Chương 33

It turned out that the things on the other side of the corner were Death Knights. And that meant these were like General Skullthrax, who was a Death Knight himself, if my memory served me well. And most importantly, I wasn't sure what the best way to tackle them was. I explained the situation in chat.

"If you want, I can go out and shoot them all," Alice proposed.

"It's three of them, and their armor looks very thick. They're also undead, so you probably need to blow their heads off or something. If just one survives and gets close enough to you, you're dead. But here's what we're going to do. Marcus will step out first, and I will walk in right after him. Tina and Hailey — we don't have enough space for everybody in the corridor, so you guys stay back with Lucas, just in case any other monster pops up from behind. Then I go with Marcus and we take one Death Knight each.

You, Alice, try to snipe yours, and then we'll leave you space — first me and then Marcus — so that you can shoot our targets as well. We'll try and step back. Just aim properly, all right? Headshots only."

"Don't worry," Alice said. I was feeling a little queasy about this. There was something in my guts that made it so that I felt something was going to go wrong. But the plan was so easy now that we had Alice with her twin guns. She could really just shoot down any monster as long as she had enough bullets. And I had told her before not to shoot one mana bullet unless it was going to be strictly, strictly necessary. And these were the first enemies against which I found Alice's intervention strictly necessary.

The Death Knights looked way less ragged and unkempt than any other undead I had seen so far. Their armor smelled of rot, but it had no rust upon it. It was a rather thick sheet of black metal that looked fused over their bodies, moving in concert with their every shift. It felt like the armor was actually part of their being. Which, given that this was a world with magic and the undead, I didn't put it past them. But we had to kill them. And we had to kill them fast. We needed to leave as fast as possible.

I wished that we still had King Pussycat. The lion would have made a wonderful addition here, considering his incredible strength. I was sure that even the vampire boss could have been killed by one swift paw from the gigantic lion.

"All right," I wrote in chat.

"Let's go." Marcus stepped forward, and the Death Knight turned toward him. Then something hit us that had nothing to do with swords. A wave of pure terror rolled off the three of them and down the corridor. My legs locked. For a moment, the Death Knights weren't Death Knights anymore — they were nightmares. The rot swelled, the armor split open, and I was looking at three towering things stitched out of everything I'd ever been afraid of. Behind me, someone whimpered. Marcus's shield arm was shaking.

But in the Sphere of Intuition, nothing had changed. Three armored corpses, level fifteen to seventeen, standing in a corridor. The two images didn't match — and only one of them was real.

"It's an illusion!" I shouted, forgetting the chat.

"It's just fear. They're pushing it on us. Shake it off!" The pressure snapped, and my legs were mine again. Then I walked in right after turning the corner, and the first thing I did was clutch the Horned Impaler and try to stick it into the open helmet of the first Death Knight. However, the Death Knight reacted with surprising instincts for a zombie. And actually, those kinds of instincts were surprising even for a human.

It felt like I was stepping into the cage with a martial artist the moment I faced the Death Knight. It raised its shield, making my spear jump up, and then tried to gut me with its sword. If I had not possessed the Armor of Raziel, that would have worked, because I had overextended myself. I immediately acted on pure intuition as the sword failed to penetrate my armor but bruised my ribs. I thought to myself, God damn it. I need to learn how to fight properly. That was stupid.

Meanwhile, I heard the sound of a shot from Alice's pistol. Now that I paid attention to it, it felt like a laser gun from a video game. I saw the head of the third Apprentice Death Knight get vaporized, and I breathed in relief. That was until I saw the same Death Knight bull-rush Alice, at which I swore, "Fuck." Alice was shocked, but she maintained her composure, and before the knight reached her, she managed to shoot at the sword-wielding arm.

The arm was detached at the shoulder, with a piece of its collarbone exploding together with it. But still, she was bashed by the large shield that the Death Knight carried with it. And Alice didn't have the constitution that either Marcus or I had, so she ended up on the ground with the Death Knight scrambling to raise its shield and use it as a guillotine to remove Alice's head. Seeing that the Death Knight was moving despite its head being destroyed almost froze time for me.

In the Sphere of Intuition, everything seemed to go slower for a moment. My brain was in overdrive. A thought was quickly formed and discarded in my head. I could have used the Judgment of Raziel, but the explosion in such an enclosed space might have not only collapsed the entire underground corridor, but also killed my friends. I had found out that I was immune to the explosion itself, but my allies were not, so I couldn't use my strongest Skill. And I didn't have a Skill strong enough for this.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. Hailey appeared in my perception as slightly golden. And I looked, in my mind's eye, at her staff. I tackled the Death Knight that was about to kill Alice, stopping him and throwing him to the side. Thankfully, despite the armor, the Death Knight was not heavy at all. But the one right behind us managed to score a deep gash on my thigh, which made me hiss from pain. And then I said, "Hailey, come here."

Hailey rounded the corner with Lucas and Tina behind her. And I said, "Use the corpse explosion right now," while trying to push the Death Knight — only holding its shield in front of the other, using it as protection before I could get slashed again. Marcus was handling his own Death Knight, thankfully. And so, in this brief stalemate, Hailey raised the Staff of Amon and pointed it at the Alpha Apprentice Death Knight. But through the Sphere of Intuition, I could see that there was panic on her face now.

"John," she said, "it's not working. It says they're too high level." My eyes almost popped out of my sockets. Why didn't the Sphere of Intuition tell me? Then I felt something inside of my armor, against my chest. And I said, "Holy fuck, yes." I kicked with all my 43 points of Strength, making the Death Knight fly against the other. And then I told Marcus, "Marcus, step in front of me. Push them back. Use whatever you need."

I immediately started rummaging inside my armor, with Alice still coughing, still out of it, saying, "What are you doing?" I finally pulled out the Skill Evolution Voucher and gave it to Hailey.

"Use it on the corpse explosion immediately." She grabbed the thing, and it disappeared in a mote of blazing fire entering her chest. Then I told Marcus, "Marcus, protect yourself with the shield. Everyone else, around the corner." Corpse Explosion in video games wasn't just a spell to kill the undead. It was meant to actually use the undead as kamikaze warriors against your enemies. Hailey used the Skill in quick succession, and all three Death Knights exploded like miniature bombs.

Marcus only took minor damage thanks to the fact that he had put his large shield in front of him and had crouched behind it. I had seen the scene from my Sphere of Intuition. One by one, the Apprentice Death Knights had stiffened, overextended their bodies into a rigor-mortis-like extension, and then an orange blaze had gone through their rotten faces and their armors alike, like a pulse.

And as soon as the pulse had covered all the space of their bodies, they went silent for a moment, looking normal, and then suddenly exploded in a shower of metal shrapnel, causing a minor shockwave throughout the corridor. I went up to Marcus, looking at him, with several pieces of shrapnel coming out of his arms and his legs.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"I took some damage, but I'm mostly fine. I can move." And I saw a piece of shrapnel spontaneously leave Marcus's flesh, which started knitting itself together in real time.

"Damn, dude. You're a fucking titan or something."

"Thanks, but I'll take a sip from a potion now."

"Yeah, of course, of course," I said.

"By the way," Marcus said, pulling another splinter out of his forearm, "is anyone going to talk about the fear thing? For a second, I saw… I don't even want to say what I saw."

"Same," Alice said quietly.

"It was like the worst thing I could imagine had put on armor."

"It was an illusion. Some kind of fear aura," I said.

"The Sphe— my gut didn't buy it. And the illusion collapsed when I realized it was one. But if they had hit us with that in the open out of nowhere…" Nobody finished the sentence. We all knew. And then I turned to Hailey. She had been completely immune from the effect of the Skill, just like I had suspected. Apparently, if you were the user, you couldn't be hurt by it. There was a silhouette of her on the wall behind her. All of the rest of the wall had been showered in gore and shrapnel.

But where Hailey had stood, you could clearly see her outline. And she didn't have one speck of dust on her body. I went to check on the three monsters that had exploded. Three alphas. I looked at Hailey and asked, "How much mana did that consume?" She shrugged.

"None."

"None?" I frowned.

"Well, very little," she said.

"It's way less than the healing." It was Lucas who walked forward and raised his bow-harness arm at me.

"You know, there's some lore that's very interesting about this. In some video games or role-playing tabletops, you usually pay the upkeep cost for the undead. And in one specific game, there's this very cool mechanic you can exploit where you can take control of other people's undead by starting to pay their upkeep in mana yourself. And you can just use corpse explosion, which doesn't cost mana, because it uses the undead's mana — like, the mana that you had already poured into the undead — to make it explode.

You're just, like, igniting a bomb. Like, the bomb already has the gunpowder inside, or whatever bombs use." Lucas shrugged.

"And so, in that game, the best counter to a very strong necromancer was someone chasing levels of corpse explosion. Because if it was high level enough, you could just use it on other people's undead. The control would be, in theory, switched to you for a few moments, and then they would just explode. You wouldn't be able to control them, uh, since you would need the Raise Undead spell to do so. But you could explode as many as you want."

"Well, that's an interesting mechanic," I said, thinking.

"But doesn't that mean that with Raise Undead, we could have brought all those Death Knights along with us? They looked really strong."

"Yeah," Alice said, dusting her clothes.

"And how the hell did it keep moving even after I destroyed its head?"

"Well, we might have just found out that you maybe have to completely destroy a Death Knight for it to die." I shrugged.

"I don't know. That's a question we should have asked Bluemont." I was in the middle of looking at the remains of the Death Knights to see if they had dropped some loot — which didn't appear to be the case — when, through the Sphere of Intuition, I saw that just right ahead, there was the third fake wall. Oh. I caved it in, and on the other side, I found the third scroll of the Slave Undead Incantation.

"So we just had, like, a mini-boss fight. Right, Lucas?" I turned to the archer, who nodded. He wasn't looking too happy.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Well, if this was a mini-boss fight, and we just found the third scroll…" Lucas trailed off while I placed some C4 bricks on the wall.

"Is there going to be a boss fight before we can get the fourth?" Lucas grimaced.

"I believe so, and I don't like that these Death Knights were so strong. Maybe the last one, the boss, we can make explode as well, though. That would be ideal."