The Fallen Ascending 01 -- Rebirth
Thinning the Herd

Taking a moment to recover my strength, I slowly stretched out a trickle of energy back into the surrounding earth, careful for any sort of corruptive response to my gentle probing. Much to my relief, simply feeling the ground didn’t cause the darkness to react violently and attack me again. Slowly, moment by moment, I carefully increased the flow of energy outwards to seek for anything that might give me a better clue about the missing team, expanding my search along the ground in an ever widening series of circles.

I could feel multiple swarms of the lumbering dead scattered all across the forest, within the confines of the iron circle which enclosed the graveyard. Many of the movement patterns were those of the shambling zombies and skeletons which we’d just faced, but there were some which moved along in a series of movements that I found almost impossible to predict. One moment I could feel the creatures on the ground, then they were gone, only to reappear on the ground elsewhere a dozen meters away a moment later.

Were they doing some sort of teleporting? Instant travel from one spot to another? I really couldn’t tell how they were moving; I could just feel them on the ground, then lose them, then feel them back on the ground once again. This new, unknown enemy was worrisome to me, so I made a point to try and track them as closely as possible so we could avoid them, if at all possible.

Expanding my search even further, I finally felt what I’d consider the first traces of the others, at what I can only describe as barrow mounds scattered in the forest. Some of the mounds were still sealed; I could feel the earth enclosing them completely. A few others however had been cracked open; I could feel where a hole had been dug or bored into them, by what I could only assume was the actions of the other group.

Some of the opened mounds were simply small, enclosed chambers where the dead lay at rest, but a few connected to a series of winding tunnels that wove and twisted together in a tapestry of confusion. Some mounds were connected together by these underground tunnels, whereas others weren’t and were connected to a completely different set of passageways. From what I could tell with my gentle probing of the earth from this far away, there were at least a dozen of non-connected labyrinths in the graveyard, and trying to follow and unwind them all from here to pinpoint an exact location of the other group was simply impossible.

“I think I’ve found us a lead on the others,” I finally told my group. “This place is swarming with the dead like we just fought, and with other creatures too which worry me considerably. At first guess, I’d say there must be hundreds of the dead moving out here, and dozens of somethings, which seem even more dangerous.”

“Tha.. that’s a lot of dead,” Jess stammered nervously. “Shouldn’t we go back and report all this to the school and let them round up the knights, or the guards, or something, to deal with it?”

“No.” I shook my head from side to side. “We’re here now. If the other team is still alive, they’re stuck trying to survive in the middle of all this mess alone. I know if I was them, and there was a rescue party this close to me, I’d want them to push on and at least try and save me, before they gave up and turned around.”

“Then what’s the plan, My Lord?” Crystal asked, cutting to the heart of the matter.

“For now, we’re going to take advantage of the daylight to thin the herds of roaming dead down somewhat. I can feel the ground, so I can feel the dead as they move across the ground. We’re going to be working our way in deeper towards the center of this mess, towards a set of crypts and barrow mounds. We’ll be walking in a zig-zag meandering manner, so we won’t be going directly there. Instead, I’m going to hunt the wandering groups of dead like we just killed, while avoiding the more dangerous creatures which I still can’t identify.”

Crystal simply nodded in agreement. “I really don’t think just moving forward and leaving all these stragglers behind us to wander and catch up to us at any time is a good idea. Thinning them when we can is a good idea, My Lord.”

“And, if they do replace a way out, there’ll be a lot less of them to harm the local hunters and farmers,” Dino observed, while Jess stayed quiet on the whole subject.

“Then it’s decided,” I told them, “for now, we hunt the dead for as long as we have daylight.”

With everyone nodding in grim determination, I pulled my energy back in closer and started to feel for the nearest group of wandering mobs. A little to the east of our current position was a group of eight, and a bit to the northwest was a group of eleven. When I mentioned zig-zagging, I didn’t say anything about backtracking, but if we were going to get both these groups, that’s what we’d have to do almost, as they were almost in polar opposite directions from each other.

“To the small group first,” I decided, and starting walking off to the east. I figured we could practice getting rid of the smaller groups first, work out what works best for us, and then deal with the larger groups later.

Everyone trailed off behind me, keeping a nervous watch all around. Crystal followed up front, close by my side, while Dino brought up the rear and Jess stayed nestled in the middle between us all. I suppose it wasn’t a terrible formation, considering the group we had with us, but now I found myself wishing we’d brought more warriors along. I really didn’t like being in the vanguard of our group, and would’ve preferred having a couple more heavily armored people standing as shields in front of myself. But, wishes weren’t reality, as the saying goes, so I wearily led us onwards.

We passed more of the twisted, gnarled trees, and finally had to hop a small stream of brackish water, before catching up to the first group of meandering dead. Before we could even see them, I could tell they somehow sensed us as they slowly stopped and then turned in our direction. The dead doesn’t have eyes, nor ears, and yet they were somehow able to sense our presence even before we could see them ourselves.

In the movies and TV shows I used to watch back on Earth, before I got sentenced and killed, the dead was always depicted as being stupid and distracted easily by sound or light. If you wanted to escape the dead from a TV show, all you had to do is set off a car alarm in one spot while running somewhere else while the dead all gathered around and stared stupidly at the vehicle. Unfortunately, I was learning, reality doesn’t work so nicely.

The dead don’t have ears, and they don’t have eyes. Some of them are nothing more than walking piles of bones -- undead skeletons. When one takes a moment to think about it, it’s obvious that they can’t use sight or sound to replace their prey, so hiding in the dark or setting off a car alarm wouldn’t do shit to distract them. The best I can figure, they must simply seek the energy of life; the same essence which all living things have, that Jess uses her magics to manipulate to help heal others.

As a healer, and one attuned to life, Jess seems to have a natural affinity to sense death. Apparently, the dead have that same reverse affinity to simply sense life, and their sense is much greater in the forest than our limited visibility allowed us to see.

“They’re coming,” I warned the others, as I sensed the dead slowly approaching across the ground. They may have a sense for nearby life in their area, but I had a sense for anything moving across the ground within a kilometer’s distance. I might not see them, as they may not see me, but I could still sense and track them just as easily as they tracked us.

“The first one is going to be coming from behind those trees,” I pointed for Crystal and the others. “The next will be a few moments behind, and should come from over there,” I pointed a little way further off to the right. “And then the rest will be wander in slowly, scattered between them.”

“I’ve got the one of the left,” Crystal proclaimed, as she advanced with her sword raised and ready.

“And I’ll blast the one on the right,” Dino boasted proudly.

Jess didn’t say anything, but we all knew she wasn’t going to be that useful in the actual fighting. Her job was to heal and tend to the injured, if we got any; not use her energy or put herself up front where she might get hurt herself.

Since Crystal and Dino had claimed the first two, I simply stayed quiet and saved both my breath and my energy. If they needed me for support, I’d help whichever I could, but I didn’t think they were going to need me for much more than tracking and hunting the dead for now. After all, the two of them had managed to take down the last group, which was larger than this one, without ny assistance from me while I was dealing with resisting the backlash from the tainted earth.

The first battle was completely anti-climactic. A skeleton wandered out of the forest, where I’d predicted, and then simply crumbled into a scattered heap of bones before anyone had did anything. Crystal glanced back towards me and half-shrugged. “The walking bones seem to do that, My Lord, whenever they get close to me at all. Do you think it may be my perfume?”

“If it is, I want to borrow some of it,” Jess joked, as the second skeleton shambled out of the forest to simply be blasted apart by a ball of fire from Dino.

The rest of the dead slowly emerged one or two at a time from where I’d expected them to, and easily crumbled to our group. Crystal made the hunt a complete joke as all she had to do was get within a dozen steps of the skeletons and they’d shatter. The zombies were a little more resilient to her presence, but even they slowed and seemed as if they wanted to turn away from her rather than approach her directly.

It seems the sword I’d created didn’t just repel the dark corruption all around; it also repelled the dead themselves. If it wasn’t such a strain to create, I’d love to make us all something to wear or fight with, but that simply wasn’t possible. It took a small piece of my life and a chunk of my very soul to empower the blade which Crystal carried, and I could still feel that dull ache where I’d torn my own spirit to complete the process. Making something else was simply not something I was willing to do again, for the moment.

I don’t know how long it’ll take for my soul to recover, but I’m not going to sacrifice another part of it until I’m certain I’ve fully recovered from the first; though, I do have to admit, I was grateful to have Crystal and the protection her blade now offered, with us.