Legends of Orlea

Chapter 3:

(The longer italic text is a gruesome part that you can skip. It isn't major, and is only an event that adds to the plot. There is also profane language.)

The dog was rapidly covering the ground that separated it from Thomas. Suddenly, it was upon him. His eyes widened, and he gasped. "Crap..." he muttered as he stumbled back, barely managing to pull the skill off, let alone hit the beast. 

I have to stop it right now! thought Zirem as he drew his blades, ready to fight. The Guardian roared savagely,  and the flaming black eyes moved to look at him. However, he was already upon it, Faze Swords flying in all directions. 

In two hits, the HP bar was in the red zone. Zirem jumped back, not slipping, and Thomas landed a blow on the beast, his sword barely piercing the thick hide. At this, Zirem almost gasped. How did he do so much damage, and why did Thomas only deal a minuscule amount? Did it have anything to do with his class? 

Quickly, he finished the beast, and waited for the regeneration to come. Sure enough, the dog came back, red tentacles flailing and whole body consumed by black flames, the same as the ones burning in its eyes. 

Thomas moved to get up, but the dog leaped to him, savagely tearing at his cloak and taking almost half of its HP with the attack. Zirem leaped over it, thrusting, and cut through its face, or at least what used to be its face. Now it was just mangled flesh, slowly darkening, until it fell to the ground, charred and unrecognisable. 

The dog roared, and charged again, but it flew back as Thomas raised a hand feebly. "You... should learn things like this... It helps," he said with a grin, revealing that he knew Zirem didn't use magic. Then, as he put his hand to his chest, he muttered a single word, and  a green light enveloped him, and his HP shot up. Not to full, but on the brink of the yellow zone.

Zirem leaped onto a rock, and used it to propel himself upward. Silently, he cursed his weakness; his old stats would have enabled him to slay this beast without even noticing it. However, he wasn't in LoO, and needed to get over that fact.

His Faze Swords flashed brighter, and he started hitting the beast at an insane speed. Faster... he thought, remembering his time in the game where he wasn't playing. Faster... again, he sped up, but still tried to go quicker, attempting to outdo even his old self, as well as the numbers that comprised his current stats. Finally, he finished the dog, but not before he'd landed at least eight hits. "Th-that's not a beginner combo..." mumbled Thomas as he forced himself up.

"... I just sliced, and the skill initiated. I don't exactly know what happened," lied Zirem. In fact, he'd been so used to using that skill in LoO that he'd reproduced it here, even though his enemy had been finished before the combo ended.

He mumbled a goodbye, and left Thomas. As he strode down the hill, he thought back on LoO, which brought a shiver down his spine. "What's this?" he asked as he reached a large slab of rock which had three runes he'd never seen before. His menu popped open and he observed as a skill window opened: Necromancy. 

Zirem sighed. He didn't like games that focused on magic, so he readied himself to close the menu when he read an interesting passage Once the skill level reaches 340, the Necromancer receives the ability to track and hunt down any being that isn't a player that has life left in him/her. Once the player dies, until the body rots, the Necromancer can use the body as one of the Dead and summon it. The body will still have all the skills the player had when he/she died.

The amazing ability practically changed his mind about not using magic. Plus, Necromancy was only usable by Humans and Orcs who chose Dark Swordsman or Dark Mage as their class, which meant very little people, since class was chosen first, and apparently, Necromancy wasn't very known; the last rune told him that not many people had visited Necromancy Shrines. Since the runes had been scanned by his menu, he now had a translation to English. The first rune gave him the skill tree, the second was an incantation, and the third gave him the amount of people that had visited Necromancy Shrines, which he guessed were these slabs.