Damerian Claudiere sat in his safe room shaking in equal parts, fear, and rage. RULE was supposed to have granted him the power to resurrect his long dead wife in return for control of the earth. Instead, it decided to do nothing until the zombies were purged. Zombies whose existence had to be the result of RULE itself.
The Scholomance had been Damerian’s previous last hope, but it was more an abandoned library than a school. When prayer had failed to save his wife’s life, he turned to the other side and traveled to the school supposedly taught by the devil.
Of course, when he and the other students arrived, they had found only empty halls and dusty tomes. Damerian was still able to learn dark magic and focused on necromancy. He never attempted to resurrect his wife as necromancy was less about rejoining a soul to a body and more about the animation of the dead. Knowledge was knowledge however, so he had learned all he could while there.
It was there he had met Vlad. Vlad was a genius beyond rival and deathly competitive. Of the eleven students that were granted entrance into the fallen school, only four had left. The other seven had met their end at the hands of the Impaler.
Damerian posited that he had only survived due to staying clear of any of Vlad’s fields of interest. The Weathermaker only survived due to Vlad having no interest in the position and the blacksmith bought his survival with magical gifts.
Damerian had remembered Vlad being an unstable madman, bent on learning every secret of science, magic and everything between. Which is why after leaving the Scholomance, Damerian fled and stayed far from Vlad and his subsequent conquering of the world. It was interesting, watching the man he feared take a behind the scenes role, allowing puppet leaders to rule in his stead. Interesting and alarming.
Damerian knew once his spell had gone awry, Vlad would come for him, and he was proven right when he saw the man on a screen that showed another of his own saferooms, its defenses had struck down several zombies. He was wearing the blacksmith’s gifts in all their glory. The ‘regalia’ as Vlad called it, wrought from a foul metal steeped in death.
Damerian sat, mind spiraling in fear and hatred, thinking of ways he could escape the notice of the one-man army carving his way through hundreds of thousands of zombies. He was coming up with nothing when a massive explosion of magic flared above him. It felt like it was miles above him and within his grasp at the same time.
Hope swiftly replaced Damerian’s dread as he felt the magic of RULE. It had decided to act after all. Not on Damerian’s behalf, as no message was received but a channel was open none the less. He willed the previous message with the countdown forward and focused on contacting his potential savior.
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Stefan had been having the best time he could remember in the last three decades. The weapons his Master had created from his visions of the future were truly magnificent. Stefan had received the same message his Master had after using the Implosion Cannon a third time. It took several minutes for the weapon to recharge, which was fine because Stefan was running out of areas outside of the city to fire it. Firing it within the city would bring buildings down and that was to be avoided if possible.
The latest weapon Stefan wielded was little more than a medium sized box with handles and two flattened metal bars sticking out of one side. Each handle had a grip section that could be depressed in stages. The first stage didn’t seem to influence the zombies, but the second stage would cause blood to leak from their noses and be pushed off to the sides of their faces.
These zombies hadn’t had time to truly decompose but their skin was still weaker than if they had been living. If the weapon was focused on a zombie for long enough, the skin would start to split and peel back. Unsure of what the weapon was doing, Stefan depressed the grips to the third stage.
With the new stage, the effect was obvious. The head of the targeted zombie vibrated wildly until it deflated, caused the skin and hair to flop backwards, it expelled blood, gray matter, and powdered bones from the now boneless scalp and face’s orifices.
Experimenting, Stefan targeted the arm of a new zombie and depressed the weapon to the third stage. The arm hung limp and the fingers and hand immediately swelled like a surgical glove being inflated to several times its normal size. Stefan didn’t need to target the zombie’s chest to know what would happen, but he did it anyway out of a morbid curiosity to see what it would look like in reality versus his imagination.
The head of the zombie sunk into its now boneless torso like a bowling ball resting on a waterbed. The sudden shift in weight caused the malformed zombie to pitch forward, falling and landing with a wet slap. Stefan set the unnamed weapon aside and drew something different and hopefully more widely destructive.
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Vlad had cut his way through masses of zombies for several hours. His work was paying off. Between he and Stefan, the once mighty horde became several disparate groups numbering in the thousands. Vlad made his way to one of the groups when a rod of polished metal, topped with a thick disc slammed into the ground at the center of the smaller group of undead. The disk on the top began spinning at a rate fast enough that even Vlad’s eyes couldn’t follow it.
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It took Vlad only a moment to recognize it. This was the projectile of one of the worst named weapons Vlad had come across, but it was deadly enough to garner its creation. Vlad jumped backwards as far and as fast as he could when the spinning disc belched a ring of liquid fire that obliterated everything it touched. Leaving a circle of smoldering ruin two hundred feet wide in its wake.
“Apologies Master! I fired it before I saw you move in their direction! Not, um, not all of these come with directions.” Stefan said telepathically.
“Was that an attempt at a joke, Stefan?”
“Yes Master.”
“Exquisite.”
“Thank you master.”
“Never. Do it. Again.”
“Yes Master.” Stefan finally said with his defeated tone being communicated even mentally.
Vlad sighed and decided to let Stefan handle things alone for a time.
“Stefan, I am going to contact Natalie in the wake of our message and the immense magic we feel. You may continue to use ‘The Gun in Black’ so long as it is not fired near me or any buildings. You are lucky that the majority of these creatures stayed in the square and you only destroyed part of a flat park.”
“I apologize once more, Master. I will make sure to keep destruction at a minimum.” Stefan said once more, sullenly.
Vlad began to float upwards to begin his communication when the breeze shifted, and he caught the scent of the smoke from the carbonized zombies. More than just the acrid nature of burning bodies, the smoke carried a remnant of the bloodcurse with which they were infected. He gathered in a lungful of the smoke, not worried about the curse, and exhaled it to view it from a new angle. Vlad may not have living lungs, but they were well preserved and could still filter air.
He could feel what was left of the curse in the smoke. He wasn’t positive that it would infect the living, but it would be best not to tempt fate. With renewed vigor he once more ascended and warned Stefan to discontinue using weapons that would burn the bodies. This city may be lost but Vlad wasn’t certain how long the curse would remain active in the smoke.
After his warning to his Right hand, he began sending messages of warning to his entire circle of communication, including Natalie Fintest.
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Natalie had finished organizing the flights of transport vehicles to Romania and the other enclaves elsewhere. She herself had met with Adelina and succeeded in not killing the frail old bat. Many of the transports had communicated in distributing the battalions of talking dogs and making their way back for more.
Natalie had decided to take fifty of the mutts to each close major city with orders for them to dispatch every zombie they could find and return to the transport to be taken to another city. Natalie was surprised to find out that the enclaves of the werewolves had grown considerably. She withheld that information from her Master not wanting to add any extra pressure to his current mood.
Natalie herself decided to engage in combat personally in Budapest, where she had found the situation to be pure mayhem. Far more undead roamed the streets than they had even in New York, which reports she had received indicated it had mostly been contained already. Unlike Stefan who enjoyed guns and her Master who kept to traditional melee combat, she enjoyed the midrange. Her chakrams were a gift from her Master. Their design was well beyond Natalie, but their use was not.
They were wirelessly connected to a device in her helmet making them seem as if she were controlling them telekinetically. They were able to fly or hover in any direction whether they were oriented horizontally or vertically giving them nearly infinite versatility. Their edges were micro-serrated and always spinning, making them able to cleave through almost anything given enough time. Undead human bodies posed no obstacle to the twin discs of destruction.
Natalie’s ability to multitask was unparalleled, even her Master praised her for her mental capabilities. While she directed her chakrams to dispatch dozens of undead per second, she dashed around the city and brought her sword to bear. It was a sword unlike any other. Its blade was seven feet long but only three inches wide and a half inch thick in its center. It was double edged and made of a metal that provided no flex.
Her Master crafted it using his Nano-Cells but designed it according to her preferred style of fighting. She was an acrobatic skirmisher in the eyes of any who could call her a peer. To the zombies she was more akin to a bipedal, human sized weed whacker. Her sword lacked a cross guard and its grip could be split in half, connected by a silky-smooth braided cable, which allowed her to create her own sword swinging martial style.
She moved like a cross between a gymnast and a ballerina, front flipping over a falling zombie one of her chakram had just decapitated. She landed lightly bending her knees to lower herself as she whipped the seven-foot blade in a circle above her head dropping nine zombies around her. She launched herself upward, in a backflip, wrenching the blade from the head of the ninth zombie struck and whipped the blade downward dispatching another one.
After landing, she took a few leaps back from what was left of the small crowd she was fighting. While Natalie didn’t shy away from melee combat, she didn’t enjoy its messy results. She didn’t like wasting the time it took to wash the blood of living things out of her hair. She especially didn’t care to find out how difficult it would be to cleanse the lumpy, swiftly congealing goo from these undead.
Natalie let her chakrams finish up the remaining crowd of zombies as she scanned the area for another pack, preferably in a parking lot or some other large, open area. As she spotted the perfect place, full of the creatures, her vision was suddenly blocked by another strange, floating message.
Alert
You have destroyed more than twenty thousand Bio-Curse Infected.
As one of a few major contributors to RULE's imminent integration you are being awarded.
You have received five free Attribute points.
You have received the achievement, Grace of His Will
For more information, think "Menu"
Continue to eliminate Bio-Curse Infected to expedite RULE System Integration.