Chapter 19

The terms Undead and Restless Dead are often used interchangeably, but there is a difference. Undead is a term that encompasses all forms of creatures and people that no longer have Life Myst naturally stored in their bodies. This term covers Blightlings as well as Restless Dead. Restless Dead are undead that have no ability for complex thought. Skeletons, zombies, and ghouls are only a few of the undead that are fueled by three base instincts. Finding areas with dense ambient Death Myst to nest in, protecting that territory, and feeding. This last driving instinct is the strongest and what makes the Restless Dead so dangerous. Skeletons don't eat, but they have a desire to kill living creatures they come across while remaining docile around other undead. Zombies are more durable than skeletons and have a drive to feed. While zombies are slow and dimwitted, they come in a variety of types that can have special abilities or altered habits. Ghouls are likely the worst of most common forms of Restless Dead. They are faster than most living sapient species, smart enough for simple tool use, and they hunt in packs.

Ghouls. I hated ghouls. While I hated all types of undead, I had a special kind of hate for ghouls. I had done plenty of study on the creatures just in case I encountered a pack of them. They were vicious predators that could outmaneuver many adventurers by using pack tactics. They were also stronger than most living things of the same size and well-known to roam outside of their known territory to hunt. Ghoul incursions often overrun and wiped out settlements that left their gates open at night.

As I heard the beasts closing in, a useless fact popped into my head. A pack of ghouls was known as a shroud. Before even the first ghoul entered my line of sight, I made my move. I held onto the cable with just my left hand and reached over to that arm with my gauntleted right hand. Quickly but carefully, I dragged the claws of Venna across my left forearm, just enough to draw blood but not cause damage to the muscle or tendons. I didn’t take my eyes off the surrounding space, watching for even the slightest movement at the edge of my sight.

I didn’t need to be so scrutinizing. From the hall in front of me, a ghoul charged out of a room six doors away from me. It struck the wall across from the doorway with all four limbs, pushing off to lung down the hall. In seconds, the creature was already lunging at my face with claws outstretched.

I got a good look at the hideous thing. Limbs just slightly too long for its body with oversized hands and feet. An emaciated-looking frame so thin I could count its ribs and vertebrae from six feet away. Its dry and cracked skin was a blue-gray color with thick black veins. The face of the creature was the greatest horror of the whole package. The skin around its jaw and mouth split wide open and peeled back as the once normal person grew a short and broad snout of bone filled with massive fangs. Its ears were large and somewhat bat-like, with a serrated outer edge not unlike my own ears, if at a scale much larger. The eyes were solid black gems that conveyed only one thing. Hunger. A deep and all-consuming ravenous hunger that drove every waking moment.

Reflexively, I tightened my grip on Ferris as I let go of my cable for a fraction of a second. I dropped three feet before gripping the rope again, but I almost couldn’t stop my drop. When I felt warm blood running down my arm, I knew that was my cue to make my move. I drew on ten Vells of Morphic Myst and supercharged my arm muscles by reinforcing the muscle tissue and increasing oxygen efficiency. The blood running down my arm evaporated into glowing purple light as my body suddenly became light as a feather. I didn’t hesitate. As soon as the spell took full effect, I started climbing at a rate impossible to anyone not using magic or cybernetic augmentations. I shot up the cable, but when I heard something below that I didn’t like, I looked back. Dozens of ghouls were climbing up the shaft like massive insects. They clung to the walls, and a few were even climbing my cable. Those who climbed the walls sank their claws into the walls as easily as knives through cardboard.

“Shit!” I cursed.

I keep a pace faster than the ghouls, if only just barely. But when I reached the end of my cable, things would change. I couldn’t bring these things to Nennel, and I had to get Ferris to safety before I could do anything to get myself safely away.

As I reached subfloor 4, I shouted up to Nel without breaking pace. “Nel! Drop your cable and get ready to catch!”

I didn’t hear a response, but her anchor dropped, causing me to fall toward the side of the shaft. My left shoulder and knee struck the wall, but I didn’t stop until I reached subfloor 2. I threw Ferris onto that floor and jumped up right behind him. Without even fully finding my feet on that floor, I gripped Ferris by the harness and hurtled him up to subfloor 1. His rag-doll form limply flew up to the next floor to land right in front of where Nennel should have been.

Before Ferris had even landed on the floor above, I triggered the release of my hook and shot out a secorus gas disk just across the shaft at a steep upward angle. I had the timer on the disk set to a one-second delay. The two-inch diameter disk hadn’t even crossed the space of the shaft before it began ejecting the highly conductive and obfuscating gas. Secorus gas was heavier than air, meaning it would sink down the shaft, but not at a fast rate. I made sure to angle my shot just right so that the disk would strike a wall of the shaft between floors and hopefully bounce upward at least once. If I was lucky, the disk would ricochet at least twice, but that would have been more than enough.

I started wrapping the hook’s cable around my shoulder as I moved around the pit. I used my multitasking skills to pull up the maps of the floor I was on and Nel’s floor. But I didn’t stop there. While wrapping my cable, eyeing both maps and potting two separate courses, I shouted up to Nel. “Listen up, Nel! Don’t respond! I’m gonna lead these freaks away while you get Ferris to safety! I’ll send you a map with a potted course! You're looking for a stairway that links these two floors. Keep quiet, keep quick, and keep your eyes peeled!”

When several ghouls responded to my shout with shrieks, I knew that my time was almost up. My cable wasn’t even close to being halfway wound around my shoulder, so I circled around the pit to the opposite side from where my cable was rising. I steadily walked backward, looking over my shoulder every few seconds to make sure I wouldn’t trip or get ambushed. The clattering of my hook sliding and bouncing against the wall and the hiss of metal pulling along stone would act as a lure. My plan was to stick a Shock Bite in the back of the first ghoul to climb into the space as it searched in the wrong direction for me.

Shock Bites and secorus gas had quickly become a staple trick of mine for dealing with groups of hostiles. I was working on some other crowd-control tactics and tools, but most were still in the trial phase. I was trying to think up a backup plan, just in case, when I saw a shape rise from the cloud-filled shaft. Immediately, I stopped winding my cable and took aim with Venna. My arms stung and ached with every small motion. The Morphic Myst was just wearing off, and I was suffering for it. My arm swayed left and right, unable to keep stable, and that proved to be part of my undoing.

The other part of that undoing was that the first ghoul to reach my floor crawled up on my side of the shaft and was looking right at me. I didn’t have time to line up my shot. It was all up to chance at that point, and that chance turned to near impossibility as it howled and rushed at me. Right behind the first foul creature came three, then six more, and they only kept coming.

In a desperate panic, I fired my one readied Shock Bite blindly, hoping to land a hit on one of them. But the electrified bolt struck a support column beside the pit the creatures boiled up from and shattered like a cheap toy. My fast-rate improvised planning fell to pieces, and I was only left with one option. Run.

So I turned on my heel and sprinted into the darkness, yet again, inwardly cursing at my situation with vitriol. I sought around desperately for a quick escape route. Seeking egress by the shortest route, I barely paid attention to my surroundings. What I was looking for was a door or stairway to anywhere but where I was at that time.

Only looking back at the situation later did I realize I had been in some kind of greenhouse. The space was designed with low ceilings and glass walls to meet the specific needs of different plants. Moldering soil covered the ground in varying thicknesses, from a thin coat to heaping mounds. Planters as long as a grown Human was tall were toppled over and thrown about everywhere I looked. While all the greenhouse light fixtures were busted and long since dead, many were barely hanging to the ceiling or were completely ripped out.

I vaulted over fallen racks of planters, ducked under hanging light fixtures, weaving from one clear path to the next as soon as any barricades came into sight. Pass from one greenroom to the next in a totally random pattern, just trying to make distance between myself and my pursuers.

But my trailing cable made my efforts to avoid the ghoulsl much more difficult. Even with my hook closed, it still banged around, drawing attention, caught on corners, and hung me up time and time again. I was still trailing almost eighteen feet of cable. There was no time to stop and pull in the rest, so I would need to ditch as much of the cable as I could. So, as I ran, I dropped all the cable I had wrapped around my shoulder the next time the hook got caught and kept going. That would stop that rattling tail from leading right back to me and give me another thirty feet to run with. If I started unwinding what cable was still spooled in my reel, I could double that.

I ran another few paces, cut a sharp left into another green room, and dropped to the ground behind another fallen planter rack. I attempted to quiet my breathing while carefully listening for a hint of the location of my hunters. One thing ghouls weren’t when chasing prey was stealthy. I could hear at least a dozen of the Restless Dead. They shrieked, howled, and snarled as they threw obstacles around in their search.

While I had done plenty of “study” into ghouls, admittedly, the majority was from holo-vid movies and shows, which weren’t a great reference for hard facts. Action holo-vids made ghouls seem like they had better than average dark vision but were mindless and stupid. While horror holo-vids made ghouls seem deviously clever with preternatural senses. On the lowest end, the dark vision might have stretched no more than twenty feet out. In the total worst-case situation, they could see out as far as three-hundred feet. If the latter was the case, there was no way I could get out of their vision range without getting caught. The glass walls of the space were a serious problem for me in that regard. But while the space stuck me with a disadvantage, it also was somewhat lucky. One thing that was a certain fact was that ghouls’ strongest sense was smell, and the green rooms all stunk of rancid mulch and fertilizer. So there was no way they could find me by smell alone while I was in this space.

I kept low to the ground as I peeked around the corner of my cover to see if I could spot creatures. Most of them were too far out for me to spot through the darkness, but I caught movement in two locations at the edge of my vision. That meant those two had to be about eighty feet out. While that was a healthy distance from my current position, I couldn’t chance standing up if they had better dark vision than me. But I also couldn’t stay where I was, or they’d find me sooner or later, and I did not like my odds against twelve or more ghouls.

My best option was something that I was going to hate myself for. I pulled up the leg of my pants and slipped free a knife. Ferris didn’t get the only infusion blade that I had made. But where his was a dagger intended for both combat and utility, my infusion knife was smaller, intended for only for utility. I already had a Fire Myst Crystal slotted into the hilt of the blade, which was what I needed. Before I activated the tool, I double-checked the location of the nearest ghouls and made sure to keep the blade hidden. With an effort of will, the blade of the knife quickly grew red hot. I spun a wheel gauge at the back of the blade to crank up the power output for what I needed. After a slow breath, I reversed my grip on the knife in my left hand and started cutting away the grappling hook apparatus from Venna. Not the cable of the device, but the whole thing, reel, launcher, and all. First came the familiar smell of hot metal as the knife started melting away at the weld points. As I sawed away at the metal as fast as I could, the smell intensified, and the sounds from several of the ghouls stopped, replaced by snuffling. I cursed internally and redoubled my efforts.

Not long after I had made it a quarter of the way through the welds, the gauntlet grew from uncomfortably warm to actually burning my skin inside. I hated the pain of burns more than any other pain I had experienced, but I bit down on my lip and kept going. When the smell of burning flesh started, I heard one of the nearby ghouls howl, and I knew I was in trouble again.

With the blade still lodged between the grappling hook apparatus and the gauntlet, I shut off the power and let it sit there while I reached into my utility belt. ‘Well, I guess it’s test the tool now or get eaten alive by ravening beasts.’ I thought to myself as I pulled free an experimental gadget of metal and glass.

The device was only five inches long, made of a tube of ridged metal with a button on one end and a tapering cone holding four nozzles at the other end. Running the length of the tube was a small window of shatter-resistant glass revealing a fluid the foul green of pond scum. I called this nifty little toy of chaos a Gas Cap-shell.

I depressed the button for a five-count to set a five-second delay. While I held down the button, I peeked over the edge of my cover to find my target location. I lobbed the device overhand through the open doorway into the green room I had left not too long ago. That was the same room where my hook got caught and where it was still stuck. The Gas Cap-shell struck a shelving unit and resounded with a loud clang before it rattled to the floor.

I heard movement from the ghouls stop for several heartbeats before one of the nearer ones gave a loud chirp that was quickly echoed by the others. Then came the sound of most, if not all, of the ghouls rushing toward the sound. Several of them arrived just in time for the cartridge to release the revolting fluid into a thick and pungent gas. The ghouls caught in the initial release of the gas howled and shrieked in discomfort before fleeing. The others caught one whiff of the concoction and backed off without a second thought.

This was a nonlethal test of my Gas Cap-shell design. The fluid I filled the shell with was an absolutely nightmarish perfume. The mixture crafted by Kharmor included smells from skunk, stink bug, corpse flower, organic waste from dangerous monsters, and other similar things. The goal of the cocktail was to be disgusting and deter animals from coming near. As nauseating as the smell was, a rather unpleasant side effect was that the gas clung to skin and clothes for days after the contact.

I was debating calling the substance The Perfume for an ironic name, but at that moment, I had bigger worries. I wasn’t lucky enough for them to leave the space completely. The wretched creatures only started looking for me elsewhere, and if they noticed me, I doubted a stink cloud would deter them from pursuit.

I could hear some of the ghouls making a wide circle around the tainted room, but they were still drawing near. With the rush of near-uncontrolled panic, I turned back on my infusion knife and set to carving off the grappling hook again. By the time I was done, I could feel that a large portion of the skin of my forearm was melted to the inside of my gauntlet, but that was a problem for later. With the grappling device detached, I set it down quietly and crawled as close to the location of the hook as I could without dealing with the stink. When I sat next to the door between green rooms, I tried to wiggle the hook free using the cable. I was going to need it for the next desperate plan.

Of course, I wasn’t that lucky. The only way I could loosen the hook was to unlock it by hand. The day just kept getting better and better, didn’t it? So I mentally readied myself for scent torture, took a deep breath, and held it before crawling in as fast as I could. The moment I entered the room, I had a mallet of stench slam into my face with enough force to almost send me reeling. I entered the space on my hands and knees, but I almost immediately fell to my elbow as my eyes burned like I had washed them out with bleach. My skin pricked with pins and needles, but the worst was my nose. My sinuses were in such a state of torture I had a powerful urge to rip the entire body system out of my face with my nails.

I told myself the faster I did what I had to, the faster I could get out of the tainted space. So I dragged myself back to hands and knees and shuffled deeper in, my motions jerky and uncoordinated with the sensory overload. When I reached my hook, I grew desperate to get out of there as soon as possible. I gripped the nine-inch-long device and left the foul room immediately. In the process of leaving the stink cloud, I almost vomited twice, only resisting through a massive effort of will. The moment I entered the conjoining green room, I gasped for air. The sound of that action almost spelled my doom. When the ragged breath left and refilled my lungs, all the ghouls stopped as one.

I held my empty lungs and clung the hook to my chest as I made my way back to my original hiding spot. The area was deathly quiet. A silence as still as the grave the place would be for me if I slipped up even once more. I desperately wished I had some way to keep an eye on the locations of the ghouls without exposing myself. After that gasp, I knew the ghouls would be closing in. I had to act fast but quietly and carefully as well.

With the infusion knife cooled off, I replaced it in its sheath at my boot. Next, I removed the brake and reel control systems on the grappling hook reel and launcher before pocketing it. After that, I pulled up the map of my floor to find my exit. Several seconds later, I found what I wanted. If I moved directly to my right for several more rooms, I would find a storage space. Past that storage space was a hall that would branch off in several directions. If I took the first left and the next right after that, I would find a staircase leading to the floors above and below me. I took a moment to mark the exact location on the map of subfloor 1 to tell Nennel where to meet me before flicking the map to Nel.

One stroke of luck I was immensely thrilled for was that I still had service on my therra. I wasn’t sure how deep, but our node would lose all network access if we went too much deeper into the Undercity. We would need to adjust our route mapping before we went too far.

With that done, I made my way toward the storage space. I moved as quickly as I dared but stopped at every open space to check for threats. Things went according to plan as far as reaching the storage space. There was only one entry from the greenhouse into the storage space. The issue was that the wall that door was installed in was wholly made from glass. But I still set about preparing the next phase of the plan I code-named Bat Shit Crazy.

I moved to one corner of the green room and locked my squid hook around the leg of a still-standing shelving unit. Next, I wove my mythril cable throughout the entire space. I laced it through every planter, shelf, stand, and any other solid object I could find. I finished my trap with the final touch of creating an abstract web between the two upright shelves on either side of the door I had passed through. For a final bit of spite, I pulled out another Perfume Gas Cap-shell. I stripped the timer and set the device for a dead man switch held down by a shelf linked to the network of cable.

With my hindering trap complete, I half-stood and crept across the storage room. I thought I was home free until I heard something. If it had been the howl of a ghoul, that would have been one thing. But the noise I heard was an almost sub-auditory groan that could have come from no living or undead being. And the sound was coming from inside the storage space from a few yards to my left. I slowly turned to face the source of the sound, afraid it was some kind of structural failure.

Honestly, I think I would have preferred the floor collapsing. What I found instead was a slowly rising mound of mulch and fertilizer. When that rising mound sprouted arms and legs of the substance, I took several steps back. It was an elemental. To be precise, it was a garden elemental.

For those of you who aren’t knowledgeable of advanced magical theory and multi-realm interaction, elemental creatures are formed from the elements of nature and given basic sentience through myst saturation.  Fire and ice elementals are common enough in regions with thick ambient levels of the myst that formed said elemental.  There are also death, chaos, storm, and wood elementals, and the list continues.

As cute as the name garden elemental sounds, they were notorious pests in select regions. They could absorb any fertilizer and mulch they could find and rot most plants to add to their mass. But this elemental was a bit more than a pest, standing almost ten feet tall. The fact that this elemental could manifest a humanoid form meant that it was powerful.

“Oh, you have got to be joking.” I audibly cursed. That act drew the attention of the ghouls. The Restless Dead howled yet again before sprinting for me from several locations.

I looked from the elemental to the ghouls in a panic. The moment I looked away from the massive creature in front of me, it swung a gigantic club of an arm at me. The limb caught me in the chest and launched me across the room. I landed within arm’s reach of the entry into the hall.

I staggered to my feet just in time to hear my trap trigger. Looking back toward the greenhouse, I saw that all the ghouls had rushed into the trapped space at about the same time. The ghouls had not only gotten tangled in my cable and tripped my stink trap, but also pulled down every single item I had laced the cable through. Shelves, planters, and pots covered the space in total mess and disarray. But even entangled in my cable and each other’s limbs, and with objects piled atop them, they still pushed forward.

My eyes went wide, and I started backing down the hall. Then, the elemental lost its humanoid form and rushed at the ghouls. I thought that I had hit a serious stroke of luck. The mass of mulch, compost, and manure surged like a wave, shattering all the glass in the wall and enveloping the ghouls.

I knew my luck was only getting worse when the seething mass of ghouls, glass, and gross rushed towards me.

I turned and ran down the hall, screaming, “WHY CAN’T I CATCH A BREAK!”

I knew only a fraction of a second later there was no outrunning that wave. But if I was swept up by it, I could be slashed to pieces, devoured by ghouls, and/or suffocated in what I think would be one of the worst ways to go. Even if I managed to survive getting caught up in the nightmare wave, the wounds I would get while in it would be packed with material ripe to cause infection. I didn’t think we had the supplies to spare to clean me up enough to prevent me from dying of gangrene.

So I did the only thing I really could. I used my claws again to draw blood and Morphic Myst to supercharge my sprint. The gashes along my upper arm bled freely, enough so that I worried I might have caused severe damage. But that worry could be dealt with when I wasn’t being chased.

I had to do some magic math while sprinting and trying to stay calm, which wasn’t easy, to say the least. My Mystwell had a max capacity of thirty-six Vells, and I had twenty-eight Vells left. My body could only reasonably handle eight Vells of Morphic Myst at a time if I didn’t want more negative backlash later. But I had already caused some serious taxation by enhancing my arms not too long before that moment. I guesstimated that I could reasonably use six Vells of Morphic Myst if I exclusively targeted my legs. Much more than that, and I could risk severe myst poisoning. And any more in my arms could cause permanent damage.

I sent up a prayer to the Nameless Goddess and triggered the spell when there was less than two feet between the oncoming wave of death and my rear foot. My legs grew light as air, and the muscles within felt like they coursed with living lightning. I pulled ahead of the elemental, but my turn was coming up quickly, and my enhancement was not designed for on-a-coin turns. I dared to slow down just enough to make the turn and angled myself toward the opposite wall from my turn. In a feat of dexterity that had me proud for a brief moment, I leaped up and planted both shoes against the wall simultaneously. My feet had only just made contact, and my body aligned with the hall when I triggered a massive kinetic burst from my Pacer Shoes. I shot down the hall at a speed that matched a car's for a few seconds. The issue started when I attempted to keep up the pace with my legs after losing momentum.

I’ll say it. I was a total idiot. Rather than running at what might have felt like Mach two, my legs, even enhanced, couldn’t keep the rate of speed. I fell headfirst into the floor, and my legs lifted over my head. The best way to describe my situation was I had become a living, over-sized tumbleweed. I cartwheeled down the hall until I struck the wall at the turn, shoulder first. I felt more than heard the pop as the joint dislocated. My brain was pretty jarred from the sudden stop, but stopping was the last thing I wanted. I forced myself back to my feet at a near-panicked rate. I planted one foot against the wall opposite the turn the hall took. I faced the new direction and muttered, “Take two.” to myself before triggering a smaller burst of kinetic force from the one shoe against the wall.

The controlled burst start was definitely an improvement over the last attempt. My new issue was maintaining the speed boost with repeated timed bursts from the shoe I was pushing off with as I ran. Triggering the burst at the right time was difficult, and the inability to keep a regular rhythm only worsened things. I must’ve looked like a suicidal maniac with a desire to die in the stupidest-looking manner possible.

I hadn’t even gotten my timing down when I needed to figure out how to stop because I saw another wall approaching at top speed. I almost attempted digging in my heels to stop, but that would only lead to another face plant that would likely result in broken teeth. First, I attempted to slow my speed by reducing my pace, but the wall kept coming at a speed I knew would be painful. Next, I moved on to Plan B. I aimed Venna dead ahead and started triggering small kinetic blasts from the kinetic energy focus set into the hand. I did slow to a degree, but I still struck the wall fast enough to break my nose and crack at least two ribs.

With that hit, my brain was definitely concussed, but that, along with my nose, ribs, shoulder, and burned arm, was a problem to deal with once I was safe. With my eyes swimming and brain foggy, I looked down the hall whence I had come and saw that the elemental and all it was carrying was only just making the turn. I had given myself a solid forty-yard head start. But that was not the time to admire what progress I had made. I ran down the hall as it turned to my left and took the next right after that at a pace just fast enough to make sure I could make the turns without injury.

The next thing I knew, I was staring at a stairway. Nennel and Ferris sat on the step leading to subfloor 1, looking at me with worry and panic.

“What is that all over you?” Nel asked at the same time as Ferris asked, “Dude. What the hell happened to you?”

I wheezed out a rushed response. “No time. Head down. Being chased. Get off at subfloor 5.”