31
Selma Standpoint was the name she’d chosen.
Her file now lay on top of Tania’s in a box somewhere deep in the Records Hall.
Seven feet tall. Broad shoulders. But more athletic than thick with muscle.
Her breasts, perfectly round and unnaturally buoyant, left no doubt that she was as female as she could be.
Especially with her long curly blonde hair which cascaded down her back and bright eyes which were the color of a clear blue sky.
She wore a delicate-looking bikini of chain mail, a wide thick leather belt stuffed with daggers, axes, and swords, and a pair of heavy boots with steel caps. In one hand, she carried a sword almost as tall as she was and with a blade twice as wide as Milo’s hand.
Milo, still exhausted from finishing her build only a few hours before, sat on a gravestone and watched as she waded through a sea of zombies with that sword.
Like Tania, she was already drenched in the putrid black blood the undead seemed to spray in ridiculous torrents when they were hit.
And, like Tania, she was grinning from ear to ear.
“Woot!” She howled, carving through six zombies with one effortless swing. “This is sooo much fun! Milo! Milo! Look at meee!”
He lifted a tired hand and nodded. “Yeah, Selma. I see you.”
“Look out!” Tania barked. “Ya nearly cut my head off!”
“I did not!”
“You did too! I was standing right here! Keep ya eyes on the zombies, not on our engineer!”
“I was!”
“Was not!”
“I was! Really!”
Tania pounced on a zombie which skedaddled past Selma while she was arguing. “Then why am I having to clean up your mess?”
“Huh?” Selma blinked. Then let out an angry roar and turned back to the wave to carve deeper into them. “Hey, how dare you mooks try to get past me! I’ll show ya! How’d ya like that, eh? And that? Woot!”
With each swing, zombies fell.
Their pieces wriggled sometimes, but Tania followed behind, delivering final punches to their heads. Their brains destroyed, they stopped moving.
The more zombies the pair killed, the redder the moon became.
The redder the moon became, the more likely it was for the final boss to spawn.
A Lich.
That’s what they were waiting for.
Once the Lich was dead, they’d be able to leave the dungeon.
The challenge wasn’t really in how difficult each zombie was.
The challenge was the attrition. A slow grinding flood of zombies which never paused.
Forcing mages to test themselves to their limit as they cast as many spells as they could before resorting to more exotic ways to delay the horde while their mana refreshed.
Then rinse and repeat.
There were multiple crypts through the graveyard which students could hole up in and defend themselves inside. One of the more common strategies was to pick one, barricade it well, and use the opening as a bottleneck to make things easier.
The heavy doors could be shut for a few moments respite.
Having two golems who could practically fight until their cores emptied, felt almost like cheating. Fighting like this, their cores wouldn’t empty for months.
The dungeon shouldn’t last that long.
Mistress Vizzingbelle had told Tania it usually took a minimum of six hours for elite teams to finish it.
Tania, taking that as a challenge, had gleefully leapt into the graveyard without care for strategy. Selma, nervous at first, quickly joined the fray and now, less than half an hour later, the moon was almost completely red.
Milo pushed himself off the gravestone and limped towards the zombies who’d already been dealt with. He began picking through them for the dungeon stones. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to do.
The zombies felt cold, which somehow made it more disgusting than it needed to be.
Add to that, many of them had oozing pus-filled sores which burst if his fingers brushed them.
It wasn’t a job he liked.
But with Tania and Selma doing what they did, it seemed only fair that he pick up the stones.
He watched them from a distance.
Sometimes it was hard to think of them as constructs. As golems.
But, when they were fighting, it was easy to see. Their movements were much too precise. Their swings too heavy, reinforced by tension the human arm couldn’t maintain without their muscle blowing out.
And endless stamina.
He thought about what Tania had told him when Selma had started moving. That there had been no female dwarves. Now that he thought about it, he’d watched dozens of ancient memory crystals left by them. Mostly they were dwarves whining about this or that.
They did a lot of complaining.
But he couldn’t remember seeing a female one at all.
But if there’d never been any females, why would they feel the need to build their own versions?
What had driven them to do that?
And with such realism and attention to detail?
Fed had confirmed that all constructs in humanoid form were female. It was a bit distracting. Selma’s little mesh bikini wasn’t exactly hiding anything at all.
But all the other golems definitely looked like golems.
He’d never be able to use them as team members. It would reveal his secret too soon.
Which made him wonder if he was ever going to reveal what he knew to anyone. The mages would want to take it from him. He knew that without a doubt. So, if he wanted to keep the workshop under his control, he’d need power.
He’d need more golems.
Maybe an army of them.
Was that a crazy thing to think?
He shuddered as he imagined an army of Tanias. The thought of more than two of her was enough to make him wince.
“Look at me! Milo!” He glanced up. Selma had torn the head off a zombie. She threw it down and stomped on it. “That’s for you, Milo!”
“Umm. Thanks?”
“Quit playing around!” Tania cried. “We gotta get that moon red!”
Selma looked confused. “What’s the rush? This is easy.”
“I wanna get another reward.”
“A reward?” Selma’s eyes glittered. “What reward?”
“We got a medal last time.” Tania cut her way through a zombie, casually spiking a blade through its forehead. It fell with a moan. “I want another.”
“Hum...” Selma gave a thoughtful swing of her sword. “I want one too.”
“Then hurry up!”
“Alright.”
Only a few moments later, thunder cracked in the distance and lighting flashed across the horizon.
The zombies, as one, dropped to the ground.
Bowing.
As their master descended from the sky.
His long black cloak flapped in the breeze like the wings of a giant bat. His hooded head revealed only a cold white skeletal face. He carried a heavy staff in his hand which had a giant green orb glowing on the head.
“Ants!” The Lich’s voice was a dry rasp but it rolled over them. “How dare you ruin my plans.”
“Plans?” Selma glanced at Tania.
“Didn’t you read the file I gave you? It’s in the script. That big old bag of bones wants to turn the world into a graveyard, and we gotta stop him.”
“Oh.” She scratched her head. Picked out a piece of some zombie’s brain and dropped it to the ground. “No, I didn’t read it. Sorry.”
“Maybe next time, ya should, ya ditzy dame.”
“Sure.” Selma shrugged. “I’ll try. I ain’t good at reading, though.”
“I will turn you all into death knights,” the Lich mused, ignoring them. “And use your bodies to spread my undead contagion across the land!”
Selma flinched. “Eww.”
“You got it right, sister,” Tania said, equally disgusted. “Hey, buster. If you got the pox, you oughta get a jab. It ain’t nice to spread it about like that.”
“Dead right,” Selma nodded. “You better listen to her, bonehead. The pox ain’t nice.”
The Lich looked from one golem to the other.
Then lifted his staff.
“Die.”
Green energy blasted from the staff in a wave which looked like tens of thousands of screaming skulls were crashing down from the sky across the graveyard.
Milo ducked down behind a gravestone, tucking himself up tightly as the green light screamed over his head. A few of the skulls gnashed at him as they passed, but they were dragged along with the flow.
“Eww.” Tania pinched her nose. “I think you’ve had a can of beans too many.”
Milo peered out from behind the gravestone. There wasn’t much for him to do. He hadn’t yet built his replacement rifle. And even if he had, he wasn’t sure it would do much against the Lich.
What they needed to do was endure to the second state.
When, enraged, the Lich would soar down and use his staff as a scythe. Dozens of students had died to that staff.
The green magic he used was anathema to life. It ate living cells. It turned living minds insane. Then perverted them. Turning mortals into undead slaves to his whim.
Milo watched as Selma launched herself into the air before the Lich had a chance to even make it to his second stage. The mechanical tendons in her legs allowed her to leap higher than any human ever could.
Her sword flashed in the night like it was full of lighting of its own. Milo blinked as the Lich was cut in half from top to bottom.
She landed behind the Lich, sword held steady in one hand.
As behind her, his bones clattered to the ground. The remaining zombies let out a tired moan and crumbled, their bodies rotting as the decay of centuries could no longer be held back by the Lich’s vanished magics.
Tania carefully lifted the staff and gave it a swing.
It was known that if you could kill the Lich before his second stage, you could loot his staff.
She turned, holding it up to Milo.
“No! No, don’t look at her!” Selma cried, still holding her heroic pose. “Look at me, Milo! Look at me!”