Chương 35

So we checked on all the cages together with Queen Zosma. She wanted to make sure that none of her subjects were in immediate danger of dying, which I found very honorable. And it didn't take long, because she was running from one cage to another, distributing small drops of a large potion on their bodies through the bars. She said that, for the moment, it was better to leave her subjects here. Despite being a cruel choice, they were too weak, drained by the spell.

And if the liches managed to raise them as undead, she was not looking forward to fighting three hundred such powerful creatures on her own. I asked her, "So, are you stronger than your husband?" And she just smiled and continued going back and forth. So I just went back to my team and prepared for the upcoming fights. I also asked Hailey, "Hailey, what's the Skill called now? I forgot to ask. Is it still just Corpse Explosion?" She shook her head.

"It's gone up in rank, and now it's called Corpse Detonation."

"Isn't that just a synonym for explosion?"

"I don't know, but now it's Corpse Detonation, Rank D, and it's level twenty-seven."

"All right. That's pretty nice." I smiled, looking at Lucas, still ogling the cages. Alice was checking her guns, and she explained to me that she was now setting one to be fast and one to just carry devastating power, so that she could blow up an entire knight by injecting more mana.

"I can consume up to five hundred mana points per shot," she said, jiggling the gun in front of me.

"But the recoil is very strong. I've fired many guns and rifles, and it's, uh, very hard to handle. I've tried it once, and it almost tore both my arms off."

"I can imagine," I said. Then Queen Zosma finished her rounds and came up to us. Marcus was fiddling with the Hammer of Lightning, swinging it and telling me, "If we meet more Apprentice Death Knights, I'll try to bash them with this." I nodded. He was growing stronger and larger. I didn't know what was happening with him exactly, but Marcus was becoming one scary motherfucker. And I turned to Hailey, saying, "So, a few things for the next fights. Um, I want Tina to be focused on our rear.

And Hailey, you should be taking Tina's spot for now. Corpse Detonation is probably our biggest weapon against these monsters, and if it consumes low mana, you can use your Shield to help us out."

"I don't wanna stay back," Tina frowned.

"What about my Empower skill? I can easily fight myself."

"Yeah, but I don't think it's a good idea — not unless we lose Alice, since you two have a very similar ranged-DPS role. And Alice having the guns — unless the guns go offline for whatever reason — I'm sorry, Tina, she is one lucky woman who got an entire city charging her weapons. So, for now, her attacks are just more convenient. They cost nothing, and, well, she has very good aim." I didn't wanna say the obvious, but it was true that, for now, Alice had completely replaced Tina in the team.

I checked my equipment, and I took out more potions to hold in my armor and all the items that could be useful in any way, including a small wooden box that I carried under my arm as we moved forward.

"What's that?" Marcus asked.

"Fireworks." He looked at me as if I had just gone insane.

"What do you mean, fireworks?"

"It's— You know what? Let's just go." So we went through another set of double doors and landed in a large room.

"This is not the boss room," Queen Zosma said, and moved forward. There were five Apprentice Death Knights, and the queen just slashed at the air twice, and the Death Knights that had been about to approach her just fell apart, cut into pieces. Her claws were glowing. And I thought, That's a Skill. And we continued forward then, room after room, despite their gloomy appearance. More Apprentice Death Knights collapsed, and I was glad that we had Queen Zosma with us. She was really making all the difference.

If we had to face those monsters ourselves, only Hailey could have actually helped. And I wasn't sure how fast she could cast it, because at some point, we were faced with twenty Apprentice Death Knights, and Queen Zosma turned them into ribbons in less than a minute. Her power was scary. I turned to Alice and I said, "I'm really glad that she's on our side."

"Yeah. She moves too fast. I wouldn't be able to shoot her down." I understood why Alice was thinking about it. Even I thought, Could I take her in close combat? And the answer was, of course, not in a million years. Not while she fought like this, at least. When I saw her through the Sphere of Intuition, I could glance at some of her faster movements. I could get a general direction of where she was going, but otherwise, it was really hard to follow her.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. What was interesting, though, was the fact that I felt, as we went forward and I observed Queen Zosma fight, some manner of resonance from my Spear Mastery skill. I felt like something in it was different, or that… I don't know. Just watching combat, it felt like my intuition was drawn toward the Skill for reasons that I could not seem to understand.

Something inside the Skill was trying to get my attention, but I didn't know how to give it any. And so we just let King Pussycat's wife kill undead after undead, and we attached C4 bricks to these large halls. I wondered how powerful the explosions would be once we activated them. But I was about to run out of all these bricks when we got to another set of gigantic double doors, much larger than the ones at the Lab. And I saw, in huge characters, still in the same Gothic font, written on them: The Boss Room.

"Why is there an article?" I turned toward Lucas and his comment. Then I turned back to the door. I took a deep breath and I said, "Everybody ready?" They all nodded.

"This will be easy," Queen Zosma said.

"When they first attacked us, it was in our inferior forms. I could barely do anything compared to now. Now that I'm back at full power, I will kill those liches and rip the antidote to my husband's condition from their dead corpses."

"So, once we kill the boss," I asked Queen Zosma, "do we backtrack to the room? And how are we going to save everybody?"

"I'm not too sure." And then she said, "You can just go out. I will go save everybody."

"Yeah, no, we'll come, of course," I said. She gave me a long glance. And then we all entered the double doors to the boss. I jumped — like, literally jump-scared — because a creepy organ started playing at a very fast tempo. The pipes, which I saw first thing as I came in, were large and sharp, and each of them looked like a weapon ending in a very pointy base. Some of them were rusted, and they all had a greenish hue to them that made them very ghastly.

"Boss music," Lucas commented from behind. I sighed and focused on the unholy church setting we found ourselves in. There were three large skeletons with some very little rotting flesh attached to them, chanting around an altar that was dripping — or, more precisely, overflowing — with blood on all sides, forming a crimson waterfall that then came down the steps, close to our feet.

"Welcome," one of the liches said, and I read the level above his head. [Scholar Lich - Level 15 (Boss)] I checked the other two, and they were the same — just three levels lower. [Scholar Lich - Level 12 (Boss)] [Scholar Lich - Level 12 (Boss)] They're pretty weak, I thought to myself.

"Oh, I didn't even see your pathetic levels," Queen Zosma roared. And I saw her body starting to emit smoke, with her muscles swelling in size.

"You will pay for what you've done to my husband."

"Silence, little kitten," the level fifteen lich said, raising a very long skeletal finger and pointing it at Queen Zosma as if she was nothing but an unruly child.

"Finally, our entire plan has come to fruition. General Skullthrax said that you would fall for this, John O'Donnell." I put a hand to my chin.

"Oh, General Skullthrax — who's outside of this tutorial and part of the Sorvos Empire — told you about this, about me, despite the fact that he shouldn't really have not only much information about me, but a way to communicate with you, right?" The lich seethed, and then two flames appeared in his eyes, red.

"It matters not, John O'Donnell. This Cathedral of Undeath is not available to the System's scrutiny at the moment. The System does not reach everything at every single time. It is fallible, and you will die — unfairly so."

"So you are admitting," I said, breaking his solemn tone, "that you are breaking System rules, right? Like, this is a straight-up admission that General Skullthrax is tampering with the dungeon to an extent that one might call illegal?"

"Sure." The lich laughed.

"Will this realization make your death lighter? Is this what the essence of a human is? Knowledge for knowledge's sake?" I looked at my streaming tab to make double sure that I had just recorded all of this. And I said, "Of course. Yeah. Humans are so stupid. They're such vile little creatures who make wars and whatever. And honestly, can I tell you about the wars? I don't think that people have really ever understood that, yeah, we are, you know, warmongering. It's in our fucking brain.

The humans shouldn't be vilified because — oh, yeah, we have an instinct for war, to defend people, to, you know, form boundaries, villages. Yeah. Are we warmongering? Yes. We have also kinda made the world an awesome place and made fewer wars, um, than maybe would have happened if we had just left everyone unchecked. And thankfully — have you ever heard the term 'uniting against a common enemy'?"

"What are you blabbering about, John?" the lich said, still addressing me by my name.

"Well, I was just thinking — and sorry, it's just that my brain kinda goes in different directions in these moments. I panic a little bit. But I was just thinking, humans always had a lot of wars. And to be fair, we are fighting this so we can kinda go fight a war with ourselves. But by and large, we are about to all unite against the undead. I don't know how your empire deals with war, honestly," I said, "but we are very good at it. Maybe too good.

But for once, we are going to use that expertise to do something good — to save humanity. And, well, unfortunately, we'll probably have to fight a few civil wars, it appears, starting tomorrow night. But I guess that's why we've got to hurry up. Right, Mr. Lich? Do you have a name, by the way?" The lich just looked at me, confused.

"At my level, no one has been bestowed a name."

"All right," I said.

"That's kind of sad, man. Do you want to switch sides and come with us? I'll give you a name." The lich looked at me incredulously now.

"What are you even talking about? Do you understand that you have fallen into our trap?" While the lich was getting mad at me, I saw, through the Sphere of Intuition, that there was something glowing on Queen Zosma's back. A large array of little runes that had just popped into existence, snaking from her back all around her neck. They were still invisible to the naked eye, but to my Sphere of Intuition, they formed a collar — and then manacles around her hands and feet.

Queen Zosma was apparently cursed, or whatever the technical name was, and they were probably going to take control of her to kill us all. Which now made me realize that freeing her like that had been the trap. If we had killed the Death Knights ourselves, we would have leveled up, maybe being strong enough to destroy these liches. We would have had a troubling time against twenty undead knights, but it wouldn't have been impossible. Instead, the promise of a strong ally had blindsided me.

The Sphere of Intuition, in fact, had not really said anything about Queen Zosma. And now it appeared I had gone down the wrong path. The question was, could I distract the lich long enough to perhaps do something to those runes before one of the most powerful bosses on this damn floor killed us all while controlled by our worst enemies? I took one long look at the box of fireworks under my arm.