[60]

“Ghouls!” I shouted to the others, recognizing the undead from my reading instantly. Having read about Gozmyr extensively before our journey, I knew ghouls were bad news. Unlike the regular infected zombies, ghouls moved at a much faster speed, swarming prey before they could often react. Even worse, their large, curved claws were great for digging, allowing them to ambush the living from the earth.

Without another word, the four of us formed up in an inverted wedge formation, with Izzy moving from her usual location behind me to the front right, and Raxx taking up a spot adjacent to her on the left. Joy stood at the center, ten meters back between the two, while I took up behind Raxx to give him additional support. With her shield, Izzy was much harder to move around.

Our first volley wrecked carnage among the gibbering monsters. Raxx swung his enormous saber, unleashing a wind blade down the slope of the hill. Half the entire wave lost legs to his attack. Joy slaughtered the other half with a rain of arrows. For every target she hit, extreme necrosis set in, causing the woeful undead to melt into a sickly sludge. It took around ten to fifteen seconds to unravel each one from the point of impact, but that was long enough to keep them from reaching us.

A second wave pressed out of the crack in the earth, nearly as soon as the first was down. Because of the small enclosure, the ghouls had to fight with each other to get out. I was immensely thankful for their lack of forethought and continued to watch our two strongest range fighters mow them down.

Seeing the awful things up close was much worse than reading about them. Gozmyr’s fell magic worked just like ours. After enough essence, a regular zombie could transform into a higher form of undead. Ghoul was the most common next step; an essentially deformed corpse that had its muscles rearranged for speed and the earlier mentioned digging.

Mad, rolling dead eyes danced in opposite directions in their misshapen, shrunken skulls. Since they had been dead for much longer than the usual infected, their pale skinned, and black veined bodies stunk worse than anything I had ever smelled. Only my above average Constitution kept me from vomiting. I know because Joy had already done so.

Izzy and I stayed our hands on our respective crossbows. Though that did not last long.

A tremor reverberated beneath us.

“We need to run!” Izzy yelled, already retreating. “There are too many of them!”

Our conditioning at Ashmere paid off, and everyone obeyed the order with enough alacrity to avoid a terrible death. The ground fell out beneath our feet. Scrambling backward from the hole, I nearly fell on my rear end, but Izzy grabbed my shoulder and hauled me along. Still, the scent of rotting corpses and fresh soil followed me like a shadow.

“Get the gear!” Izzy yelled at Joy, practically throwing me into the old campfire atop the hill. I saw her turn to face the new threats climbing out of the dark where I had just been standing.

Without looking back, Joy and I ran to the team’s backpacks, throwing them over the whining horses.

“Shh! Shh!” I said, doing my best to calm down my old horse, tied to a tree along with the other two.

The animal barely knew me, smelled the undead, and heard their howls. My half-assed placation did not work. I jumped on the horse’s back, anyway, barely holding on while it shook and stomped.

Joy, who appeared to have much better control over her animal, yelled out, “Okay, go!”

Raxx was much faster than Izzy and stayed behind, holding off the oncoming horde of ghouls with a mad, heckling laugh.

Ceaselessly, wave after wave of the creatures tried to claw out of the depths, only to be cut down by Raxx's attacks and Joy’s arrows. From her upset horse, Joy continued to support our frontline, firing arrow’s so quickly I thought her bow might break. A slavering pale ghoul almost made it to Raxx’s foot, and I finally unleashed my crossbow bolt. The blow caught it right in the skull, sending it reeling backward into the hell it came from.

+3 Essence

After Izzy mounted, Joy let out a whistle, and the Harak ran for all he was worth. Unfortunately, I could not reload my crossbow from horseback, so I summoned my poleaxe. Izzy shot her nearly siege weapon sized crossbow, murdering four of the creatures in one sitting.

Joy’s attacks were not enough to slow down the horde. Her shots continued to decay the creatures, but not fast enough to keep them off the Sea Dog. Raxx leapt onto the back of her horse, with a prodigious wind assisted jump inches away from the grasping hand of a ghoul.

My poleaxe slammed down on its head a second later, and the four of us raced down the other side of the hill.

+3 Essence

The earth shook again.

Another hole opened on the hill, this time behind us, but unlike before, it exploded outward. Dirt and earth flew in chunks around us, almost knocking me from my horse. Pain lanced through my scalp in a fiery flash. Reaching up, I felt blood pouring from a shallow wound near the top of my head.

Our horses took little prodding to speed up.

“Fires of Hell!” Raxx yelled from behind Joy. It was unlike the Harak to curse like that, and the apprehension in his voice bade me look at what shook him.

Racing out of the abyss was a mummified warrior with glowing red eyes on the back of a skeletal creature the size of an Ur-Chaal. But unlike those glorious carriage sized bulls, this monstrosity had ghoul-like talons instead of hooves and the decayed beak of a bird.

“Izzy!” I yelled, trying to call her attention to the evil thing closing on us.

The Stoneblood turned, and I saw her eyes widen.

“Doom Champion!” Izzy screamed.

The words made my blood run cold. In the undead hierarchy, there were few things more powerful than a doom champion. Warlocks created the misbegotten fiends using unknown rituals on an unwilling person. From the little I found on the subject; the magic used to create a Doom Champion would only work on a person with a class. Somehow, they kept a portion of their skills and abilities, as well as a strong degree of sentience.

That was not even the worst part.

Contrary to other undead, Doom Champions had an ability that let them raise corpses without a brain. One Doom Champion could raise an entire graveyard of old skeletons, sending an unexpected auxiliary force to aid a horde. Though the skeletons they made were not as strong as a zombie, it took much more effort to keep the creatures down. Requiring the slayer to chop up the bones of the animated into unthreatening small pieces.

Meaning we could kill all the ghouls chasing us, and the Doom Champion could raise them again to continue fighting. Albeit, at a slower, but still dangerous, pace than before.

The monster continued to gain on us, eating up the distance at an unholy speed. As it got closer, I felt a dreadful aura pressing down. Gritting my teeth, I looked over my shoulder to see one of Izzy’s hammers hurling at it like an unleashed comet.

It was her biggest one, and as it spun in the air, it made a powerful “thoom-thoom-thoom” sound. A blink later, the weapon crashed into the beak-head of the skeletal mount, obliterating its entire skull. Izzy’s hammer continued its trajectory into the innards, knocking out bones and sending them dancing along the ground.

But the attack did not slow the monster on our heels.

“Damn it!” Izzy yelled, pulling her second, smaller hammer from her belt.

“Wait! Let it get closer, I want to try something.” I yelled. Raxx and Izzy both gave me a look that said, you better not screw this up.

As if hearing my words, the Doom Champion looked at me directly in waiting eyes. Black runic tattoos ran across the corpse's pallid yellow skin. Miraculously, the Doom Champion still had a rune covered nose and sharp human features, but that did not make it more pleasing to the eye. Neither did the promising smile of rotten teeth it gave me.

A rough suit of rusty plate mail protected its vitals, though I was not sure what the point was. The only way to kill the creature would be to pierce the steel plated helmet nailed to its skull.

Sixty feet, its aura caused me to tremble. A moment later, at fifty feet, I had to bite down on my lip hard enough to draw blood to keep my thoughts straight. Raxx, ahead of me, screamed in high pitch terror, throwing wind blade after wind blade at the monster, to no avail. At forty feet, my horse’s breath shuddered, and I feared its heart would explode from fear.

Just as we crossed to the top of another hill, it made it within range for me to hit it with Haunt.

The curse worked better than I could have hoped.

Like the Warlock in the dungeon run, I suspected it would be particularly susceptible to attacks against its fate. My staple curse did not work on things without sentience but seemed doubly effective on Gozmyr with it. I did not know, nor care for, the reason; I was simply glad that it worked.

At once, the Doom Champion screeched, releasing us from its terrible aura. Then it lost control of the magic it used to control the animated beast it rode on, provoking an explosion of bone from underneath it. The Doom Champion flew into the side of the hill, rolling back down the way it came with a wailing yell that echoed in the wind.

We pushed the horses for close to an hour before we finally stopped to let them rest.

“I thought we were done for,” Izzy admitted, climbing down from her horse.

“Me too,” Raxx said.

“What in the abyss did you do, Harald?” Joy asked. “I did not think mental attacks worked on the undead, like at all.”

“I did not use a mental attack,” I said, looking at their expectant faces. “I just threw one of my hexes at it,” I said with a shrug.

“You knew that would do that?” Izzy asked.

“I guessed it would, from my time in the Dungeon.” I said, looking back the way we came. No way did I want to go back in the same direction. I was not sure if that would work a second time, and I had a feeling that I had just made a terrible enemy.

What else was new.