The tunnel felt shorter going out.
Maybe because they knew it now. Maybe because nothing had come at them from behind while they’d sat against the palisade. Maybe because Lunaris was walking at the front, rapier sheathed, longsword across her back, and the weight of leading was turning out to be less a weight and more a tempo.
Toxica was slung over Poundcake’s shoulder like a sack of flour.
He had, in fact, suggested it, “Better the loaf knows the oven than the oven knows the loaf,” delivered as he hefted her across his back, and nobody had been able to parse that one in time to argue. Her hands were tied. Her mouth was gagged with a strip of cloth Ian had produced from a hip pocket that Lunaris hadn’t known existed.
She was, however, awake.
Her eyes, above the gag, were doing a remarkable amount of talking.
“If she tries to cast,” Fty had said outside the cave, voice flat, “she’ll discover I’ve stitched her mana channels shut. Temporarily.” He hadn’t looked at Toxica when he said it.
“Can you do that?” Ian had whispered to Lunaris.
“Apparently,” Lunaris had whispered back.
Now they walked.
The tunnel opened into dead air and gray light, and the mountain that had been a smudge on the horizon was a wall of dark stone rising above the valley, the tower clawing up its face like a splinter driven sideways into the world. Closer. Much closer. Close enough that Lunaris could see the wall around the tower’s base, and the shapes moving along it.
She didn’t let herself look too long.
“Formation,” she said. “Me and Ian front, Lisa and Fty center, Poundcake rear with the package.”
“The loaf,” Poundcake corrected gently.
“Poundcake rear with the loaf.”
“Better.”
The Plague Hounds came from the dead grove.
They came low and fast, six of them, breaking from a copse of calcified trees on the party’s right flank with the rolling, loose-jointed speed of wolves that had been loyal in life and were still loyal to whatever was driving them now.
Their spines bulged; each one carried a distended sac of something that pulsed dark and green along the shoulder blades, swollen and heavy and obviously not meant to be on a living thing.
“Hounds!” Ian shouted, which was useful only because Lunaris was already turning.
“Sacs!” Lisa said, sharper. “Don’t pop them near the ward!”
“Copy,” Fty said, and the ward tightened, pulling inward until it was a tighter shell, green light brightening to compensate.
Lunaris met the first hound in the air.
It leapt for her throat; she’d expected that, and the rapier took it through the soft palate as her longsword swept across to catch the second one’s shoulder mid-lunge.
The first hound crumpled; the sac on its back ruptured as it hit the ground, spraying a fine mist of black-green that dissipated into the miasma without doing anything worse than it was already doing.
That was fine. That was outside the ward.
The third hound she caught between her blades with her favorite pattern, rapier stitching, longsword sweeping, the mantle flaring silver, and the hound’s chest opened and its sac slid out onto the dead grass without rupturing.
The fourth went for Ian, and he did something Lunaris had never seen him do before.
He set his feet, dropped into a half-crouch, and drew.
The Quick-Draw on Veer’s Ironbite turned the draw into a strike. The hound impaled itself on the lead dagger, its own momentum carrying the point through its ribcage and out the other side, and Ian’s second dagger came up under its jaw in a movement that was almost, almost, graceful.
“Oh,” he said, sounding surprised. “That worked.”
“Don’t jinx it, Daggerbear!” Lunaris called, already pivoting to the fifth. His ears turned red, which the sixth hound used to go for his throat.
Fty’s heal clipped it in mid-air, a bar of green light that stopped the hound’s lunge and let Ian slam a dagger into its temple as it fell. “Focus, please,” Fty said flatly, and Ian’s ears went redder.
Lisa took the fifth hound with a contained fireball, the sac rupturing in a controlled burn that sent black smoke rising in a neat column rather than a cloud. “Like that,” she said, to no one in particular, and to Fty specifically.
“Acceptable,” Fty said.
“Acceptable,“ Lisa echoed, mouthing it to Lunaris with theatrical devastation. “Did you hear what he called my surgical work?”
“I heard,” Lunaris said.
“I’ve been downgraded from good to acceptable.“
“That’s because you used your wall ability on thirty shamblers.”
“I won’t be hearing that until Tuesday.”
Poundcake cleared his throat. Toxica’s weight shifted on his shoulder. “The oven,” he said, “is not cool yet.” He inclined his head toward the grove.
Two more hounds came through the trees. Lunaris sighed, raised her blades.
Then she stopped and lowered them.
Both hounds had taken exactly three steps out of the grove and folded, mid-stride, onto the dead grass. Their sacs rotted off their backs with a soft, wet sound, hissed into the ground, and the hounds went still.
The party stared.
“...Why did they stop?” Ian asked.
“Master,” Lisa said. Her voice had gone soft. “Gravesworth’s dead. Whatever was pushing the nearby undead into organized hunting packs… it stopped with him.”
“Oh.” Ian sheathed his daggers. “That’s… that’s kind of sad.”
“It’s efficient,” Lunaris said, and she meant it, but her voice came out lower than she’d wanted, and Ian glanced at her, and she didn’t look back. “Let’s move.”
The ridge rolled them south for another kilometer before the world got weirder.
The ground here had been a field. Lunaris could see the old stone boundary-wall, half-buried in gray earth, the patient geometry of something that had been someone’s farm before the miasma had come for it.
The bones of the farm were all that was left. And something else.
It was standing in the middle of the field.
Tall, seven feet, maybe, and consumed in a way that suggested its body had dried rather than decayed. Its skin clung to its bones like old leather stretched over driftwood, and it wore the tattered remains of what might have once been an Academy robe, the deep blue bleached almost to gray by years of sun and miasma. Its head was tilted back. Its mouth was open.
It was singing.
A thin, reedy dirge that came out of its throat in a register that sat somewhere between wind through a pipe and a voice that had forgotten the words but not the grief.
[Gravesinger Lv.33]Type: 3-rare | HP: 1,400/1,400
And around it, in wide concentric rings across the dead field, the ground was moving.
Soil shifted. Fingers broke the surface. A hand here. Half a skull there. Dozens of them, pulled upward by the dirge the way iron filings pulled toward a magnet.
“Okay,” Lunaris said. “I hate that.”
“Me too,” Ian whispered.
“Gravesinger,” Fty said. “Kill the singer fast, the ground goes quiet. Don’t kill it fast, the field gets full.”
“How full?”
“Full.“
Lisa cracked her knuckles. “I can range it.”
“Sacs on hounds didn’t rupture near the ward,” Fty said. “This one’s different—the song is the spell. Fireballs may disrupt it, or may not. If the song breaks mid-verse, it might also release the undead already rising, which means they all activate at once.”
“So no ranging.”
“Correct.”
“So Luna runs in.”
“Correct.”
“Great,” Lunaris said. “I love this plan. I love running into singing skeletons.”
“You were built for it,” Lisa said, and hugged her.
Lunaris looked at the field. At the risings. Counted. Twenty-ish on their way up, scattered across the hundred-meter spread, some almost free of the soil, some still hands-and-shoulders. The Gravesinger itself was dead center, eyes closed, jaw open.
It hadn’t noticed them.
Slipstream’s still on cooldown. Paradox Slash is up, though.
“Fty,” she said. “Veil on me.”
“Copy.”
“Ian. You take the verge—the ones that make it up in the first thirty seconds are yours. Lisa—burn the ones on the east side. No field.”
“Surgical,” Lisa said.
“Surgical. Poundcake —”
“The oven holds,” Poundcake said.
“Good.”
Fty’s Veil wrapped her. The world softened. She stepped off the ridge.
She moved.
The mantle streamed behind her, silver against gray, and Lunaris moved through the field between the risings, carving around the half-emerged bodies rather than through them, rapier and longsword held low and tucked. Her boots were quiet on the dead earth.
Faster.
A risen hand grabbed at her ankle as she passed. She didn’t slow down. The mantle shrugged the grip free, and she was thirty meters from the Gravesinger, now twenty, now ten, and the singer’s head was still tilted back and its eyes were still closed and—
Its eyes opened.
They were empty. Just two wells of dark, and the song snapped off mid-note, and the risings across the field stood up all at once as the song that had been raising them slowly got replaced.
[Paradox Slash]
The rapier went through the soft leather of the throat. The phantom-strike came from half a second ahead, the longsword burying itself in the ribcage at an angle she hadn’t chosen yet but would, and the Gravesinger’s dirge, whatever version of it had been going to come next, died in the opening of its mouth.
It folded.
“Lisa!“ Lunaris shouted.
Lisa was already casting a wide, low sweep of flame that rolled across the dead field in a crescent, catching the standing risen where they stood and turning them to ash in batches of four and five. The fire curled around Lunaris without touching her, mantle flaring, and she stood in the center of the burn-field and watched the risings collapse into gray dust.
“Acceptable?“ Lisa called.
“Efficient,“ Fty said.
Lisa made a noise like she’d been handed flowers.
Fty went to one knee.
Lunaris was at his side in two strides. “Fty—”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re on the ground.”
“I’m on one knee on the ground.”
“Fty.”
He looked up at her. His face was pale in a way that had nothing to do with the miasma. There was a sheen of sweat at his temples, and his fingers on the staff were faintly white at the knuckles.
“Talk to me,” Lunaris said. She lowered herself to match his height. “Please.”
He closed his eyes. Opened them. Then, and this surprised her, he nodded. “Sit down,” he said. “All of you. This is important, and I’m going to explain it once.”
Lisa sat. Ian sat. Poundcake, with enormous care, set Toxica down against a rock in a way that suggested the rock had been selected specifically. She glared at him over the gag. He patted her shoulder approvingly.
“Why are we taking her again?” asked Ian.
“To show good faith,” Lunaris said. “We are serious when we say we come in peace. Come on, Fty, talk.”
Fty took a breath.
“The ward isn’t a buff,” he said. “Buffs—Fleet, Guard, Nerve—those I can apply and leave. They last. They don’t need me. Heals—heals are spent when cast; once the thread’s in, it works or it doesn’t, and I’m done.”
He gestured faintly at the surrounding air. The faint green shimmer of the ward pulsed, once, in acknowledgment.
“This is different. This is a continuous spell. I’m not casting it once. I’m casting it every second it’s up. Every second, the miasma finds new places to push—low angles, through the soil, under our feet, above our heads. It doesn’t hit the ward and stop. It’s trying to find the seams, and if I stop concentrating for ten seconds, it’s inside us.”
“Inside us, how?” Ian asked quietly.
“Thirty to forty percent debuff on every stat,” Fty said flatly.
“Oh,” Ian said.
“And I can feel it,” Fty continued. His eyes moved over them one by one as he spoke. “I can feel the thread to each of you. All the time. While pushing mana into the ward itself.”
He stopped. He was breathing harder than she’d realized. He didn’t hide it this time.
“So that’s where I am,” he said. “The miasma is thick enough now that the ward is taking most of what I have. I can still do an occasional heal. I can’t keep buffs running. I need to choose: ward, or Fleet-Guard-Nerve. Not both.”
“Ward,” Lunaris said immediately.
“Yes.”
“Keep the ward.”
“Yes, which means you fight unbuffed from here to the tower.”
Lisa was already digging in her belt pouch. “Mana potions,” she said, and there was no bubble in her voice. She produced three, then four, then a fifth that she had to unstick from a wrapper that had fused to the glass. “Take them all.”
“Lisa—”
“Fearless leader,” Lisa said, and put them in his free hand one by one, “take the potions.”
“Thank you,” he said. Flatly. But his ears, Lunaris saw it, and pretended not to, had gone just slightly pink. “I appreciate this. I want to be clear, though: potions top me up. They don’t let me multitask. I’ll have mana. I still can’t concentrate on buffs and the occasional heal and the ward. Just the ward, and the occasional heal. You go in under-supported from here.”
“Understood,” Lunaris said.
“You’re sure.”
“Ward’s the priority. We’ll adapt.”
He nodded. He uncorked a potion with his teeth and drank it without taking his hand off the staff.
“Also,” he said, after the second one, “Lisa. The wrist. I saw you.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“Fearless leader.“
“Lisa.”
She sighed, extended her wrist, and let him push a thread of green into the mana burn before he worked through the third potion. The burn faded. Her mouth quirked. “Show-off.”
“Unbelievable,” Fty muttered, and pushed himself upright. “Let’s get this over with.”