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Alex met up with Stephen and Kaylee one last time even as the groups of fighters spread through the outer ring of the building.
It was shaped like a donut, with a twenty foot wide hallway ringing the entire structure with regular doors leading into the main hall, designed to seat near-to a thousand people, if not more.
Their groups had not opened the doors, partially because Alex could detect large concentrations of undead within, and they weren’t quite ready. In fact, they were acting to seal all but one of the doors, to prevent having enemies at their back while defending against the oncoming undead.
Stephen and Kaylee would be in charge of the defense against those oncoming undead, the horde that had been spread throughout the city until this point.
Lenka—along with several others—was already setting up traps and other means of hampering or doing massive amounts of damage, both inside and outside the building.
Stephen gave Alex a bright smile. “So, are you ready?” His voice was pitched to be easily heard through the ear-plugs they all still wore. “It’s going to be an important fight.”
Alex nodded, finding himself smiling in return, the man’s attitude as infectious as always. “I think so, yeah.”
Kaylee gave a tight smile, clearly trying to join in the positive outlook despite her misgivings. “We’re out in the wind here, Alex. Do you need anything from us to make this work?”
He shrugged. “Just keep the others off of us?”
She huffed a little laugh. “We’ll do what we can.” She grimaced then. “Too bad none of my base abilities work here. We don’t own this position, we’re just occupying it.”
Stephen was undeterred and his happiness undiminished. “Maybe your next upgrade or evolution will change that?”
That brought a bit of a smile back to her lips. “Maybe. I suppose I’ll just have to survive to find out.”
They chatted a bit more before Alex wished them luck one last time and approached his group for the attack.
The spear wielders were there, obviously, along with Grant, John, Pilar, and Paresh. Maria was somewhere around here, but Alex wasn’t sure if she’d be joining them directly.
Around those ten gathered another handful that Alex was less familiar with, but still grateful to have.
They wouldn’t be taking any non-Initiates, their ‘skills’ better put to use in the general defense under Stephen and Kaylee.
Those with Alex would be dealing with the ancillary creatures while he fought the Plague Lord, and if anything, that made their job more important than his.
He looked around, meeting each gaze briefly before he nodded and smiled. “Well, folks. This is it. We’ve been thrown in the deep end, and turns out Uncle Rad wasn’t lying, there is a shark.”
That got some chuckles.
“About time we kill it, eh?”
Nods of agreement came back his way.
“You all know the plan. You know your roles. Don’t die if you can help it. Let’s go.”
Without further delay, he stepped forward and pushed open the only unbarred set of doors, revealing the great, conical auditorium, a near to thirty foot flat circle of open floor at the bottom in the center.
The group moved in quickly and others pulled the doors closed behind them. By this point, all other entrances had at least been initially blocked in some manner, and Alex could even vaguely hear continued work to make the closures more permanent.
In the center of the space stood a stand with what appeared to be a microphone atop it.
That was a little odd, but Alex tried not to focus on any one thing, his eyes moving across the large space.
Above was a sort of refractory glass or crystal… maybe plastic? Regardless, it caught the light from the early morning sun and diffused it throughout the entire room, giving a growing illumination to the otherwise dark space.
As he looked closer, he could see the hinges for the main floor to fold open in a few places.
That’s where they needed to go. That was the way down to the vats, the Plague Lord, and the end of this madness.
Most of the seats were empty, but a few held discarded belongings of one kind or another, and those all the way at the bottom had what looked to be bags of equipment or other such things in many of the first-row chairs. Professors and staff techs often fill those rarely used seats with such things…
Alex sent out another pulse of Detect Unlife and frowned. “I think there are undead hiding in the rows, and likely many near the base, but I can’t pinpoint them at the moment.”
Natasha gave him a concerned look. “Has that happened before?”
“No, no it has not.” His frown deepened, seeing all the undead mana in the air around them. “I think it’s because of the density of undeath here?” Regardless, he was glad they weren’t only relying on his spell.
The Russian woman frowned, but finally nodded.
They advanced as a group, checking every row visually before moving forward, determined not to be attacked unawares from the sides if they could help it.
They were about halfway down when their opponents showed themselves.
The ‘bags’ and ‘junk’ in the first row unfurled, beginning to stand up and revealing that they were figures in long black robes, rotting flesh swaying unnaturally from their bones beneath the fabric.
John got off one shot, momentarily dropping the nearest one before they opened their mouths and released overlapping screeching horror.
Everyone in their group dropped, the sound like someone driving a railroad spike through Alex’s ear with a sledgehammer.
The cadence of the ‘singing’ was the beat of the driving force, the pure sonic agony carrying the magic deeper than ever before, their earplugs all but useless.
Still, they weren’t without preparations.
Two of the Initiates pulled things like boom-boxes from their Inventories, acapella songs from this world rolling out from the devices.
It didn’t stop the horrific attack, but it did seem to lessen the strain on their minds, even if only a bit.
Jacob immediately did his best to create a loose barrier of air between them and the enemy, dampening the sound just a bit, and allowing them all the smallest bit of ability to move, to think.
It was none too soon as it turned out. In their successful attack, they had forgotten the undead came in non-humanoid varieties.
Snakes, rats, and other small creatures began to swarm toward them from either side, but Pilar was able to cast long, low barriers of fire before any reached them.
Natasha pulled herself up next to Alex, pain evident on her features. “Can you do anything?”
Alex grit his teeth. He tried moving his Life to his ears. Nothing.
He tried moving his health to his ears. Nothing.
He even tried to pull all health and Life away, trying to deafen himself to gain some reprieve, but it didn’t help in the least.
He briefly considered trying to actively attack his own hearing, but he was hesitant to do so. “No. I don’t… I don’t think I can do anything from here.”
She growled. “What sort of horrific language must they be singing in that the System translation still carries this much pain?”
He gave a humorless, pained smile. “I know, right?”
Then, he froze, eyes widening. Natasha visibly brightened around her growing grimace of building agony. “Did you just think of something?”
He nodded, opening his mouth to explain, but she cut across him.
“Don’t tell. DO!”
Alex grunted and pulled up something he hadn’t thought of since the start of all this.
He pulled up his System Language settings. Oh, please, let me be remembering correctly!
System Language Settings:Please make a selection in each field
Translate intelligent, auditory communication in languages unknown to you into:English (Selected)Valley GirlPiratePig-LatinBleepsSilence[NULL] No other known language found for Alex JohnsonDo Not Translate
Translate written words into:English (Selected)Valley GirlPiratePig-LatinScratchesBlank Surfaces[NULL] No other known language found for Alex JohnsonDo Not Translate
Alex grinned around a grimace of pain. There it was, an option under ‘Translate intelligent, auditory communication in languages unknown to you into:’
Silence
Alex made the change and confirmed his selection.
The next moment, he jerked where he knelt on the ground as the incredible weight of pure, blissful silence fell upon him.
The magical effects were still there—this wasn’t some cheat to get away from spoken spells or magical effects—he could even still feel the sound vibrating through his body due to the proximity and intensity, but to his ears? His mind?
There was blessed silence.
In that silence, he could feel the mana around him, feel how it suffused the sound rippling through the air, attacking the bodies and minds of everyone, even him. Thankfully, it was concentrated in this room, so the defenders outside should be fine.
He could also sense how his body rebuffed a small portion of the incoming magic, his very Life resisting the external influence.
He grit his teeth and hardened his will. He had to act now.
Alex briefly considered trying to deafen his companions or getting them to change their own System settings, but from what he could see, that wouldn’t help them very much at all.
It was only his basic resistance to magic that allowed him to function. The removal of the sound was a purely physical alleviation, albeit a necessary one for him to be thinking clearly in this moment.
There was only one path forward.
He charged.
As he wasn’t in the front of their formation, he had to get creative.
Alex had incredibly superior Physical Stats when compared to before the System. Even when he’d been at university, he’d occasionally shown off by running down the chair backs in lecture halls.
It had been incredibly foolish, and he and others had fallen and gotten hurt dozens of times, but it hadn’t been every time, and if a pre-System human could do it, he should be able to as well.
He stood to his feet and jumped past the others where they were struggling to use various magics to cover their formation.
He wanted to help his friends—to help them all—but the best way to do that was to remove the horrible sound at its source.
He practically danced across the chair-backs. The fact they were mounted into the floor meant that they could take both his weight and the torque of his quick passage with ease.
His Physical Agility was massively beyond what any pre-System human could have ever hoped, and so even though he was moving faster—with a heavier body and a lot more on the line—his progress was easy.
Less than ten seconds later, he was at the base of the room, ready to face this foe up close.
Alex nodded and enacted his plan.
He jumped up, getting on top of the chair-backs, and ran forward.
He was contested of course, undead snakes, rats, and other vermin striking up at him as he passed overhead, but with Multi-Strike, his dadao intercepted the few that acted fast enough to possibly impair him.
Honestly, though, it was the speed of his passage that most ensured his safety.
As he drew closer, the pressure of constricting magic grew, but as he was mostly mentally free, he was able to work against it, directly.
If his basic resistance was the ability to do quick mental math, he was now able to nearly fully focus on the calculations, doing sums and figures that would never have come quickly without that focus.
The resistances are just a baseline? A base capacity?
He grinned at the thought before setting it aside, devoting even more toward resisting the magical influence upon him.
A System notice triggered almost as soon as he was up on the chairbacks, but he ignored it.
Another sounded when he was nearly to the base, and he left that one to the side as well.
The figures in the center were all focusing on him as he drew closer, surprise and confusion clear in their movements, despite their inhuman nature.
They were clearly used to utterly dominating those they directed their magic at, and given Alex had been told he shouldn’t have been able to gain magical resistance? They were likely reasonable in that certainty.
Still, it allowed him to close and swing his sword, decapitating the closest even as he performed a perfect dismount.
You killedBanshee (Epic), level 17
Reward:Experience to be granted when in a safe location.
There was a moment of stunned stillness, before all the surrounding monsters turned to regard him alone.
Alex’s Basic Mana Sense told him that they’d pulled their attack from his group and were now aiming it entirely at him.
All of it.
It felt as if a lead blanket had been thrown over him, followed by ropes, dragged downward by a dozen powerful foes.
Sure, he could resist, but in this case, the resistance was futile.
Even so, as he dropped first to a knee, then flat to the floor, he couldn’t help but grin.
The undead were closing in on him, emaciated frames shifting under dark robes to reveal claw, fang, or blade. They were hungry both for his flesh and for vengeance.
Alex began to laugh, the force of the magic sending his mind into a half delirious state. Even still, their very focus was a victory.
He’d done it. He’d taken the pressure off his companions, and that meant—
The sound of gunfire filled the near silence of the auditorium as Alex was experiencing it.
John showed his skill yet again as ten of the undead jerked, each taking two bullets—one to center mass, one to the head—and that was enough.
The pressure came off of Alex like a magician ripping back the veil, and he took off like a shot—maybe not like John’s shots, but possibly one of Lenka’s or Kaylee’s—closing on the still falling undead, slapping his hand against each as he passed, sending pulses of Life and HP through each, the first to learn, the second to destroy.
He’d gotten a lot of practice quickly moving through a crowd and using his Basic Life Transfusion over the past few days, and so even as John worked his way around the utterly confused and disoriented undead, Alex was close on the heels of his hits, slapping his power through each undead before it had time to reach the ground.
They fought back, and he took several cuts as he blew past—the very fact that he was trying to let his Life learn what it could, slowing the process enough to allow for such retaliation—but he took them gladly.
His mana sense told him that the sonic attack had stopped, and that was confirmed by his own comparative lightness as he tore around the circle.
Several of the now frantic undead tried to open the floor to retreat below, but those became priority targets for both John and Alex.
One even tried to run up the far side of the auditorium, but two crossbow bolts slowed it down, allowing for a lance of fire to put an end to that threat.
Less than a minute later, it was over.
Alex stood amidst swirling ash, panting as his whole body trembled.
He jerked as Lenka put a hand on his shoulder, her mouth moving without any sound coming out.
Alex frowned, working his jaw to try to pop his eyes. “What?”
She gave him a concerned look, then her mouth moved again.
He frowned, and she snapped her fingers. He could hear that just fine. Why—?
Oh…
He put the heel of his palm between his eyes and rubbed. “One moment.”
He pulled up the System settings once more, choosing to have foreign languages translated to English once more.
And all at once, the silence was at an end.