by Hugo Huesca
-It allows the Dungeon Lord to create and control dungeons, as per the limitations of his Dungeon Screen.
Energy Drain: None.
IMPROVED Reflexes - Allows the owner to experience increased reaction time in small bursts.
-Basic status elevates reaction speed to a degree dictated by the owner’s Agility, for a duration of 3 seconds per use.
Energy Drain: Activated. High.
RESIST SICKNESS: Basic - Allows its owner to resist disease and sickness.
-Basic status allows the owner to resist non-magical sickness as if they had Endurance of 15 in optimal conditions (clean, well-fed, rested).
SPELLCASTING: Basic (I) - Domains: general. Forbidden: Healing - Represents the owner’s magical ability.
-Basic status allows the caster to use and learn all basic related spells of their domain. Extra ranks improve each individual spell’s characteristics, such as range or damage.
-Allowed spells: 1 basic per day + 1 basic spell due to Dungeon Lordship.
Energy Drain: Active. Varies per Spell.
SPELL LIST
Minor Order - Command. The caster forces a target creature to follow a simple order as long as said order is not immediately against the creature’s moral code or presents a threat to its life.
ELDRITCH EDGE - ENCHANTMENT. The caster adds a magical flame to the blade of a weapon. This flame makes the weapon magical for the duration, allowing it to bypass weak magical defenses.
Duration: 1 minute per Spellcraft rank.
MURMUR’S REACH - COMMAND (MANTLE). The caster possesses a minion located in the same dungeon as the caster. The caster’s body is left defenseless during this time.
Duration: Ten minutes per Spellcraft rank.
THAT “TWO SPELLS PER DAY” limitation was getting on his nerves. Lavy had explained to him how the Spellcasting talent doubled as a skill, in that it also had ranks that could be raised by practice and study. Raising those ranks would earn him more spells per day, but it wasn’t easy. Lavy herself had barely had enough time to gain her first rank before Kael’s dungeon went belly-up.
Ed decided he would add in some magic practice following Kes’ training. The combination promised brutal effort, but his magic was currently his best defense against Fighters and professional warriors.
If he survived tonight, that is.
On the other hand, there was something he could do. He had a hundred experience points saved up, and last time he checked, he’d earned a couple interesting options. Since there had been no reason to spend the points, he’d been reluctant to use them until he had raised his attributes and skills, but Kharon had changed the circumstances.
I’ll have to buy a couple talents after I figure out what I’m up against, Ed decided.
He went down the passageway, ignoring the skulls and the bones, sword at the ready.
What could he expect of Ivalian undead? When he had played Ivalis Online, he had cleared one or two undead-themed dungeons. There had been a mid-level vampire Dungeon Lord that had killed his friend Mark’s first character and resurrected it as a thrall…
I really hope that Kharon didn’t throw me into a vampire lair without proper equipment, Ed thought. If there were vampires in the catacombs, he was as good as dead. Besides the many powers a vampire had, they were heavily resistant to normal types of damage. Ed had no blessed or magical weapons, and as a Dungeon Lord, he doubted he could call the Light gods for help.
From what he could recall, the variety within undead was immense. Wights, zombies, skeletons, flesh golems, vampires, wraiths, specters, liches, mummies, and a very long etcetera. All undead shared the same basic array of weaknesses: they took extra damage from fire, sunlight harmed them in varying degrees, they were vulnerable to holy magic and silver weaponry… but they also shared a few special powers. For example, they were immune to fear, couldn’t be sneak attacked, could see in the dark, and were more powerful in it.
If Kharon had given him a warning, Ed would’ve at least ordered his drones to scour the hills for silver ore. With Heorghe’s help, maybe Ed could’ve improved his short sword to hurt undead.
The Boatman’s decision to send him in without any kind of backup had limited Ed’s options greatly. He’d need to find the woman, locate the exit with her help, and get the hell out of dodge while avoiding combat altogether.
The passageway brought Ed in front of a door. The door was reinforced with thick iron bars and secured by a heavy lock. A quick examination revealed that Ed could open the lock without a key—it was broken.
Ed’s other option, besides trying the door, would be to keep following the corridor and see where it led.
Following gamer logic everywhere, Ed decided that the evidence of danger meant he was on the right track and opened the door.
He saw a cramped room with old, broken coffins strewn in rows. The air carried rot and was heavy with dust. Also, about six corpses stood stupidly in the middle of the chamber, staring at nothing with their empty eye-sockets. Their bodies were partially mummified, old and dry and with the leathery skin barely covering the bone, which was exposed in some parts. Ed saw ribs and spines, but no internal organs: they had rotten away long ago.
The zombies turned as one toward the sound of the door opening and Ed found himself staring eye-to-socket with one of the undead beings. Stiff extremities rose in his direction, a terrible groan rasped out of dead throats, and mouths opened to reveal black and yellow teeth without a tongue in sight.
As one, the six creatures shuffled in Ed’s direction.
Ed, with deliberate movements, closed the door as softly and as firmly as he could.
Then he added his weight to the wooden frame. “Fuck everything about this,” he said.
Intellectually, he had been exposed to the concept of zombies since he was little. Like many people his age, he had fantasized a couple times about surviving the zombie apocalypse, facing hordes of undead armed only with a shotgun and a baseball bat, and living from the land while protecting entire towns of scantily clad women.
He had killed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of undead while playing videogames. He had seen them get mowed down by the score in movies. He had been exposed so often to the concept of zombies that he had lost the fear of them. They were jokes, nowadays, or props for low-budget movies.
He glanced at his hands and tried to will them to stop shaking. They’re only zombies, he thought. But seeing a zombie in pop culture was one thing. Another very different thing, was to stumble across a bunch of reanimated corpses in real life.
The idea of zombies hadn’t come out of nowhere; since the dawn of time, mankind had been exposed to death and feared it. The sight of a corpse produced an instinctual reaction, deep within the reptilian part of the brain, that screamed wrongness and danger.
The kind of fear awakened by the sight of the dead wasn’t the kind that could be shrugged off by clenched teeth and a motivational speech. It was a statement, not a suggestion. It admitted no arguments.
The corridor it is, Ed thought.
He heard the distant clash of metal against metal, and screams. Battle screams, punctuated here and there by the unmistakable sound of agony. The noise came from the other end of the zombie-infested room and didn’t seem far off.
Kharon had told Ed that an innocent woman would die here without his help.
Ed glanced at the corridor. The sounds of battle intensified. Was he willing to risk an innocent life because he was scared?
On the other hand, and this was almost as horrifying as the zombies, Ed realized that Kharon’s decision to motivate him with a maiden-in-distress gambit was about to work flawlessly.
“Fuck,” Ed said. He smashed the door open to reveal the dry husk of a man nose-to-nose with him, dead mouth hungering for living flesh. “Fuck!”
Ed punched it in the face.
The zombie collapsed like a sack of bricks and Ed vaulted over the creature. The other five stood close by, a wall of arms and op
en hands extended in Ed’s direction.
“Fuck!” Ed dodged and darted to the right. He grabbed the extended hand of the right-most zombie and pulled the creature toward him, then he punched it square in the jaw. The zombie didn’t go down, and the impact almost broke Ed’s wrist. He stepped toward the zombie and shoved him—was it even a him?—into the others.
Instead of the zombies going down like Ed had hoped, the creatures acted as a cushion for each other, and the monster in front of Ed merely took a startled step back before grabbing Ed by the forearms with an iron-like grip.
“Fuck!” Ed pushed and shoved the zombie away as hard as he could, then dragged himself away from the remaining creatures’ reach. He fought the zombie while teeth snapped inches away from his nose. The undead wasn’t as strong as Ed, but it was tenacious, and Ed couldn’t make it let go no matter how hard he tried.
Whiteness threatened to drown his vision, and Ed realized he was about to lose his mind to panic.
He stumbled against a coffin and fell, bringing the zombie with him. Ed’s left wrist burned when the zombie managed to get a lucky chomp as they fell.
“Fuck!” Ed used his leather bracers to fill the creature’s mouth and push the dead face away from him.
Zombie and man rolled on the floor while the other undead shuffled their way, trying stupidly to wade through the coffins.
You’ve faced death before, Ed desperately reminded himself.
Long before coming to Ivalis, he had seen Uncle Jonah’s torn body as the morticians had stitched it back together. When he was older, he had buried his parents—one after the other—and had been left to fend for himself in an uncaring world.
And he had faced death when he had driven a flaming sword deep into the open maws of a mindbrood.
This… this low-leveled mob was nothing in comparison.
Green light danced on the undead’s face as Ed activated his Evil Eye. The cold anger of the Mantle drowned the screeches of the reptilian part of his brain. Fear of death may have been an absolute statement for any man, but Ed wasn’t just a man anymore.
He was a Dungeon Lord.
“Release me,” he ordered the zombie, his voice emanating with power and authority. The zombie let go of him instantly as if struck by lightning. His eye sockets glared at Ed scornfully, as if demanding an explanation.
Turns out that the minor order spell worked flawlessly against a being with barely any Spirit attribute.
Ed stood up, picked his sword from the floor, and turned to the rest of the zombies as they approached. He glanced down and walked away from the group while he counted in his head.
One, two, three… when he reached sixteen seconds, he felt the magical energies of his body focus once again.
“Eldritch Edge!” Tongues of green flame emerged from Ed’s sword hand and enveloped the blade in an inferno of arcane energy. Now he reclaimed the ground that he had given. The zombie that had bitten him was still down.
Perfect.
Ed brought the weapon down hard atop the fallen zombie’s head. The impact splintered the undead’s skull and collapsed it like a clay sphere crushed with a hammer. The creature convulsed and rolled on the floor as the necromantic energies that animated him left his body.
The spell eldritch edge enchanted the blade as a magical weapon and added fire damage to it. And undead were both vulnerable to magic and weak against fire.
And the best part? The spell lasted for an entire minute.
The rest of the zombies shuffled his way. Ed received them with a welcoming smile.
Green flames danced over his head when he raised his sword, and he felt the magical heat on his skin as he brought the blade down against the nearest monster. The strike hit true and sent the creature sprawling down as green fire caught and began to spread on the rotten cloth that covered the zombie’s body.
Ed lacked Kes’ technique or strength, but he had played America’s pastime enough to know how to hit hard with a baseball bat. And a human head bobbling slowly up and down made for a much easier target than a fastball.
Ed swung, over and over again, bringing a zombie down with each strike. Green flames spread over dead flesh and collapsed wood. Shadows danced in the walls of the ossuary.
A mummified woman managed to crawl unnoticed to Ed’s feet and took a hard bite, which was thankfully deflected by Ed’s leather armor. Ed swung his sword down, like a mace, and caved the zombie’s skull in.
His shoulders burned with effort when the eldritch edge spell ended sixty seconds after its activation. The magical flames that threatened to burn down the room died, too, leaving a dense cloud of smoke over the charred remains of bodies and wood. There was no movement left in the chamber but Ed’s, and the only sound was that of his ragged breathing.
He glanced at the arcane letters that formed in front of him as the Objectivity informed him of the value of his efforts.
You have gained 5 experience (0x6 zombies, 5 for surviving your first encounter with an undead ambush). Your unused experience is 114 and your total experience is 319.
Your Untrained Combat skill has increased by 1 rank. Your Combat Casting skill has increased by 1 rank.
Five experience points. He had almost been eaten alive by reanimated corpses, and yet Objectivity had judged that the risk he’d incurred was barely worth noticing. Five experience points.
He examined the charred remains of the nearest zombie, using his Evil Eye to display the stats in front of him:
Newborn Zombie, human. Exp: 5. Brawn: 3, Agility and Spirit: 1, Endurance: 5, Mind: 1, Charm: 3. Skills: Untrained Combat: Basic V, Move Silently: Basic X, Tracking: Basic V. Talents: Pack Tactics, Undead.
Ed laughed through gritted teeth. It was a bitter laugh, without any humor in it.
The Objectivity wasn’t wrong. It was never wrong. Zombies should have been a trivial risk for him, because he was worth sixty times more experience than each one of them. Objectivity cared little about the feelings of men when faced with the horror of death, it only knew of the raw truth of numbers.
Numbers would never lie to him, but fear would. Had he allowed himself to be consumed by his fear, he’d have been doomed.
“Never again,” Ed swore. He glanced at his wounded hand. A tiny wound, nothing more than a scrape and a few drops of blood.
And yet, it was a zombie bite.
Oh, shit, Ed thought.
THEY WORE RED ROBES. Kharon had told her that they were freedom fighters or some such nonsense, but the fact of the matter was, they wore red robes. They had daggers. They stared at her with unfocused eyes, frothing at the mouth, their faces constricted by maddened rage.
Rebels my ass, Katalyn thought as she dodged the swipe of her nearest attacker. Ask someone in Lotia, ask someone in Plekth, they’ll all say the same thing. Red robes, daggers, and weird-ass rituals equal cultists. It’s not hard to get right!
She rolled across the floor, darted like a deer to avoid the man who tried to rush her down, and then used the wall to change directions. A judicious application of her feline acrobatics talent allowed her to vault over the third and last cultist’s head and land out of his reach, closer to the door than any of them—just as she had planned.
Now she only had to deal with the zombie guarding her exit. Hard to do with three assholes trying to stab her.
“Stay still, bitch!” one of them said, spewing spit with every word. He was broader in the shoulders than the others and had a Brawn score of fourteen. It’d be a bad idea to let him get a hold of her, so she swung her knife in a wide arc to discourage him from getting closer.
She had stolen her knife from the fourth member of their little group, who was now lying in a pool of his own blood after Katalyn had hit him with a silver vessel. She had stolen the vessel when she had disrupted the ritual downstairs, which had prompted this group to give chase.
She enjoyed stealing from these assholes, and now she was going to steal from them the greatest prize of them all: her own hide.
Behind her, the zombie slowly shuffled her way. The other two cultists realized this and exchanged knowing glances. They kept their distance and simply watched like kids going to their first bardic theater play. Katalyn could’ve laughed in their faces, but didn’t.
They had paid to know her full character sheet! They knew she had the alert talent, which made her immune to this sort of situation. It was amazing how little attention people paid to obvious things.
“I could stay still,” Katalyn told the burly man, “but then I wouldn’t be able to benefit from my advanced dodge talent, and you wouldn’t believe how many experience points I paid for it.”
The cultist’s eyes darted to the point behind her where the zombie was probably about to take a good chunk out of her neck. Her alert talent filled her head with the metaphorical screech of a bell, and the skin of her back tried its best to stand on end, despite lacking any kind of fur.
Katalyn smiled beatifically and activated feline acrobatics again. The effort of its continued use made her vision blur for an instant, but the training of the Thieves Guild allowed her Endurance to tank the energy expenditure.
The Thief dropped down an instant before a pair of putrid hands attempted to clamp down her neck. She rolled to the side, and then jumped back while leaving her leg in front of the zombie, who stared stupidly at the space where she had once been and perhaps wondered where his food had gone.
Katalyn slapped the undead creature in the back, which prompted him to take a step forward. The zombie barely had enough Agility to stand without help, so it immediately lost balance and tripped in an almost comical way across the room—and straight into the stunned arms of the burly cultist.
“Dunghill!” the cultist said. He tried to dodge, but green-and-brown hands encircled his torso as the zombie tried to regain balance. Then, undead instincts took over, and the monster took a chomp out of the man’s neck. Blood sprayed like a fountain, and both figures went down in a crimson frenzy of arms and legs.