(5.2) Beneath the Surface

Within minutes, the group has crossed half the necropolis and has holed themselves inside a multi-floor storage building. They quickly block and seal every ground floor entrance from the inside and out.

"Shouldn't we have done that after  checking if this place is safe?" Phoebe wipes the sweat from her brow and reclines against the wall. "What about Mirra and the kid? What happened to them?"

"We're here; it's clear!" Mirra's voice rings from upstairs. She pokes her head over the wooden railing of the first floor to look at every one. "This kid is a seriously next-level necromancer, I tell ya. He picked me up with some shadow spider thing. Then we started air-sniping all those skeletons as we swung through the air. Didya know that was possible? It's such an OP class. We even took care of the rest of the Ogre spiders!"

"Woah, how'd you guys get up there?" Phoebe fans herself as she looks up at her friend.

"Open window. Don't worry, nothing's getting through there while Ogre's standing guard." Winter calmly walks down the stairs to join everyone else on the ground floor. "We've still got time before sundown, but there's a whole bunch of Dead between us and the top of that tower."

With the efficiency of a well-written spell, while Winter and the adventurer pair were talking, the soldiers had shuffled around the tools and broken furniture within the warehouse to form an impromptu meeting room.

The platoon leader directed soldiers to pair up and guard the barricaded entrances and for half of the soldiers to secure the upstairs.

Aki follows them up to find a dusty open space with busted equipment and tools. Broken caskets and old embalming equipment lay scattered across the room. Standing vigil, just as Winter said, is the necromantic ogre spider. It shifts slightly to look at her and the soldiers before returning to its duty.

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(Tactician Lv. 1 - Insight granted)

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"Oh… gross." Aki hesitantly approaches the spider entity and presses a hand to one of its limbs. The magic sequence making it up unravels itself in her mind.

It's highly advanced but temporary. Plus, it is actively draining its summoner's mana. Even without this fact, it only has a few hours at most before crumbling. If everyone moved together, this thing would become a liability.

There's no guarantee Winter could get his hands on another, and so far he hadn't pulled anything else out so it's likely the spider was his only necromancer servant.

A thin, inky hand pierces the floorboards next to Aki's foot. Shouting and battle cries come from downstairs. Another hand busts through the boards. It grabs hold of a soldier's ankle and attempts to force them through the hole.

The soldier is too big, and the hole too small.

His companions grab hold of his arm while another stabs their spear into the monstrous limb.

More shouts and an ear-piercing roar of pain follow.

An amalgamation of half-rotten flesh, sticky with an inky red substance covering a mess of faces of all sorts of races, bursts through the floor now. With a wide hole opened in the floor, the soldier is dragged below.

One of the faces, a humanoid type with a massive, drooping eye, swings toward Aki and Ogre. It has no lips, its skin and muscles bulbous and melting from the skull. The face clacks its teeth together.

She's nearly certain that if its face were normal, it would be screaming.

Ogre hisses and lunges at the amalgamation. Several faces turn their attention from the attacking soldiers and bite at the summon.

It gets shredded in seconds.

The soldiers on the far side are fair, only slightly better than the summon. Magically enchanted armour defends them, but the brute force of deteriorating therian skulls damages their weapons, crushing weak points in their armour and smashing one soldier into the wall.

Mana visibly manifests and fractures upon impact. His scream melds with the monsters' own, building in volume, higher and higher. The soldiers try in vain to rescue their comrade, but the monster ignores their attacks.

Bile and blood squirt and gush from its amalgamated body. Despite the damages, a revalin skull moves to the front. It compresses its veiny neck and slingshots itself into the soldier's head, turning it into a bloody mess.

The remaining soldiers cry out, swinging their weapons with renewed vigour. Meanwhile, a humanoid, revalin, wolf, and lizalo skull slither out of the body towards Aki.

"Shockwave!"

An explosive force originating from Aki's amulet sweeps the surroundings. The old stone walls shudder, and the wooden floorboards crack and break even more, piercing the amalgamations body. The monster itself recoils from the force and slams into the far wall, stabbing itself into the broken floorboards.

Neither the soldiers nor herself are safe, getting slammed against the walls and wreckage of the room with incredible force. The ensuing spell damage causes her amulet to fall from her grasp and slip down the hole in the broken floor.

Still, Aki's attack was far from enough.

Bleeding, growling, and shivering, the amalgamation starts to pull itself free.

"Downstairs! Regroup!" A commanding male voice shouts. The platoon leader, if Aki had to guess.

Heeding their leader's command, the soldiers stab at the monster a few more times as they retreat. Aki is the first one down to her allies. The same monster greets them below. More specifically, the bottom half of the monster that attacked them above.

If it were possible, the bottom half was more horrifying of a sight.

Arms of all sorts of beings wriggle and squirm. Some swipe aggressively at her allies but even more writhe as though in unimaginable pain. Faces began to appear amidst the glistening mass of flesh and bone. It roared. Howled. Groaned. Cried.

Whatever it was, the sound was haunting.

From outside, Aki heard responding shrieks from the Dead they had outran not long ago. The horde was closing in and the safe lead they worked for was disappearing.

The monster was acting like a beacon. They'd be there all day if they didn't kill it now and escape.

She scans the room, looking for her amulet. She tries to trace it with magic, but the miasma of the monster is so overwhelming all she can feel is death.

Aki urgently ducks and dodges as she runs around the room. Her allies fight valiantly, but the platoon's numbers fall from injury to injury. Phoebe and Mirra throw spells and fists with all they can, but the monster barely reacts. Aki growls in anger, considering using the Briarwood axe in this situation.

That is until she notices steel reflecting the light from one of the soldier's spells being used to illuminate the warehouse.

Her amulet is wrapped around one of the monster's many arms.

"Someone! Destroy the arms on the far side. My amulet is stuck to it. I can't use magic without it!"

The monster responds to her and immediately swats at its attackers before swinging its mass of writhing flesh at the defenceless Aki.

All at once, the platoon pincers the monster. Piercing it, blasting it, and slicing it with magic and weapons. Mirra punches a particularly bulbous part of its body, causing bile to explode and cover the wall.

Phoebe launches sharpened stones where Aki had directed, ripping heads, limbs, and boils from the monstrosity.

One of the stones rips the arm carrying her amulet and pierces it against the wall. Aki hops and scoots through the flailing monster. It strikes her a few times, but nothing bad enough to injure her.

The necromantic spider Aki had seen torn apart earlier stands next to Winter. It lunges at the monster over and over again. Each time it gets torn apart, and each time, Winter re-summons it from underfoot. Handily, it serves to open a path for her.

Finally, she's reached the wriggling arm. Disgusted, she takes hold of her amulet and blasts it to pieces.

"Where did it come from?" Aki shouts. She narrowly dodges a bladed arm the monstrous entity is swinging. "If I know where it came from, I might be able to figure out what it is!"

The commanding voice from before shouts in response. "Seeing it isn't enough? It burst through the floor from some sort of casket!"

"Casket monster, casket monster… It's a gashuku, cover me!" She hops over a limb, narrowly dodging another limb that gets redirected thanks to Winter's summon.

She digs through her bag and pulls out book after book as she approaches the monster. Her allies deflect and blast any attack that so much as twitches in her direction, allowing Aki to reach the hole it's stretching from.

Inside, she sees a small black casket. A pile of bones and torn clothes fill the casket to the brim. As if body after body had been shoved inside that small space. The miasma of the gashuku is richly concentrated here, obstructing much of her view from how dark it is.

A wide, pale face with massive, glassy eyes and a smile too big for its lips spurts from the miasma. Its appearance is so fleshy it's uncanny. It blinks and stretches to meet her face-to-face.

Had this been a year ago, Aki would have surely screamed and ran in terror. Now, she was merely frozen in fear.

Like any experienced slayer of incomprehensible horror, Aki did the only reasonable thing she could do.

She punched the overly-fleshed face with a mana-boosted fist.

The gashuku recoils, causing the rest of its body to shudder. Pieces of the monstrous aberration fall apart or melt away after Aki's attack. Seeing it weaken, everyone renews the assault with increased morale.

It starts to fall apart and, in desperation, releases a cloud of miasma at the cost of its strength. The two adventurers and the remaining platoon members descend into severe coughing fits as they struggle to remain standing. Still, enough strength pulses through their bodies, unwilling to fall without a fight.

Winter and his summoned spider are undeterred. They put the pressure on, causing the pale face to slink away from Aki and strike directly at them. The soldiers aren't soldiers if they weren't prepared for something like this. One of the swordsmen slashes at the extending neck. Blue light envelops his sword as it arcs through the air.

The monster's neck is sliced, but the attack doesn't cleanly cut through.

Sheer numbers make up for the incomplete cut. Several other soldiers were already slashing and hacking with their swords, axes, and pikes. The sheer violence of the black liquid splattering everywhere is astonishing.

Within moments, the pale face is separated from its body, causing the mass of flesh to squelch noisily on the floor as it loses strength. Dark bile gurgles from open wounds. Various faces and limbs wriggle purposelessly now that nothing controls them.

The gashuku is dead.

However, the struggle has yet to end. Outside, the droning of the Dead sounds close now. If they didn't get moving now, forget completing the mission before nightfall, they'd all die from sheer numbers before the next morning.

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(Tactician Lv. 1 - Insight granted)

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"You Acolyte's really do know everything about these things," says one of the soldiers, huffing and puffing from the battle.

"Uh… yeah. We gotta get going, though." Aki looks between the adventurers, Winter, and the soldiers. "I came up with a plan. We'll never make it as we are. So, we four should take Winter's Spider to the tower. In the meantime, your platoon holds ground and makes the Dead divide their attention between us."

"That's exactly what I was thinking," Winter adds. He summons his necromantic ally again, looking larger than it did minutes before. "The necromancy spell on them is simple. They're programmed to go after intruders. But that thing in the tower is the source of their spell, so they'll act to try and prevent its destruction."

Winter climbs onto his spider's back, beckoning for Aki and the adventurers to follow.

"Meaning, if they have two groups of intruders as targets, one that's going to the tower but isn't destroying anything, and another that isn't going to the tower but is destroying everything, it's possible the spell instructions will act in conflict with each other."

"A strike team with the sole purpose of destroying the target and a larger team drawing fire…" The platoon leader nods slowly. He looks over at one of his soldiers, who holds up a mechanical dial.

"We've got three hours until sundown. I'm not a fan of this idea, but it's all we have at this rate. Alright, new mission objectives are a-go."

The soldiers regroup, professionally moving behind the four as Aki and the others soar from the balcony opening atop Winter's Ogre.

Beneath them, Aki sees armoured skeletons, putrid corpses, and other monsters she's not entirely sure of rushing into the necropolis from the main path. Some look up and launch attacks at them with little success.

Ogre is surprisingly nimble and propels itself through the air with its webs. It hops from rooftop to rooftop, taking drastic measures to protect its riders.

Explosions and battle cries sound behind the four. Looking back, Aki sees massive spells yielding devastating results bursting from the warehouse.

It seems now that they don't need to save their energy for fighting their way to some necromantic power source; the entire platoon is pulling out all the stops.

"They're giving it their all right now," Mirra laughs out loud. "Let's make sure we do the same!"

A bolt of necrotic energy pierces one of Ogre's limbs, causing its entire body to rumble as though it were in danger of breaking apart. More spells and even projectiles fly at them, causing Winter to abandon a direct line to the top of the tower.

Instead, Winter carefully directs Ogre closer and closer to one of the gaping holes in the tower walls. Since they can't go straight to it, at the very least, Winter can get them as close as possible to the top.

"Hang on!" Winter warns the women just as a massive fireball splashes against Ogre.

An echoing screech of pain comes from the shadow spider as it wraps itself around the four. Somehow, Ogre manages to use the attack as propulsion to help it direct itself into the old stone walls of the tower, all while securely holding its riders in its limbs.

Boom!