pierced through the neck by Velin’s arrow, severing its spine and making it collapse on the spot.

I threw two boomerangs at a lizardkin’s ankles and cut down its legs. The zombie collapsed, still trying to pull itself towards Niff. I could have gone for its neck but their species were scaled. Its legs were a much easier target.

“Are those boomerangs enchanted?” Velin asked as he drew back for another shot.

“Partially,” I replied. “A summoned spirit cantrip. The spirit can move the boomerang a little bit but can’t provide much force.”

“Ah,” Velin replied. “So you throw the thing and the spirit has enough control to steer it. That’s why you’re not missing any shots.”

“Yup,” I replied. “Feel free to use it.”

“Ha,” Velin snorted. His arrow cut through the head of the wolfkin zombie and the nape of another.

“I don’t miss,” He added.

“But what about the range?” He added. “The further the spellform is away from you the more mana it takes to complete it? No? Isn’t that a waste of mana then?”

“I don’t need to keep the spell going,” I replied. “I power it with as much mana as it can handle then throw it. The spell takes about thirty seconds to fully dissipate and by then-”

“You’ve already struck your target!” Velin exclaimed. “Impressive.”

“I didn’t come up with it, actually. It’s one of the earliest recorded spells throughout all of history. No matter the people or the location. It’s primitive magic.”

“How interesting,” the cleric said before loading up another arrow and firing it down onto the zombies.

I had to be conservative with my boomerangs.

“How strange,” Velin muttered. “I was always under the impression that adventuring would be far more dangerous than this.”

“We’re not even twenty miles away from the entrance,” I replied. “Any zombies that get this far only do so because the higher rank areas don’t care to stomp them out.”

“I understand that…but this, it seems like basic labor,” he replied.

“From what I understand, the amount of undead in here ebbs and flows depending on a whole lot of other factors. The bodies come in from the Land of the Dead and not from the Graveyard Dungeon itself. Some of them are from here, but those are rare and powerful resurrected undead. The ones here are… well you know about the Land of the Dead.”

The Land of the Dead was an Outer Realm, not much was known about it but it was known to have played some role in an ancient war between the gods. It reflected the living, in that for every living being there was, there was also an undead.

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“It is an interesting place you know,” Velin started as he unloaded another set of arrows. “Some theorize that it was the place of romance for the Lady Of Life and the Lord of Death, an illicit romance of two opposing gods. Others say it’s a natural thing meant to counterbalance the living, something to do with the amount of death mana equaling that of life.”

“An elemental plane of death,” I replied.

“Of sorts. As opposed to the elemental plane of life which has still not been found, though the argument is that the elemental plane of life is scattered throughout all the life-bearing realms.”

I nodded, mostly in apathy.

Magical theory was complicated and mostly useless. Many people thought that understanding magic meant getting better at it, but magic governed our world. Not all knowledge was applicable. An understanding of the various realms and their connections wouldn’t let you cast better spells, but they were the foundation of higher-level spell casting.

But even then, they needed to be built upon for centuries before something useful came from it.

And I was far from an old research mage and topics of theory and not magical fact bored me.

Though Velin found it interesting. He found most things interesting, I learned. That was why he was a cleric of the Lord of Wisdom, I assumed. Unlike other churches, instead of spending their days worshiping or reading a holy text, the Church of Wisdom’s people liked to study, regardless of topic and practicality, they loved to learn.

“It’s gone,” I said after some time.

“Yes,” Velin replied. “Could it truly hear us?”

“Yes. It moved through our attack. It stayed away from Niff and Darvind but it manuvered around us.”

Velin and I called out shots and where we should aim. If I noticed a group attacking from the left or the right, I’d tell Velin and Velin would do the same for me.

And every time we did that, it had moved to avoid our attacks.

“Interesting,” Velin replied.

“Niff! Darvind! We’re calling it!” I yelled out to the two warriors.

They weren’t that far out, only about eighty feet away but the groans of the zombies could get deafening at times.

Niff rushed to us, as did Darvind.

The horde that had been mainly focused on them turned to follow, flooding towards us with rotten bodies.

But this too was expected.

Zombie hordes, even this close to the entrance of the dungeon, were vast. There were thousands, if not tens of thousands in the copper area alone. We were near the border of the bronze rank area and in there were hundreds of thousands, scattered over the course of a few hundred miles.

If you fought them for too long, you risked attracting more zombies and eventually creating a horde of hundreds.

We couldn’t take on such a horde, much less harvest them so we had to send the zombies away.

I threw a ball in front of the horde and it burst out shinging.

The zombies groaned. It wasn’t anything special, just magical light but for creatures of darkness and death, it was repulsive.

It didn’t harm them so much as disgust them, overwhelming their drive to hunt us and pushing them to scatter elsewhere into groups of tens.

Some still came for us obviously, but we could dispatch of those before they started attracting other zombies. Eventually after a few more balls of light, the staging area was clear and the zombies were gone.

A few lingered in the distance, but we weren’t close enough for them to lock in on us. Zombies weren’t really intelligent and in a place like this, movement was an unreliable thing to chase. Zombies also moved after all.

So the spirits that possessed them searched for light and speech most of the time. As long as you didn’t manage to create too many of those things, you could weave your way through zombie-infested land.

“Niff, I want you to make sure all their napes are severed. We’re talking deep cuts into the spine. Some of them are dropped but they can still move their torso. Velin, check if there are any special zombies within the mix. Ghouls, runners, any varients, and Darvind, you stand guard. If anything suspicious approaches, even if it looks like a regular zombie, cut it down with precision.”

There was a pause of awkwardness before they went and did what I said.

I wasn’t the leader per se, but I was in charge of this specific operation. I had more experience with monsters than anyone here and I was particularly adept with undead.

Darvind took a couple of seconds before nodding and following through. Niff was almost instant, running off as soon as I had finished my message and Velin asked for clarification.

“Do the special variants matter?” He asked.

“In terms of sales, yes. Regular zombie parts can function as good replacements but special variants tend to have a more complete anatomy. They’re also more capable and powerful, and they last longer.”

“Ah,” Velin muttered. “I see.”

He was in here for his mission and while Niff and I wanted to help, we were also trying to make a good bit of gold.

Gathering the corpses was the most times part of the whole thing. They didn’t smell, lots of people thought they did but undead don’t smell unless they’re actively rotting. The ones in District 112 did because they were partly alive.

But these guys were all dead from their minds to the bacteria inside of them. It was all flooded with death mana.

A person who went through necroplasey or whatever they called it was still technically alive. Their heart didn’t beat and their lungs didn’t breathe but they had a soul and somewhat active organs.

I still didn’t understand the nature of the procedure, but it was designed to make a part of you undead and a part of you alive, more like a vampire than a true zombie.

These things weren’t that. There was only death mana in them and that meant that nothing could be alive, not even bacteria.

Rot was a living thing after all, and with these zombies from the land of the dead that couldn’t be allowed.

I looked at their anatomy as I collected them. They looked regular, though I wasn’t too familiar with how cut-up people looked like and the shapes of their insides, but they were normal as far as I could tell.

“Intriguing aren’t they?” Velin asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. “They’re weird though. Somewhere between magical and mechanical undead.”

“Yes. It’s noted that further in the undead are more powerful because they can rely on the death mana to invigorate them, but the closer they get to the dungeon entrance the less death mana there is thus forcing them to rely on their physical attributes rather than their magical ones, effectively turning from magical undead to mechanical.”

I nodded.

That was the only reason that cutting their napes worked. If we were deeper into the dungeon, that would do effectively nothing to hinder their movement.

Deeper in they would be more like skeletons, moving through magic instead of muscle fiber.

The interactions of death mana with the living were noted. It killed them. But the interactions of death mana with the formerly living were unique, especially in this case.

Well, I could speculate later. I started cutting off heads and putting bodies into my suitcase.