Hate to Apathy

Mission

In the morning, I woke up and left his room. I didn't eat the breakfast I had ordered my zombies to make the night before, and instead went outside to get a bit of fresh air. There, I was met with my other party members, all of which were ready to get going.

'Finally! You took forever to get up!' Said Aria, sighing exaggeratedly.

'Come on. We need to get going to kill the monsters, then scout out land to find the portal.' Said Violet. 'Usually, we would leave two of us here to guard the camp, but it seems your...', she coughed, 'zombies are good guards, and the camp they made is more of a mini underground fortress. That is why we are all going together, which will make this mission a lot easier.'

     After that announcement, there were a few other inconsequential "good morning"s and "sleep well?"s before we left, walking deeper into the deep, dark, and slightly foreboding sea of green and brown. The mission, as I soon realised was not that hard, especially with my necromantic powers and ability to sneak up on prey. It was apparently a very good combination. After just a couple of hours, we had killed 73 slimes, 65 alraunes, 48 dryads, 24 giant slugs, and lesser succubi. We had even found evidence of a demon portal nearby, so we were on our way to destroy that at the moment.

By the time we had gotten to the portal, we had killed all the monsters we had to kill except for 3 lesser succubi, who just happened to be around the gateway of the portal. In just a few more minutes, we had completed the mission, and had already started on our way back to the camp. Violet explained to me that that mission would have taken a couple of days normally, but since I was here, and since the camp was guarded so that everyone could come, that meant that the mission was a lot easier, and was completed in a total of 2 hours and 23 minutes.

On the way back to camp, we encountered next to nothing, seeing as my undead minions were killing those that got within a 20 metre radius of us. One could argue that I was now overpowered, and I wouldn't disagree. However, if they told me to stop, I would retort that I was simply exploiting an advantage. The problem is that other people see it as unfair...

We had decided to sleep in camp for the last night so as to keep looking around, killing monsters and picking up the loot from monsters my skeletons killed. We brought back some meat and a few herbs. We even found an apple tree, from which we took two apples for each of us, one for that evening, and one for the next morning.

When we got back to camp, it was quite late, and all we did before going to bed was cooking our meals and eating them. I, myself, fell asleep rather easily, believing myself to be safe for once. While I slept, I could stop thinking about violent, bloody murders. I said that I fell asleep quite easily. That doesn't mean I didn't repeatedly wake up during the night in a cold sweat, all because I had just seen someone being hanged by their own intestines from a tree of severed limbs. It was horrific, but what truly disturbed me was that I found it... beautiful. When I woke up, I had to run out of the underground house to vomit the contents of my stomach.

At some point, I finally stopped dreaming, and instead woke up to the sound of my teammates doing something or other in my room. When I opened my eyes, I saw that that Aria were ripping apart my cloak, Violet was smashing my Swiss Army knife, and Elisa was performing a spell on the Necromancy book. With a sudden flash of light, Elisa's spell was finished, and with it, all my knowledge of how to raise the undead vanished, as if I had never learnt how to do it in the first place. Elisa then ripped up the pages of the book, and all the while, the book was screaming.

     I sat up in my hammock and asked them in a very, very serious tone something that would end up breaking up the band completely...

'Why did you do that?'

'Well, we thought it was unfair how you got so powerful in such a short amount of time, so we wanted to make sure you weren't getting any cheats.' Said Violet, as if it were a perfectly normal thing for a team captain to be announcing.

     I didn't answer. I just stared at them, silently judging them.

'I'm not angry.' I said. They looked relieved. The even had the audacity to smile. 'I'm just disappointed.' Their faces fell from an expression of joy to an expression of sadness. Their sadness seemed comparable to grief, or depression, or both.

     I then got out of my hammock and left. I walked calmly up the stairs, out the bunker, and followed the path back to Lescatie. In fact, there was no path, but the large palace in the distance was indication enough of where the capital was. The problem with walking back, now, was all the monsters. However, on my way back, I didn't see any sign of any monsters.

     I then remembered something. This phenomenon, known as: "The Silence before the Storm', only occurred when the old Demon Lord had been slain, and a new one was being appointed. It was a short period of time, lasting from half a day to several. During this time, all monsters were in hiding, and were all mutating to fit the new Demon Lord.

     I began to run back to the capital. There might be something in the news, or a rumour, or something akin to that. I was intrigued to find out what this new Demon Lord was. That would give me the minimum information to deduce the motivation, the tactics, and maybe even give me some insight how to not die by a monster attacking me. Then again, my deduction might end up being entirely wrong, and I would end up in a completely random situation. It was all up to Chaos to decide...