Chapter 429 – Survivors
Five years. Five fucking years. Estefania Berrios Caraballo was supposed to be on two-week trip to Orlando (Winter Park, really) for a writer’s conference hosted at Rollins College, and then fun at Disney World, before heading back home to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It should have been simple. But the fucking Apocalypse had to descend right as she was giving a presentation on the importance of inclusivity in the horror market.
The blue boxes had been one thing. Getting turned into a Necromancer and Scribe was fine, as far as it went. Becoming a Greater Lich thanks to picking [Tier 3 Race] as one of her boons was not so great. Fortunately, she’d spent her remaining boons on [Personal Weapon] and [Personal Armor]. Her mage staff and black robes leveled up with her, gaining new abilities as they did so.
The first monsters hadn’t been zombies, but Dire Wasps. Whoever thought that this world needed a wasp the size of a chihuahua on meth and the temperament to match deserved to rot in the deepest layers of hell. Especially since they could shoot their venom, as well as sting people. And if she never again had to see one of the damned creatures implanting eggs into a living person so that the grubs could eat their way out, then it would be too soon.
Two hundred people managed to retreat to the Alfond Sports Center, near Lake Virginia, and seal up the doors and windows. The swarming wasps had kept them trapped. Cell phones died, whether from this System or because something happened to the towers, no one knew. Even the radio had too much interference. Back then, they hadn’t known about the broken dungeon to the south. They learned quickly when the undead came pouring through campus.
The Dire Wasps turned on the zombies, but it quickly became apparent that zombies were immune to the wasps’ poison. The stingers only worked if they hit with enough force to penetrate the skull, or the wasp got the zombie in the eye, and the wasps were not intelligent enough or strong enough to get either outcome except by chance. And wasp grubs born from undead hosts became undead.
The Dire Wasps were driven off, their nests destroyed, and no more spawned. That much was fine. Less fine was the fact that they were now surrounded by a fucking horde of zombies, who were not going to just let them escape the city. The only good thing about this change of circumstances was that they did not need to block up all the air vents, and could open up the roof access, since the Zombie Wasps had all been taken out by the Dire Wasps before they were forced to retreat.
Still, two hundred people go through a lot of food and other supplies. Even if Estefania was undead, and didn’t need more than the ambient mana to survive, the rest weren’t so lucky. There were low-level spells to create some basic food and water that some of the spellcaster classes got. Wizards and druid types, for the most part. From what Estefania heard, the water was utterly tasteless and lukewarm, which made it better than the food, which had the taste and consistency of cardboard. But it kept the living alive, and that meant they had time to make better plans.
Luke Sutton, one of the students at the school, managed to get the Druid class, with a Scholar profession. Working with Blake Parry, a Fighter and Gardner, they came up an idea. They could turn the rooftop of the sports center into a garden. They wouldn’t be able to do much, but that would give them a way to grow some of their own food, especially with a Druid using magic to help the process along. The issue? They needed supplies to get started, and the undead outside weren’t just going to let people walk to the store for a supply run.
Which is where she’d come in. For whatever reason, the zombies only targeted the living. Probably because the mindless creatures saw all undead as the same as them. So long as she didn’t take any actions against the zombie horde, like using her Necromancer abilities to take control of them, then they would ignore her. Even if she did use those abilities, it would only cause the ones in her immediate area to turn hostile. Either way, that meant she could move around more or less freely.
It was a little over a mile to the nearest hardware store. Not a big place, just an Ace Hardware. But it was close enough. One of the students had given her a backpack, which she filled at the store, and she’d stolen a cart from the store, to add to how much she could bring back. Even so, it had taken four trips to get everything Luke and Blake needed.
The others weren’t idle, either. When the power failed in month two, an Artificer created a magical AC unit. The mages figured out how to put a ward around the building, preventing hostile undead from approaching too closely. When the density of zombies on campus was low, the survivors would make brief pushes to hunt and scavenge supplies from the other buildings on campus. Never going too far from the Sports Center, but that allowed them to stretch what supplies they had. Not everyone came back from those hunts, but the ones that did gained levels and grew stronger.
For five years, they had made this work. Five years of grinding against the unending horde of undead. Two hundred survivors had become forty-three, though four of them were kids who had been born after the siege started. Estefania had become the leader of the survivor community, with Luke and Blake as her lieutenants.
Unfortunately, even though she was a necromancer, the bodies and bones of undead creatures couldn’t be raised as new undead. The System did not like that, apparently. The spell to revive undead that had fallen was costly, as well, but manageable. Still the zombies weren’t completely useless.
A Priest in their group found that the [Purify Food and Water] spell could be used on zombie flesh. It took a few castings to make the meat safe to eat, even with cooking, and no one was exactly pleased by it, but it added protein to the living survivors’ diet, which was good. And the crafters in the group found that the bones, once purified, could be used in weapons and armor that gave bonuses when fighting against the undead.
Even the bodies of their fallen had uses. Everyone agreed that, if one of their own fell, then the body should go to Estefania, rather than letting it become a zombie. With her magic, she could turn the body into a Skeleton, and arm them with some of the weapons and armor that the crafters made. She had a strike force of just over sixty undead, with thirty Skeleton Warriors, fourteen Skeleton Archers, eight Skeleton Assassins, six Skeleton Mages, and three Skeleton Priests.
Over time, the survivors had all gained the [Deathtouched] template, making them immune to the zombie virus, or whatever it was, and making it so the zombies did not sense them until they got into melee range. Once they got that close, though, the undead would continue to follow them, even if they tried escaping, until they were either destroyed, or caught their living targets. It was not enough to get them through the horde, to the outside world, but it meant that they were not at risk of being swarmed every time they stepped outside of the Sports Center.
As for herself? Estefania had slowly grown to Tier 2, becoming a Level 2 Bonelord Necromancer and Deathspeaker Scholar. Her class gave her a Death-bound Charger that she could summon as a mount, complete with bridle and saddle, and a Spectral Raven as a familiar. Having both out at the same time reserved twenty percent of her maximum MP, and the Raven could only fly at night, or when it was cloudy, but having them offered her better mobility, and the ability to see through her familiar’s eyes.
Which was how they knew that the outside world still existed, beyond the few System alerts that were delivered to them automatically. She’d tried sending her familiar to the Wall surrounding the Orlando area, but the familiar was still treated as undead, and the wards repelled it. And the few times the bird got close enough for one of the people on the wall to see, they shot at it with bows and guns. Unfortunately, there was no way for them to contact the outside.
A week ago, something else had changed. A field blanketed the entire city, everywhere inside the Wall. The System turned off like a light, and the flows of ambient mana stilled. Other than that, she could tell that nothing had changed. She was still an unliving corpse with a soul tied to a crystal in her chest, after all, and the zombies didn’t just turn into mulch. But the System had provided guidelines, and structure, to the skills and abilities it gave them. A Necrotic Bolt spell flowed naturally from her when she was casting it with the System’s help. Without the System, it was like trying to ride a bike after years of not having one.
Point being, over the last week, everyone had been focused on ‘relearning’ their current skills. The zombies weren’t acting any differently, and the ward remained in place, so they figured it was something that they could safely ignore. Or, rather, it was decided that making sure they could use their skills and abilities was a more productive use of their time than worrying about things beyond their control.
On the third day, they’d spotted the first slimes. Green ones, for the most part, but other colors were in there, too. Thousands of them. They were moving across the ground, seeking out the zombies. It was like the mindless slimes had been given a single, overwhelming directive: destroy every zombie inside the wall. Considering that the slimes were not exactly speedy creatures, at the best of times, they must have been moving for some time. The wizards, who had focused on relearning their wards first, quickly made another ward, which would keep slimes at bay. So far, it was working.
Just after sundown, she’d managed to get the spell to see through a familiar’s eyes working, and sent Shadowbeak flying. Thousands of slimes were still moving through the city in a methodical progression, sweeping from the gate she’d seen before, over by University Boulevard to the east. So, they’d all been released into the zone from there. But why?
No, no point in asking questions like that. The important thing is that the slimes were moving in a wave, and that there didn’t seem to be any zombies popping up behind them. She knew that the zombies replaced themselves normally, since she’d personally killed the same cheerleader zombie at least a hundred times over the last five years. But they weren’t getting replaced, now. But did slimes really have that kind of power?
Wait, not the slimes, but the field. That’s why they cut off mana and the System, to keep respawns from happening. And the road between the Sports Center and the gate looked clear.
“Luke!” she called to her lieutenant. “Wake everyone up, and get them loaded into the wagons those artificers tricked out for resource runs. We’re moving!”
Luke frowned as he turned to her. “You sure, Stef? You load all of us up on those mana wagons, and we aren’t going to be moving more than walking speed, anyways. And there isn’t room for all your skeletons.”
“Don’t need to move fast, Luke, just need to move steady. I’ve had Shadowbeak out scouting, now that I can make the connection again. The slimes have moved past us, and the zombies aren’t respawning. Or, if they are, it is so slowly that we’ll be dealing with them in ones and twos. Two and a half hours, and we’ll be at the wall. We might finally have a chance of getting out of this hell.”
Luke’s eyes went wide. He turned to the main area, and yelled, adding [Voice of Nature] to make sure everyone in the building heard him, “EVERYBODY UP, RIGHT THE FUCK NOW! BOSS LADY HAS A PLAN TO GET US TO THE WALL AND BACK TO CIVILIZATION!”