Chapter 145: The Undead

Foolish mortal. Whosoever places a single foot upon my realm of the dead shall be bound to it eternally!

• Lumesh

Then I won’t place a single foot upon it.

• William Oh

“Try not to let anyone die on this Floor.” Arkesh the Mind-conqueror said, the ancient Immortal Serpent walking beside Will as they led the caravan to the West. For once, both the Stronghold and the Key Site were in the same direction: West.

“I think that’s pretty good advice in general.” Will replied.

“What I mean is, the Ketulkitnah did something unnatural trying to stop the growth of The Tower and prevent monsters from spawning on this Floor, in an attempt to preserve their way of life.”

“Did what?” Will asked.

“I’m not sure, but the end result is that if you die on this floor, your body becomes host to a ravenous consciousness, and you are lost. Resurrection becomes impossible.” Arkesh said.

“I’ll field this one,” Reese said, approaching from Will’s left-hand side.

“The Technopriests – easier to say than Ketulkitnah – were getting close to achieving the twin holy grails of magical technology: Extradimensional space, and self-replicating magic.”

“The thing that I have in my Phantom Hand is the peak of magical technology?” Will asked.

“Think bigger,” Reese said, gesturing to the world around them. “Where do you think we are right now?”

“Ah.”

They were inside The Tower. From the outside, the tower only looked like it could be maybe a quarter mile in width, but the inside contained entire worlds. It was just like Will’s Phantom Hand, just on a scale he never had reason to think of.

And so many Floors, each one a world of its own.

If a society were to understand how The Tower worked, they could make their own worlds…manipulate or travel between the Floors as they saw fit, without being forced to fight.

That would be valuable beyond compare.

“That truly is…What’s a holy grail?” Will asked.

“I forget.” Reese said with a shrug.

“Holy Grail: Noun. In medieval legend, the cup or platter used by Jesus at the Last Supper, and in which Joseph of Arimathea received Christ’s blood at the Cross. Quests for it undertaken by medieval knights are described in versions of the Arthurian legends written from the early 13th century onward.” Loth said from a short disance behind them. “More colloquially used as a stand-in for something eagerly sought after.”

“Where the hell did you get that dictionary?” Reese asked, glancing behind him at Loth.

“Family heirloom.” Loth said with a shrug.

“Huh. So anyway, since The Tower has a ban on unchecked Extradimensional powers in the hands of mere mortals, the Technopriests ran into a wall before they could implement what they learned. They must’ve figured out self-replicating magic first. They figured out that you could dope miasma to cause it to form certain micro-structures. Create just the right micro-structure and it will assemble more of itself out of raw miasma. Miasmatic life. Or I guess a miasmatic virus…since it doesn’t eat or poop.”

“Pooping is a requirement for life?” Will asked.

Reese grunted, nodding. “Everything poops.”

“Even trees?”

“Trees poop air and dead leaves.”

“Huh.” Will mused, imagining them all breathing tree-poop.

Arkesh the Mind-conqueror was giving Reese a quizzical look.

“Quick disclaimer: I was in a box before…whatever this is,” Reese said, motioning to the purple haze around them. “But If I had to guess, they probably created a miasmatic virus that was designed to lower the Miasma levels on the Floor and prevent monsters from spawning, so that they could continue to dominate The Tower.”

“Now, typically, a living creature has it’s own internal miasma ecosystem, and their little miasma virus struggles to get a foothold on it while it’s alive. It just gets washed out along with the rest of the Miasma. But a dead body…that’s a completely different story.”

“…What’s a virus?” Will asked.

“An infective agent that typically consists of a nucleic acid molecule in a protein coat, is too small to be seen by light microscopy, and is able to multiply only within the living cells of a host.” Loth said, prompting Reese to stare at her. “Alternatively, a piece of code that is capable of copying itself and typically has a detrimental effect, such as corrupting the system or destroying data.”

“Code?” Will asked. “Like a secret code, or…what?”

“Let’s not get carried away. We could spend multiple lifetimes on this rabbit hole, trust me,” Reese said, motioning for Loth to stop showing off.

“All you need to know is that they created a magic spell, it was self-replicating and they didn’t perform enough testing before deploying it…or perhaps it walked out on the bottom of someone’s shoe. In any case, when the dead started killing the living in a population dense urban center…that was the final straw, and the Coil ground down another ‘great’ civilization.”

Reese scornfully put air quotes around ‘great’.

“But hey, at least there aren’t many actual ‘monsters’ on this floor, so I guess they achieved one of their goals.” Reese said, glancing around. “Unfortunately, since the population was in the billions, I’m guessing you’ll have to deal with the occasional zombie horde. Case in point:”

Reese pointed ahead of the caravan, where Will made out twin pinpricks of light in the distance, a brilliant glowing purple.

Eyes.

Through the purple haze, more and more twin points of light appeared, stretching across the road, wobbling side to side as they sprinted towards them.

Well, sprinted was a generous term. More like shambled hastily.

The creatures that manifested out of the fog were emaciated, dry and brittle human corpses covered in purple scars, their only moisture seemed to be a strange oily substance that dripped from their snarling mouths that only contained a few of their most stubborn teeth.

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Their fingers seemed to be where the real danger was. Their fingers had somehow elongated over time, the flesh having long since sloughed off their fingertips. The tiny bones at the end of their fingers had been sharpened into shivs through repeated use as a stabbing instrument.

Will sent his middle snake forward, morphing it’s armor into a long, thin blade.

With a thought, the front rank of the approaching horde was decapitated, slumping to the ground.

“Attack!” Will heard shouting going up from the sides and back of the Caravan, and he climbed up into the air to get a more commanding view.

The moving corpses were streaming towards them from every possible direction, stretching back as far as the eye could see through the ever-present haze. Will heard a faint thump and glanced up, spotting the glowing purple eyes of thousands more of the zombies above them, pressed tight against the inside of the crystalline buildings, their faces pressed up against the glass with feral hunger.

Glass. Windows. Those are windows? Will had never heard of a panel of glass larger than a man, let alone one strong enough to stop a person and without any imperfections. Will’s brain recategorized the buildings from crystal to windowed towers.

Will shook the amazement out of his mind and focused on the current problem. The current problem was that the caravan was surrounded by undead in every direction and this was looking like it might be a battle of attrition.

Individually, and even in small groups, these creatures weren’t that tough.

The problem was that there were enough of them that Will couldn’t even see the limits of their numbers through the haze. There could be only a few thousand or there could be millions.

Or billions, according to Reese.

Might as well buy some time while I figure out what to do.

Will deployed his Phantom Snakes and had them cut swaths around the caravans, stacking up bodies at an outlandish rate.

The pressure on the defenders instantly eased up, and Will began to muse.