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Reward: Skill

Flesh grafting Lv 1

Costs Mana.

Control and form the flesh of the dead.

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It turns out Alice was remarkably lucky, randomly getting what might be the closest thing to a healing Skill a Necromancer might be able to get. And not just that. Had she just gotten this Skill right off the bat, she might have actually despaired. After all, what good does a Skill that only allows her to heal herself once she is already dead? By the time she could use it, it would already be to late. That is, if she doesn’t get a Skill to turn herself undead beforehand. Which she did.

She wasn't sure if that meant anything. Maybe, she was really just incredibly lucky. Or maybe the "random" level-up rewards weren't actually all that random.

"I think I got the Skill I need. Though, it sounds a bit sketchy. Can you make sure nothing suddenly attacks while I try to un-deaden myself?"

The redhead's eyes began to sparkle as a grin bloomed on her face, the good news definitely well received.

"Was that a PUN?"

"Not intended," Alice's mood quickly improved as well.

"Let's go inside," Ava suggested, immediately walking over to the entrance of the building they were in front of.

Alice was just about to ask her how she was planning to do that when the girl's soul had already started stretching and moving through the wall, the body following behind.

Theatrically, Ava opened the door from the inside and answered her unspoken question, "We said we would commit crimes only after we confirmed there are monsters that are trying to kill us. Which we did. And besides, most of the punishment you get for breaking-and-entering is for the breaking part of it. Entering is just considered misbehavior that gets you a slap on the wrist if it gets to trial."

Alice shook her head with a smile, trying to think of why the hell her friend knew that kind of stuff. She quickly went through the door and sat down in the first best place where no one could see her from the outside through the glass door. The building seemed to be some kind of warehouse, but Alice had no intention or reason to go and search around. And she didn’t have the time either.

While Ava stood next to her in a position where she could see as much of the corridors as possible, Alice pressed her right hand on her chest. She didn't actually think that it was necessary when using the Skill on herself, but it helped her imagination.

She activated the Skill, and to her relief found out that the biggest problem she had thought she would have didn't exist. As soon as she activated the Skill, she got a rough understanding of the area she was trying to affect. Without this, all she could have done would be the equivalent of blindly poking around in her wound and expected to succeed at a heart surgery.

Bit by bit, she began the complicated process of putting her wound back together in a way that she could only hope was correct enough that she would get out of it without instantly dying from a heart attack. And this time, dying for real.

First, she patched up the places with clean cuts. There weren't many, and they were small, but it was at least something she could do to reduce how messy the wound was.

Then, she began to work on her heart, the part she had to deal with before anything else if she wanted to survive, just in case she ran out of Mana halfway through. Luckily, while deadly, it wasn't actually too bad. None of the fiddly parts she had little to no idea on how they were supposed to look like were actually injured, only the muscle itself was. After patching it up as cleanly as she could, she went to work on the much larger entrance wound.

When she had only fused together the back half of the wound canal, she got a faint feeling of weakness. Almost like running out of stamina, but somehow different. And indeed, when she checked, she found out that her Mana was running low.

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Mana: 2/15

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At that point, all she could do was to patch the rest up the quick and dirty way, leaving behind a big bruise and a strange, swirling and bulging scar on the inner side of her left breast. It looked ugly, but she had to do it to prevent bleeding. Now she only had to hope that she didn't get an infection, but now it was too late to think about that.

If that happened, all she could do was try to find someone with an actual healing Skill intended for the living and not the undead.

"Well," Alice said, "here goes nothing. Let's hope this Skill comes with automatic resuscitation."

Before Ava could say anything else, Alice deactivated her Undead constitution through a mental command.

For a moment, nothing seemed to happen. But before the thought could even fully register, the pain came. Like a fish on dry land, Alice's body began wildly contorting itself as her muscles seemingly tried to contract all at the same time. A soundless scream left her as a terrible pain flooded her brain, as all her nerve endings seemed to scream at her at the same time.

Alice was pretty sure Ava was saying something, but it didn't register until what felt like hours later, when her spasms had finally calmed down.

Alice looked at her friend, who had tears in her eyes, a sight that was as rare as a head-sized diamond, although inversely as precious.

"Turns out, coming back from undeath feels as if some asshole has turned your stereo to maximum volume while you weren't looking," her joke managed to put a slight smile back on her friend's face, while she tried her best not to show in how much pain she still was.

"We should put the hospital on the list of places to visit. Let's hope there are some doctors who are humanitarian and intelligent enough to choose a Class with healing capabilities while daring enough to stay on their posts."

"Didn't you heal yourself already?" her friend asked, worry now back on her face.

"Not really. I just put the flesh back together. Worst case, it gets infected. And even if it doesn't, it still hurts like a bitch. What now? Mikey's first and then the bike shop? What's closer after that, shopping center or hospital?"

"The shopping center, but let's hit the hospital first."

"Okay, yeah," Alice gave her assent.

"Hissssss..." she breathed in sharply as she tried to stand up. It felt like she had the biggest bruise in all of history.

"It's fine," she assured her friend, who clearly didn't believe her. But in Alice's books, even if painful, a bruise was a bruise, and not a stab wound reaching her heart.

After taking a short break, the two of them went back outside and into the streets. Alice could tell immediately that something had changed. Or rather, something had changed already a while back, but she noticed only now that she wasn't in a constant adrenaline rush or running from crisis to crisis.

For one, there were the screams, human and inhuman, fading away in the distance. There was also the occasional gunshot, revving of engines, and the sounds of cars crashing. But that wasn't all. In a way, the air felt colder.

No, not colder. Dangerous. Raw. It reeks of death. Can I feel this because I'm a Necromancer?

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Name: Alice Liddell

Level: 2

Class-primary: Necromancer 71,4%

Class-secondary: Warrior 78,2%

Resources:

Stamina: 10/15

Mana: 0/15

Soul energy: 1/10

Primary Stats:

Muscle-density: 15

Stamina: 15

Mana: 15

Magic power: 15

Secondary Stats:

Soul energy: 10

Skills:

Soul collection Lv 1

Soul sense Lv 1

Undead constitution Lv 1

Flesh grafting Lv 1

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I'm pretty sure my affinity for Necromancer wasn't this high before... Didn't it start below 70? Did almost dying increase my affinity, or is it my level? But I don't think my Warrior affinity increased. Mmmm...

A light jog later, the two girls once again stood in front of their original target. It was only now that Alice noticed that the glass of the front door was smashed in, a small drop of blood hanging at one of the jagged edges still hanging in the frame.

The store behind it was a mess. One of the displays had been thrown over, and numerous articles were strewn across the floor of the small aisles.

Alice walked once along the front wall, paying attention to her soul sense if there was anything inside. As far as she could tell, it was empty, but neither did she reach all the way in, nor could she be sure if there wasn't anything inside that could hide its soul from her newfound sense.

Alice nodded, and Ava pulled the door open, allowing Alice to step inside while carefully checking to the left and right, then up, and finally in the aisles one after another. All the while, Ava stood guard at the door.

The door to the back of the shop was locked, but Alice couldn't feel any souls behind it, the closest one, besides Ava, being one that was two floors up. But somehow, Alice was pretty sure that it was a human.

The only unwelcome surprise she got was when she found Mikey himself lying behind the counter, the face and chest of his corpse mutilated by claws, a chunk of flesh ripped out of his right biceps.

She gagged at the sight and sent a short prayer to whoever was listening. Alice wasn't exactly religious. If anything, she tended more towards atheism. But with the recent developments, the probability of some god-like entity existing had exponentially increased. And more than anything, doing nothing felt just wrong, but she had neither the capabilities nor time to give the man a burial. A prayer was the least she could do for him.

"It's clear," Alice said, Ava joining her shortly after

Alice reached down, picking up the dead man's gun that was lying next to him. It was a sawed-off pump-action-shotgun. A quick check showed Alice that there were still eight heavy slugs loaded. She checked the safety, engaged it, and slung the weapons belt over her left shoulder.

During their previous break, they had talked about adopting several tactics and approaches to make sure they wouldn't get any more uncalled-for surprises in their bid for survival.

One result of that conversation was their tactic for securing rooms that mostly consisted of Ava standing guard while Alice was in charge of securing the room. That decision was made since she could detect souls even through walls and over a distance that was pretty big inside a building.

Another point of discussion had been on their position towards guns. Ava had made some pretty good arguments against using them.

For one, there was the fact that neither of them was especially good at shooting, so there was the problem of actually not hitting but instead attracting more enemies with the noise.

Then, there was the fact that sooner or later, the bullets would run out, which would turn a powerful weapon into little more than a fancy club.

Finally, she suggested the not unreasonable risk of using guns resulting in getting gun-related Skills. Skills that, just like the guns themselves, would turn useless once there were no bullets left. And while Alice could more or less imagine a Shadow Assassin or Necromancer with a Skill for guns, she couldn't imagine either of them getting Skills that allow making more bullets.

As such, any guns they found would become their trump cards until such a day that a gun wasn't enough to injure their opponent.

As quickly as they could, the two girls went through the shop, collecting what they had come for and more.

A total of four walkie-talkies, in case they found more companions or one got damaged. A number of charging cables of various types, power banks, solar chargers, and two chargers that had a small turbine that could be put into a water stream to charge electricity that way.

In the end, Ava found small in-ear headsets of the kind one would imagine being used by some villain's henchmen.

Or bodyguards in general, I guess, Alice thought.

On the other hand, Alice found a collection of spring and folding knives under the counter, of which Alice took two that looked especially sturdy, while Ava replaced most of her more flimsy-looking kitchen knives.

Lastly, Ava managed to convince Alice to pack five packs of cigarettes and several lighters. Neither of them smoked or had any plans to start. However, Ava argued that after a while, the little sticks of tobacco would become some kind of currency.

Alice wasn't quite convinced of it, but they were light enough, and there was still some space in her backpack left. Incidentally, Ava had left her own behind for some reason.

It took them another ten minutes to equip and set up their radios so that they could use them hands-free, but then, they could finally move on to their next target location.

Only two minutes later, they came across their first obstacle. Another group of the monkey-creatures was rampaging around on the street they were about to turn into, sparking a short argument. It was mostly Ava who argued that they should "farm" the monsters while they could since every bit of extra power could mean the difference between life and death in an emergency.

Her argument made sense, Alice had to concede. Even together with Ava, she wasn't confident in winning if they encountered anything stronger than the monkeys or even just more than three of them at once.

However, Alice managed to convince her friend to leave them until they had collected some basic necessities. On the one hand, it was to reduce the general burden of survival by increasing their options as much as possible before they started taking any more risks.

On the other hand, Alice wanted to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. She was by far not as fine as she was projecting outside. She could bear it for now, and she didn't think it would kill her anytime soon, but her chest still hurt a lot more than it should, and she didn't know why.

She hoped it was just her magic doing weird stuff to her nerves in that place, but until she got herself checked, she couldn't know.

It took them almost twenty minutes until they finally reached their goal. They took almost three times longer than expected because they had to take several detours, the monkeys now being all over the place.

Around two hundred meters down the street was the large, two-floored bicycle shop they were heading for. Incidentally, in the same place, they also noticed several large plumes of smoke rising to the sky.

They didn't have to walk far before they found the source. Several cars in the parking lot looked like they had been in a crash, not with other cars but with the small dragon lying in their midst like the cars were its nest instead.

Small, in this case, was relative, however. It only meant that the creature wasn't the Godzilla-sized kind of dragon. Its torso still had the size of an especially big pick-up truck. Attached to that was a two-meter-long, snakelike neck with a head of appropriate size, and on the other end a tail that seemed to wrap around the whole thing at least once.

The whole thing was then covered in red scales and black horns and spikes, and equipped with four powerful legs with claws the size of Alice's forearm. At least it didn't have wings, meaning running away from it would be just a little bit easier. Not that it was currently necessary as it seemed to be sleeping.

"Let's take the back entrance..." Ava suggested in a whisper.

"Sounds like a plan," Alice quickly agreed as they sneaked back up the street, now noticeably more careful.

It took them almost another quarter-hour of climbing over fences between loading bays and backyards before they finally stood in front of the building again. This time on the opposite side of where the sleeping terror was located.

"Now, how do we get in?"

"I still have one last teleport in me, but then I'm completely out of resources. Actually, I could really use a break. I'm almost completely out of stamina."

Alice herself was also breathing hard for a while already. It was actually a wonder that she could keep going for this long, probably owed to the extra five points in stamina she had gotten and the fact that she didn't use stamina while undead. Investing some statpoints there was definitely on the to-do list.

"Let's see if the break room is safe. Maybe they even have something to eat there. It's safe, by the way, not a soul on the other side," Alice said after checking the other side of the service entrance for souls.

It took Ava a while of shuffling around before the meager shadow the doorframe offered covered her enough to activate her Skill, which also took noticeably longer.

A moment later, the door opened from the inside, Ava motioning her to come inside.

Quickly, but without getting careless, Alice and Ava checked first the corridor and then the side rooms. Two of the side rooms were office spaces, while a third one was clearly reserved for the boss, as was indicated by the little, triangular brass sign that literally said ‘Boss’. Apparently, they had a sense of humor, or were trying at least.

Two more rooms remained, one of which was the breakroom. The other one actually turned out to be a side entrance to a small workshop where several bicycles stood around in different states of disrepair.

Most importantly, the entire place was completely abandoned, and not a soul was around, all of them probably on the way to finding their own family or friends. Or simply unwilling to stay in such close proximity to a goddamn dragon.

Only after taking a second look at all of the rooms, not yet dealing with the showroom, however, did the two girls settle down in the breakroom.

Only a moment after Ava started raiding the fridge, while Alice leaned back on a couch, did both at the girls startle at a sudden noise. Their hands immediately going to their respective weapons betrayed how stressed out and nervous both of them were.

However, it was just for a moment. Both of them recognized the sound a moment later. Alice's phone was ringing.

We're bloody idiots!

The two of them had talked and thought so much about preparing for mid and long-term survival that they completely forgot about the things they could still do right now, even if the option would be gone in the future.