Chapter 1029: They Don't Look Dead (Patreon)

With the first chance to truly flex his perception after having his astral kingdom sealed, Jason expanded his magic and aura senses. Immediately, a frown creased his forehead.

“The range and clarity of my perception have been crippled.”

“Your avatar is sealed away from your soul, Mr Asano, forcing it to produce an artificial aura, like a magic item. I submit, however, that ‘crippled’ is an exaggeration. Your aura strength, and with it your perception, is diminished, but your new limits are typical for an essence user at your level of progression.”

“Only because I have Gordon’s ability to boost my aura strength. It’s not something I’ve much needed in the past.”

“Then, instead of complaining, perhaps you should simply be grateful for his help?”

Jason let out a sigh.

“Yeah,” he conceded. “I’m not used to being behind the curve with my aura.”

“Adversity is an opportunity to build strength, Mr Asano.”

“That’s true. I really shouldn’t complain when I can still extend my perception for kilometres. Not that there’s much to sense.”

Grey clouds hung low in the sky, heavy with the promise of rain. Uneven ground was covered in scrabbly grass, muted green fading to straw yellow. Rocks poked reluctantly from the ground here and there, and there were scattered patches of wildflowers in washed-out purple.

“This place is strange,” Jason observed. “Colin, what do you think?”

Jason held out his hand and blood sprayed from his palm. It was a shot of bright red against the paleness of the world around them, as if the realm itself had been leached of colour. The blood coalesced into Colin, the familiar taking his blood clone form.

“I don’t like it,” Colin said, looking around with his face bunched up in distaste. “We’re the only living things here.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Jason agreed. “Normally, any place is full of life, even when you can’t see it. Birds, insects, adorable little creatures, hiding in burrows. There’s none of that here. Even the plants don’t register as alive to my senses.”

Gordon manifested out of the air.

“This is not a place of life,” he said, his angelic chorus of a voice emitting from the orbs floating around him.

“He is correct,” Shade said. “This was ever a place of repose for those whose ending has come and gone.”

Jason looked over to the crumbling castle in the distance, and beyond it to the impossibly huge sword jutting from the ground. The open ground made for long sightlines and both were beyond the reach of Jason’s senses.

“We do have signs of occupancy,” Jason said. “Not recent occupancy, from the looks of it, but should we take a peek? Maybe figure out what we’re dealing with?”

“I don’t like this place,” Colin said again and grabbed Jason’s hand. His body melted into blood and seeped through Jason’s skin, being comically sucked up as if by a vacuum cleaner. Once it was done, Jason set out, flanked by Shade and Gordon.

“What do you think we’re in for?” Jason asked.

“This is a place of death,” Shade said. “We are all familiar with what happens when death is corrupted.”

“You think we’ll run into undead?”

“Yes, although in what form I cannot say. I would have anticipated the more ephemeral varieties, such as wraiths and spectres, but the castle and sword suggest that things will not be so simple and obvious.”

“Yeah, that’s what I think when I hear ‘wraiths and spectres.’ Simple and obvious.”

“Would you like me to scout ahead, Mr Asano?”

“No, until we know what we’re dealing with, let’s stick together. I know you can afford to lose a body or two, but who knows what strange abilities the things here might have. I don’t want them using one of your bodies as a conduit to hurt you when I’m too far away to help.”

***

Rather than hasten across the moor, Jason took his time. He moved oddly, shuffling to one side and then the other, or doing what looked like an awkward little dance.

“I didn’t realise how much I had been unconsciously using my aura,” he said. “Even just moving my body normally, I’ve been shifting myself around, adjusting how much pressure my weight applies to what I’m standing on. How much do you think I weigh, now?”

“Around three-to-four-hundred kilograms is normal for a gold-ranker,” Shade said. “A little more for larger individuals, or those with enhanced physical strength like Mr Geller and Miss Farrah. But remember that all high-ranking essence users can levitate themselves, even without aura-based telekinesis like yours. Managing weight is not the problem, however. Managing strength is. Even with being that heavy, every gold-ranker’s strength-to-weight ratio is sorely out of balance and you must all learn to adapt. Your ability to move objects with your aura has become an advantage so ingrained that you don’t even realise that you’re doing it.”

“I guess monsters have an edge there, with most being much heavier than essence users. Is that why they tend to get bigger with rank?”

“A question better saved for Mr Standish, as I have never conducted an in-depth study of monster physiology. I can tell you that messengers approach this issue in the same fashion as you, heavily employing their auras to regulate the motion of their bodies. It is what makes them such powerful physical combatants. Essence users compensate with a combination of powers and technique, with varying levels of success. Resolving the issue directly with telekinesis or a similar effect has fewer drawbacks than most.”

“And now I have to actively relearn a behaviour I’ve been building up unconsciously for decades.”

“And through learning we grow, Mr Asano. Adversity is—”

“—an opportunity for strength, I know. I love a good training montage as much as the next guy, Shade, but we’ve kind of got some stuff going on.”

He stopped short, refocusing his attention on the castle still more than a dozen kilometres away.

“Okay, I sense the undead.”

“Are you able to determine what manner of undead they are?” Shade asked.

“Numerous,” Jason replied. “That’s what kind of undead they are. That castle is bursting at the seams.”

“Do you believe they noticed your senses reaching out to them?”

The walls of the castle were suddenly painted with bodies that crawled out of windows, over parapets and out of holes in the crumbling structure. Pouring out like water from a spring, they flowed in the direction of Jason and his familiars.

“Yes,” Jason said. “I think they noticed.”

***

As they grew close enough to make out, it became clear that the approaching undead were not uniform in nature. The largest contingent looked like zombies, skeletons or something in between, but these were not mindless shamblers. They sprinted forward with ravening fury, ragged clothes and rusted armour hanging from their bodies. Some held weapons that looked as if they would break the moment they struck anything.

Scattered heavily amongst the humanoid undead were things much stranger. Some were ghostly figures that looked like humans, elves or other humanoid species. Others amongst the ethereal beings were translucent monstrosities with warped, unnatural features.

Many of the physical undead were twisted and macabre variations of recognisable beasts. A full herd of horses had gaping holes in their flesh, maggots spilling from the wounds as they thundered across the moor. Their faces had eerily human features, leaving it possible to make out depraved expressions of manic hunger.

There were several giants standing half the height of the castle, stitched together with limbs grotesquely misplaced in both location and number. Their immense size was too much for any of the castle doors and they squeezed themselves out through the larger damaged sections, brickwork crashing down as they forced their way free.

Jason’s eye was caught by what looked mostly like a mammoth, its long fur matted with black ichor. In place of a head it had an overlong, prehensile trunk. It used the trunk to snatch up other undead and feed them to a massive mouth that took up most of its back.

Jason stood between Gordon and Shade as the hideous wave flooded across the moor towards them. The castle became a clown car as impossible numbers kept pouring out endlessly, far more than it should have been able to hold.

“You coming out for the fight, buddy?” Jason cajoled.

A leech emerged from the skin of Jason’s neck to sit on his shoulder. It shook its head firmly before going back, leaving only a slight smear of blood behind. Jason conjured his cloak and drew his sword.

“Just the three of us then.”

***

At gold-rank, the number of different afflictions Jason could deliver approached the absurd. His core effects had been with him from the beginning, escalating damage that slowly but surely annihilated his foes. As he ranked up, additional afflictions became more niche in what they had to offer. Marshal of Judgement tracked enemies while Blood from Stone could make even a ghost bleed. Tainted Meridians made the victim’s powers more costly while they also literally bled out their mana. One of the more specialised afflictions was one Jason had learned from the Pallimustus goddess Death.

Ghost Fire did nothing to most enemies, but the silver-grey ghostly flames were anathema to the undead. Ignoring form, power and protection, the ethereal inferno tore through the horde like a bushfire through drought country, spreading wildly and burning anything in its path. Jason barely touched the undead horde before it was tearing through the unliving monstrosities.

What quickly became evident was that the fire, as destructive as it seemed, was not leaving behind scorched and annihilated corpses. Instead, what remained were people, unconscious but seemingly alive. Jason could hear their breathing and feel the warmth of their bodies. Once-ragged clothes were now clean and intact while armour was no longer rusted and dented. Even their physiology was changed, with bizarre undead deformities undone. The mammoth Jason spotted earlier was now a giant fuzzy elephant with a loud but adorable snore.

“What is going on here?” he wondered aloud as the ghostly flames continued their work, even as undead continued to pour from the castle. “How does fire fix clothes?”

“It was magic ghost fire you learned to use from a goddess,” Gordon pointed out.

“Yeah, but it’s repairing armour and undoing bizarre deformities. Except for those things, which were less horrific as undead.”

Shade looked to where Jason was pointing at a cluster of two-headed horse lizards.

“They are heidels, Mr Asano, and they’re meant to look like that.”

“Nothing is meant to look like that.”

“Mr Asano, of all the unnatural abominations and macabre monstrosities that you have encountered across multiple worlds, how is it that these normal animals are what draw your ire and disgust?”

“They’re like dudes who spend the whole convention hanging around the booth babes: they’re gross and it’s not okay.”

“Mr Asano, there haven’t been booth babes at conventions for decades.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know that. I haven’t been to a convention in decades.”

“Oh, so that wasn’t you at Dragon Con last year, dressed as yourself but in an unconvincing cloak to see if anyone would recognise you?”

“Uh, nope.”

“I have to wonder who I was following around, then.”

“I have no idea what you were doing,” Jason told him. “You need to get your life together.”

Shade did not have eyebrows to raise, yet somehow perfectly conveyed the sense of glaring at Jason from under them. After clearing his throat in an unconvincing display of innocence, Jason awkwardly turned his attention back to the undead horde. The flames were consuming the undead as swiftly as they could pour from the castle, leaving sleeping people and creatures to pile up outside its walls.

“What do you think is going on here?” Jason asked. “Why are they coming back to life?”

“They are not,” Shade said. “These people are dead.”

“They don’t look dead.”

“That is because they are souls in the afterlife. It appears that the ghost fire has purged the corruption affecting them and restored their original state. Can you sense any life coming from them?”

Jason focused his freshly diminished senses.

“No, now that you say it. Is it just me, or is the whole castle catching on fire?”

They watched as the ghost flames consumed the castle as if it was an undead in and of itself. Like the undead, it was not destroyed by the flame but restored, becoming an intact and impressive edifice.

“This happened in Voltron,” Jason said. “The Castle of Lions got trashed and immediately got replaced with a better castle.”

“Episode five: Princess Joins Up,” Gordon added.

“It was that soon in the run, wasn’t it? You know, some of those early episodes were more confronting than this undead army. Don’t get me wrong, I love some specifically lion Voltron, but I’m glad they moved past the nipple-oriented weapon systems of the early robeasts.”

“Mr Asano, I recommend turning our attention back to the topic at hand.”

“Nipples?”

“Being in a broken afterlife fighting an army of undead. I would specifically like to end any discussion of robot nipples.”

“I think they were technically cyborgs,” Jason said.

“Actually, there was little unity to the origins of the robeasts,” Gordon clarified. “They were a combination of monsters, cyborgs, robots and mechs with no unifying parameters beyond being deployed to combat Voltron and its allies.”

“Important as it was to clear that up,” Shade said, “I will again suggest we turn our attention back to the matter at hand.”

“This looks pretty sorted,” Jason said. “At this point, I think we just wait for these souls to wake up so we can have a chat. It would be nice to get an idea of what’s going on.”

“I believe I can help with that,” a voice said from behind them and they turned around. In front of them was an elf with brown skin and darker brown hair, flecked with green. Jason gave Gordon a scolding look.

“How do you have eyes doing circles around your body and not notice her sneaking up on us?”

Previous Next