“Oi, you lot! What’re you cowering for?! On your f-” 

- Several popular attributions, authenticity disputed  

---

 

The horde of undead tore itself apart in its eagerness to get in; pus-slicked fingers and clumps of skin sloughed through the space between the frame and the doors, pooling down in a putrid mass. The first to break through spilled onto the ground as a wave of gnashing, blood-filled maws and grasping arms that stymied the progress of their kin. 

The Radiant Crux and their cohorts didn’t waste the opportunity; the captain darted forward, brandishing her greatsword in a high stance. 

“By Luminae’s grace, know peace! Radiant Cleave III!”  

A harsh gleam extended her blade’s reach and she commited her entire body into a vicious swipe. Where the light struck, zombies burned. The closest simply didn’t exist by the time the others joined in with their own lesser magics, taking two or three with every swing of a weapon wreathed in light or flame.

As the scuffle began, Cecilia wrapped her long, ribbon adorned tail around her waist and vaulted over the captain’s shoulder, splitting an unfortunate zombie down the middle and releasing a wave of frost that overtook swaths of the horde before following up with her own light infused “Cleave” spell to shatter her victims, maintaining her trademark grin all the while. 

She, the captain, and a handful of the soldiers displayed inhuman melee prowess that reminded Olive of the Imperial Hoplite Division, though they prefered invocations of a “righteous Immacula” or “brilliant Luminae” over power armor.

It rarely took long for such one-sided displays to make a professional army break, when the Steel Reason supported a platoon of hoplites his duties usually boiled down to telling them which direction the enemy was fleeing, they didn’t need much in the way of fire support. 

But the dead feared neither the brutality of their foe, nor the retribution of either god, and they had their own elites. 

A blur slammed itself into a cat-eared soldier’s shield hard enough to crack it. The specimen was a horror of red, gleaming eyes and bulging veins. It snapped its teeth, thrashing about even as she strained to push it back. Another sprinted for her unprotected side, muscles spasming uncontrollably as it whipped and rattled its head, trailing blackish-red salvia.  

“Interject!”

With speed mortal legs weren’t meant to reach, Cecilia shattered the incoming red-eyed zombie’s jaw with her pauldron, shortened her axe, and lopped off its head before relieving the other of both arms with a flurry of efficient strokes. She found the time to wink at her as she rushed to do violence elsewhere.  

The tide of undead surged but the soldiers kept a firm grip of their zeal even as the captain barked above the cacophony of shouting, groaning, and clanging steel. “Pull back! Crescent formation, keep it loose!”

Those in robes and lighter armor were already positioned several paces behind the melee combatants, waiting for such a moment. Staves and crystals and bows rose between gaps in the hastily, but orderly arranged barrier of metal and mettle. Pinned in as they were, the zombies made fine targets for volleys of arrows and flashing bolts of energy. The ox woman with the cannon opted to stay in the front, turning skulls into portholes with swift, carefully placed jabs. 

As yet more undead poured in, the battle line widened, forcing a soldier to take on two or four zombies on their own. The better melee combatants remained mobile, dispatching any that threatened to overwhelm their comrades. 

Olive didn’t doubt Cecilia’s conviction, but at the rate they were losing ground, it wouldn’t be long before they’d have to stand and die, or present a wide enough gap for one of the faster zombies to get at the rescuees. He wasn’t the only one to make such an observation.  

“How do we get out of this!?”

“You’re asking me!?”

“Fuck. We’re just gonna die again.” 

“Should’ve gone back to sleep.”

“Well, I got eaten by a bearcow, this can’t be worse.” 

Few of the forty-odd civilians had a fighter’s physique and fewer still weren’t busy panicking or falling into a fugue of resignation made worse by the sight of one soldier getting caught alone by three red-eyes; her armor might as well have been paper with the way one made off with her arm while the other two buried their faces in her chest. Olive had seen worse, but not by far. 

He'd be fine with sitting on his hands and not engaging in any unnecessary "heroics" if things had gone swimmingly, but they weren't swimming. They were treading water, about to drown. 

On one hand, there were professionals at work, and he'd been advised to stay put. Even if they failed, the smartest option would be to calmly duck in a corner and depend on the most agitated of the crowd to draw the attention of any zombie that made a breakthrough and hope for the best. He was unarmed, unsettled, and unappraised; any law drafted up by rational minds would find him blameless. 

On the other hand, another principle- another law, beat the above train of thought into submission. It was old and far removed from the realm of the rational. It was written in the sharp staccato of snare drums and proud brilliance of emblems reminiscent of the kind of heraldry the Empire held when they had their own knights. It was a brand, seared into Olive's heart the day they plucked a sick, starving orphan from the remains of a cottage and deigned him worth the price of an uplink.    

A proper officer does not duck. 

He slammed a hoof against a sufficiently large and jagged bone chunk on the ground, it didn’t crack. Good. 

With a grunt, and embarrassingly, more than a little effort that had him resort to raising his arms and employing his horns, he ripped the sleeves of his sackcloth shirt into two long strips and proceeded to wrap them around one end of the bone chunks that’d make the best bludgeons. They were rough. The minute divots and granules would probably ruin his hands even with the makeshift grips, but that just meant that the blokes on the receiving end would get it worse. 

Plastering an image of outward calm to his face, Olive stood tall against his own self-preservation instincts as he weaved between spine pillars and spooked civilians, seeking an individual, any individual that didn’t look ready to lay down or soil themselves. 

“And why aren’t you with the rest of your buds!?” 

He found two. A lanky human with black, shaggy hair and a shaggier beard that wouldn’t look out of place in a brawler’s pit and a pale, expressionless woman that was almost as short as he was. Her hair was a loose mop of white that nearly reached red eyes with strange, swirly pupils and dark marks beneath. She was consoling a child with moth wings when the shaggy-haired man decided to take out his frustration on her.  

The woman shrugged at him. “Not my ‘buds,’” she drawled in a scratchy voice. “They won’t like it if I do.”        

“What’s that supposed to mean? you’re with them, aren’t you? Hey!” He reached for her shoulder, but Olive got there first.

“Are you willing to fight if they reach us?” Olive asked the woman as he placed himself between the two. He pressed the larger chunk firmly in the shaggy-haired man’s outstretched hand and let go, prompting him to grab onto it with his other, though not without a questioning look. 

“I’d rather go before one of them,” Olive explained, indicating the moth boy with a jerk of his head. Of course, that was only half-true; the need to keep up appearances to himself motivated him just as much as his ethics. 

The shaggy-haired man considered Olive, then the line of fighters as their war shouts and the groaning of the dead grew nearer, then the woman who stared at him impassionately as her young charge hid his face behind her back. 

The man harrumphed. “Fine, call me Richard. Who am I gonna be an entree with?” 

Olive gave his name with a smile, then repeated his question to the woman. “Will you fight?”

She wore a dark hooded cloak with a ring of gray feathers adorning the neck, more pouches than he had fingers were either sewn into it or secured by a large leather belt. She nodded. “Zoe. This-” Zoe moved aside, bracing her hands against either of the moth boy’s shoulders “Is Timmy.” 

The boy, for his part, managed a wave before his courage failed him. He fluttered his wings behind Zoe, peeking at the two of them periodically.      

Olive didn’t hold it against him; most of the rescuees above his age were far less composed. “Capital. Richard, if you’d be kind enough to lend me those sleeves…” 

They managed to rally a dozen volunteers, directing the unwilling to be silent and pick a corner, some even listened.

Olive wasn’t all too confident in his field presence, but he learned long ago that speaking as if he had authority, or at least some modicum of a plan and asking nicely went a long way. Though many of the twitchy hands and nervous eyes they gathered may have just cast their lots to reclaim a sense of control, or as Richard put it, to, “give life one last finger for the road”. 

 Zoe refused a chunk of bone, letting her hands slip into the long sleeves of her robes as she held them aloft, five crimson strings spooled out from each. “I’m armed.”    

Timmy, for his part, clung to Zoe like a limpet until she managed to pry him away and all but shoved him into a run. For a moment, Zoe gave the retreating boy a half-smirk, though on her face it looked a tad disquieting.  

“We’ll have to be aggressive; mob them before they do the same to us,” Olive said. The acknowledgment of his fellows was less than enthusiastic, but they were committed now, and no one had a better plan. Olive paid Zoe a glance, she was a native, she ought to know more, if anyone. 

He got a nod. It was assurance enough. 

As they steeled their nerves, a glimmer of hope came through, the situation on the front seemed to stabilize. The ranged fire wasn’t half as thick and the soldiers’ enthusiasm gave way to dogged determination, but the undead lay in stacks four or five high at their thickest, slowing them considerably as they stumbled over the fallen.

Richard let out a chuff. “We might not have to get our hands dirty after ah- are you shitting me?” 

His relieved smirk flattened into a look of blank incomprehension and more than half of the volunteers turned tail before Olive could line up with what threw them for a loop. Six figures in red robes superficially similar to Zoe’s streaked towards them from across the ceiling, twisting this way and that to avoid arrows and spells. 

Soldiers reoriented and broke off, even at the cost of exposing themselves, but they weren't fast enough. The captain punched her fist into the air, managing to pull one down and into a nasty fight with herself and the ox woman with a thick length of golden chain summoned by a cry of “Lucent Lure!” One of the maniac hell geckos turned, clearly intending to help his comrade, but the one behind him shook her head. 

As one, they dropped, producing scepters made of skeletal hands clutching skulls twisted into expressions of agony. With incantations that hurt to hear, crimson streaks lept from five of the spine pillars that had yet to be broken and into the scepters' eye sockets. They’d apparently achieved their objective with that, turning to jump, twist, and adhere themselves to the ceiling again to make their escape, but not before releasing a fistful of zombies from the blank space within their sleeves. 

The only indication of surprise Zoe gave was slightly widened eyes as she swung her own sleeve at the slowest of the red-robbed necromancers; her strings stiffened into clawlike arcs, scoring deep gouges into her target’s back, a woman with short canine ears. She yelped in pain, falling into the clutches of a pack of soldiers eager to give her a very warm welcome.

Zoe didn’t stop to admire her handiwork. “Rise, Poppets,” she growled. 

Her pouches, all of them, burst open and a horde of anthropomorphic stuffed bunnies pulled themselves free of spaces that shouldn’t have accommodated their three-quarter meter forms. Button eyes tightened in effort as they rolled on the ground, pulling themselves up with the aid of not-so-comically oversized kitchen knives and bone saws. They fell upon the dead, stabbing and grinding them down with a viciousness that would have made Olive sorry for them if one of the red-eyed zombies hadn’t torn three of them apart and shambled towards Olive and Richard, who were the only ones who hadn’t fled at this point. 

By unspoken agreement, the pair backed up until there was no space between them and a defenseless gaggle of civilians. The zombie was a deer man of some kind; on top of the half of its head that remained sat a branching antler slick with gore and some silver links of shredded armor. Its left arm was reduced to strips of flesh and its femur jutted out of its left leg, crunching and popping with every step, but the thing was motivated by a force beyond reason. Everyone competent was too tied up or too far away to be of immediate assistance, but it was falling apart, surely they had a chance?      

“On my mark?” Olive suggested.

“Nah.” 

Olive was about to say they didn’t have time for second thoughts, but he’d misjudged Richard’s intent. He bounded towards the zombie, which let out a gurgle before he slammed his bone chunk home. 

Not to be outdone, or to let him get killed by merit of his own idea, Olive followed up. The thing fell under a rain of desperate blows, but it simply refused to die, scratching and kicking back at them with rabid, unshackled hatred.  

Even as they beat it to a literal pulp, the zombie earned a glancing swipe across Olive’s chest, drawing a pained hiss and more than a bit of his sackcloth. 

HP: 23

“Fuck!” Richard shouted between swings. He was covered in red now, they both were. 

“Agreed!” Olive huffed, more astonished than fearful at this point.

The zombie’s eyes flared scarlet. The same tingle in the air that came with Cecilia's healing magic clung to Olive’s senses, but here it carried with it a biting chill. 

“Nghoooouugh!” The zombie screamed in a voice that belied a disturbed intelligence breaching the surface.

It backhanded a bug-eyed Richard hard enough to send him tumbling across the stone floor then rounded on Olive, grabbing his arm before he even processed what happened. 

Crack! 

That wasn’t the zombie’s bone. 

HP: 17 

The Ode helpfully informed Olive of his rapidly shrinking life expectancy as black dots swarmed his vision. It was his turn to scream. Instinctively trying to dump the pain into an uplink that wasn’t there, he jerked his arm away only to immediately regret it when the zombie took the opportunity to plunge its hand into his stomach. 

HP: 8

Olive slammed his open palm against what was left of the zombie’s face. He wasn’t a gamer by any means, but he was familiar enough; he had a hunch the Ode would let him wield what it told him was his with a simple command, but in Arcova, leaving spellwork to a hunch ran the risk of destroying the caster’s body in the most forgiving of cases.

HP: 5

That was no longer a point of concern. 

“Spark bolt!”

A flare of sizzling gold lit the zombie’s head from the inside. Turning a not-so-living thing’s organs into overdone soup while it tried its best to remove his was a uniquely unpleasant experience, one that resisted proper description. The zombie, however, refused to stop, as did Olive.  

“Spark bolt!” 

“Spark bolt!”  

“Spark bolt!”

+1 exp 

+5 exp (deadly encounter bonus)

+ 25 Influence

+1 END

Olive did not lose consciousness, though without an uplink to calm his broken everything, he wished he had. No, instead, he felt the sickly warm shift of things that shouldn’t shift inside his belly as Richard disentangled him from the smoldering remains of the zombie. He felt every imperfection in the stone floor as Richard dragged him towards a wall and relative safety. He also felt incredibly daft but not completely unsatisfied.

The living outnumbered the dead now, free hands saw to the injured while the least exhausted of their group carefully herded the last zombies. The two red-cloaked villains that were left behind, however, fought madly.

Surrender was neither given nor requested. One parried the captain’s blade with a scythe, the other stood over two dead soldiers and held a failing barrier against a barrage of red, green, and white bolts slung by a pair of elves and a robed member of the Radiant Crux, unaware of a stuffed rabbit with a filet knife creeping up behind her.

Two straggler zombies caught an interest in Olive and Richard. Olive raised a limp hand while Richard uttered more curses than he knew existed, but it didn’t come to a fight. Crimson stings tore the first zombie apart while Cecila decapitated the other. 

“Olive, I’m sorry! Please don’t die!” Even though she said that, the mouse woman approached at a speed that may very well have robbed him of his last bits of HP if they collided. Olive tensed up, which given how “open” he was, felt as fun as one would imagine. Thankfully, she slowed in time, kneeling at his side to wash away the filth that didn’t belong to him with a word and numbing him hard enough to lose track of his tongue with another. Olive slurred something he didn’t quite understand himself. 

“Huh?” Cecilia asked. 

Zoe interpreted. “Not your fault. Didn’t duck.” 

Zoe shook her head, leaving Richard to recount their ill-advised stand. 

Cecilia twisted her tail and bore her teeth, her words came out as a chewed up, half-formed mess. “You wuh- why?! No. Save your breath, I don’t care! You’re alive and you’re going to stay that way, you dummy!” 

“The sanguine dead evolved before you could end it, you were unlucky,” Zoe said, idly peeling back the flaps of her pouches. It didn’t mollify Cecilia in the least bit, nor did the fact that the difference between Olive and Richard getting hurt, and several rescuees with less fight in them getting torn apart "might have" been down to that last zombie, it could have easily not gone that way, and they would never have a chance to know.

Strings snaked out of Zoe’s open pouches as she took a breath. “To me, Poppets.” Her stuffed army came trotting back, or rather, its four survivors did. One was more fuzz than fabric, riding home on the shoulders of another. The frown Zoe wore while her strings squeezed them in was the most emotion she’d displayed so far. 

Cecilia struck Olive as the kind of person that was nice to everyone. He was an animal of the same stripe, if with a tad less enthusiasm. As Zoe performed her incantation, however, Cecilia grimaced, pulling her ears flat as if noticing that the cat she let inside her house was, in fact, a bear. She tried to mask her reaction behind a strained smile, but it was too late. 

“Don’t know what you have against old girl, but things would’ve been hairier than a granny ape’s taint without her,” Richard said.  

Cecilia made a strangled squeak, though whether it was at the crass choice of imagery, or getting caught out, Olive didn’t know. She recovered well enough. “I don’t have anything against her! I’m sure she’s really sweet, just let me help my friend, alright?”   

Were they friends? It felt as though Cecilia had put some kind of claim on him. She was pushy but warm enough to not be unwelcome. If the show of familiarity rang any warning bells in Olive’s head, they were firmly beneath everything else that occurred in the past several minutes. 

“I’m sure you two did what you thought you had to,” Cecilia said. “but I’m still miffed at you! But I promised to protect you…”   

Between a teetering stream of apologies, possessive headpats, and gentle admonishments, Olive gleaned that his rescuers came prepared for small throngs of roaming undead, or even the odd monster, but nothing on the scale he witnessed.  

“Attack of opportunity?” Zoe mused, “Farm components are valuable. Not all of Rattle’s servants are above greed.” Zoe preempted the question both Olive and Richard were about to pose. “Patron of death, undeath, the End of Endings, and the End Unending.”

Richard shuddered. Olive was just starting to worry he was the only one who felt the capital letters.

“You think they’ll come back?” Richard asked, casting a worried glance at Cecilia’s glowing gauntlets as she held them over Olive’s stomach. It made him a little giddy inside; all he had to do was risk his life beside him and he already showed some level of care for his well-being. 

Zoe shook her head. “Unlikely.” She muttered something under her breath that sounded like “amateurs,” as the two enemy necromancers tried and failed to escape.

Cecilia invoked a steady chant, calling upon the light and the name of both the knights’ vaunted deities- or patrons, rather, ending with a “Lesser Healing I” then II. He wasn’t in any position to lean forward and he couldn’t exactly feel how together he wasn’t at the moment, but Cecila bit her lip and shook her head. She moved on to his arm, which mended with a crunch that he was very thankful he was numbed for before she stood. 

 “The bleeding’s stemmed, but you’re missing too many bits,” she said. 

HP 19/27

Olive chanced a quick peek at his status window. For almost dying, the Ode deigned to reward him with a single point of “endurance” which seemed to affect his health. An ugly red line kept the green bar representing his life from maxing out. He really was in some kind of immersion-tech game, who would have known not abusing his uplink for pleasure would leave him unprepared for the future?     

Zoe’s hand disappeared into her sleeve, returning with a bunch of fuzzy pink cotton. “It’ll last a week.” 

“No! Absolutely not!” said Cecila. “I mean, no, thank you, but there’s no need. We have better healers, I’m gonna get one, okay?” She walked backward, nervously eying the ball of fluff as if it would leap out and bite someone until Zoe put it back. On her way she swiftly reduced the reddish beginnings of several bruises across Richard’s body before patting Zoe down for injuries. “Stay with him, please.”     

Zoe watched her merge into a number of mages performing triage before covering her mouth with her long sleeve, “Phuphuphu.” 

Richard took up an unreadable expression. “Never met a gal with an unironically evil laugh.” 

This, of course, only made her laugh... harder? It was difficult to tell, she didn’t raise her tone much.

Olive tried to call her name, pushing his zombified voice into a question. 

“She’s fun. You’re fun,” She said, addressing Richard and Olive both. “I made the right choice.”