Cenotaph of Bones: Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Chapter 23: Feelings

“Get off me!”  Almost a dozen skeletons and one corpse had slipped around us already, and they had all piled on Jamila.  Her katanas were a whirlwind, removing limbs and heads as soon as they got within range.  Except for the corpse hanging on her back, gnawing on the top of her helm like a crazed monkey.  “Can somebody help me out here?!”

Before I could do anything, an arrow surrounded by a haze of wind qi blasted through the head of Jamila’s attacker and embedded itself in the stone floor a few paces away.  She gave Valerie a sharp nod of appreciation before returning back into the fray, swords spinning in a dance with no music.

I slammed my shield into the ground in front of me, and the spikes along the bottom held it in place.  When I took a step back, the newly-placed obstacle forced the undead to part around it to get to me.  I spun the solid metal spear like a staff, and then got to work.

Three skeletons came from my right, and a quick slash from the spearpoint separated skulls from spines.  Their bones collapsed into a jumbled pile, creating another obstacle to slow the enemies approaching from that side.

The two corpses that rounded the shield to the left were blasted back by an errant wave of wood qi unleashed by Chu.  They let loose a screeching sound that somehow managed to be both dusty and loud at the same time.  It was also the first time they had made a sound that showed they could feel pain.  The life qi didn’t truly harm them, but it must have interacted with the death qi holding their bodies together.  I would take any advantage I could get.

“They don’t like wood qi!”  I shouted it to my friends while coating my spear in a thin layer of energy.  “Use it to push them back!”  I used the butt of the spear to smash into the chest of the closest corpse, and spun it horizontally to bring the spearpoint into the temple of the second target.  The first one got tripped up by the falling body of the second, and I used the shaft of the spear like a stickball bat to remove his head.  It got some pretty good distance.

With the sudden burst of violence and change to wood qi, we quickly knocked them clear of the gate and I got a quick count of their remaining numbers.  The undead were diminished to somewhere around thirty.  Such diminished numbers should have made them hesitate, however the loss of so many didn’t seem to phase them.  Their actions so far told me they might be able to operate without direct supervision and grasp a modicum of tactics, but they didn’t comprehend a losing battle.  The death cultivator’s creations would fight without stopping, no matter the odds.  I just had to make sure the odds always favored us.

As the remaining undead reformed into orderly ranks, another explosion of lava erupted from their midst.  Valerie’s formation plate took down another six and made a great opportunity for us to attack.  I plucked my shield from the ground, and readied my spear in the opposite hand.  Valerie jumped down from her place on the wall and fell in behind Donny.  Without needing to say anything, the five of us quickly closed with the enemy.

I boosted my speed with a burst of qi.  It gave me the momentum to slam through the first two skeletons, sending limbs and rib cages flying.  I would have kept going if it weren’t for the next target in line being one of the tougher desiccated corpses.  It held together just long enough to get a spear through the eye socket, and the energy holding it together couldn’t withstand the tearing motion of me spinning sideways.  I now had a very disgusting decoration on the end of my spear, so I clubbed it into the skull of the next corpse in line.  It made a sound like two coconuts bonking together, and I had to fight the strong urge to laugh at the random moment of silliness.  Battles were funny like that sometimes.

The head decorating my spear didn’t hold together after I tried to repeat the same action, but it did manage to return both of the skeletons to true death.  A swipe with the sharp edge of my shield to the shoulder of another skeleton cleared out the immediate area around me, and I saw we were down to just a few enemies left standing.  I managed to kill one more of the corpses by crushing its skull with the butt of my spear, and then it was over.  They were dead.  Again.

“Well, that was fun.”  Chu was inspecting his gear for damage, but none was immediately obvious.  “What was up with them trying to bite us?  I had one drop his weapon in favor of getting a bite in, but it was obvious by that point none of them could get through the armor.  I don’t get it.  Do you think they have orders to bite people or something?”

“Whatever it means, it can’t be good.”  Donny was wiping the dust of dead things from his axe blade with a scrap of cloth.  “I have a bad feeling about this.  We should get back to the others, and let them know about the army marching around down here.”

“I hate losing all the progress we have made, but I have to agree.  Let’s finish up here and head back.”  I quickly picked up any weapons and items that survived the battle, but there weren’t many.  There were a few obsidian weapons I wanted to look at later, so I made sure to store them in the copper stud I was using to hold all my coin and valuable jewelry.  I did find it odd that there wasn’t a single valuable item anywhere left on the remains.  You would think at least one or two of the bodies would at least have something on them.  “Okay, let’s go.  And be ready for that gas attack.”

We had to take our time going back, mostly because we hadn’t cleared any of the side tunnels after setting off the trap.  And there were a lot of tunnels.  Most of them either circled back to the main tunnel, or were dead ends.  Two of them ran into natural caverns, and the damp from the water dripping down the stalactites had destroyed any evidence of what they had been used for by the former inhabitants.  I did find a rusty old pickaxe head that fell apart when I tried to pick it up.  If there had been a handle, it had long since rotted away to nothing.

Finally, we reached the area we had already searched, and our pace picked up.  It was hard to gauge time down here, but I think it was something close to four hours since we had fought the undead before we saw the light of the cavern.  The haze of smoke in the air as we approached was definitely a bad sign.

We were greeted by the sounds of the injured screaming in pain, and the smoky remains of the makeshift gate were covered in the bones of formerly ambulatory skeletons.  There were only a few spots of blood, meaning the captain and his men had suffered only minor casualties.

“Hey!”  A shout from atop the walls alerted those inside of our approach.  “They’re back!  And they ain’t dead, neither!”

There were intelligible shouts from within, and by the time we reached the gates the captain was there to greet us.

“We didn’t think we would ever see you again.  Not after what we saw, anyway.”  He pointed at the piles of bones and bodies surrounding the area.  “We barely held them back, and we had defenses to help us.”  He was leading us deeper into the abandoned village, so I pulled him into an empty building to question him.

“What happened while we were gone?”  I grabbed a chair from my storage belt and took a seat.  Everyone else copied me, and we were soon sipping on some kind of qi-enhanced wine Chu produced from somewhere.

“A few hours after you left, we all heard your horses start neighing and carrying on, like there was a pack of wolves nearby.”  He pointed through the empty doorway, back towards the gate.  “Then Shoop heard some kind of rattling noise coming from the tunnel you went through.  We went to check it out, and a whole bunch of those death cultivator puppets everyone hates to see came into the light.  Only we never saw the death cultivator controlling them.  He must have been hiding in the dark somewhere.  I don’t understand why, though.  He has to be the most powerful death cultivator I have ever heard of.  There must have been two or three hundred of them.  I had everyone get behind the walls, and we fought it out for over an hour.”

“That sounds a lot like what we went through.”  I pulled out one of the obsidian axes the biting ones had used.  “Did you see any of them using these?”

He took it from me, but shook his head.  “No, I don’t think so.  They all had old weapons, except for the one we knew.”

“The one you knew?”  Jamila leaned forward in her chair.  “What do you mean, the one you knew?”

“It was Kurban, one of the men who didn’t make it up the mountain.  When we saw him, we didn’t know what to do.”  He handed back the obsidian axe, and leaned back in his chair.  “That’s when the strange got even stranger.  Shoop ran out to try and save him or something, I don’t know.  It was pretty clear Kurban was already dead.  But Shoop ran out there anyway, and he fought through a bunch of those bone puppets until he made it to him.  Never seen him fight like that before.  It was almost like a single blow would knock down a skeleton, and they wouldn’t get back up until after he passed.  When he got there, Shoop was so tired he could barely lift his sword.  Instead of killing him, Kurban bit Shoop in the neck.  It took out a big chunk, and we didn’t think he was going to make it back.”  The captain pointed to where the neck met the shoulder, to indicate where his man had been bitten.  “Shoop managed it though.  He slipped right through them, almost like he wasn’t there.  We managed to get the bleeding stopped, but he hasn’t said a word since.  I think the whole thing broke his mind.”

“We would be happy to take a look at him if you would like.”  I pointed to Chu.  “My friend is a very skilled healer.”

“I would appreciate it.”  He gave Chu a sharp nod.  “Now, if you all will excuse me, I need to see to getting the gate repaired, in case they come back.”

“What do you mean, come back?”  I was suddenly on my feet without realizing it.  “Why would they come back?”

“Well, that’s the other strange thing.”  He put away his chair and turned to leave.  “Not long after Shoop made it back, they gave up and left.  There were still over a hundred of them out there.  We were lucky they stopped when they did, otherwise we might have been overrun.”

As he left, my friends and I looked at one another.  Something wasn’t right.  The undead we had fought were completely dedicated to bringing us down, until none were left standing.  Like Donny said earlier, I had a very bad feeling about this.