I finally had a full squad. We’d modified the formation, of course. Andy was in the center of the formation, ready to call orders and directions to each of our teams. I was the point man of Alpha team. Chavez was on my left and Carter on my right. Bragg was behind her on the wing. Andy was ten feet behind me, and behind him was our Bravo team. Bravo team carried no firearms. They didn’t need them anymore. A quick raid on a local Home Depot the first day had allowed them to fashion makeshift spears. The wrought iron, backed by the force of their strengthened bodies, often did more damage than a bullet could to their targets.

The plan was simple, as all good plans are. When Alpha team ran out of bullets, everyone, except for me, would switch with Bravo team. Each team would leap-frog the other team, pushing the monsters back. Andy was the key. He would call out when it was time to switch. For the plan to work, Andy needed to call the switch when it was needed, and each fire team needed to trust his judgment. If any part of the communication broke down, it could get some–or all–of us killed.

Thankfully, the monsters we were facing weren’t the brightest bunch. The zombies weren’t exactly observant, and we killed a half-dozen before whatever was controlling them noticed they were missing.

When possible, I cut down the corpses as quietly and quickly as I could. We cut toward the heart of the cemetery, where the mana funnel came down from the sky and seemed to touch down just above a mausoleum. Eventually, however, the undead got wind of our presence. There were about a hundred corpses, all headed our way. They did not move quickly, but again I was reminded how difficult it was to fight something impervious to pain. When I cut off the limb of a squirrel, it would freeze for the briefest moment, which would allow me to finish it off. These shambling monsters, however, had no such weakness. The corrupted core was the only weakness. Once broken, the body would fall limply to the ground.

So, we pushed forward. I would hack and slash at anything that came too close. Chavez used a spear to fend off anything that came at my left, and Carter pumped rounds from her shotgun into the zombies on my right. It felt like no time at all before she was announcing that she was out of shotgun rounds, and Bragg handed her an automatic.

It took even less time for Carter to announce she was out before I held up my left hand, my fist closed. That was the signal. Up to that moment, I was leading the movement of the group. I determined our forward momentum and pace. Now, it was Andy’s job. He barked a command, and the eager Bravo team charged forward. Unlike that first day, there was no hesitation today. Like me, they could all see the spiral in the sky, and I told them what it meant.

“Alpha team, forward!” Andy barked. My team of four moved between Bravo team, pushing the undead back with our weapons, killing some with sure strikes from makeshift weapons.

“Bravo team, forward!” Andy called again, and the eager youths answered the call.

Each charge did not kill the front line of the undead, though many certainly fell. What concerned me the most was the energy. After a core shattered, the energy would surge back toward the mausoleum. But the energy seemed to only gather there, not moving further from the funnel reaching down from the sky.

We continued pushing forward. Each time I was at the front, I would try to cut at their cores to finish the undead off. Barring that, I would cut off arms. Not legs, however. No need to turn the enemy into corpses reaching for you from the ground. This finished after what felt like hours. We’d marched over a hundred corpses and finally arrived at the front door of the mausoleum. Power had continued to grow there, and I anticipated a harder fight than what we experienced against Komodo dragons.

“Get ready,” I said as my foot landed on the first step of the mausoleum. In retrospect, I should have expected something like that to happen. After all, why would an animal wait for us to attack first? Unlike the dragons, what came out of the mausoleum resembled nothing like what it originally must have looked like. The former man was in a tuxedo. It carried a rusty sword in one hand. The energy from its core seemed linked to the weapon somehow. Pulses of unholy power coursed flowed back and forth between the weapon and the creature’s core.

As the figure took its first steps down the mausoleum, pieces of its fine outfit fell off, turning to dust as it went. The pieces that didn’t turn to dust were held together by rotten tissue, which was also in the process of sloughing off the bone. Some flesh still clung to the creature’s face. The skin seemed to have melted over half the face, making it look like it had no mouth on one side. On the other half, there was no skin, turning that side into a grinning mockery of a human face.

If I couldn’t see the mana in its body, I would have thought it was just another undead, albeit one with a weapon. This thing positively glowed with corrupt energy. I strolled forward to meet the opponent, and I sensed the others fanning out around me. I was the anvil, and they were supposed to smash the thing onto my unbreakable position. I raised my trusty sword and leaped to the attack. My sword flicked out, striking at the creature.

Its sword met mine… and didn’t break. It was the first time my sword hadn’t cut through whatever it touched. Doubt settled into my stomach. My opponent’s blade flicked left and right with a sinuous grace that should have been impossible without muscles. I slashed at its shoulder, and it slipped aside from the strike, but its own sword didn’t miss. The point of the sword pierced my shoulder, sinking deeply to scrape against bone. The strike was so fast I almost hadn’t seen what happened.

That’s when the rest of my team charged in for the kill.

“No!” I shouted, just as the creature turned its sword on Zapata. Just like she’d done a hundred times over the last three days, she raised the makeshift iron spear to block the incoming attack.

She died with a shocked look still on her face. I knew she was gone the moment the sword cut through her chest. The blade, coated with the corrupt energy, touched her core, and the energy was just gone, pulled into the sword and the monster.

“Get back!” I roared. It will kill all of you.

Both teams took steps back from the creature, moving away from it as it tried to attack. Even as it swung at one target, however, another teammate would swing at its back. We couldn’t keep going like this.

I pulled the sidearm from the holster on my thigh, aimed it at the undead creature, and squeezed the trigger. The bullets collided with the thing’s chest, punching in toward its core, but none of them penetrated far enough. All I managed to do was pull its attention all on myself.

“Shit,” I yelled, as it came for me. I ran. I had one plan left, and if it didn’t work, I was probably dead anyway. So, I ran for the mausoleum.

Even though the room was almost devoid of light, I could still see everything as the mana flowed through the room, giving it shape. I saw mana all swirling into the back corner of the room and down to the floor.

I rushed forward just as the footfall of the undead behind me touched the first step. I looked for a pool, similar to what Corey had been in. What I found disheartened me. It was a crack in the floor. With my mana sight, I could see that it stretched down at least five feet, well beyond the length of my arm.

“Shit!” I yelled as my mind raced frantically. “Shit shit shit.” I finally dove to the floor as the monster swung, aiming to take my head off. But I wasn’t trying to kill the undead. Instead, I thrust my right hand into the crack in the floor, the tip of my sword scraping against the rock as it burrowed toward its target. I felt fire along my back but paid no attention as I let out an exultant yell. I felt the familiar rush of power into my body, circulating through my mana channels and purified by my cores.

The final blow never came. I turned back to see the corpse, fallen to the ground. The rusty sword, near unbreakable when it was protected by the mana, had shattered on the ground, the pieces sliding apart in the pool of my blood on the ground. I saw the core of the undead coalesce. It did not take shape in the chest of the creature, like with the other undead. This one’s core formed in its skull. I stood up, pulling my sword free from the crack in the ground, and I stood over the remains of the enemy that had taken one of the lives of my team.

“Fuck you,” I muttered to the corpse.

That was how my team found me. It had only been moments, but most of them rushed into the mausoleum, hell-bent on finishing what they’d come here to do.

Instead, they found me standing over the corpse of the monster, crushing its skull to dust under my boot.