The prospect of a shadow walking out by itself wasn't that surprising.

Well, it was surprising, but not terrifying. Shades were mostly intangible and harmless.

What was terrifying, though, was that the shadow appeared to be able to see him, even with the invisibility spell that Samuel claimed to have cast upon him. It was either an invisibility spell or a spell that made him not be able to see himself, and based on the fact that Samuel was shouting in the wrong direction, Adrian assumed that it was the former.

"Hurry! I'll stall The Hunter! Run!"

So Adrian ran. He ran harder and faster than he ever had in his entire life. This was probably due to the agility spell he had cast upon himself and the speed potion he had consumed seconds prior, but it was nevertheless true.

He ran for a reason. A purpose. A million lives depended on this.

Say...

Which way was the tower?

Adrian's thoughts aruptly came their inevitable halt.

He, however, didn't, leading to the death of a tree, dizziness of him, and a map falling out of his backpack, showing him that he had been running the wrong way for the past minute.

Oh, shit.

No, he had to avoid using profanities at times unfit for them. That would make him look like a fucking moron.

...

So Adrian ran. he ran harder and faster than he ever had in his entire life, including the run moments prior which nobody would ever know of. He ran with a reason, a million fucking innocent lives, in the right direction this time.

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Samuel ordered another zombie forward to act as a meat shield as The Hunter, with a capital T and H-- he was very insistent about that, which would've made him less creepy and scary if not for the fact that there were no records on anyone who didn't capitalise it, or anyone who talked about anyone who didn't capitalise it-- fired another arrow. Had it been any other shade, the arrow would have been an illusion, but the explosion of rotting flesh proved otherwise.

"You don't have to do this, you know," Samuel shouted as he raised five more undead, "You're losing, anyway. There are thousands of souls here, and I'm raising five for every one you kill."

The Hunter hissed, "You are just saying that because you are losing. As you have just mentioned, there are thousands of souls here, which you must use your mana to raise. You only have enough mana to raise one or two thousand, while my mana recovers faster than it is used to conjure arrows."

"And if you miss one?"

"I do not miss."

"Sure, well," Samuel flinched and swore he would take as many showers as possible if he survived this as he got hit in the face with the remnants of the, well, remnants of the remnants of what seemed to have been a liver, "There are always firsts for everything."

"There are also lasts for everything," The Hunter fired five arrows simultaneously, forcing Samuel to use all his undead as meat shields, "like your death!"

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This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Adrian finally reached The Tower.

The Tower was a massive, black, tower consisting of a hundred floors, each one containing some undead, kind of like a dungeon. The Tower Master was... supposedly a necromancer. Nobody knew of them, and Adrian assumed that they were either Samuel's mentor or master, based on the fact that Samuel kinda sucked at necromancing. Relatively speaking, of course.

Adrian rushed in through the entrance, which looked like a giant monster's skull.

Once inside, he ran through clusters of all sorts of undead monsters; An undead mermaid, five undead sirens-- the difference between the two was that sirens killed you and mermaids didn't-- a couple of zombies, a couple of skeletons, a giant spider, a giant spider skeleton, which was surprising, since Adrian had heard from Samuel that exoskeletons were hard to raise, an undead zombie-- you could tell it died and was raised again since the body parts were all over the place, although Adrian had always thought that undead zombies were skeletons-- an undead undead zombie, which seemed closer to a slime with some rotten flesh than a zombie at this point, and several others that Adrian didn't look at in fear of having nightmares about them for years afterward if he were to survive this.

This went on for several floors until he reached the tenth one, which was filled with spiders of all sizes, some as small as Adrian's pinkies and one taking up about 99.99 percent of all the space in the room, which made Adrian confused since the room was bigger than the tower itself. He quickly ran up the stairs, which lead up to another room that must have been inside the room he had just been in, given the number of stairs he ha just climbed, but was invisible to him while he was inside the latter.

Dimensional magic?

No matter. He would have to get to the Tower Master first.

The rest of the rooms were similar to those he had already gone through. Each room was bigger than the last, with the exception of the boss rooms, which were placed at every tenth floor, each somehow bigger than the entire tower, making wonder if the Tower Master was more than just a necromancer.

When he finally reached the hundredth floor, just as his invisibility and speed spells, as well as his speed potion wore off, he saw him.

The Tower Master.

But the Tower Master wasn't what he had expected. Adrian had expected a creepy-looking guy in a dark cloak with his face mostly covered, with just enough showing that you could see that he had pale skin.

But in front of him was...

The Tower Master turned around.

"Do you have the jade?"

"Uh- Uhm, yeah."

"Give it to me."

"Uhm..."

"Are you hesitating, child?

"What? N-no. Okay, fine, here it is... Catch!"

Adrian yeeted the jade as far as he possibly could, towards the real Tower Master, who was chained to a wall behind the fake one. As expected, he was wearing a dark cloak that covered everything except a tiny portion of his face, so that you could tell that his skin was pale.

Unfortunately, the fake Tower Master used the force to yeet it back from the real Tower Master right before he caught it.

He was screwed.