Thinning out the ranks of the Undead was a massive undertaking. I hadn’t truly conceptualised their numbers, not actually pictured what it meant that there were only about four hundred people holed up at Apple Gate Farm. There had been around half a million people living within the city limits, with a similar number in the outlying communities, depending on what distance you included them, and I would be surprised if there were more than maybe two thousand people still alive of those. Mostly, the question was how many people had holed up in different places, how many of those had managed to escape the Undead and whatever else might be haunting the city.

I wasn’t even confident that people hadn’t started preying on each other, it was a common trope in most apocalyptic stories, something the people at Apple Gate Farm had luckily avoided. But I wasn’t optimistic enough to believe that there were no assholes out there who decided that now, without any laws, it was their time to shine, to rape, pillage and brutalise at their leisure. There had been people like that before the change hit and there would be people like that afterwards.

The only thing I had to make certain of was that I would be the one doing the killing if I ever came across people like that.

But before there was any killing of people, the Undead were the target of my ire. Seemingly endless numbers of Undead. It wasn’t just my group who tried to deal with them, but there were nights when it felt just like that.

The idea sounded so incredibly simple, at least for the weaker survivors. Their job was to simply launch a few attacks at the Undead, kill a few of them with the opening volley and retreat. Given that the Undead had shitty senses, making them almost unable to perceive anything further than around thirty metres of them, it should be a piece of cake.

Only, from what I had heard, it wasn’t. During the daytime, the Undead didn’t just hang out in the streets, as they did in the night. They were shaking up in various buildings, maybe avoiding the sun just like I was, or maybe they were trying to make small Undead, I wasn’t really sure and I didn’t really care. But with them hiding in buildings during the day, only coming out when something got too close to their hideout to the point that they could attack, made the idea of dealing with them from a distance difficult.

There were ways around that, obviously, but it made the operation Undead killing a lot harder than I had hoped for. And it meant that the leadership, now going by the name of the Council, had asked me to speed things up a little. Or at least make sure that the balance of power within the city didn’t shift too far to either of the sides we suspected.

Or, in other words, Lia, Silva, Alex and I had been asked to go into the city and deal with the special Undead, maybe kill a few of the racoons, make sure that their number remained manageable. There was a part of me that was conflicted about the idea, simply because I wasn’t sure how sapient the racoons and the Undead were, but I wasn’t about to let an unknown force that had already demonstrated to be hostile towards me gain a massive army of Undead. The basic Undead were individually weak but there were simply far too many of them.

And so, the four of us had been sneaking into the city, trying to get a better idea about how many of the green-eyed ones there were. I was somewhat amused that the expression had caught on, given my own green eyes, but I wasn’t overly fussed about it. The identifying and uniting feature of the special Undead and the racoons were their dimly green glowing eyes, so green-eyes worked just fine as an identifier. Though maybe I should have suggested glowing eyes, though even using that didn’t help given that my eyes glowed as well when I activated Overflow.

Either way, I didn’t mind too much as long as people didn’t try to kill me for the colour of my eyes.

Hunting our green-eyed foes had been both frustrating and somewhat enlightening, as it allowed us to glean some more information. The most important thing we had figured out was that the Undead weren’t really special, at least not individually. When killing one of the green-eyed Undead, the rest of their swarm simply reverted to what I considered a holding pattern, moving around without too much plans or effort. We had done so a few times the past couple of nights, killing enough of them to bring me to level thirty-seven, only to realise that we didn’t make any progress.

The next day, another of the Undead had green glowing eyes and was leading the swarm, the next strongest amongst their number. It was almost as if they were promoted, gaining a boost in strength somehow, and took over. My personal theory was that the racoons were somehow responsible, leading to us trying to catch the chittering monsters.

Only to realise that they were incredibly slippery, stealthy and nearly impossible to catch or kill. Our hunt quickly turned into a bizarre game of cat and mouse, only that the mouses, or racoons in our case, had a swarm of flies under their control, allowing them to call upon the Undead in an attempt to mob us, as we were trying to catch them.

Due to that, we couldn’t actually focus on our hunt, we could launch one, maybe two concentrated strikes on an individual racoon before we had to retreat and hide again, or we would be faced with a massive number of Undead, trying to swarm and surround us. So far, we had been unable to get any of our attacks to stick, the racoons were quite perceptive to the point that they could dodge attacks from a distance and they even managed to find us. I hadn’t tried to go after one on my own but it was something we might want to try at some point.

On the other hand, I had considered trying to get the number of Undead down by using large-scale magic, maybe a conjured Blizzard or something along those lines, but those took time. Enough time for any wary racoon to either bring in numbers to kill us or to get the Undead out of reach. If I wanted to try that, we’d have to prepare well in advance, to make sure we didn’t get stuck and mobbed. I had no desire to join the Undead as a corpse.

The best solution we had managed to come up with so far was to try and cut down the Undead under their control. similar to the way we tried to thin the number of Undead outside of their control.

Which fed back into the original problem, there were so damn many of them. We could kill a dozen Undead easily, even a hundred if I conjured up something suitably impressive, the Undead didn’t have the speed to readily avoid such magic, but it felt as if we were trying to empty out a desert, one grain of sand at the time.

Lia and I had been discussing how to proceed. Whether to try killing the Undead or to go a different route, maybe try to circle around the city and look for other groups similar to the one at Apple Gate Farm. It was something I had talked to the council about and they had agreed to send a few people. It wasn’t that Lia and I couldn’t move around the city, it would be far easier for us to do so than for anyone else, but sadly, neither of us would inspire any trust in, well, anyone. Both of us were visibly inhuman, though my inhumanity was relatively subtly in dim light, and neither of us could move in the sunlight, it would be far too easy to mistake us for monsters.

Because of that, the council had promised to get a few groups together and have them move into the organised suburban communities and the villages that had, over time, become urbanised. Hopefully, doing so would give us bigger numbers to deal with the sheer number of Undead we were facing.

The other option to take on that many Undead was to rise on the power-scale. It was mostly a project I would have to face myself, to get creative with my magic and continuously raise the different magic skills and rune masteries I had acquired. If I were to get anywhere close to the power I could command on Mundus, even without the Nexus, I would have a good chance to deal with the Undaed myself. The attack I had conjured to strike Hatterion, after they had murdered Olivia, came to mind. If I could get something like that, cleansing the town would be almost trivial. The sacrifices might be problematic though, so it was unlikely that we would go down that route.

Regardless, we needed to deal with the Undead and find a way to hunt down the racoons. Sadly, I wasn’t sure how to accomplish either of those objectives.