“So, we’re fighting walking corpses?” Gaspard exclaimed happily, looking around the meadow. “Gaspard like it!”
“Not the first time you do that?” Nura turned around, kicking the nearest skeleton.
“Long story, I’ll tell you later,” he waved his hand dismissively. “What do we have here?”
“The entire village cemetery has risen from its graves, and we’re holding them back, so they don’t break through to return to their living relatives,” Nura summarized the situation.
“You know, in some corners of our beloved Empire, it’s believed that on special days, the dead rise from their graves and visit their living descendants. Although, they do so as ghosts, and unnoticed by the living.” Gaspard suddenly decided to demonstrate his ethnographic knowledge. “Or is it in the Alienated Principalities?” he frowned, trying to remember. “Anyway, they throw a big festival every year to celebrate.”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with what’s going on here,” Elanil remarked. “The dead here don’t seem to be particularly kind to the living.”
“And this thing up there? Does that have anything to do with it?”
“What?” Elanil and Nura exclaimed together. Gaspard pointed at the sky behind them.
“I don’t see anything,” Nura admitted.
“Neither do I,” Elanil agreed. “Wait... yes, you’re right. There’s something up there, some kind of pale green glow.”
“Try not staring at it, use your side vision,” Gaspard advised.
They did as he said. Indeed, Elanil now saw something in the fog, like a greenish swirl, hanging in the sky above the cemetery. But it looked so vague that whenever she tried to focus her gaze on it, it immediately dissolved into a dim glow.
“How did you notice this, and we didn’t?” Nura asked, surprised. “You just came, and we’ve been here for a while!”
“Ah, Nura… how many times do I have to repeat these truisms for you?” Gaspard sighed in affected disappointment. “First, you’re used to paying attention to the wrong things, and second, I have a keen eye.”
“Okay, Mr. Keen Eye,” Nura mocked him back. “What is it exactly you see?”
“How should I know?” Gaspard’s eyes widened, his voice filled with genuine bewilderment this time. “That’s why I was asking you. Go closer and check.”
“But we must not let the zombies into the village—”
“Just go,” Gaspard muttered irritably. “I’ll cover you here. What could be better for morning exercise than kicking some bony asses?” he stretched himself preparing for a fight. “Only be careful. Or call for help if your asses need saving.”
Elanil caught Nura’s sight—she nodded in agreement. They rushed towards the cemetery, maneuvering between the dead that was trying clumsily to catch them. A sound similar to a butcher’s cleaver cutting a carcass reached them from behind, followed by a series of knocks of steel on bones, like a woodpecker’s drumming.
“Huzzah!” the joyful battle cry rang out.
“Be gentle with them, Gaspard, don’t chop them into shreds,” Nura yelled back. “Or Elanil will punish you.”
“Great!” his voice came from behind. “My buns are craving for good spanking.”
“Nasty jerk,” Elanil smiled.
Nura nearly turned to comment on that, but was distracted by two undead attacking her from both sides. She made no aggressive moves, simply ducking and slipping through the gap between them. Leaping forward, they clearly hadn’t registered she was already out of their reach. They seized each other’s throats, thinking they’d finally captured their prey.
“Brainless,” Nura smirked, looking at them.
“Enough playing with the dead,” Elanil grumbled, dodging another skeleton’s attempt to grab her shirt as she ran. “We need to quickly figure out what raised them from their graves.”
They were already running through the cemetery, which turned out to be quite spacious, probably as big in area as the village itself. Although, if Biwa’s inhabitants had lived there for centuries, generation upon generation, it was unsurprising that the village necropolis had no less dwellers than the village itself. And this worried Elanil. There had to be at least a hundred of walking dead, perhaps even many more.
As far as the thick fog allowed, the entire cemetery resembled a farm that had survived a mole infestation. Clumps of dirt from freshly dug holes lay everywhere, and tombstones were knocked over. Here and there other gravestones were swaying from side to side—dead men continued crawling out of their underground beds.
The mysterious vortex in the sky revealed itself completely unexpectedly. Just a few steps prior, Elanil saw nothing but a blurry spot, dimly visible in the fog. Now, however, she could clearly see its ragged edges. It resembled a malachite-colored swirl, glowing but not illuminating.
“Is that it?” Nura glanced up, kicking two more undead creatures that rushed at her. “The crap that keeps raising them from their graves?”
Elanil nodded. “We need to close this fissure in the sky quickly.”
“I bet, our amulets must work somehow, but how?”
“I don’t know,” Elanil admitted honestly. She truly had no idea how the amulets individually were supposed to stop the necromancy spells.
She picked up her amulet and examined it more closely. From the story synopsis, the wearers of all Five amulets were supposed to combine their powers and, in a final, epic battle, once and for all seal the Chasm—a suddenly formed link between this world and the transcendental realm of spirits, demons and other entities that had no place among the living. The creation of the Chasm resulted in the Undead Legion raising from their graves, and its closure was supposed to put an end to it. But everything happening now had long since deviated far from the game’s original plotline, Elanil realized.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
From the amulet’s magical depths, a hardly noticeable glimmer of green light radiated, echoing the pulsations of the vortex hanging above. She was so immersed in contemplating her magical artifact that didn’t even notice the massive zombie that had grown up right next to her. But Nura had spotted the danger first. She picked up a long sturdy stick lying nearby and swung at its head.
“Don’t forget to look around,” she reminded Elanil.
“Look at your amulet,” Elanil said instead of thanking. “Is it flickering?”
“Wait a second,” Nura threw the stick aside. She took a deep breath, and her [Intimidation] battle cry echoed throughout the cemetery. Even the thick fog couldn’t suffocate it. Like a blast wave, it swept across the cemetery, scattering clouds of mist and pushing all the dead around, causing them to take a few steps back, staggered.
“Much better,” Nura looked contentedly at her ability’s results and, taking the amulet, peered at it intently. “Now this undead shit won’t distract me.”
The dead men’s confusion, however, didn’t last long, perhaps a few seconds. Coming to their senses, they continued tightening the circle around Nura and Elanil.
“It seems to me, [Intimidation] isn’t that effective against the dead,” Elanil remarked. “Perhaps a little better than against constructs, though.”
“Oh, crap!” Nura grumbled, tearing her attention away from the amulet. “What a useless thing. It doesn’t work against constructs, it doesn’t work against the undead: is it even capable of intimidating anyone?”
“It worked very well on squirrels,” Elanil reminded her. Nura made a sour face, as if saying that was poor consolation. She was about to grab her axes when Elanil stopped her. “Work on the amulet, it’s my turn to distract them.”
Taking up her bow again, she decided to try a new trick. Nocking an arrow, she fired downwards, a few steps in front of her.
[Knockback Arrow]
Washing Elanil’s legs like a tidal wave, an electric discharge spread in concentric circles from the arrow’s impact. When it reached the nearest ranks of the undead, they immediately began writhing in unimaginable and revolting convulsions.
“Elanil, warn me next time!” Nura exclaimed, as she instinctively jumped, afraid that the shock effect of Elanil’s ability would hit her. “Or at least inform me in advance that we’re immune to friendly fire.”
“I wasn’t sure whether we were susceptible to our own shocking abilities or not,” she shrugged.
“Crazy elves!” Nura grumbled and returned to her amulet. “Well, it’s flickering,” she reported. “Scarcely, but flickering. A dim, crimson glow.”
“Crimson, you say?” Elanil repeated thoughtfully, firing her bow at one of the zombies that was too far from the [Knockback Arrow] area of ??effect, and hence kept advancing. “Mine’s green. Like this vortex.”
“So your amulet should work here, not mine,” Nura concluded.
“What made you think that? Maybe it’s the opposite: mine, green, activates—yours, red, deactivates,” Elanil suggested, and fired a series of arrows at the advancing undead. Her quiver started running low.
“Interesting color allocation, what gave you that idea? Never mind, you’re a mage, you know better.”
“Exactly,” Elanil didn’t argue, just admitted silently that her assumption had nothing to do with her knowledge of magic. To be honest, she still understood very little about how magic worked. But if she told anyone about this gap in what she should have been perfectly familiar with, she might give herself away. At the very least, she’d arouse too much suspicion.
“Try commanding the amulet to act,” she advised Nura. “Focus on it.”
Nura raised the amulet higher toward the sky, closed her eyes, and concentrated. Nothing happened. Elanil grabbed the stick with which Nura had hit a large zombie on the head recently and crushed four skeletons at once.
“It’s not working,” Nura complained. “Maybe there’s a magic word?”
“I can’t remember one. If magic words even work with these amulets.”
“I command you to close it!” Nura shouted angrily at the amulet. “Do as I say!” She sighed and turned to Elanil. “Listen, why don’t you try yours? I think it’s the matter of color matching.”
“Take care of them for now then,” Elanil nodded toward the undead who had formed a tight circle around them.
“Strange,” she thought. “There are so many already that they can simply overwhelm us with their sheer number. Even Gaspard might not save the day. But why doesn’t it alarm me the way it should?”
“Don’t want to sound overly capricious, but I think we can’t get by without excessive violence,” Nura echoed her thoughts.
“Alright, cripple them a bit with [Boomerangs],” Elanil agreed.
Nura didn’t need to be asked twice. Obeying her will, her axes soared into the air, circling around the undead, hacking their way through flesh and bone. The nearest ranks quickly crumbled and turned into carrion pulp A spectacularly disgusting sight, it nevertheless significantly delayed the advance of the undead rear ranks, creating a rampart of sorts.
“This will delay them for a while, but won’t stop them completely,” Nura reported.
“In a pinch, I’ll burn them all with my [Explosive arrow.]”
Elanil closed her eyes, concentrating on the amulet with her inner sight. Nothing happened. No sensation. Then an idea came to her mind.
“I need your amulet too.”
Elanil decided to test her guess. She approached Nura and brought her amulet closer. She could have sworn that at some point the amulets began moving toward each other, like two magnets. The two stones touched. From their depths, as if from an abyss, a glow of crimson and green rose. Two shimmering auras then spread beyond the amulets, intertwining with one another in the air like clouds of steam. These tongues of magical light rushed in all directions from Elanil and Nura. Quite quickly, crimson threads weaved the entire cemetery and enveloped all the dead, like a spider wrapping a victim in its web.
Those of the dead who had previously been seriously dismembered by Nura and Elanil were gathering back together. It looked similar to how the little dryad inside the teddy bear reknitted its severed body together.
“Shit!” Nura hissed. “We screwed up!”
“Wait,” Elanil raised her hand, stopping her panic. “Let’s see what happens next.”
Enveloped in a crimson glow, the bodies of the deceased froze, their arms at their sides. Then they all got lifted slightly above the ground. Rising from below, green glowing threads were wrapping around their legs, like lianas. Then they moved higher, snaking around the dead bodies and finally the necks, at which point they rushed into the sky, right to the vortex.
Elanil looked around. The spectacle was mesmerizing and menacing at the same time. She didn’t have long to admire it, however. The vines stretched taut, and in a single movement, hundreds of dead bodies were decapitated. The crimson glow around them vanished, and they all fell to the ground. The green threads got sucked into the vortex, as if sewing up the fissure in the sky. And then there was silence.
It was getting brighter. The fog was gradually clearing, and a sunny day was asserting itself. As if nothing had happened at all. As if it had all been just a nightmare. But the corpses scattered everywhere, like after a brutal battle, suggested it was all real.
“I take it back,” Nura smirked. “Not only did we not screw up, but also cleaned up the mess after ourselves. And here I was thinking it would take the villagers a lot of work to put their ancestors back together piece by piece.”
“Most important, we seemed to close this fissure,” Elanil noted. “At least for now.”
“Hey, that was great!” Gaspard’s voice came from behind, followed by approaching footsteps. Soon, the bard himself emerged from the thinning fog. “First a red flame, then a green one, and then whoosh!” he crossed his neck with his palm imitating a head getting chopped off. “How did you do that?”
“Ask Elanil, she’s a mage.”
A quest notification popping up was very timely saving her from awkward questions.
Quest: The fissure (main)
Status: Completed
Description: May the dead of Biwa now rest in peace.
Rewards:
- Weapon schematics x3 {expand the list}
- Armor schematics x3 {expand the list}
- Runes x3 {expand the list}
- + 40 Silver
- + 500 Ringing Springs Valley reputation
- + 1000 XP
[Level Up] Gaspard
Level: 15 → 16
4 Stat points gained.