We Can Be Heroes ...?

47

Shion had hoped that nearing their objective, the lair of Nukrambuzer, would prove a little easier than the rest of their journey, but she was sorely mistaken. If anything, the groups of monsters, that the others called 'mobs', increased in frequency and now they consisted of all the varied types of monsters they had encountered throughout the city.

Swarms of skeletons, zombies and ghosts attacked them as they turned each corner, as they passed seemingly empty houses, as they crossed squares. And other creatures had joined them. Flesh monsters, similar to the first, transformed body of the king, though smaller and not quite as durable. Wraiths appeared. A kind of ghost that drew upon the blood of their enemies, like vampires, but with the etherial quality of their spectral cousins.

It wasn't easy. None of it had proven easy from the moment they first encountered skeletons, but they had become a team. They had fought long and hard beside each other. Had come to know how each other moved, how they fought, what risks they took and when they held back. Shion considered that the others already knew these things, having adventured together before, but it was all new to Shion. Except, not any more. She knew she could rely on these people and she hoped they believed they could rely upon her, also.

After a while, the city flattened out, the ruined buildings becoming sparse and spaced further apart and Shion saw why. Here, at the far end of the city, the people of Stillfallow had set aside a great swathe of land dedicated only to one thing. A cemetery that stretched out before them all, rusted, ruined gates proclaiming the entrance, dangling from the remains of a once-stout wall, with several paths that wound among the gravestones and the mausoleums. And, there, at the very edge of the city, the very edge of the cemetery, sat a temple.

Four, twisted steeples rose up at the corners of the temple, curling in toward each other like four great fangs in the jaw of an enormous monster. Those steeples may once have stood straight and tall, in praise and celebration of whichever god the people of Stillfallow worshipped, but either they had become buckled as the city was torn from its foundations and dragged here, or the presence of the Arch-Necromancer had corrupted them.

"Creepy. And, oh! Look! Great touch." Face twisting in a grimace, Jova pointed to the ground. "Fog. Can anyone hear pipe organ music? Like Dracula movies? Or the Phantom of the Opera? No? Just my imagination managing to make this even worse than it actually is."

Indeed, fog had crept in from nowhere, covering the ground and sending chills through Shion's legs while hiding the pathways that would lead to the temple up ahead. The headstones of the graves now peeked above the frigid grey wisps of fog as it drifted out, across the sea of graves, crypts, sepulchres and tombs and Shion could only imagine what loathsome creatures could emerge to give fright and to attack them.

The fog clutched at long-dead trees, devoid of leaves for centuries, rising up the dry, brittle trunks. The temple now took on a hazy, ghastly pall as it passed in and out of sight as the fog drifted in random directions, though Shion was unsure how random those movements could be. There was no wind upon which the fog could travel. No breeze to give the fog movement from one place to the next. The fog had a magical quality to it. A fiendish undercurrent. A malice to it.

"Everybody stick close. Watch each other's backs and shout if you see anything." Mila summoned, first, her staff, and then her colony of Bobs, sending the little blue creatures out in all directions. "This may turn out to be as bad as that boss section with the never-ending zombies."

Mila made certain each of them had a touch upon another, standing and moving in an ever-turning circle that edged forward at a tortuously slow pace, but they could do little else. The fog had obscured any signs of the paths they could take and, with the nature of the creatures they had met this far, travelling across the land, over the graves themselves, could disturb ever more of the dreaded undead that had plagued them all along.