The first hitch their quartet ran into was actually not the undead. It was the military. Irwyn did not really understand how they could possibly be mistaken for enemies, given they were quite literally destroying a horde about to spill over the makeshift barricades at the time, but he nonetheless had to block a salvo of bullets. The shooters were from two dozen soldiers trying and failing to entrench themselves at an intersection.

  “Stop you idiots!” Alice yelled back at them as soon as she noticed. Irwyn mostly just glanced towards the baffled soldiers. Regular bullets like that were not dangerous. Not to his shields… but the nation had to have more. Even though there were no gods in the Republic, they had to have something to enforce their independence. Irwyn would rather not find out what it was firsthand. That made him warry of being overtly hostile.

  “Do we approach and explain ourselves?” thus he suggested mediation.

  “It would be a waste of precious seconds,” Elizabeth disagreed. “Giving the dead more time to wreak havoc.”

  “Infighting between us will cause far more chaos,” Waylan pointed out, making Elizabeth frown, then sigh and agree.

  “Maybe I should just maintain a permanent veil,” she suggested.

  “And make them panic as I summon seas of flame in front of them? That may be even worse, no, it won’t work,” Irwyn argued and, somewhat reluctantly, Elizabeth agreed. Therefore, he beckoned his platforms to approach.

  “Identify yourselves!” an officer seemingly in charge yelled at them before they could actually get close. The soldiers raised their firearms - ceramic as many things in the Republic, Irwyn noted - and tried to be threatening, which was somewhat undermined by their proven inefficiency and the memory of what power Irwyn had just shown.

  “Let’s not waste any more time than we need to,” Elizabeth looked down with authoritative disdain. “We are hunting down the undead as is our duty. Spread the word so that other groups do not slow us down.”

  “Who are you people?” the man tried to put on some bravado but Irwyn could almost feel the fear hidden beneath a thin veneer. The officer had seen him break the horde with enough flame to drown a good chunk of the city. He had also witnessed it vanish just as quickly. It was power clearly beyond the man’s comprehension if Irwyn was any judge of the faltering expression.

  “Foreigners from far South,” Irwyn explained, playing the mediator. “Your superiors are aware of us, at least some of them. We slay the dead, as is anyone’s responsibility. It would be better if your colleagues did not waste amunition.”

  “We had things well in hand,” the man hissed in denial, grasping for anything. It was very fragile.

  “You have not earned such Pride,” Elizabeth softly scoffed. “And firearms are horrendous weapons against the dead. As you can probably tell by now. Kneecaps are terribly small to aim for.”

  “Not the time to bicker,” Irwyn interrupted before the man could talk back again. “Please spread the word, we need to get going.”

  And so he quickly rose the platform again. It couldn’t have been more than… 30 minutes? Actually. “How long has it been since the start?” he glanced at Alice while guiding them towards the next epicenter.

  “37 minutes, almost exactly,” she replied.

  It had been 37 minutes and they had already destroyed perhaps thousands of undead. That street had been their 21st strike as they moved at breakneck speed. There was seemingly no end to it, the situation worsening with every moment despite their best efforts. Every little flame they flew by could swell into a horde in minutes. And they were quickly running into the simple issue that the undead had begun splintering into individual carriers of those white flames.

  Incinerating a gathered group was simple. Elizabeth could sweep through a small neighborhood in less than half a minute with her Concept empowered speed. But that didn’t matter as much once the dead had already spread across several streets, randomly entering homes or hiding in nooks in hopes that they would be passed by their hunters only to wreak havoc again. One thing was clear: For all their lacking power, they could certainly track the living with instinctive ease and maintained that uncanny perfect coordination. Where the army had managed to organize they could actually hold anything short of a full-on swarm at bay but the dead did not play by those rules.

  Two dozen grizzled and armed soldiers behind a makeshift barricade blocking the street with a supply of explosives? The undead would just go around them… or in the opposite direction altogether. Or disperse into individual hunters, pursuing smaller groups of civilians that were distinctly not good at surviving against creatures that felt no pain and would kill them with a touch.

  To reiterate, it was escalating mayhem.

  The only saving grace was that the undead were burning out relatively quickly. Irwyn estimated that once the flame took hold it took about 10 to 15 minutes before the burns to the body became too debilitating to mobility to pursue anyone and perhaps another three until the corpse would be fully reduced to ash on its own. Otherwise, the chaos would have been even worse.

  They arrived at another large gathering - a hospital of some kind. Every exit had been blocked by the ever-ravenous horde. Elizabeth did not need to even ask for Alice to teleport her into the midst of them while Irwyn began the work of isolating further spread. For all Elizabeth was incredibly fast, the building was closer to a sprawling complex with a dozen levels when the presumed underground was included – that took up precious time. Almost two minutes, to be exact. That was when Elizabeth reappeared, confident she had gotten most of them. Hopefully, any who had still managed to hide in some dark crook would burn out before spreading further.

  They were halfway to their next destination when the shift for the worse finally occurred. A surge of magic burst forth from somewhere closer to the city’s center. Rotten, malformed mana, flowing over them like a tide. Though only a fraction of it had directly leaked, the weight of its source became unmistakable. As was the tremendous potency.

  “What is that?” Alice immediately questioned.

  “The other shoe,” Elizabeth said with a frown. “That is a lot of magic. Enough for several Concepts’ worth of spells, I think.”

  “Are we dealing with more than one Draugr then?” Irwyn asked with some trepidation.

  “Not necessarily,” she shook her head. “It’s more likely a large-scale ritual of some sort… I am no expert but I had a thought earlier: How much magic can really be squeezed from one mortal Soul if no care is given to preservation?”

  “Enough to burn the body to ash,” Waylan muttered with edge to his voice. Their sneak was taking the mass death toll… not too well. Alice at least had her ring which at some point had stopped flickering and just remained on her finger.

  “That is the thing, those flames don’t actually burn that hot. And what happens when one is slain prematurely? None of us have the senses to observe the Soul that directly, so it’s hard to estimate but surely that would have been accounted for. I had a feeling the math might not check out but thought it was merely inefficiency in the animation. Instead, it seems like that the undead we have seen indeed do not require all of that magic to work. Some of it is syphoned away.”

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  “A nexus empowered a bit by each and every death,” Irwyn grasped, looking towards the swelling place of power. It might be out of sight but certainly not beyond his sense for mana. “And on this scale that can add up. But to that degree?”

  “There might be more at play,” Elizabeth nodded. “To wield the power gathered, even inefficiently… there probably really is at least one Draugr. Now the choice is, what do we do?”

  “How many people will die if you flee?” Waylan was the first to speak, glancing at Elizabeth. “You should be able to match one of them, right?”

  “One on the weaker side, yes,” she nodded. “Perhaps two if their Concepts were not attuned towards combat.”

  “The Republic should have something that can deal with threads of this magnitude,” Irwyn half-argued. They held to no gods yet none had subjugated them despite all that power those beings held. That had to be for a good reason.

  “Look at this chaos, Irw,” Waylan shook his head, gesturing towards the city. The sirens were still singing their shrieking songs, people had almost completely cleared out of the streets but that hardly meant they were safe. The army despite their best efforts struggled to achieve much. There was no howling of artillery or other specialized weapons against the undead - either because they were too difficult to make without metal or because no one had positioned any within their own capital. They were not prepared to deal with the uncanny organization of their foe either. “They need you three.”

  “Even if they have something to deal with the ritual, there is too much chaos to employ it in time,” Alice concurred. “In the worst case, the whole city might fall. I say we fight.”

  “I also don’t want to just let an entire city crumble to the Rot, alright?” Irwyn admitted, turning to Elizabeth. “What do you think then?”

  “It is our duty… to a point,” Elizabeth nodded. “I would not retreat from a reasonable battle even if you three did not seek it. But should the odds be truly overwhelming, we will flee. I cannot have us give our lives failing to protect a nation that will likely not exist in a century or two.”

  “Agreed,” Irwyn nodded, not thrilled to throw away his life either. Waylan did not seem particularly thrilled about the conditional but did not complain and Alice’s expression remained neutral, merely nodding.

  “We will leave Waylan at one of the fortifications along the way,” she said. “Now let’s get going. With a bit of luck, we could disrupt the ritual before it concludes.”

  The energies coursing around Feranir were fearsome indeed. Thankfully, it was his master who had prepared the site and the ritual - the younger necromancer still lacked the skill required for that. Instead, he was merely channeling the energies generated by their scheme, smoothing out large bursts into longer stretches of time so that the arrays were never cut off nor ever faced too much raw magic in one moment. Still, one discrepancy occurred to him.

  “This is less power than we have expected, master,” he looked over at the disembodied skull on the ground, blueish-white flames flickering in the sockets.

  By all means, Feranir would have perished a slave, relegated to the mines of Kapila as a form of a death sentence. That was until he had stumbled across his teacher, buried miles deep beneath the surface, entombed in the smallest of pockets and untouched for untold millennia. That had been enough to revert his fate - tap into his latent potential for necromancy and embark on the path of revenge against those who had betrayed his line in the first place.

  And that plan would soon come to fruition. Once the ritual was done and the city dead, the Kingdom of Venen would have no choice but accept him as a rightful High Lord of those lands, holding the leash of a newborn god of his master’s making as a Chosen unlike any other… For a split-second, doubt flickered about the validity of those plans yet a moment later it was thankfully flushed over by the unerring certainty he preferred. Well, except that something still felt off about the present.

  “Someone interferes,” the skull’s ethereal voice sounded. “Young but powerful for their age.”

  “Should we worry?” he hid his anxiety.

  “Our brethren are too dull to tell details,” the skull cackled. Feranir did not register the ‘our’. “But no one so young will endanger us… merely weaken the ritual at worst.”

  “But it can still be completed,” Feranir asked to be sure.

  “There is still enough death in the city to feed upon, worry not.”

  “That is good,” he sighed in relief and looked outside towards said city. The boundary of the barrier distorted his view but also protected them from being noticed. They had settled close to the center of the city on a plaza which was mostly open - besides the numerous statues - and saw little foot traffic. It was thus rather surprising when he was suddenly almost bisected by a black blade.

  Feranir flinched, jumping backwards as the improbably dark weapon was stopped by the barrier, a great downward swing aimed just where he had been. He spotted a figure that retreated at a blurring speed, vanishing from sight before he could tell any details.

  “Master?” he asked.

  “I need to concentrate,” was the only response before the skull went silent which in itself was disturbing. He could not recall that ever happening before. Were these interferers really so… nonthreatening?

  The next strike came from the top of the barrier. Rather than a blade it was a massive ebony spike, trying the shatter the dome with penetrative force. At the impact the barrier rippled, briefly revealing a flutter of his master’s blueish-white flames before it returned to serenity. Then a wall of normal orange fire rose around the barrier out of nowhere, enveloping it from all sides to the point Feranir could no longer see anything else. He also realized that he felt no more magic seeping in from outside. In fact, he felt like his power had suddenly – to his horror – vanished. He tried to cast a spell, just the simplest manifestation of mana he knew but realized even that had slipped him.

  “Master!” Feranir exclaimed unsure how to put it to words.

  “Nothing to worry about,” the skull said. “We merely need a slight change of plans. Approach.”

  So, he did. There used to be a complex drawing on the floor, drawn from mutilated Souls as Feranir well knew. He no longer saw it nor did he experience the power being proliferated through it. Nonetheless, his steps were still confident as he navigated around the delicate shape… which he could no longer see? How did he know where to put his foot? The doubt was brief and quickly dismissed, making him feel better in just a moment.

  In the meantime, the barrier was still being assaulted. Constant attacks from pitch-black weapons made it flicker while the other flames used every opportunity to sap its power, visibly eroding what they could before the defenses stabilized. The necromancer(?) thought he perhaps saw the slightest crack before it was mended a blink of an eye later. He no longer felt any of those powers though.

  “I did have greater hopes for you,” the skull spoke. “You would be surprised how many families lock their great heirlooms behind wards of bloodline, then carelessly spread it across the countryside or lesser nobility. Unfortunately, circumstances sometimes demand suboptimal solutions.”

  For a moment Feranir felt creeping dread, but that too quickly vanished. He lay there in the middle of the altar, motionless. Barely aware. Staring at the flames trying to burn down the barrier from above. Then it finally shattered, a cascade of fire descending as if from the heavens. Another barrier immediately sprung up in place of the shattered one but it was clearly weaker, immediately cracking with the first strike of that black weapon, barely even able to stall it. Not that it really mattered.

  It took Feranir about a full second to realize he had died. There had been no pain, the usual indicator. His heart was technically still beating through sheer inertia, though it would undoubtedly slow down quickly. There had been no lag in his thoughts, no disturbing pause. It would really be quite easy to not notice at all with the way it had been done… Well, except for the new searing knowledge.

  The other undead across the city were part of it, if distant. The sixth sense he had just gained for their presence did not feel natural quite yet and thus felt closer to a discomfortable foreboding. Even the skull, shining like a beacon in it, was not immediately apparent from so close. But those were not what made him aware of his demise. It was the words.

  When he heard that voice, he immediately knew with unerring certainty that the gods were mere pretenders. That they claimed majesty and worship, yet could not begin to compare to the sheer vastness of the entity he felt. They were ants - fleeting, irrelevant… same in death as him. For it was in death that Feranir could finally perceive it, all that which he had wished for in life. A rapturous epiphany that solved every doubt, answered every question he had ever asked or never would coursed through his entire being. A moment of pure bliss, granted by a parent he had never know. And all his Father wanted in return was to follow a simple commandment:

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