When Lilia finally reached the next town, she was surprised to find it wasn’t deserted.

  Seeing it from Directions’ eyes, she’d initially worried that she might need to go around. After all, she couldn’t smuggle Cyclops and Mr. Bearbones through a populated town in broad daylight. The gates would be closed at night as well. Something had seemed strange about the people, though, so she’d asked Directions to get a bit closer. That’s when she realized that while the town might not have been empty, that didn’t mean anyone still lived there.

  Just like the group she’d run into before, none of the people here paid any attention to Lilia’s friends. Somehow they seemed to be able to identify even Directions as being undead. As for herself, Lilia kept repeating an order instructing the not-dead she encountered not to perceive her every time she noticed one looking her way.

  As Lilia walked the streets, she examined the people closely. Some lay still on the ground; others limped around aimlessly. Even the ones that were moving did so awkwardly, as if they hadn’t quite figured out how to control their limbs. Each had a terrible wound carved into their body and some still had the weapons that had ended their lives lodged inside them.

  Only a sparse handful of the people here moved naturally, as if they were still alive. They all appeared to be soldiers, but Lilia didn’t recognize their armor. From what she could tell, these soldiers seemed to be gathering all the unmoving bodies inside buildings and dragging them into the streets. A few had been standing guard at the gate, too.

  Lilia tried not to get too close to the soldiers in particular. Each and every one she’d found had a few spells worked into their souls. She didn’t know what they did. Just the fact that the spells were there was enough to make Lilia leery of the soldiers, though. If any of the not-dead here had a strong enough link to a necromancer for them to share senses it would be those.

  The others, though, didn’t appear to have been touched by a necromancer at all.

  Curious, Lilia crouched down between a pair of bodies. One moved only in small twitches; the other, not at all. She found that interesting. The first appeared to be a middle-aged woman, while the second looked like a child no older than ten. Did the difference in ages have something to do with how long it took them to reanimate?

  Looking at the two with her soul sight, Lilia found that the woman had one of those fake souls—soul crystals?—forming inside of her. She could be certain without digging it out, but it looked about the size of the one Cyclops had torn out of the chicken. Just a casual comparison to one of the people stumbling about was enough to determine that theirs were two to three times as large.

  On the other hand, the child’s incomplete soul crystal couldn’t have been larger than the roadside blueberries Lilia had subsisted off of for the last few days. Her first instinct was to attribute that to the age gap, and she didn’t think that would be entirely wrong, but her gut told her it had something to do with their soul conduits instead.

  Ordinary people didn’t use their soul conduits much, in Lilia’s experience. Some mana always trickled through, though, regardless of whether it was being used. Her own growth over the last year told Lilia that soul conduits were similar to muscles; the more one used them, the greater the flow of mana.

  The only possible conclusion was that as a person aged, their soul conduit opened up even without conscious usage. As a result, older people reanimated more quickly. What Lilia didn’t understand was why their souls weren’t leaving their bodies in the first place. Growing up in a farming town, she’d seen more than enough souls leaving animals’ bodies to know that they were supposed to detach only a short time after bodily death.

  It didn’t seem like the souls themselves had changed. Rather, whatever caused the soul conduit to detach appeared to be the problem. No matter how closely she examined these people she didn’t see any signs of their conduits detaching. Not the ones at the mid-spine, anyway. The other conduit, connected to the head, always seemed to fall apart on its own…

  Lilia sighed and stood, concluding that she’d learned all she could from these two. The question was what she should do with them. She’d panicked the other day when she tried to resurrect that soldier; her parents had always told her not to carelessly revive people. She didn’t really understand why. They’d told her it was disrespectful to disturb someone’s afterlife without permission, but why would anyone complain about living longer?

  Even if Lilia wanted to revive these two, though, there were limits to the number of undead she could support. She already had quite a few undead animals wandering about with her mana sustaining them. Her conduit had expanded greatly in the last year, but she didn’t think she could sustain the number of people in this town even if it seemed like only a small portion of the population had “died” here.

  It would require severing their soul conduits first, too, which she also wasn’t supposed to do. But the more she saw these not-dead wandering around the more Lilia came to believe it was no way of living. Sending them off would be a mercy, like putting down a horse with a broken leg. Her parents had allowed her to do that, hadn’t they? Surely this would be the same.

  “What do you think, Cyclops?” Lilia asked, turning to her friend. Her eyes widened in alarm, though, when she saw a ball of fire hurtling towards them from down the street. She scooped Cyclops up and dove aside, ignoring his indignant screams had the fireball sailed over the both of them and slammed into the bodies she’d been inspecting. The heat of the flames still washed over them despite the distance.

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  Down the street Lilia spotted a man in robes. His stomach had been cut open and his guts were hanging out, but any blood in his body appeared to have drained out long ago. At this distance Lilia could just barely tell that his lips were moving.

  “Don’t see or hear me!” Lilia yelled, backing the order up with a burst of mana that carried her intent. The mage didn’t even appear to notice. “Uh-oh. Run!”

  Just as the mage threw another ball of fire in her direction, Lilia spun around and sprinted the other way with Mr. Bearbones following close behind. The second fireball had been aimed at where she’d been, so she didn’t even have to put any effort into dodging it. When she checked Directions’ point of view, though, she saw the mage running after her.

  “Hold him down!” Lilia ordered the nearby not-dead. She didn’t wait around to see if it worked, but she did keep an eye on what happened through Directions. The dozen or so people in range of the command lurched into motion. Only one of them moved quickly enough to catch the mage pursuing Lilia, but once that one grabbed onto the man’s arm, the others soon caught up and piled on top of him.

  Any relief Lilia might have felt vanished quickly, though, as the mound of bodies vanished in an eruption of flames that put her village’s festival bonfires to shame. Even from dozens of meters away Lilia could feel the heat and smell the burning bodies. Nearby buildings caught fire as well, and the flames quickly began to spread across the closely-packed neighborhood.

  Then the mage shot out of the conflagration. Not horizontally, but vertically, flying on a column of white flames.

  “Not fair!” Lilia screamed as she evaded down an alley, barely avoiding a stream of fire that scorched the street behind her. Fortunately the mage didn’t seem to have noticed Directions watching him from above. Lilia saw through her friend’s eyes as the mage corrected course to track her, giving her enough time to barge into a shop to her right through the back door.

  That only bought her seconds. She’d hardly entered the building before the roof went up in flames. By the time she reached the front door the ceiling had already begun to disintegrate into ashes. Lilia ran out into the street, acutely aware of how exposed that left her, and immediately darted into the smithy across the road.

  “I can’t just keep running around like this. He’s faster than me and there’s only so many buildings to hide in,” Lilia said to herself as she dodged an anvil. She tripped over a dropped hammer and narrowly avoided a whip of pure fire that lashed across the room an instant later. Seeing his attack had failed, the mage took to the air again instead of following Lilia further into the building.

  There was only one way out of this that Lilia could see. If he had a soul crystal, she couldn’t identify it through the massive amount of mana surging through his soul conduit, so that left a direct attack on the not-dead mage’s soul. Lilia didn’t have any other means of defending herself to begin with, so that much was obvious. Getting close without being burned alive was the problem.

  “Cyclops, I’ve got something for you to hunt!”

  When Lilia exited the smithy onto the next street over, her arms were empty and Mr. Bearbones was no longer trailing her. She hung a right and rolled under an abandoned cart, which promptly burst into flames as it took a fireball meant for her. Then she passed by her true target—a soldier holding a spear.

  “Throw your spear at that guy!” Lilia ordered. The not-dead guard, already winding up to spear Lilia, shifted his aim at the last second and launched his weapon into the sky. It sailed through the air and pierced the airborne mage’s leg, failing to give him even a moment’s pause but throwing his next spell far enough off course to miss Lilia entirely.

  She made another right turn. That brought her back onto street she’d first encountered the mage on. Smoke from the burning buildings filled the air, obscuring even Directions’ view of the area. But that meant the mage chasing Lilia couldn’t see either. He had to plunge down into the smoke to search for her.

  Lilia dodged the charred bodies from earlier, fighting to breathe amidst the smoke-filled air. She’d underestimated how bad the fires had gotten in the scant minutes since they’d begun. Already she could barely see a few meters in front of her. Worse, with the sound of burning buildings all around her, Lilia had a hard time identifying the sound of the mage propelling himself through the air. She had only a second’s notice before he shot past her from above.

  That single second proved to be enough. Lilia threw herself to the side. An instant later the mage bathed the center of the street in fire on his way through, scorching Lilia’s hair and setting the sleeve of her shirt on fire. As she regained her feet, Lilia hurriedly unbuttoned her shirt and cast it off, thankful she had an undershirt on below it.

  Deciding enough time had passed, Lilia turned right down the next alley, squeezing her way between two burning buildings with flames so close to either side of her that she felt like she was being cooked alive. The mage spotted her again just as she turned right one final time. Her feet pounded furiously against the paving stones as Lilia raced to escape a fiery death.

  Just as Lilia reached the edge of the burning section of town, the mage caught up. She watched from a distance as he pointed a hand in her direction. Fire began to gather before the palm of his hand. Then, just as the flames began to brighten, in the moment before they shot forward, a dark blur caught the mage in midair.

  In one brief moment of contact, claws raked across the not-dead mage’s throat. His spell died with his ability to speak. Then a skeletal paw reached into the air and seized the mage by the hand. With a sharp tug, Mr. Bearbones redirected the mage straight into the ground.

  Lilia skidded to a stop. She could barely breath. Her legs burned, not from fire but from overwork. Only adrenaline had kept her going even this long. But she wasn’t safe yet. Her pursuer could alert his master to what was happening if she allowed him to leave, or maybe find some way of casting spells without speaking. She didn’t really know how spellcasting worked and cutting his throat had been little more than a lucky guess to begin with.

  While Mr. Bearbones pinned the mage down, Lilia staggered over to his prone body and gathered her mana. His soul, brimming with mana of its own, resisted when she tried to push hers into it. But Lilia had spent a year wrestling with souls wrapped in layer upon layer of spells meant to keep intruders out. She concentrated her mana into a thin tendril and pierced the mage’s defenses, worming her way through to his very core.

  It took every bit of willpower Lilia had to maintain control. This wasn’t like severing the soul conduit of a half-dead chicken or a thrall. She suspected even the defenses of that soldier from the other day would have been easier, had she taken the time to overcome them. But she refused to let up.

  Lilia navigated the whirling torrent of mana protecting the mage’s soul, allowing her tendril of mana to twist and turn without ever snapping, until she finally managed to wrap it around the mage’s soul conduit. Then, like tightening a noose, Lilia pulled her mana taut. Nothing visibly changed, but Lilia sensed the moment when the mage’s soul came untethered.

  It drifted away from his body and vanished, finally free.