In Heroic Age there are tons of advantages to being an undead, but there are also plenty of weaknesses to counterbalance those advantages. My old character was actually a half demon, not one of the undead races, but my character did have the trinity classes of grandmaster necromancer, arch warlock, and dark sage. I was more than knowledgeable enough about undead in Heroic age, and I’d rather chance the undead evolutionary path then roll the dice and get something random with a chaos egg.
Still being a skull sucked.
There was really no getting around the fact that being a skull was pretty much the worst thing ever. Skulls were weak, had no real spells or skills to protect themselves, and were unable to move in any meaningful way outside of clacking their jaws together. That was what I was working with here, an immobile and unprotected body that would break under the swing of any idiot with a mace.
Luckily I was in some sort of crypt or something, probably a dungeon or instance, that was absolutely full of skulls and skeletons serving as wall decorations. I fit right in, and unless I brought attention to myself I would probably go completely unnoticed by raiders and hunters alike. I was just another piece of the scenery here, which could at least ensure my survival if some adventurous types decided to go dungeon diving.
How I would gain any sort of experience or whatever it was that allowed me to advance and level up was anyone’s guess. Then again I didn’t even have any classes to level, so I was basically clueless as to how I was going to grow past this skull on a shelf position I currently find myself in. Maybe if something collapsed on my shelf close enough to me I could manage to gnaw them to death. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for that though.
Really all I could do now was what every serious gamer does when they set up a new character, plan out my character’s future and paths. I was the proto undead, in Heroic Age that meant I could evolve onto any of the undead evolutionary paths. In the end the undead paths lead up to five main end routes, at least five I knew of. There was the lich path, reaper path, spirit king path, vampire path, and the horror path. In my mind the only three options were the lich, reaper, and vampire paths. Liches were essentially pure casters and had the clearest progression paths, but they also tended to evolve into dead ends and had the disadvantage of being unable to enjoy the pleasures of life. Reapers were the strongest undead I knew of and they were basically the perfect race for any combat class, but there was the disadvantage of eating a set amount of souls every week to survive. Then there were vampires, probably the most balanced of the three with the only real downside being the permanent light weakness and the racial blood thirst trait.
I didn’t know all the exact details of these evolutionary paths in the game, and who even knew what differences reality would have compared to Heroic Age. Still there was no harm in evolving along the skeleton path until reaching the skeletal lich evolution. That was when the major branching off would begin and paths would start to isolate themselves off from the main undead evolutionary tree. That meant I could evolve four times before having to seriously worry about the advanced evolutionary path stuff.
As for my classes I decided it would be best to stick with what I knew best, it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up the novice necromancer and warlock classes. The dark scholar class would be a lot harder to get though, I might need to settle for the cultist or dark mage classes. Regardless of what my third class would be, my main two should be enough to carry me through Eden safely enough. Both necromancers and warlocks had minion summoning which should ease the burden and danger I would have to otherwise personally handle, and they both also had powerful offensive abilities and skills. Add on to those classes that innate defenses that undead have and the resistance traits they pick up and I would be one hard to kill monster. Of course this assumes I can survive long enough to reach that nigh unkillable status.
If I could stay under the radar and avoid having any crusades called down on me or bounties put up for my head I figured I could do it. Sure it would be hard, this new life of mine was basically going to be an attempt at a no death run in Heroic Age after all, but it should be possible for me. I had to believe that, otherwise I’d end up a depressed skull stuck on this shelf for all eternity.
That was unacceptable, I needed to find Tess.
*
God it was boring here, I haven’t even seen any other undead. Here was a fact I hadn’t really considered before, undead don’t have stamina. Undead are like perpetual motion machines, they don’t need rest and lesser undead can’t even sleep if they wanted to. I’ve been conscious for at least three days now. Three days of uninterrupted consciousness with quite literally nothing to do but watch the hall in front of my shelf. I’d playback some music in my head, at this point there was basically a constant rock playlist going on endlessly on shuffle in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t helping me stave off the boredom much.
See these are the things that weren’t in Heroic Age, the waiting and boredom between the battles and leveling. I would kill for a television, and I would commit genocide on a scale that would make even the most bloodthirsty dictators blush and turn away if I could #### curse again! God #### I have never needed to say #### or #### more than I do at this moment. If I ever came across Loki… Well let’s just say that words haven’t been invented yet to describe what I’ll be putting that #### through before he dies. Oh hey there’s some motivation to take the reaper path, advanced reapers could kill gods in the lore of Heroic Age. I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at god slaying if it was Loki.
Sadly, there was little to no chance of that happening. I doubted Loki would ever show up in front of me if I ever gained a way to actually kill him.
*
Do you know why the caged bird sings? I do. That bird is so #### bored that it would either kill itself or go insane if it didn’t sing. I’m sure that’s it, it has to be.
I’m sure any raider who came down my hallway would be shocked at what they found, they might even take me away as some sort of artifact or novelty pet. At this point I didn’t really care.
“GET UP, COME ON GET DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS!”
“GET UP, COME ON GET DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS!”
“GET UP, COME ON GET DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS!”
“OPEN UP YOUR HATE, AND LET IT FLOW INTO ME!”
“GET UP, COME ON GET DOWN WITH THE SICKNESS!”
Was belting out Disturbed at the top of my nonexistent lungs smart? No, no it wasn’t. Did it make me feel better? A little.
A part of me actually hoped that someone would show up, if only to break up the monotony. Never a good idea to hope for an encounter just so that you can stave off boredom, but that was where I was at now. If I wasn’t so sure that I was sane then I’d be certain that I was going insane right here on my shelf. Not my proudest moment here, but what can I say.
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*
It’s the skull equivalent of twiddling my thumbs, but I’ve been playing with my fear and negative aura skills. My current excuse is that they could level up some if I practice them enough, but the truth is I just got tired of singing and needed something to do to stave off the endless boredom.
*
I’ve named the skeleton hanging on the wall across from me Teddy. Teddy doesn’t talk much, he just likes hanging out. Heh, hanging out. Yes, I’ve sunken to making puns, I don’t even cringe at the bad ones anymore.
Me and Teddy have in depth chats about all sorts of things, and by chats I mean I yammer on endlessly about random nonsense at an inanimate skeleton that I pretend is actually listening to me. Objectively I guess what I’m doing is pretty sad, but regardless it’s all I got. Pathetic? Undoubtedly. The lowest point in either of my now two lives? Most definitely. Helpful? Slightly.
Thus Teddy and I talk.
I tell him about that time I woke up in the middle of the night to find Tess straddling me with a kitchen knife in her hand as she decided whether or not to kill me, he hangs there and doesn’t judge me for my strange life choices that led me to such a scenario being expected for me. I make a joke about a nun and a beaver at a hockey game, Teddy doesn’t laugh and I’m forced to admit the joke wasn’t bad enough to wake the dead. I admit that I unironically enjoy soap operas for their drama and various love polygons, Teddy keeps silent not condemning me for my horrid taste.
At some point Teddy became my therapist.
We hammered out a lot of my internal issues from my unhealthy codependency with Tess to why I can’t watch Star Trek Evolution without having a minor panic attack. Turns out I was a hot mess of issues, but I think my time with Teddy really helped me to come to terms with that. I’m a mess, so what? Everyone is a mess.
Needless to say Teddy and I grew a strong bond over the weeks, or was it months now? Regardless we grew close Teddy and I. I decided I’d be bringing Teddy to life with necromancy at the soonest opportunity, it was the least I could do for my friend after all.
*
“And when I was four Nancy Stuart, the girl from across the street, kept wanting to play doctor with me when all I wanted to do was play Last Journey on the VR set she had at her house. Turns out I was whoring out my body to her for a whole summer without even knowing it, though later on she did end up getting into medical school so maybe her intentions were purely scientific after all. Regardless that summer I managed to raise my rogue 2kool4scool to level sixty four and discovered my love for VRMMOs. After that I was hooked, and played any decent VRMMO I stumbled across, and begged my parents for the latest VR system each year. But then when I was fifteen the Full Dive capsules came out, and well…”
I laughed a bit as I remembered how I spent every cent I had ever made from cutting lawns and babysitting to buy the full dive bed, and even then I needed to borrow some cash from my parents to afford the thing. It was a glitch filled second hand bed, and I loved the thing like a long lost sibling.
“Yeah, after that the VR head set systems just weren’t good enough anymore. With full dive it was like you were really there in the game, all your senses were stimulated and you couldn’t tell the difference between the game and reality. Full dive became the standard within the first year of its release and any media that wasn’t full dive compatible all but died out. And then there were the industries that went through a whole sort of rebirth period under the full dive tech. As a teenage guy I really appreciated what full dive could do with porn, but you know… yeah…”
I coughed to dispel the awkward mood and tried to move past my bit of oversharing there.
“So it was right around then that I met Melody, the first real girlfriend I ever had. I freely admit I had no idea what I was doing. I showered that girl with attention and gifts to the point that I might have reasonably concerned her parents, all the while unaware that she was fooling around with three other guys and even one of the hottest cheerleaders at school. Looking back on it, I’m actually impressed Melody managed to joggle us all without one of us being suspicious of her for an entire year. To make things worse was the fact we all knew each other through Melody too, even hung out as a group a few times. Ah, I really was blind back then, but at least I wasn’t alone. We all made a support group for each other after we found out, Melody’s heartbroken harem all helping each other get over the loss of their first love. Kinda funny now that I think about it…”
Junior year of high school was really weird for me after that, which in hindsight might be why I like watching the dramatic love polygons of soap operas. Nothing like living one to make them seem so relatable.
“So after that I stayed single until my second year of college, when I met Tess it was… well… It was something at first sight. I’m not even sure how to describe what Tess and I have together, we’re not really ‘together’ together but we are together. We’ll occasionally date other people, but it never lasts long because we get jealous of whoever the other is seeing and end up convincing the other to dump them. Then again we can’t stand being alone together for very long either because we always end up fighting and resenting each other for something or other, but we also can’t stand being apart either… I remember that Kat once called us friends with benefits, but I don’t think I can honestly say that Tess is my friend. In fact most of the time I’m with her I can’t even honestly claim to like her as a person. In a way I guess we are ‘soulmates’ I can’t live without her and don’t want too, she feels the same. Kat thinks we’re both insane and was worried that one of us would eventually kill the other, but honestly things never escalated that far. We wouldn’t let things get to the point of physically attacking each other, but psychological warfare was fair game…”
I let out a weary sigh that seemed to well up from my very soul.
“I miss Tess. ####, I miss Kat too. I miss my apartment, and my crap job at the office. I even miss that idiot Mackie, even if he was a ####.”
It was a good thing skulls couldn’t cry, because I was pretty sure I was close to breaking down emotionally right here and now. I was lonely, so lonely I was telling my life story to a #### corpse. I had always been tough mentally, but it had been months now and nothing had changed. I was still alone here in the hallway, I was still a skull unable to do even the most basic of actions, and I still hadn’t found my Tess. I was a geek, I’d read more isekai and transmigration stories then I could count, none of them had the main character stuck alone and helpless in the middle of nowhere. I should be having an adventure, building a harem, and leveling up into some unstoppable overpowered character. Instead I was serving as a decoration on a shelf in the middle of an abandoned hallway. It wasn’t fair.
“Tess…”
If there was a way to go back in time I knew for sure that I would have chosen the chaos egg. I wished so badly that I had chosen the chaos egg. Why didn’t I chose the chaos egg again? Oh yeah, I thought I was being clever. I was so cocky, I thought I would have no trouble evolving from a skull all the way to a skeletal lich. It would take me a month, at max, to get to that evolution then I’d end up spending some time deciding my path from their based on my experiences. Hah! If only things were as easy as I had thought back then, as easy as the game was. Shocker, reality wasn’t some game you could breeze through because you’ve played it before. Reality was cruel, unfair, and didn’t give a flying #### about what you thought or planned.
I was losing it, I could tell. It was all too much, I had been alone too long with nothing to do. It’s funny, people always say that you can’t actually tell when you’re going insane. I could tell. I was losing my mind, and that made me more scared than anything else in the world. My mind was my sanctum, I didn’t want it altered, inherited, or damaged. That was why I never did drugs, why I stayed away from alcohol, and why I exercised it regularly with brain teasers. Yet, here I was losing the battle for my sanity. Turns out that time and solitude can wear down even the most stalwart of minds.
“Hey, Teddy? I know you’re not really there and all, but well… I could really use some help here. So if you could just say something, anything, just this once? Please? For me?”
I needed to hear someone else’s voice, see something besides the same old wall with the same old skeleton hanging from it in the same old hallway. I needed something, anything, to happen. I needed it because if nothing changed, if things kept going the way they had all these months, then I would lose who I was and probably end up some cackling insane skull on a shelf for all eternity.
“Hah, of course. What was I expecting? Of course you can’t talk back Teddy, your just bones… Just bones. Ha. Haha. HahahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHA…”
It was funny because I’d been talking to bones for months now, bones didn’t listen and bones can’t talk back. Bones weren’t undead, without a soul bones were just bones. Just bones…
“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
I wonder when it was I started screaming?
[ Skill Gained: Ghastly Wail 1 ]