Chapter 145: The Undead

Foolish mortal. Whosoever places a single foot upon my realm of the dead shall be bound to it eternally!

-          Lumesh

Then I won’t.

-          William Oh

“Try not to let anyone die on this Floor.” Arkesh the Mind-conqueror said, the ancient Immortal Serpent walking beside Will as they led the caravan to the West. For once, both the Stronghold and the Key Site were in the same direction: West.

“I think that’s pretty good advice in general.” Will replied.

“What I mean is, the Ketulkitnah did something unnatural trying to stop the growth of The Tower and prevent monsters from spawning on this Floor, in an attempt to preserve their way of life.”

“Did what?” Will asked.

“I’m not sure, but the end result is that if you die on this floor, your body becomes host to a ravenous consciousness, and you are lost. Resurrection becomes impossible.” Arkesh said.

“I’ll field this one,” Reese said, approaching from Will’s left-hand side.

“The Technopriests – easier to say than Ketulkitnah – were getting close to achieving the twin holy grails of magical technology: Extradimensional space, and self-replicating magic.”

“The thing that I have in my Phantom Hand is the peak of magical technology?” Will asked.

“Think bigger,” Reese said, gesturing to the world around them. “Where do you think we are right now?”

“Ah.”

They were inside The Tower. From the outside, the tower only looked like it could be maybe a quarter mile in width, but the inside contained entire worlds. It was just like Will’s Phantom Hand, just on a scale he never had reason to think of.

And so many Floors, each one a world of its own.

If a society were to understand how The Tower worked, they could make their own worlds…manipulate or travel between the Floors as they saw fit, without being forced to fight.

That would be valuable beyond compare.

“That truly is…What’s a holy grail?” Will asked.

“I forget.” Reese said with a shrug.

“Holy Grail: Noun. In medieval legend, the cup or platter used by Jesus at the Last Supper, and in which Joseph of Arimathea received Christ's blood at the Cross. Quests for it undertaken by medieval knights are described in versions of the Arthurian legends written from the early 13th century onward.” Loth said from a short disance behind them. “More colloquially used as a stand-in for something eagerly sought after.”

“Where the hell did you get that dictionary?” Reese asked, glancing behind him at Loth.

“Family heirloom.” Loth said with a shrug.

“Huh. So anyway, since The Tower has a ban on unchecked Extradimensional powers in the hands of mere mortals, the Technopriests ran into a wall before they could implement what they learned. They must’ve figured out self-replicating magic first. They figured out that you could dope miasma to cause it to form certain micro-structures. Create just the right micro-structure and it will assemble more of itself out of raw miasma. Miasmatic life. Or I guess a miasmatic virus…since it doesn’t eat or poop.”

“Pooping is a requirement for life?” Will asked.

Reese grunted, nodding. “Everything poops.”

“Even trees?”

“Trees poop air and dead leaves.”

“Huh.” Will mused, imagining them all breathing tree-poop.

Arkesh the Mind-conqueror was giving Reese a quizzical look.

“Quick disclaimer: I was in a box before…whatever this is,” Reese said, motioning to the purple haze around them. “But If I had to guess, they probably created a miasmatic virus that was designed to lower the Miasma levels on the Floor and prevent monsters from spawning, so that they could continue to dominate The Tower.”

“Now, typically, a living creature has it’s own internal miasma ecosystem, and their little miasma virus struggles to get a foothold on it while it’s alive. It just gets washed out along with the rest of the Miasma. But a dead body…that’s a completely different story.”

“…What’s a virus?” Will asked.

“An infective agent that typically consists of a nucleic acid molecule in a protein coat, is too small to be seen by light microscopy, and is able to multiply only within the living cells of a host.” Loth said, prompting Reese to stare at her. “Alternatively, a piece of code that is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.”

“Code?” Will asked. “Like a secret code, or…what?”

“Let’s not get carried away. We could spend multiple lifetimes on this rabbit hole, trust me,” Reese said, motioning for Loth to stop showing off.

“All you need to know is that they created a magic spell, it was self-replicating and they didn’t perform enough testing before deploying it…or perhaps it walked out on the bottom of someone’s shoe. In any case, when the dead started killing the living in a population dense urban center…that was the final straw, and the Coil ground down another ‘great’ civilization.”

Reese scornfully put air quotes around ‘great’.

“But hey, at least there aren’t many actual ‘monsters’ on this floor, so I guess they achieved one of their goals.” Reese said, glancing around. “Unfortunately, since the population was in the billions, I’m guessing you’ll have to deal with the occasional zombie horde. Case in point:”

Reese pointed ahead of the caravan, where Will made out twin pinpricks of light in the distance, a brilliant glowing purple.

Eyes.

Through the purple haze, more and more twin points of light appeared, stretching across the road, wobbling side to side as they sprinted towards them.

Well, sprinted was a generous term. More like shambled hastily.

The creatures that manifested out of the fog were emaciated, dry and brittle human corpses covered in purple scars, their only moisture seemed to be a strange oily substance that dripped from their snarling mouths that only contained a few of their most stubborn teeth.

Their fingers seemed to be where the real danger was. Their fingers had somehow elongated over time, the flesh having long since sloughed off their fingertips. The tiny bones at the end of their fingers had been sharpened into shivs through repeated use as a stabbing instrument.

Will sent his middle snake forward, morphing it’s armor into a long, thin blade.

With a thought, the front rank of the approaching horde was decapitated, slumping to the ground.

“Attack!” Will heard shouting going up from the sides and back of the Caravan, and he climbed up into the air to get a more commanding view.

The moving corpses were streaming towards them from every possible direction, stretching back as far as the eye could see through the ever-present haze. Will heard a faint thump and glanced up, spotting the glowing purple eyes of thousands more of the zombies above them, pressed tight against the inside of the crystalline buildings, their faces pressed up against the glass with feral hunger.

Glass. Windows. Those are windows? Will had never heard of a panel of glass larger than a man, let alone one strong enough to stop a person and without any imperfections. Will’s brain recategorized the buildings from crystal to windowed towers.

Will shook the amazement out of his mind and focused on the current problem. The current problem was that the caravan was surrounded by undead in every direction and this was looking like it might be a battle of attrition.

Individually, and even in small groups, these creatures weren’t that tough.

The problem was that there were enough of them that Will couldn’t even see the limits of their numbers through the haze. There could be only a few thousand or there could be millions.

Or billions, according to Reese.

Might as well buy some time while I figure out what to do.

Will deployed his Phantom Snakes and had them cut swaths around the caravans, stacking up bodies at an outlandish rate.

The pressure on the defenders instantly eased up, and Will began to muse.

The first thing we’re going to want to do is cut our way of the city. Then we’ll probably wanna have Travis kite the horde off in another direction before we arrive at the Stronghold.

A sharp whistle caught Will’s attention, and he glanced down at Loth waving up at him, standing next to one of the first zombies that Will had decapitated.

“What’s up?” Will asked as he arrived beside her. “Also how do you whistle?” Will asked, frowning at the black kobold.

“With a great deal of practice.” Loth said, clicking her black thumb and forenail together. “Look at this.” She pointed down at the decapitated corpse.

The body was twitching, which bodies usually do after you bisect their central nervous system.

But the black ichor that was oozing out of the stump, creating weblike strands between the two pieces of the body and slowly drawing them back together…that was unusual.

“Shhhhiiit.” Will grumbled, glancing up at the hundreds of zombies he’d already bisected. Each and every one of them had the weblike filaments of shiny black bridging their parts.

“That’s what the purple scars are,” Will said. The purple scars were where previous generations of Climbers had run into this exact same problem.

“How long do you think before the first ones recover?” Will asked.

“Oh...about five minutes.” Loth said, eyeing the head creeping towards the stump.

“I don’t think we’re going to clear these things in five minutes.” Will said, scanning the shambling horde.

The problem was, if it took more than five minutes to clear all of them, then the first ones would rejoin the fight, creating an infinite loop that would wear them down eventually, no matter how easy they were to kill.

“Yes, that seems to be a sticking point.”

“How are your bugs?” Will asked, wondering if Loth could make some kind of trap that could slow them down. Or just dig an enormous pit and fill it in. Problem solved.

“My bugs sicken and die as soon as they step outside my vivarium. I’ll have to take some time to breed ones that are resistant to this air.” Loth said.

“We could get Mason to just vaporize them,” Will mused. Matter of fact, why hasn’t he done it already?

Will walked up to where Mason was sitting on top of a wagon, surveying the battle while drinking some 7th Floor tea from a jar. He probably figured they had things well in hand, so there was no need to create explosions that might destabilize a building or cause more of the zombies to approach.

That’s actually a really good concern, Will thought.

“They regenerate.” Will said as he arrived beside their Nuker.

“We were doing so well. There’s always a catch.” Mason sighed, closing the lid on his tea.

“Try hitting them with a cantrip first. I’m concerned about what an explosion will do to these buildings.” Will said, gesturing above them, where thousands of hungry undead were waiting to literally rain down on them if someone were unwise enough to break the glass.

Mason glanced up and scanned the surrounding buildings before he nodded.

“Soft touches. Understood.”

A mote of fire leapt from his fingertip to  a shambling corpse. Not having any moisture in it, the body instantly caught fire. It burned merrily, as though the oily black substance was… some kind of oil. Gouts of black smoke rose into the air as the corpse tottered to a halt and collapsed to the ground.

Which was good until Will sensed the malevolent Charge inside the billowing black smoke rising from the corpse.

Will thought he could almost make out organic shapes in the smoke, a half-formed demon sleeping behind a veil of inky water. Whatever it was it was hungry, and Will honestly thought it might be better off  trapped in a physical body…where he could see it.

“On second thought,” Will said, holding up a finger. “Maybe we don’t burn them.

A second zombie tripped over the flaming one, catching fire in the blink of an eye, as if it were doused in lamp oil. Then a third and a fourth.

The smoke flowed together, the figure inside and seeming to twitch, the demon inside beginning to rouse from its sleep.

“Mason.”

“On it.”

Mason flicked forward his ball of empty cold and the growing pyre of zombies froze in place, the flames snuffing out in an instant.

Suddenly detached from its umbilical cord, The smoke was began to wrap around itself like a living thing, concentrating and coalescing into-

Will whipped his foot forward, catching a spike of air and compressing it before sending it straight into the heart of the smoke. He released the air and the ominous cloud was scattered before it could form…whatever it had been trying to create.

Once he was sure it wasn’t coming back, Will glanced up at the glass above them, wondering if the rapid temperature change would weaken them. It didn’t seem like it.

“You think you could freeze all of these?” Will asked, gesturing to the shambling corpses trudging tirelessly towards them. It would likely take several hours for a body that had been frozen solid to start moving again. Plenty of time to escape.

Mason rubbed his chin, scratching the thin beard that was beginning to form.

He rose to his feet, picking up his Staff of the Warmage, scanning the endless army of the dead. They were beginning to pile up around the caravan, forming a stack of body parts three men deep.

“I think I could at the very least freeze enough for the caravan to punch through and lose them, but it would use most of my Charge.”

Punch through? Will thought, scanning the road. How are we even supposed to drive the wagons over these piles of limbs in less then five minutes? Some of the limbs still had a hint of life to them, reflexively swiping at anything they came into contact with.

That’s just asking for a wagon to get a wheel busted. And…are those black filaments stitching multiple bodies together into one?

How can we get over these things without actually…Oh.

“Let’s make freezing them the backup plan.” Will said. “I have an idea that should…more or less get us to safety.”

Will reached out with his right hand and grabbed the air with his right hand, adding the ‘not terrain’ tag to everyone in the caravan.

The world around them froze in place as the air solidified around them for hundreds of feet.

“Everyone back to the wagons!” Will shouted over the din. “I made a ramp leading over the wall of flesh in front of us!” Will motioned for the drivers to steer the wagons straight ahead.

The caravan hit the invisible five-degree incline Will had created and began rising up into the sky, gradually gaining more and more distance above the horde. They heaved a collective sigh of relief as they rose above the reach of the horde beneath them.

Higher and higher they climbed, with Will using two Phantom Snakes to alternate grasping at air, their controlled area overlapping by three hundred feet. When the caravan was entirely on the leading patch of solidified air, the rear snake would go forward six hundred feet and create another overlapping platform, keeping the bridge of air continuing without Will’s direct input.

After they rose above the height of the towers, the entire city was splayed out beneath them, with patches of the city visible through the thinnest of the purple haze.

“I stand corrected.” Mason said, pointing down at the city hundreds of feet below them.

Every single break in the purple haze was populated by tens of thousands of undead covering the ground, each of them a pair of pinpricks of violet light staring back up at the interlopers.

They were everywhere, in every direction, swarming across the ground like ants, slowly shuffling to group up directly beneath them.

“…I could not have frozen enough of them to punch through.” Mason said.

“Hey Travis!” Will called over to another wagon seemingly gliding across the sky, with dozens of civilians peering over the edge with a mixture of horror and enchantment.

“Eh?” Travis grunted.

“Your time to shine,” Will said, pointing at the horde beneath them.

“Fair enough,” the Master Decoy said, cracking his knuckles.