Necromancer and Co., Book 3: The Underearth

Chapter 3: A Race Through the Woods

[Alen]

The next few hours passed by in a flash to Alen. He’d found them. They weren’t complete, but his friend was right there, walking with him. He couldn’t take the smile off his face. He didn’t want to. From what he’d heard, Adam was back at where they were headed too. Lynn spent the time trying to communicate with the strange, big-eyed people. They looked like those aliens from a typical alien commercial, but horrifyingly more buff. Alen glanced at her, then looked back at his friend beside him.

Sam was relatively glad to see him, but the occasional grim look on his face suggested that there was something Alen still didn’t know about. Something bad.

As they trekked through the trees and ducked under stone-like branches, Alen shot Sam a look. “So you told me how you two got here, but what’s up with the guys who look like they live in a UFO?”

“They can understand you, you know,” Sam pointed out, and Alen saw one of the alien-looking guys glaring at him. He waved.

“So? What’s so bad about living in a UFO? I’d be down,” said Alen, grinning at the alien-guy who grunted and looked away.

Sam sighed. “I told them the same thing when I met them for the first time. Bad thing is, I mentioned that aliens abducted cows. They didn’t like that. Good thing Dieter was there to clarify.”

“Dieter?” Alen asked, raising a brow.

“Yeah, not surprised you don’t know him. He’s a pretty cool dude, man. He’s a new arrival from our batch, but it looked like he ended up here in the Underearth on his first day.”

“The Underearth, huh. I always thought it was one of those myths because there really wasn’t enough proof to back up the claims. Guess books can still be written by people who don’t know much at all.”

“I had a book in my pack when I was brought here.”

Alen’s eyes shone. “Where is it?”

“An orc tore it up as a show of dominance. Fuckin’ asshole.”

“What a fucking dick. How’d you kill him?”

Sam paused, then gave him a confused look. “What? Why would I?” He glanced weirdly at Alen, “It’s just a book, dude. The guy had a kid. I’m not screwing that kid over just because his dad’s a big-ass douche.”

Alen blinked, looked at Sam’s face, and frowned. He turned quiet. What the hell did he just say? He scratched his chin, then paused, before looking down at the hand scratching it. This was worrying. The sheer ease of which he said those words with—how casually he was able to mention killing someone over… what? A book?

But if he was Sam, would he have done it? If it was a book, probably not, but if anyone had even tried to fuck with his phone, then he’d…

“Uh, are you okay?” Sam waved a hand in front of his face, then raised a brow. “And nah, I didn’t kill him. It was just a book I was reading as a joke. Remember Royally Screwed?”

Alen remembered the book. It was about some really horny dude with a dick for a brain and tried to fuck every girl in sight. Well, that was what he got from the first dozen paragraphs anyways. He was never much for romance books with half-naked dudes for book covers. Alen just couldn't trust those ones. After he had his fill, he'd left Sam to cackle by himself afterwards. They’d made fun of it when he’d slept over at Adam’s place months ago. Maybe Sam was even enjoying it. Who knew? The thought was funny, but Alen could only manage a slight smile.

Would he have killed that orc?

Seeing his silence, Sam quieted down. He called over one of the hunters and told him something about checking ahead. The man nodded and sprinted off. Alen clenched his fist, unclenched them again, then let loose a breath. He lightly slapped Sam’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “So uh, where exactly are we going?” Alen asked, looking around at the trees that truly did seem to be made out of solid rocks. The bioluminescent leaves and fruits were the only things that confirmed that these trees were even trees in the first place.

“Back to these guys’ village. They call themselves the Analik. Kind of took me and Adam in when we accidentally stumbled into one of their hunting parties.”

They moved past the trees and entered a tunnel of sorts. The warriors led the way, with Lynn idly talking to one of them while Alen and Sam followed closely behind. Sam nudged him with an elbow and pointed to the white-haired elf with a grin.

“So you’re still single, right?”

“Fuck you.”

Sam laughed. They stopped near a wall, and waited, before slowly, the wall began to shift, revealing another tunnel. They walked in, and Sam shot him a curious look. "You told us she was pretty cool, though. Right? You aren’t going for it?”

Alen felt himself quiet down as they walked. He hesitated, then slowly began to speak. “I mean, she’s cool as shit, but I wasn’t really thinking about that before…”

“Whoawhoawhoa, wait up. Before?” Sam interrupted.

“Ah, fuck,” Alen sighed, glancing at the elf. “I don’t know any more man. She jumped in after me when I thought I was going to die alone and just… hell. I guess she’s pretty cute? Fuck it. I kinda do like her, yeah. More or less. I probably just realized it recently. Yeah,” he said, then he raised an indignant brow at Sam. “Happy?”

The tunnel in front of them opened up, and Sam grinned at him as he walked past and out the opening. “Oooh boy,” he snickered. “I don’t really care, but I bet she is.”

“What?” Alen asked, then out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Lynn grinning embarrassedly at him. She scuttled past him and hurriedly followed Sam into the light outside. Alen was stood there alone, stock-still as a single thought ran circles around his head, laughing at him.

Elves had good hearing, didn’t they? They did.

“Motherfucker,” Alen hissed, then ran after them.

—o—

The village wasn’t very far from there. Just a couple more shifting, hidden tunnels and several climbs and caverns later, and they finally arrived at their final stop. Sam said that the village would just be beyond the next boulder field, and agreed when one of the hunters suggested a short rest. Alen paced around a good distance away from the camp.

“Fuck me,” he muttered, his arms crossed as he walked back and forth between two rocks. He internally cursed at Sam the entire time. The fucker was having the time of his life watching him deal with the situation. He’d usually take things like this in stride, but every time he made eye contact with Lynn, she’d be grinning at him and Alen could feel the sheer amount of teasing he’d be at the receiving end of. While he appreciated that she wasn’t the awkward type, now he was the one who had no idea how to react.

Screw it, Alen thought. He’d just come back and pretend it never happened. They’d forget about it eventually. He nodded to himself, glanced at the fire in the distance and walked back. He could handle getting made fun of. Yeah. He was good at that. He could do it. He neared the camp.

Lynn saw him and walked over, smiling mischievously. “So that was why you complained about my cape, of all things. I like being complimented, you know. You should do that more.”

Alen groaned, sulked down on a rock, and covered his face with his hands. He couldn’t fucking do it. “I hate Sam so much,” he muttered into his palms.

He indignantly glanced up at her between two fingers. “You have nice nostrils.”

She laughed, and he sighed as she sat down beside him. “I get it,” she nodded, serious. “I’m admirable. Outstanding. You shouldn’t hide it. I like being praised, you like praising me, so I think we should work together in making me feel good about myself.”

“I think I like insulting you more, honestly.”

“Really? Maybe I should throw you off a cliff and jump after you again.”

“Don’t even joke about that. I’m surprised I haven’t developed a phobia for heights after all of this garbage. I’m done with falling. I have parachutes now.”

“Is that what you call them? I’ve heard of Gnomes using those after jumping out of their flying machines, but I didn’t know the Draenys Library had so much information in it. Not many humans write about Gnomes after all, with the racial tension and everything,” she shook her head disappointedly, as if the entire conflict was nothing but a children’s fight. She probably wasn’t far from the truth, Alen guessed, then shook his head.

“Not sure what Gnomes called them, but we had some over in Earth—my home world,” Alen offhandedly mentioned. He pursed his lips and felt that his mood would sour if he talked about home any further, so he stood up. He pointed at the camp ahead. “Let’s go ahead and join them.”

“Sure,” she nodded, offering her hand to him.

Alen blinked and gave her a look. She raised a brow at him and he shrugged, taking her hand and pulling her up. She grinned and started walking towards the camp. She looked back.

“It’s been quite the adventure so far, if I do say so myself,” She said, looking up at the glowing crystals that lined the cavern roof like twinkling stars. “Let’s keep it going, okay?” She flashed him a smile, then turned and started walking towards the camp.

Alen gave her back a long look, then let loose a breath and walked after her, staring up at the crystals above. He smiled.

He got the adventure he always wanted, and in some ways, it was shaping up to be more than he ever thought it would be.

—o—

“…so after I left the orc tribe behind, I met up with Adam in Malavarr City and after we dicked around for a while, we kinda just decided to take a commission together, y’know? Some bonding exercises. Killing stuff and all that family friendly crap,” said Sam, a helpless look coming over his face. “Then one thing led to another, and after an argument about levers and a dead undead cyclops, we got bamboozled and found ourselves here. Hm.”

“How the hell did that go from that to this so smoothly?” Alen asked, motioning at the sea of stony trees that expanded out past the cliff’s drop.

“It wasn’t smooth at all,” Sam complained. “Teleportation portals man. Who does that shit? If Dieter and these guys hadn’t found us, we would’ve died in the tunnels.”

“These tunnels,” Lynn nodded to the wall behind them, where a gap was slowly, but surely closing. “They change, don’t they?”

Sam nodded grimly. “Yea, they do. The crystals in the ceiling act like the sky, and every day here lasts for about forty hours, and the tunnels shift and move to new positions in a set pattern. When night hits,” Sam pointed at the mostly dark ceiling, with only a few glittering crystals lighting up the seemingly endless void, and spoke, “the crystals change to that. It’s a lot brighter in the day, thankfully, but they still have to send out patrols in the night. One of the Xargith managed to find the village a few days ago, and if he’d gotten away, we would’ve had to move locations again.”

“Xargith?” asked Alen.

“Some really scary dudes with black skin and horns and all that crap. I hate those guys. I heard they were real dicks. No one in the village really talked about them,” Sam pointed to one of the hunters, who looked away, and sighed, “so I talked to Dieter and found out why, and well, I understood.”

Alen locked eyes with Lynn, and both of them remembered the three they’d encountered and their… camp. Alen felt sick to the stomach just remembering the small torso sizzling above the open flames.

“We encountered three of them,” Lynn said, darkly.

Sam frowned. “Where?”

“Not too far from where you found us,” Alen said. “We barely got away.”

One of the hunters stepped forward, and for the first time, Alen heard one of them speak. “That was a scouting party. They shouldn’t be here,” the man said, accent thick and noticeable through the strange version of Common it spoke. To Alen, it was like listening to a dialect. Strange—foreign, but weirdly understandable.

They stopped walking, and another one of the men leaned in, covered in a strangely decorated hide armor like the rest of them, but with a hood over his head. His black eyes shone under the hood. “What do we do?” He asked, voice raspy.

“We must hurry,” the first one said, voice a heavy baritone. “You are fast, Kirrtik. Run ahead and tell the Father. We must evacute by tomorrow, or else we run the risk of them discovering us again.”

The hooded one nodded and took off without a word, disappearing into the trees as a blur and a resounding rustle.

“Sam,” the man glanced back at him, “try to keep up. We are going first.”

Sam groaned and looked at Alen and Lynn as the three other hunters got ready to move faster. “You guys move quick?”

“As quick as my right hand,” Alen said.

“I’m fast,” Lynn grinned.

Sam spared them both a glance, before his already blue eyes began to shine with an even brighter light. “Okay. So I know this area well enough not to get lost, and you guys shouldn’t be too slow, right? Let’s race back to the village after them.”

Lynn clapped her hands together. “Sounds fun,” she nodded. “Count me in.”

“I’m down,” Alen simply said, then channeled his magic to his boots. It was his first time navigating in a forest. It wouldn’t be too hard, right? He just had to—

“Move!” The baritone-voiced man looked back at them, and in a flash, he was off, sprinting into the woods at a speed even faster than Alen thought possible from his large frame. Sam took off without a moment’s notice, gliding forward quickly as ice formed under his feet. Lynn jumped right after, jumping from tree to tree with motions so practiced that Alen couldn’t doubt her ancestry as an elf.

He was already falling behind. Alen grit his teeth and caused his mana to surge into his boots. Bang! The keratin pikes exploded out, sending him blurring forward. The trees shot past his vision like speeding cars, and one rapidly approached him like a speeding train.

Fuck! He hurriedly braced his arms in front of him, keratin shielding his arms and legs before—Boom! He crashed through the tree, the hard, stone-like surface numbing his limbs beneath the protective keratin coating. He staggered forward, and Sam shouted something back at him. Alen gritted his teeth and shot forward again. He needed to find a way to maneuver past the trees. He couldn’t fall behind so easily.

A tree rapidly approached and Alen held his hands out, a keratin hook exploding out of his sleeve. He angled his body and—Boom! He was sent spinning to the side, the hook tearing out a portion of the stone tree. Alen tumbled to the ground and rolled back into a sprint, before shooting himself forward again. Lynn and Sam were just ahead of him, the latter gliding through the trees as the former flipped and floated above the branches with a trained grace.

Too sharp, he frantically thought, twisting out of the way of an incoming tree. He grit his teeth and stared in front of him. It was dark. Everything was barely visible thanks to the light from above. Alen hurriedly opened AutoBone and flattened the edges of the hook he’d made. He closed it. He blurred towards another tree.

“Fuck!” He shouted, smashing through it with another bang that reverberated through his bones.

“Can’t we slow down!? We might leave him too far behind, and he has a horrible habit of almost getting himself killed!” Lynn called out to Sam, pointing back at Alen who struggled to keep up.

“Nah,” Sam said. “This part of the Underearth is safe! Worst case scenario, he gets lost and we find him ten minutes later!”

Alen listened and grit his teeth, summoning the hook once again. Ahead, Sam glanced back at him and nodded before taking a turn. Lynn reluctantly followed after Alen gave her a reassuring nod.

He ground his teeth together. This was it. The turn was coming up. If he didn’t turn, he’d smash into a cliffside wall. He wouldn’t die, but he’d be damned if it didn’t fucking sting. Alen zeroed in on an approaching tree and readied the hook. His Intelligence stat was high enough for something this. He just needed to focus. Focus. The tree zipped closer. Closer. Closer and closer and—

Now! He twisted. The hook latched onto the stony bark. He swung his legs in a wide arc. He turned. He tucked his legs under him and spun, unsummoned the hook, and then slammed his feet into the ground!

He shot forward with a resounding bang. “Yes, yes, yes! Fuck yes!” Alen cheered, his forward momentum throwing him forward like a bullet. Lynn’s back slowly approached—got closer. They turned again. He followed. Focusing was getting easier now. He had the stats, and now, he was using them the way he should’ve been all along. He shot forward diagonally, rising above the branches. He tucked his legs under himself again, then jammed them into a branch. Bone Spear. The branch shattered into a million pieces as the force of his spell sent him shooting forward even faster than before!

Air rushed past him in a frenzy, sending his hair and clothing into disarray. One, two three, he counted, watching the branches approach. He missed one and clicked his tongue. Again, he thought. One, two… three! He his foot found purchase on the next branch. He blurred forward with another Bone Spear. Lynn glanced back at him in shock as he caught up.

“You’re copying me!” She exclaimed, shooting forward from another branch.

“I learn from the best,” He replied, grunting as he roughly smashed through a stray branch in the process. “I can go faster without getting myself killed, I think. Let’s go and leave that fucker Sam behind, yeah?”

“Alright. There’s no way I’m letting myself get there last!” She nodded, grinning. “When I say go,” Lynn said, then watched as Alen fell behind, then caught up with another burst of speed, “At go, you grab my ankle and pull me behind you. Ignore the trees. Just go straight and leave the rest to me!”

Alen nodded, then, as he caught up for the third time, Lynn shouted.

“Go!”

Bang! His boots felled an entire tree as a torrent of mana erupted into the form of a Bone Spear. He grabbed Lynn’s leg. She shot forward with him. A tree rapidly approached, but before Alen could even worry, an arrow of ice stronger than any he had ever seen tore it apart. Frost drifted off of Lynn’s new bow, and she drew another arrow, felling another tree a long distance away.

Alen grinned. With this, he could go all out.

His mana exploded with the force of a tsunami, and this time, the top half of an entire tree shattered with his stomp, revealing the soft, wooden core within. Continuous bangs rang out as tree after tree was obliterated in their wake. They caught up to Sam. He looked up at them incredulously.

“That’s so broken!” He complained, gliding between two trees with sweat dripping from his brow as he panted.

Alen was breathing heavily too. The concentration was extremely taxing on his head, but he spared the effort to grin at his friend. “I know,” he gloated, before slamming his feet into the trunk of a tree and shooting forward again. Sam saw this and thought for a moment, before he smiled and channeled his magic to cause three orbs of ice to form and rise up behind him, following him closely.

They rapidly morphed into three blades of ice. Sam pillar of ice beneath Sam’s feet shot him forward. He cut straight through a tree with the help of the blades and caught up. “Bam!” He said, hurtling beside Alen and Lynn. “I can do that too!”

The elf grinned at him and looked back at Alen. “Sorry Alen, but it looks like it’ll be more fun with the three of us racing instead. I can’t let myself fall behind, can I?” She twisted and got her foot out of the necromancer’s grip. Alen watched her fall, her bow shooting at a tree in front of him. He and Sam slowed down for a second, shocked, and Alen was about to call out after her when a blur of black leather and white hair shot past him.

It was Lynn, her hair flowing past her shoulders as she overtook both of them. Lines of blue magic followed after her, latching and sinking into the trees as she passed. We’re those… roots?

The forest came to life around her. Branches swayed. Leaves rustled. She slowed down, and a tree literally twisted, catching her with its branches before throwing her forward like a catapult. She mischievously smiled back at them. “I’ve been practicing,” she helplessly said, “but that does pretty little when there are no trees in the Sandsea, huh?”

“How the fuck does your magic system work!?” Alen asked, baffled. He tore through the air after her, Sam trailing just ahead of him. A tree came up, and he barely twisted out of the way. Sam sliced apart trunks and branches and brambles, while they gave way for Lynn as if welcoming their matriarch. Alen grit his teeth.

If these guys can destroy the forest to move faster, I will too! His magic surged, and a feeling welled up in his body, calling out to him. Black and white light flickered behind Alen’s emerald eyes. The globe of death mana inside of his body flared to life, and almost instinctively, Alen readied a Rotfire Blast, pointed his hand at an incoming tree, and pulled.

His vision blacked for an instant, and when it returned, his feet had no branches to catapult off from. He slammed into the ground. Alen rolled and lurched to a stop, flat on his back. He groaned and sat up, a strange throbbing in the back of his eyes. He blinked, and the previously lush forest of stony trunks and glowing leaves was no longer present. No. It was. In the distance, a few meters in front of him, the forest continued on. He frowned.

A clearing? Impossible, he shook his head. He was clearly maneuvering through a forest just seconds ago, and even though his vision was relatively bad, it was still a lot better than an ordinary person at the first threshold. There was no clearing ahead. He was sure of it.

Then… he looked down at his hands, felt the magic within them. Frowning, he pulled up his status screen.

Status:

Name: Alen

Race: Human

Type: Necrotic

Current Threshold: 14

Health: 98%

Stamina: 89%

Mana: 71%

Strength: 26

Dexterity: 27

Agility: 23

Constitution: 32

Vitality: 27

Resistance: 24

Intelligence: 62 (+)

Wisdom: 83 (+++)

Control: 69 (++)

Skills:

Mana Programming, Dominate Undead, Deathbolt, Necrotic Blessing, Numb Senses, Numbing Mist, Summon Greater Skeletal Minion, Rotfire Blast, Deathchill Grip, Deathchill Nova, Bone Spear, Skeletal Rupture, Vitality Drain, Drainblast, Blightwater Surge

System Applications:

AutoBone, System Notepad

His brows furrowed together. His mana was way too low for what he was doing. While his Bone Spears were effectively powerful when he used them to move, he hadn’t magically enhanced them to become more durable. He knew his mana pool. It should’ve been depleted to ninety percent at the absolute most. So that meant… Rotfire Blast? He shook his head. He wasn’t min/maxing a magic build for nothing. Rotfire Blast shouldn’t have put such a large dent on his capacity. And this forest... Rotfire Blast wasn’t that powerful. Even if it was, it left remains. Dust. Ash. A trace of what he destroyed. In front of him was a flat plain. An entire area completely devoid of life, or any evidence that life even existed in the first place.

Empty. It was completely empty aside from the earth and stone below.

Crackle. His eyes flashed down to his hands, where a flicker of what looked like black and white lightning fizzled out between his fingertips. He licked his lips.

So that was it. Only one of his affinities had that color, and only one was mysterious enough to surprise him with what it could do. Death Affinity, Alen shuddered. He looked around, and for a moment, a feeling of intense panic registered in his chest, but quickly faded away as he realized that when he’d cast Rotfire Blast, Sam and Lynn were much farther than the edge of his spell’s blast radius. It had carved a pretty clear boundary, after all.

Seeing that they probably weren’t coming back for him, Alen sighed. “No way I’m catching up to them now,” he muttered. He’d already lost the race at this point. Lynn was surprisingly fast in the forest, and Sam’s maneuverability was shown to its full potential in the terrain. He would probably be faster in an open plain, but for now, he would concede to his loss.

Alen plunked down to the ground and observed the magic inside of his body. He reached out to his Death Affinity and felt it. Empty, endless, and hungry. That was how it felt. A void waiting to be filled.

Slowly, he summoned a simple flame. It flared up above his index finger, calmly swaying in the wind like a candle in a soft breeze. He sucked in a breath, and slowly, carefully, he took a strand of the pure magic in his body, then mixed it with the magical affinity he had for death. His eyes widened as the strand struggled, on the edge of sputtering out. He quickly poured more magic into it, watching as the strand finally stabilized. The magic making it up quickly turned black and white. Alen licked his lips and slowly had that strand flow through his body, before carefully having it sink into the small flame above his hand.

Fwoom. The flame changed. The yellows and oranges turned blacker than the night, and the reds and blues of its radiance turned into a piercing white.

The small flame no longer swayed, as if the wind was nonexistent around it. Alen probed at it with his magic. No, he looked at it in curiosity. The air was nonexistent around it. Somehow, it would simply disappear where the flame was, as if sucked into the endless vacuum of space.

Interesting.

“Death, huh,” Alen muttered, looking at the flame with a small bit of fear. It looked like his new affinity wasn’t about simply rotting things away. It wasn’t biological death, no. That was different. This magic was true death.

It erased things from existence.

He shuddered. What would happen if he used this on a person?

Simple, a voice rang out in his head. He nearly jumped. Selerius continued. It looks like you aren’t stupid after all. Yes. This is death. True death. If you used this on a person, their soul would be snuffed out. Completely and utterly erased. Death in body, and in soul. True power.

Alen frowned. “I made my magic so that I wouldn’t have to do things like this. I don’t have the right to snuff out a person’s soul. Nobody does.”

Selerius sighed audibly. Souls are merely strands of magic. Their strands grow as they age by the lifetimes, and they weave and gather and tangle together as life is born. It took me years of practice as a necromancer to even begin to manipulate it. Thagathos’s blessing is more significant than you think. Spare me your moral justifications. It is simply power. How you use it is how it will be taken—whether it be vile, or a force of good. The lich laughed in his mind. Granted, it will be hard to be seen as good when a wave of your hand could completely wipe a village from the map. I’ve tried.

“You’re awfully talkative today,” Alen raised a brow at the lich in his head.

Selerius harrumphed in response. Be glad that I’ve given you advice. It’s not every day that a novice like you hears from a master like myself. Now, do not let my efforts go to waste. Stand up, and do not die. You have company.

Alen’s eyes constricted. He twisted, and Bone Spears shot out from his feet and flung him backward. A sigh rang out from the woods, and a large man with unnaturally black skin and red eyes stepped out from the trees.

“And here I thought you’d be easy to pick off,” the man said.

“Oh no,” Alen glanced behind him and noticed the worrying lack of reinforcements. “I’m fucked, aren’t I?”

“I believe so,” the man smiled, then readied the spear strapped to his back.

Alen threw shards of bone and keratin to the ground and clenched his fists.

This had better not end with him falling again.