Chapter 54 A somewhat heavier touch of undeath (Patreon)

Nathan spoke first. “I think I should go first. I’ve got perception skills, as well as resistance to magical traps and healing for non-magical traps. And it seems I’m pretty good at taking on undead in close-quarters.” Nathan gestured to the corpse he’d just finished sucking the necromancy out of. “After me, probably Aarl, then Stella, Sarah and with Khachi bringing up the rear in case any come at us from behind?

Khachi closed his mouth. He’d been about to suggest their ordering, and it was probably about the same order. The big wolfolk looked confused more than upset, as if he hadn’t been expecting Nathan’s suggestion.

There was a moment of awkwardness as everybody looked at Nathan, then Khachi. The wolfolk had been acting as the unofficial leader of the Heirs since before Nathan had joined. And this wasn’t Nathan trying to take over so much as potentially get the Heirs used to listening to him in tactical situations. Nathan liked Khachi, and he trusted the wolfolk with most things. But he didn’t want the Heirs to settle into the pattern of listening to him on everything, especially because Nathan had skills and knowledge that might give him unique insights into tactical situations.

Nathan nodded his head towards Khachi. “Do you agree that it’s best for me to be in front, calling out directions? I have perception skills and can’t be fooled by magic. We should have talked about this before, but here we are. For now, I believe my suggestion is the best one?”

Khachi slowly nodded, and the rest of the Heirs fell into the suggested order.

Cool. I hope this doesn’t lead to confusion as to who gives orders. I do think this party order is best, and if Khachi can’t see anything he’ll have trouble calling plays. When I get yeeted into the middle of an enemy formation then he’ll be the one calling the shots. Like where to throw Nathan.

They entered the tomb. The first thirty feet looked like they’d been clawed out of the packed earth by bare hands. The ceiling was low and the walls covered with finger-marks. There were signs of multiple cave-ins that had been cleared by hand, from the inside. Nathan saw a zombie ahead, blindly staggering towards them. Khachi’s stone boot scraped on a stone and it quickly raised its arms, lurching in their direction and opening a mouth to bite.

Nathan seized it by the throat, dumping the inert corpse to the side a moment later. He shook his hand in a vain attempt to remove the squishy gore and the cold, slick feeling of the death mana.

That zombie’s hearing was better than its eyesight. Huh.

Stella conjured a pair of lights and set one hovering over each shoulder. The paired lights prevented any one object from throwing sharp shadows, diffusing more light around the inside of the tomb. The lights revealed that the bare dirt transitioned to worked stone floors. Only a few steps further in the walls and ceiling were also replaced with smoothly joined stone blocks.

The tunnel blossomed out into a larger room, decorated with dirty reliefs. An altar of some kind stood in the center of the room, and three passages led deeper underground. Another zombie was wandering out of the rightmost passage, blinking at them in the light. It opened its mouth to moan and Sarah nailed it in the face with a javelin, dropping the zombie with a wet sound.

Nathan took a moment to study the altar and the stone reliefs. They definitely weren’t Quazian, and looked vaguely Mayan to Nathan. That likely meant Sklias dominion, who were a snakefolk empire from long ago. They didn’t tend to leave the most dangerous or impressive dungeons, so weren't prioritized in the Gemore Adventurer education. Most often, Sklian dungeons were tombs of various Sklian mage-lords. They’d been high on magic but low on the sort of long-term enchantments and constructs that could make dungeons truly nightmarish.

And this is probably one of those. But not a very rich mage-lord, apparently. Not enough decoration for that? Anyway, time to follow the right wall? I want to see wherever those zombies are coming from.

Nathan gestured toward the right passageway, then stepped forward. He looked around carefully for traps or signs of magic, and was a few paces in front of Aarl. Nothing happened as they crossed the room and entered the rightmost passage. In the rear, Khachi swiveled and started walking backwards, shield up and watching their backs.

Nathan moved forward cautiously, looking for more traps and details. He saw some reliefs of a naga-like creature standing on a pedestal overlooking many bowing figures. The corridor turned sharply to the right ahead, and another zombie stumbled into view around the bend. Nathan grabbed it quickly, laying the now-still body quietly against the wall of the tunnel.

Then Nathan turned the corner, and took a few steps forward into a larger space. He motioned Stella forward to give him lightning and see what was ahead.

It was an ossuary. And a burial chamber. A long room stretched out, two rows of stone shelves arranged like bookshelves. They were heavily decorated with bones. The shelves held bodies, stacked three-deep. Higher shelves held more bones, many of which were nonhumanoid. Central tables held yet more bones, and Nathan saw a dozen Stalker skeletons, carefully laid out on a row of tables that sat between the shelves. Their third eyes were still present, and glistened with a black mist that absorbed the light cast from Stella’s spells.

Most of the bodies and skeletons were inert, though Nathan saw one of the stalkers twitch slightly. As he watched, a human corpse jerked, falling from the shelf where it had been laying onto the ground. It lay there for a moment, then unsteadily got to its feet and stumbled towards them.

Nathan took a moment to kick his shoes off, gesturing back to the Heirs to stay put. He ran forward on the balls of his feet, doing his best to stay quiet on the bare stone floor. He seized the newly mobile zombie and rendered it immoble, again laying the body down quietly instead of letting it fall.

Nathan looked around the room again, and noticed another detail he hadn’t seen before, thinking it a trick of the light. Sticking from the ceiling was a black crystal which seemed to absorb the light. From this close, Nathan could feel a suffocating pressure from them, not unlike what the Grave Tangle had unleashed. But instead of a tide of overwhelming mana that sapped the strength from Nathan, this mana was insidious. With his new understanding of death mana Nathan understood that it was trying to animate him, even as it was absorbed into his skin. He laid a hand against the zombie he’d recently drained, and found that more mana had slithered inside of it in the brief moments since he’d last touched it.

Ok, so that crystal is slowly animating all of the corpses in here. There’s a lot of them. Time to break it I guess? Especially before it gets those Stalker skeletons moving, those things look nasty. I don’t wanna know what those eyes do.

Nathan hopped up onto the table, avoiding the six-legged skeleton stretched along it. He glanced back to the Heirs, only twenty feet away. They were watching him cautiously as he stretched up to grab hold of the crystal. What he felt surprised him - there was definitely a spell in there, which seemed built to shape the mana as it passed through, shaping it into a form that would be better for animating corpses. But the mana was passing through the crystal from somewhere else. This crystal was a conduit for the death mana, not its ultimate source. Nathan got a sense that the mana was conducted through the rock from somewhere else. As far as he could tell it was coming from somewhere farther into the hill. Not deeper underground, but at an angle away from the entrance.

I’m glad we tested what happens if I absorb mana even when I’m already full of stamina.

Nathan pulled on the mana in the crystal, siphoning a lot of mana out of it very quickly. His stamina was already full from all of the zombie-draining, so the excess stamina manifested as an urgency to move. Nathan felt ready to sprint a mile, leap down a flight of stairs and fight whoever was in front of him. From his past experiments with Stella, Nathan knew his every movement for the next few minutes would be empowered with the excess stamina. It was a surge of energy that energy drinks could only pretend to in advertisements.

Nathan used [Focused mind], pulling his attention back to the crystal and the spell inside. As Nathan siphoned mana, the crystal lightened slightly, showing a smoky-quartz nature instead of matte light-absorbing black. With an effort of concentration Nathan reached past the torrent of mana flowing into him, breaking the spell that guided the diffusion of the mana. Then he released the crystal and studied it warily for a moment.

{High-tier Focused Mind 3 achieved!}

The crystal quickly darkened back to black, then resumed spilling mana into the air. It was undirected now, more like what the Grave Tangle had released. But it would still probably serve to raise the corpses. Now it would just take longer because the mana was undirected.

Nathan looked around the room from his new vantage point. From here he could see doorways that led to other rooms. The light wasn’t great, but Nathan could see the same shelf-table-bone setup, and assumed that they were similar body-storage-and-reanimation setups.

He also saw a set of stairs leading up and down through a gap in the corpse-shelves. It was out of sight of the entrance where the Heirs were still hunkered. As Nathan watched, a zombie stumbled down the stairs thirty feet away. It clearly saw Nathan, and he saw its mouth open and realized it would be impossible to reach in time.

He hopped down from the table and ran back towards the Heirs, hearing a deep moan from behind him. It was shockingly loud in the quiet enclosed space, seeming to echo back and forth from rooms above and below. Then Nathan realized that those weren’t echos, those were other undead repeating the noise.

He reached the Heirs and spoke quickly. “Back into the corridor, we need a choke point. The mana source isn’t in here, I think it’s a straight line from the central corridor, that way.” Nathan pointed in the direction he’d gotten from the crystal. “Fighting retreat, we decide if we’re leaving or going for the mana source based on how bad this is. We’ve got a straight shot at the exit if this is too much.”

Aarl and Stella nodded quickly, turning and moving to put some distance between themselves and the open space. Sarah and Khachi were already a little farther down the corridor, watching the route back to the exit. Nathan was rearguard, and ran to catch up while looking over his shoulder. The Heirs were moving faster than the zombies, and Nathan was trying to decide if they should hole up in this corridor or go all the way to the entrance to make their stand.  Then a swarming crowd of agile figures overtook the shuffling zombies trailing them .

They were still humanoid corpses, but they moved with a speed and power totally unlike the slow awkwardness of the zombies. The bones of their fingers had extended and sharpened, giving them a set of awful claws. Their teeth had elongated and split into a jagged mess of sharp enamel and bone.

Ghouls. Oh Joy.

Nathan turned and counter-charged the tide of undead, trusting his team to back him up. He activated his Rage, imagining the social setup that would allow one mage-lord to set up a tomb filled with this many bodies. It was tyranny that reached beyond death, that spoke of an ownership that could never be escaped. How many of the bodies charging him would have chosen this fate? He was going to break this monument to long-dead arrogance.

Thank you Artha, for teaching me to call true Rage within a moment. The secret to this class is that your anger must be deep and true, but never mindless.

Nathan was faster than the ghouls, and his momentum slammed into the tide of flesh and stopped it. His hands snapped out, aiming for necks. His right hand was on-target and a wave of death mana flowed into him as that ghoul went slack. The mana was stronger and more concentrated than that from the zombies. His left hand was met with a gnashing maw of jagged teeth. The jaws clamped shut on Nathan’s hand, breaking skin in a dozen places.

{Mid-tier Sprinting 3 achieved!}

Nathan formed his hand into a claw and ripped the ghoul’s lower jaw off. He punched out at another ghoul attempting to grapple him. He had a better understanding of the way death mana flowed through the undead, so when he punched fingers into a rotting shoulder and sucked out mana the ghoul’s arm went slack.

A dozen ghouls surrounded Nathan, burying him under a press of clawing fingers and biting jaws. He was being dragged down bit by bit, absorbing mana from the disgusting press of bodies. Clawed fingers and jaws broke his skin in a dozen places, and Nathan strained to stay upright.

Any time now

A fireball impacted the ceiling above Nathan’s head, exploding out in all directions. His stamina once again topped out as the ghouls closest to Nathan were blown apart, while the ones farther back were merely toppled like bowling pins.

Exactly what the doctor ordered.

Nathan leapt forward, taking advantage of the fireball’s disruption to quickly draw mana from three more ghouls before they could regain their feet. There were only a dozen left and Nathan engaged them hand-to-hand as Stella landed a pair of fireballs farther down the corridor, among the crush of zombies that were slowly catching up. Body parts pelted Nathan as he vaulted away from the still-mobile ghouls.

He skirmished with the remaining ghouls, trying not to let them surround or grab him again. It was a truly unequal fight, since Nathan’s every strike disabled a limb or completely drained a ghoul, while they had to work to even pierce his skin. The only equalizing factor was that they had him outnumbered, but that changed quickly enough. Nathan heard another fireball from behind him, but didn’t stop to look around. He leaned into his acrobatics, kicking off a wall and planting one hand on the floor to aerial away from three ghouls starting to surround him before grabbing one ghoul that had tried to slip by around the neck.

Nathan was absorbing an incredible amount of mana, and his every motion was suffused with power. Despite Raging, despite [Regeneration], despite spending stamina to enhance every one of his motions, he was still gaining more stamina than he spent. He rolled into a ghoul to knock it over, then sunk fingers into a different foe’s eye socket before planting a bare foot on the prone ghoul’s neck to drain the mana from it.

{Low-tier Tumbling 7 achieved!}

Before Nathan knew it, no more ghouls remained. Zombies were still staggering towards him, but in a trickle instead of a flood. Their numbers had been vastly reduced by Stella’s fireballs, and they were stumbling over the organic wreckage littering the corridor. Nathan moved forward quickly, leaving a trail of newly-motionless corpses behind him.

He reached the ossuary room again and saw no more incoming undead, so he turned and ran back into the corridor to see what was going on with the Heirs. It looked like a few ghouls had gotten past Nathan but had met Aarl’s greatsword. Past that, the Heirs were battling another tide of undead that had come from behind them, toward the entrance. Nathan almost leapt to assist, but it didn’t look like they were in need of assistance. The best thing he could do was ensure no other undead hit them from this side. Like one of those bone Stalkers, for example.

It looked like the undead coming from the direction of the entrance were more staggered than those who’d engaged Nathan. A few ghouls at a time came around the corner, then charged towards them.

Khachi was planted in the middle of the corridor like a rock, his shield glowing with golden light. It burned to the bone any undead that touched the glowing surface. The big wolfolk swung his hammer methodically, crushing the ghouls as they approached. Stella was steadily vollying spells past him at targets of opportunity. She saved fireballs for the clusters of ghouls, but Nathan saw her carefully aiming spikes of rock at single targets. Sarah had out her favorite bow and was steadily planting arrows through eyes. Meanwhile, Aarl was standing behind Khachi with a mace and hatchet, taking care of any leakers.

Two groups of ghouls surged down either side of the hallway, and Khachi yelled “target left!” He pivoted right, stopping that group cold while Stella made a low [Force block] that tripped the charging ghouls, leaving them easy meat for Aarl.

Ok, they’re pretty good.

Nathan turned his back on the slaughter, watching their backs and calling out his availability. “Watching our backs, call for help if needed!” He heard the steady sounds of under-control combat behind him for a brief time.

Then Khachi called out a new command. “Slow retreat!”

Nathan glanced over his shoulder and saw a mass of zombies slowly pushing down the corridor. The Heirs were slowly backing away as Stella carefully volleyed fireballs at them, blowing enormous holes in the press of bodies.

Nathan was tempted again to take the stragglers, but Khachi had taken back command of the fight since it had switched directions, and Nathan didn’t want to yell “mine” and run past him to steal the last kills while a bone Stalker snuck up behind them.

So, he watched the rear as he listened to the Heirs cleaning up the last of the zombies.

Overall Status:

{Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 4

Permanent Talent 2: High-tier Regeneration 4

Talent 3: None

Class: Spellbreaker Juggernaut level 43

Class skills:

Stamina: 530/530

Juggernaut's Wrath

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Juggernaut's Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Utility skills:

High-tier Focused Mind 3

Mid-tier Earnestness 7

Mid-tier Sprinting 3

Mid-tier Spellsense 4

Mid-tier Notice 4

Low-tier Identify 10

Mid-tier Dodging Footwork 2

Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 7

Low-tier Lecturing 6

Low-tier Tumbling 7}