16 – Undead Zombie Battle Maid

Chunks of flesh were missing from her body, her maid uniform was stained with blood, and her eyes had the glazed-over look of something operating with only the most primitive mental functions. Behind her, she dragged a flail with a spiked metal head that dug gouges into the soft earth.

It was a sobering sight.

Scryer hissed and ran up a tree. We quickly got up off the ground and assumed a combat formation.

The creature groaned, a haunting, sepulchral sound.

“What the hell is that thing?” I asked.

“Undead zombie battle maid,” Linli said, holding his staff forward warily. “Necromancers create them to be their personal bodyguards slash pleasure slaves.”

“Undead zombie is redundant,” Erl said. “You can just say, undead battle maid.”

“But why the maid uniform?” I asked. “Why not give her some armor or something?”

“Necromancers definitely have a certain type,” Myrl said, placing his pipe carefully back in his robes. “Guys who have to reanimate a woman from the dead just to get a girl to talk to them tend to have unrealistic ideas of what women dress like. Plus, when they’re not guarding the castle or performing their other *ahem* duties, they generally get put to work cleaning the place and making meals for their masters. A sad existence, really.”

“This one probably wandered off,” Bagavash said. “But that doesn’t explain how it got through the wards.”

“Should we, I don’t know, help it?” I said, but as I asked the question, the undead battle maid swung her arm forward with surprising speed, sending the spiked metal ball straight for us.

We all leapt out of the way just in time, and the spiked head slammed into a gravestone directly behind us, obliterating half of it in an explosion of dust and stone.

“The only way to help it is to put it out of its misery,” Bagavash said. “It was brought into this world for two purposes. To fight and to f…”

“Feather dust?” Erl suggested.

“Close enough,” Bagavash said. “Imagine being trapped in a decaying body with only your most primal instincts and a dim awareness of constant pain. Death will be her only succor.”

Then he unleashed a thunderbolt on the fiend.

As the lightning surged through it, it wailed to the heavens as sparks flew off its body. When the lightshow was over, it was smoking and charred, but still standing.

Bagavash hit it again. It shrieked, but it was almost like the lightning was helping to reanimate its flesh or something. Like if Frankenstein’s monsters was a maid or something.

“I don’t think that’s helping,” Myrl said, as the maid took another swing, knocking the head off a statue and nearly knocking ours off as well.

For a decaying zombie girl, she was surprisingly strong.

“Got any better ideas?” Bagavash said.

“Erl, why don’t you hit it with a [Fireball]?” Myrl suggested, dodging another swing.

“I don’t want to destroy the cemetery,” Erl said. “This is where people are laid to rest.”

“Wake up, Erl,” Linli shouted as the maid charged at him. “THE CEMETERY IS ALREADY BEING DESTROYED.”

Linli managed to cast his augmentation spell just before the flail hit him. The spiked ball lodged into his side with a bloody splat, did significantly less damage to his larger, buffer form.

“I’m not going to desecrate these graves!” Erl said.

“Myrl!” Bagavash called out. “You got a spell for this?”

I desperately hoped he did. I wasn’t that excited about the prospect of having to cut off the girl’s head with a [Void Blade], even if it meant ending her misery.

“I’m checking,” Myrl said, as he closed his eyes and scanned through his list of level 1 spells.

Linli, in his hulking form, yanked on the chain, and the undead maid went flying into the crypt. The large stone slab that covered the entrance cracked in two when she impacted it. For a second, she sat there with her head slumped, but then rose again with a trickle of dark blood dripping down her forehead and a demonic gleam in her eye.

She dropped the handle of her flail, and her eyes locked on me. Then she moved faster than I’d ever seen anything move. Her arms trailed behind her as she dashed straight for the kill. She hit me with such force that she knocked me on my back.

For a second, as I lay there with the zombie maid perched on top of me, eyeing me like a piece of rotting meat, I thought she looked kind of cute, in a decaying, undead kind of way. Then her eyeball fell out of its socket and landed on my face with a disgusting squelch before rolling into the grass.

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She shrieked and made like she was going to bite my neck, before Erl tackled her off me and pinned her to the ground.

Scryer was hissing and spitting like crazy from the branch of the tree he had climbed up. The maid writhed under Erl’s weight but couldn’t escape. “Now!” he shouted.

I scrambled back as Myrl raised his staff. “[Silver Arrow]!” he called.

The spell circle glowed a holy white, and a divine arrow shot forth… only to find itself buried in Erl’s backside.

“Ow! What in the hells…?” he said, trying to look over his shoulder at the wound. “Myrl, you’re supposed to hit her, not me!”

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “The aim on this spell isn’t that great.” He walked over to where Erl had her pinned to the ground. We all did.

She shrieked and writhed, but as we looked down on her, something else came through, some lost vestige of her old consciousness. For a moment, her expression changed to one of profound sadness. She looked up at us with her one remaining eye and uttered a single word. “Please.”

Myrl pointed his staff at her head point-blank as the undead zombie part of her took back over, and she started shrieking again.

“[Silver Arrow],” he said again.

This time, the arrow flew true, embedding itself in the decaying brain matter of the reanimated maid. With a final spasm of misfiring synapses, she was at last laid to rest.