Lively Resistance

Undead are usually mindless monsters puppeteered by a necromancer not that far away from them. The necromancer is usually only able to give the group of zombies simple orders with their strength residing in their ability to overpower others with sheer numbers.

A foe the party is all too familiar with.

They had instinctively went for both their weakness as soon as they had recognized them. Their heads and their mobility.

Necromancy works much like issuing commands through certain frequencies. The heads of the undead in this case, act as sort of an antenna making these commands easier to issue. Beheading them weakens the necromancer’s hold on their puppets.

Even with this weakened link commands can still be issued just with a bit of a delay. Immobilizing the undead to prevent them from overwhelming them by charging in is the logical next step. Doing so by electrocution in this case is not only efficient taking into consideration their current environment. Electrocution also helps weakens the necromancer’s hold as well as permanently take the undead out of commission by frying their nervous systems.

Even undead are limited by their anatomy, they are just able to slightly ignore their limits.

Either way, they should’ve all been defeated by those attacks. Getting up should’ve been out of the question.

They are usually also lifeforms that Shanel can easily detect in an area. They are also not smart enough to create doorway illusions or cast spells.

It had finally dawned on them. They were entirely in foreign territory.

This dungeon was unlike anything they’ve ever experienced.

“Myor!! Fall back now!!!!”

“Don’t gotta tell me twi- UEEGGOOUHHH!!”

His attempt to leap backwards up the stairs was halted.

An undead resembling a paladin had quickly ran up to him, ramming him in the stomach with a lengthy stone hammer. This caved in his serpent scaled-fauld preventing his innards from being crushed completely.

The zombie paladin was slightly hunched over as it poured all its strength into ramming him with the hammer. This left its neck exposed as it curdled itself around the length handle of the battle hammer.

Myor wasted no time repeatedly slamming the pointed end of his shield into its neck with all his strength.

The Paladin’s frame was sturdy enough to withstand these heavy blows so it was slowly adapting to this new pressure. In an attempt to counter, it began pressing the hammer deeper into Myor’s chest.

As it did so, in a moment too quick for Myor to react, the Paladin released its left hand grip on the hammer, rushing for Myor’s neck.

It’s over.

Myor’s final thought was interrupted by a stone hammer slamming violently into the back of the Paladin’s armor most likely crushing every bone beneath it. The force of the blow embedded the zombie into the floor like a nail.

A bright golden aura oozed profoundly from the hammer. A holy enchantment. “Good looks Chama.” Myor thought as he gazed at the hammer that distanced him from death.

“We’re pulling back to make sense of this. There are too many dangerous unknowns.” Tnel, the wielder of the gigantic tool declared to Myor in a voice that would leave no room for negotiation.

Tnel tended to get this way in dire situations like this. When one wrong move could lead to death.

Before the two could properly set their sights back on where they came from, a powerful blinding vapor consumed the hallway.

A smoke screen.

“The holy enchantment was effective! They’re trying to give themselves time to recover their own too!” Ymel shouted after the realization.

A mummified voice slipped through the vapor fog.

“Sal Stoken.”

Myor and Tnel became frozen in place with their throats clogged up in shock realizing the water beneath their feet.

Myor’s body was no longer eel adjacent. The longevity of Ymel’s Ani morph incantations depended on how closely genetically aligned her target was with the creature they morphed into.

The tables had turned so quickly. Now, they were the ones being outmaneuvered at almost every turn.

Quickly snapping out of their fright, both men jumped onto the stairway isolated from the watery floors beneath it.

A split second after their feet had touched the stairs, a knocking sound could be heard.

Tnel had wondered what it was as he readied himself by assuming a defensive stance to make up for his lack of a shield.

“No way. Tnel get down!” Myor’s eye and mouth widened in realization before he pushed his friend’s head down using his shield arm to properly defend their headspace.

With a swing of his sword hand, he clashed with and forcefully redirected the boomerang sword covered in lightning headed their way.

The force of the steel colliding at such strength left Myor’s hand vibrating heavily. His wrist bone broken.

Before it could even hit the wall, the sword was caught.

Caught by a zombie knight silhouette in the fog drenched in lightning. It used the same lightning that decimated its companions to give itself a speed boast.

It pressed its leg into the nearby wall sinking it in before making a lightning fast leap towards Myor and Tnel with its boomerang cleaver leading the charge.

A strong gust of wind delayed its assault and a light speed arrow through its sword hand halted it completely, nailing it to the opposing wall. The gust blew away the fog at the same time.

Shanel had used his now healed wing to create the gust and his archery to stop the attack.

Myor and Tnel wasted no time running up the stairs immediately afterwards.

“Sal Bolken! Sal Nos!”

As soon as both men re-emerged, the somber but stern shouting of a sorceress full of life sounded the halls.

She commanded a stone wall to emerge from where they came from. Purple thorns sprouting fairy wings cuddled this stone wall probably sealing what was behind in.

Almost no physical or magical blow could penetrate the wall.

Such a spell would not come without a cost. These same thorns latched onto Ymel’s body creating new orifices for blood to gush.

Mystia had shrieked under her breath as he held up a holy barrier around her to prevent her friend from bleeding to death. Combined with her exhaustion from casting so many other incantations earlier, the pain left Ymel unable to even utter a word of thanks.

“Back- back when I was still a maiden at the sun palace, I heard a theory from my sisters in worship. It was based on some of the older scriptures they’d deciphered. They said that the magic we study could very well be an inferior weaker version of the actual thing as the true spoken language of magic is lost to time. If that magic were to be somehow revived however….. some of the spells we know would be much stronger. What I’m getting at is-“

“The possibility that those are real undead. The ones we’ve been fighting up until now might’ve just been undercooked versions.”

Shanel finished what Mystia was trying to say as he noticed she was clearly distraught by the state of Ymel.

“Well that explains their resilience but not why they fight like us! That was insane! It would’ve been chops for me if not for Tnel. Thanks for saving my ass back there-“

“Mystia, your nose! My lord, your bleeding!”

Myor and Tnel had begun slowly making their way back over to the others when Tnel spotted the fountain of blood coming from Mystia’s nostrils.

“Are you serious right now? Someone else is clearly in a more perilous situation at the moment!”

Mystia hastily snapped back not hiding her annoyance in her tone.

“No, I had my suspicions but I wasn’t sure but now I’m certain. Because you’re…carrying. The holy ones no longer view you as a pure vessel so whenever you try to channel them, you’re getting hurt because you’re getting “purified” yourself. You have to stop this! If this goes on you could even hurt the-“

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Mystia had shut him down with a monstrous scream. She had not lost even an ounce of the vigor she was known to have.

“Chama, is that true?” Myor inquired in a strained but distressed voice.

The halls grew quiet once more with everyone, even Ymel barely hanging on to consciousness looking to Mystia for an answer.

“He..doesn’t fully know what he’s talking about. My baby is safe. In fact they’re too safe. The incantations are….affecting me because the holy ones have deemed me an impurity and want to protect the child from me. Stuff like this comes with breaking the holy oath of chastity so trust me I got this under control.”

As she spoke, she revealed a golden serpent marking on her stomach to them in order to support her claim.

An arrow flew straight into her throat leaving the rest of the party with no time to fully soak in what she had just said.

The undead archer was camouflaged as it stuck to the walls, waiting for the right moment.

“MYSTIA!” Tnel was the first to scream out his lungs.

The barrier meant to heal Ymel had fallen as a result of this as well leading to the her passing out from the pain of the thorns.

Shanel had lost some of his mobility due to his wings disappearing but this didn’t stop him from fighting. A swift barrage of arrows was sent after his double in quick succession. He attacked off of instinct giving himself no time to soak in what happened.

The undead was too agile for any of them to hit. It bounced off the walls doing backflips and twirls in midair to avoid the arrows.

Myor suspected as much. He sent his boomerang sword to intercept it in the middle of a summersault. It deflected the weapon by hitting it with an arrow as it flipped in a display of true marksmanship.

Tnel acted third charging it in a blind act of rage swiftly swinging his hammer to catch it after it deflected the boomerang.

It was able to step right in the middle of the hammer’s lengthy handle just in-between the tall dark elf’s grip. In a split second, it readied its now as it stood there, the now defenseless Tnel’s head in its sights.

“Sought Light, Seek Not the Pure and True. Staff of the Sunseeker”

A golden light shaped like a spear phased through Tnel’s frame impaling the creature. It burned and sizzled as soon as the light made contact with it.

It was Mystia. Her left hand was holding a barrier around her neck to sustain her wound while her right hand wrapped in a serpent shaped holy chain was the source of the light.

“ I had to be protected by you again,huh.” Tnel smirked as he said this below his voice. He looked down as his eyes dropped below his shadow as if he were sadly reminiscing.

“I’ll pull through. I just need you all to buy some time while I patch us up.”

“At this point we don’t have a choice. Look. Cheeky bastards, they even copied her phasing spell.”

Shanel followed up on Mystia’s reaffirmation as he witnessed the two zombies phasing through the sealed up wall.

“Looks like they are down a few though.”

Myor pointed out that it was just the sorceress and the warrior who was now holding the paladin’s hammer.

“And naturally they wouldn’t have a holy woman. Big hole in their formation if you ask me.” Tnel smirked as he stared down his foe pointing out one of their weaknesses.

“Heh. Sounds like you boys are finally ready to put on a show. Time to get them back for those surprise attacks.”

All three men readied themselves with their morale being boosted by their healer’s words. Their weapons glowed gold in anticipation as she left a blessing with all three of them.