Chapter Eighteen
Denny screamed like he’d been damned by all the gods and spasmed. His eyes bulged and his mouth opened to let the horrible noise escape. Denny’s entire body shook like lightning was wracking his muscles, and then he spewed blood into the air.
That was when Vester spotted the twin blade tips emerging from Denny’s chest and the figure behind him appearing from stealth. It was the same skeleton in heavy armor that had attacked Vester’s airship earlier that day.
The sickly green energy coating those daggers was pouring into Denny, and Vester could see lines of corruption rising through his twin’s veins. It looked like the skeleton had stabbed Denny through both lungs, and the damned thing was laughing about it.
“Vester?” the skeleton asked incredulously, and for the first time Vester could hear it clearly enough to recognize its voice.
“You’ve been the pain in our asses this entire time? How did we not realize that? It makes sense—you always were a burden,” Jack finished while kicking Denny in the small of the back to dislodge the Hero from his weapons.
The kick didn’t even look like it took that much effort, yet Denny’s body went flying past Vester to bounce off the stone and tumble to a stop somewhere behind him.
Vester’s fist tightened around Trickster’s Cane, and he almost took a swing at Jack before he remembered he wouldn’t be able to hit him directly.
“Maybe you’re just not that smart,” Vester snarled while splitting off a half-dozen images of himself to circle Jack—using Decoy Swap at the same time to spawn more and take a position behind the undead bastard.
“You’re just a bully hiding under Denny’s friendship, always have been,” Vester added, speaking out of all the illusions at once.
“Fuck you!” Jack roared. His armor gleamed while he swept his blades through Vester’s illusions, his bony fists clenched around the hilts of his daggers.
“You don’t know shit about me and Denny! You’re just a lazy fuck who was never good enough!”
Jack jerked back when the phantasm he’d sliced appeared to burst into flames; Vester made sure heat washed over the skeleton too.
Vester circled continuously, moving his illusions and making it harder to spot which of him was real, and while he moved, he cast Nightmare Field, keeping the space tight around himself. A few pink flames streaked into the sky above him and detonated, signaling for his Party to stay back.
To Vester’s surprise, Jack’s fears manifested as two figures seemed to erupt from the ground before Jack.
One was clearly Vester, suit, cane, glowing eyes, and it wove around Jack like a speed demon.
The fear-Vester moved so quick it blurred and left afterimages—Jack constantly twitched back away from it to avoid the black blade it clutched in one hand.
But Jack’s reaction to the fear-Vester was nothing compared to what happened when he spun and spotted the other illusion.
Jack let out a screech of terror and threw his arms over his head while falling onto his ass—all because a five-foot-eight, potbellied, foul-smelling, bald man had appeared in a dirty wife beater.
The man had a massive mustache and was sipping a beer.
“Still a fucking pussy, aren’t you,” the guy growled in an utterly bored voice. “Looks like I’m going to need to try toughening you up a bit. Can’t have people seeing my son is a little bitch,” the illusion explained while undoing his belt with his free hand.
Vester took a second, staring at the illusion of Ralph Kincaid, Jack’s father, then shook his head.
Knowing Jack grew up with that is almost enough to make me feel sorry for him, Vester thought with a sigh, then he glanced at Jack again.
On the other hand, fuck him for trying to kill me so many times.
The Nightmare Weaver flicked open the clasp on his belt box and began tossing metal cards at random all around Jack.
Vester scattered them in a wide circle, then hid them under the illusion of moss.
Once the traps were down, he used Inconvenient Illusions to trap Jack in a maze of thin, spiky walls.
They’d shatter at the slightest pressure, but the jagged bits would make breaking them an act of self-harm, further triggering the fear enhancements.
With Jack momentarily contained, Vester spun and searched for Denny.
To his surprise, his twin was floating in midair and flying fast toward the Sanctuary.
If Denny hadn’t been visibly gushing blood and hanging limp, Vester might have thought it was some kind of movement skill; it took Vester a second to realize it was Reve using her telekinesis to pull Denny into the campsite.
The Avatar of Life was also holding out her mithril arm and deflecting beams of lavender power from Rachel, as well as incandescent balls of white power from Emma—though those cut off with the sharp hiss-crack of Li Ra’s rifle and a bolt of energy that lashed in Emma’s direction.
A feline shriek sounded, and a moment later an enraged Kimmy charged on all fours downhill toward where Krysta stood waiting for Denny.
The felid was tearing up the ground, claws gleaming on her fingers and toes, and Vester wasn’t sure if Krysta had remained inside the safety of her Safe Zone, or stepped out where the felid could reach her.
Kimmy never reached Krysta.
A tremendous bong sounded as Kora intercepted the charge, leaping out from the Sanctuary where she’d been standing guard and taking the felid by surprise.
The impact caused Kora to slide backward, her boots digging furrows in the mossy-stone, while Kimmy flew up and back to crash into the ground after a short, airborne arc.
Kora slammed her shield down, and a wall of stone rose behind her to block the Sanctuary edge from the eyes of Denny’s Party.
A wave of eerie light, a swirling miasma of greens and putrid yellows, swept outward from where Vester had left Jack, which drew Vester’s eyes to the small maze he’d built around the undead.
The light took the form of thin streamers, a swirling mist of illumination extending tendrils that burrowed into the bodies of the fallen blood elflings.
It wasn’t until the first corpse started twitching that Vester realized what was happening.
“Jack’s raising the dead!” he bellowed. “Destroy the corpses!”
Unfortunately, it was soon clear that simply tearing the bodies apart wouldn’t be sufficient—the various chunks and pieces were sliding toward each other and merging into some kind of chitinous flesh-blob.
Li Ra fired a rapid barrage into one of the largest masses, but the dead flesh was only scorched before it rolled deeper into the blob. Reve had better luck, smashing one of the shapes under a wide telekinetic barrier, but the squirming paste just started oozing toward one of the other piles.
Kora and Kimmy showed no awareness of the greater threat.
The pair were moving fast and hard, coming together again and again in a screeching spray of claws against armor.
Kimmy was taking wounds from Kora’s flame-covered scimitar, but her athletic frame was healing with visible speed.
For the moment, the pair appeared locked in a stalemate, but Vester saw Ripper circling to one side.
The grotesque balls of flesh and fragments of shell began to coalesce into five distinct figures, each the size of a minivan.
Eight-legged, scorpion-tailed lower bodies formed and were topped by skeletal elfling torsos.
Crimson gemstones glowed with eldritch flames in the skull’s eye sockets, and all of them turned to focus on Vester—then they roared and charged at him as one.
Fuck my life, he thought, then Vester took off running, circling wide.
He knew most undead were immune to his Labyrinth Ward, and he had no intention of bringing danger closer to the Sanctuary.
That left him with the option of heading away from his friends, so he chose the direction most likely to cause chaos.
Vester ran straight toward Emma, Rachel, and Davis.
He extended Trickster’s Cane and dug the tip into the ground ahead of him, the longer shaft acting like a pole vault and sending him flying into the air so he passed up and over Rachel’s shields.
He saw three shocked faces while he sailed overhead, then he was down on the other side and running once more.
The sounds of five undead monstrosities impacting Rachel’s barriers was like an anvil hitting cardboard, and Denny’s Party screamed in shock at having the things trying to claw over and through them to keep chasing Vester.
Rachel cast something, her staff momentarily absorbing all the color from the world around her, and then a beam of bright purple lanced out from the crystal focus to ignite flames deep inside one of the undead bodies.
The ignition spread up and outward, and a whoomph sounded as the body exploded into tiny splinters.
A second undead was taken care of by Davis. The healer threw out a hand and a golden glow wrapped around the scorpion-tailed abomination. Chitin, bone, blood, and ichor began rotting away, decaying into some kind of black sludge that splattered across the dungeon floor in a grotesque shower.
It didn’t look like Emma was doing much to contribute, though Vester had noticed a charred hole in her robes sitting right over the girl’s heart.
Her skin was torn up, looking like fractured porcelain, and she had a waxy coloration that screamed of poor health.
Li Ra’s shot had obviously come close to killing Emma, and it looked like Davis hadn’t been able to do more than patch her up enough to stave off death.
Vester tried dropping a few illusions around Rachel’s group to distract the remaining undead, but the damned things ignored his phantasms completely.
They also failed to retaliate from Rachel’ and Davis’ attacks—they just parted to go around the group and continue chasing Vester.
He wasn’t thrilled with being so popular, but all he could do was continue moving away from the Sanctuary.
“If you want to live, move down to my team and promise you surrender!” Vester shouted to Rachel before he ran off.
Despite the constant conflicts they’d had, Vester was still hesitant to simply put down the people who had been on the bus with him when he’d died.
Emma he viewed as a threat, her connection to Peace so deep he didn’t trust her not to be making Denny’s enslavement worse.
Jack, well, Vester had actively hated that asshole; though he’d have left Jack alone if Jack had done the same.
With Rachel, Davis, and Kimmy, Vester couldn’t tell if they were victims or conspirators. Kimmy’s chains had always suggested she was being coerced, and Rachel and Davis had acted friendly enough when they traveled together for the Raid that Vester viewed them neutrally.
All of that had run through his head when he recommended Rachel just give up and surrender to his team, though he doubted she would take him up on his offer.
The Hero’s Party had been crushing all the challenges that came before them outside of Vester’s team, so he doubted they truly grasped how dangerous this world could be.
Three scorpion tails impacted the ground all around him, and only a timely Decoy Swap let Vester vanish without being skewered.
He forced himself to refocus, turning all his attention to the undead chasing him.
The monstrosities were fast and strong, and they clearly had a way to see through his illusions.
His only advantage was that he was slightly faster, but he knew that wasn’t sustainable—undead never got tired. Eventually, Vester’s stamina would run out and he’d be torn apart. They wouldn’t kill him, but that still wasn’t a memory he wanted to possess.
A bolt of crimson energy lanced through the skull of one of his pursuers.
The bone immediately charred black, then shattered as the air inside superheated.
Flames blew out the skeleton’s eye sockets moments before its head came apart.
Sadly, the body continued to chase Vester, though it seemed to have a much harder time keeping track of him now.
Vester turned, heading back downhill, and the added boost of gravity let him widen the gap between himself and Jack’s minions.
He passed straight through the illusory maze he’d built around Jack, his Freeform Illusion allowing him to warp the creation to keep it intact while he shot out the other side.
He got a momentary glimpse of Jack and saw the skeleton had been put over Ralph’s knee, and the drunk was whipping Jack’s armor with the belt, all while insulting his masculinity and implying Jack was a sissy-failure.
I don’t think he’ll be defeating his greatest fears anytime soon, Vester thought while using his momentum to run up one of the shorter pillars; he paused for a moment to take deep breaths, trying to regain his wind.
Fuck, so the Goddess of Death obviously brought Jack back…
Maybe he’s the Avatar of Death now? Ugh, I have no idea if Non would want me to kill the bastard again… not that I’m sure I can.
He knew there were some obscure rules about Avatar interactions, but the only other Avatar he’d met was Reve, and they weren’t exactly fighting. Non and Julius had thrown the pair together and almost required them to cooperate. This situation was far different.
Greater undead are harder to kill, he mused, Jack could have some kind of enchanted anchor object somewhere, or it might take some kind of special ritual to put him down.
Hell, Death herself might have applied a blessing to ensure Jack can no more stay dead than I can.
Gods, that’s a horrifying thought. I don’t like the idea of Jack and I being the only two people on this planet that might be permanently immortal.
The clatter of chitinous legs on stone announced the arrival of Vester’s three shadows, so he leaped off the column and once more started circling. He didn’t see Rachel or the others where he’d left them, so his strategy of leading the undead through that group wasn’t going to work a second time.
The fight between Kimmy and Kora was still going strong, though now Ripper was part of it as well.
The trio were a ball of blades, claws, and flashing metal.
Blood kept flying into the air, but it didn’t look like Kimmy was going down anytime soon.
The Ragedancer’s clothing was growing far scarcer, though her body looked to be keeping up with the brutal fight without a problem.
Vester rounded a boulder, only to go flying backward when an unseen forced grabbed hold of him and lifted him into the air. He found himself coming down next to Krysta, who was kneeling over Denny and channeling her full attention into the injured Hero.
Denny looked terrible. Black veins had spread all over his body, his muscles appeared to be wasting away, and his skin had taken on an ivory pallor that made him appear half-dead.
Considering how Jack had raised the elfling corpses, and that the undead had been riding a transformed titanbat, Vester wondered if Jack was attempting to turn his brother into another undead.
“Can you save him?” he asked Krysta. He might not have been sure what he wanted to happen with Denny; but Vester definitely didn’t want his brother to become a walking corpse controlled by Jack.