Chương 62: Chapter 55 — The Well

[NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── XP: 4, 850 / 10, 000 They came out of the trees in a wall of death, slow plodding and surrounding Max and Fenwick. The smell hit before they did. New death carried a sweetness that turned the stomach, the early decay of things not long gone. Old death was something else entirely, the deep rot of earth and centuries, the smell of things that had been in the ground long enough to become part of it.

Both smells together, layered and enormous, rolled out of the treeline ahead of the shapes themselves. Max's sword was already moving. Rushing forward to meet the first rank as it reached the clearing's edge, and he met a rotting zombie of an elk with a Scheitelhau, the blade coming straight down from overhead in a single committed arc, splitting its face in half before it had finished closing the distance.

A horse zombie with most of the face rotted away pressed in from the right, and he threw a Twerhau to meet it — the hilt snapping up high in front of his face, the blade turning flat and sweeping sideways as he stepped off the creature's line, the edge catching it across the skull. He threw the same cut again immediately from the other side, hilt rising, body pivoting the opposite way this time, as a mummy cow wrapped in rotted linen came in behind it, both strikes landing inside two seconds of each other.

[NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +50 XP +50 XP They kept coming. Fenwick's Magic Crossbolt cracked from Max's shoulder, four bolts of force finding a mummy that had been moving faster than the others. It staggered, kept coming, took a second volley, and went down. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +150 XP They came from every direction at once and kept coming.

Zombies first — the newly dead among them still recognizable, faces intact, clothes only lightly soiled, moving with a confused stiffness like something still learning the mechanics of its own limbs. Behind them came the older ones, the ones who had clearly been waiting longer for this. Skin gone grey and loose over the bone, fur shedding in clumps with every step, old dirt falling from wounds that had stopped being wounds and become simply gaps.

They moved in the slow, deliberate shuffle of things that had forgotten speed but not direction. Behind the zombies came ghouls, faster, moving the way Max moved, their eyes showing intelligence and focused on Fenwick and Max. Mummies followed, wrapped in linen gone black with age, the bandages straining on bodies in motion rather than at rest, as they were meant to be.

A bear crashed through the trees behind them, wrapped in the same dark linen, shouldering smaller bodies aside, crushing them or sending the bodies flying, each footfall landing hard enough to send a small shock through the ground. A fox cut wide around the main press, fast and low, hunting the edges rather than the center. Things Max had no names for came after that. Bodies built for hunting, skulls and jaws that had not belonged to herbivores in life and had not improved with death.

Long limbs ending in claws that dragged against stone. Things that moved low to the ground and things that moved upright and badly, all of them sharing nothing but the same fixed direction and the same patient hunger. Max was tireless. The sword rose and fell and rose again, bodies dropping at his feet, the blade finding skulls and spines and the joints that held things upright. A zombie split at the shoulder and went down.

A ghoul came in fast, and he stepped into it, bringing the pommel up into its jaw, and put the blade through it on the way back. He moved through the press, always moving, the horde closing behind him as he pushed through an opening ahead of him before it could close there too. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +50 XP +100 XP +50 XP Fenwick cast and cast. Sparkly Hands bought them a moment of chaos when the pink smoke and tiny lightning scattered a cluster pressing in from the north.

His mana was burning through fast. He switched to Crossbolt, rationing it, one volley at a time, picking the ones that were moving fastest. They were losing ground. A wolf mummy broke from the press on the right, faster than the first, its wrappings looser, the limbs beneath them moving with an agility the bandaged shape shouldn't have allowed.

Max caught the first strike on the flat of the blade, the impact ringing up through his arms, and answered with a Zwerchhau — hilt snapping high, the blade turning flat and cutting sideways — that opened the wrappings along one side. The thing kept coming for two more steps before whatever held it together finally gave out, and it folded. The press didn't slow.

Max willed the fire, and the blade caught, blue-white flame running its length, and the next swing took three of them across the chest in one arc, the old linen and dried fur catching instantly, fire spreading from each hit into the bodies pressed close behind them. For a moment, the line broke — the burning ones stumbling back into the ones behind, confusion rippling through the press, a gap opening wide enough that Max could breathe. It didn't last.

The sheer volume behind them closed the space again within seconds, the burning bodies absorbed back into the crowd, more taking their place as fast as they fell. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. +100 XP +100 XP Max held the press back longer than anyone should have.

The same angles worked here that worked everywhere else — step, bind, redirect, cut — and his body ran through them without him having to think about which came next. But the line kept growing. Three deep, then five, then more pouring out of the trees behind those, the clearing filling faster than he could empty it. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +150 XP +100 XP The fox found its flank. It came in low from the right while Max was committed to a cut on the left, fast enough that there was no recovery.

It hit the back of his knee, and he staggered, one hand leaving the sword to keep his balance, and the line pressed in on the opening. He recovered, drove the pommel back into the fox's skull, felt it crunch, got the sword back up. But the line was inside his reach now, and he had to give ground to create distance. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +100 XP Three steps back. Five. The clearing's center was behind them.

[NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +50 XP +150 XP One of the unnamed things broke from the press low and fast, closer to the ground than anything should move, four limbs working in a gait that didn't match anything Max had cataloged from the natural world.

Its body was wrong in a way that took a moment to place — too many joints in the forelimbs, the head set too low and too wide, jaws that hung open on a hinge that looked broken until Fenwick realized it had simply never closed all the way, not since whatever it had been died. It came in under his guard, going for the legs rather than the body, a tactic none of the others had tried.

Max shifted his weight at the last possible moment, dropping low instead of stepping back, and brought the pommel down hard where the thing's skull should have been softest. The blow connected with something that crunched wrong, joints folding in directions joints didn't fold, the creature's forelimbs buckling out sideways instead of under it.

It kept moving for a full second after it should have stopped, legs scrabbling against the dirt, jaws still working at nothing, before whatever animated it finally let go, and it went still. Another one was already coming up behind it, drawn by the noise or the smell or whatever passed for instinct in something that had been dead long enough to forget what instinct used to feel like. Max didn't wait for it to close the distance.

He stepped into the gap the first creature's body had left and met the second one with a thrust that took it through what would have been the throat, if it had still needed one. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +350 XP Fenwick's mana was gone. He had his hands braced on Max's shoulder and was watching the geometry of it, calling out what he could see that Max couldn't.

"Left. High left. The bear is coming around." Max shifted left without looking. The bear's weight came down hard against his blade, and rather than meeting that pressure head-on, he let the point drop and slip under the bind, bringing it up on the other side in a Durchwechseln, the new angle catching something in the wrappings that slowed it without stopping it. The bear's mass came through regardless, shoving Max back another two steps, and where he had been standing was immediately filled.

[NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +50 XP +50 XP Ten steps from the well now. Maybe twelve. Fenwick's harness strap caught on a backswing. He didn't fall far — three feet, maybe four, from Max's shoulder to the ground. But the impact was wrong. His head connected with the packed earth at an angle that turned the world sideways and then briefly off. He lay still for a moment. The sounds of the fight came at him from the wrong direction. Max turned. The fight had been in front of him.

Now it was in front of him and behind him and on both sides, because he had turned, and the army had filled the space his turning created. He got to Fenwick. He stood over him, and the movement changed — the tight bind-work of a moment ago giving way to the sword sweeping in long continuous arcs that kept every approach at the edge of its reach rather than meeting each one individually. He did not move from that spot. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +50 XP +100 XP +50 XP Fenwick pushed himself upright.

His vision had most of its edges back. He looked at Max, at the circle of undead pressing in around them, at the ground they had covered and the ground they had lost, and understood what had happened and why.

"Max—" Max did not look at him. The sword moved. [NOTIFICATION] ──────────────────────────── +150 XP +100 XP +50 XP Then they were at the well. Fenwick did not remember the last twenty feet of it, the details lost in the press of bodies and the effort of staying upright. He had climbed to the stone lip of the well and was standing there, nothing behind him but the drop, and in front of him the horde came forward one slow step at a time, and the step after that, and the step after that. Max was still fighting.

Sometime ago, the blade had been extinguished, and his mana was blinking 0/3. There was blood on the sword, not his; the blade was dark with it. The level notification had appeared at some point in the last three minutes, blinking in the corner of whatever Sindy showed him, and he had not looked at it once. ⚠️ ATTENTION ⚠️ ──────────────────────────── LEVEL UP — MAX HAS REACHED LEVEL 5 — PLEASE ALLOCATE STAT POINTS The horde surged. Everybody in the clearing moved forward at once, a wall with no gaps left in it.

The ground around the well was slick with the ichor of a hundred kills, black and thick, and when the wave hit Max, his feet found none of it. He went sideways, shoulder catching Fenwick across the chest, and they went over the lip of the well together in a tangle, neither of them having chosen it. Darkness enveloped them as they fell.