I left the summoning room in a bad mood. Cordelia was hiding inside her flask and wouldn’t come out even when I used the activation phrase. Without Voulos to act as a common enemy, it seemed that she considered our partnership over. She hadn’t explicitly stated it, but even in my befuddled state, it was obvious she was trying to get rid of me.

Cordelia could have been a lot more helpful, but the conversation hadn’t been a complete waste of time. I had gathered some useful information, and she had given me a couple of good ideas.

The first thing I had to decide was if I should fight or flee. My zombie instincts said to fight, but those instincts had little in the way of self-preservation. A zombie would happily walk onto a sword for the chance to eat some brains.

Based on her reaction, Cordelia clearly believed that fighting the [Enforcer] would be suicide. I didn’t have a magic flask to hide in, so perhaps I should take her advice and run into the woods.

Time was of the essence, and I couldn’t make up my mind. ‘Hans, flip me like a coin. Heads up, we fight; face down, we run.’ I said. Before I even had time to question where the idea had come from, I was spinning through the air. As the floor rushed to greet me, I absently wondered why my ear was so itchy.

The face down landing broke my nose, but at least I had a path forwards. Before we left, I decided to follow Cordelia’s advice, namely to grab all the best loot for myself before we left. Despite the delays, only an hour had actually passed according to the clock on my character sheet.

How much time did that leave to escape? A few hours meant at least three, probably more. If I spent the next hour looting, I would leave myself plenty of time to get lost in the woods. An hour was less time than I would have liked, but it was something. Why did the system give me a head start at all? It was like it was toying with me.

Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to waste the time I had left. From the staircase landing, Hans shouted for the hulks to follow. I didn’t exactly lie when I promised them brains; I just didn’t specify how long it would take. The deception was necessary, because I needed all the help that I could get. Hans served well as my ride, but I could really use some muscle to back me up.

I called the one on my left Pecs and the one on my right Abs. Pecs had a rib bone poking through his pectoral muscle, and Abs had a grotesquely swollen abdominal cavity. Somewhere in the knowledge [Made to Serve] gave me, I seemed to have swallowed an anatomy dictionary. In order to name my new bodyguards, I expelled two of the unevolved zombies from my party to make space.

Zombie, aka ‘Pecs’

23:12, 20th of Iosi, 1465 3A

Total Level: 15 (Bronze)

Type: Hulking Zombie (D)

Attributes:

Dexterity: 5

Strength: 21

Vitality: 14

Wisdom: 5

Intelligence: 2

Charisma: 2

Affinities: Nether (100%), Poison (50%), Fire (-25%), Holy (-100%)

Traits:

Made to Serve

Flesh Construct

Hulk

Skills:

Supernatural Senses

Undead Resilience

Anabolic Necrosis

Abilities:

Unarmed Strike

Rush Attack

Bite

Flesh Hunger

Infected Claws

Death Grip

Smash

Roar

Hurl Zombie

Zombie, aka ‘Abs’

23:12, 20th of Iosi, 1465 3A

Total Level: 17 (Bronze)

Type: Hulking Zombie (D)

Attributes:

Dexterity: 5

Strength: 21

Vitality: 14

Wisdom: 5

Intelligence: 2

Charisma: 3

Affinities: Nether (100%), Poison (50%), Fire (-25%), Holy (-100%)

Traits:

Made to Serve

Flesh Construct

Hulk

Skills:

Supernatural Senses

Undead Resilience

Anabolic Necrosis

Abilities:

Heavy Blow

Rush Attack

Bite

Flesh Hunger

Infected Claws

Death Grip

Smash

Roar

Slam

Payback

Being in the same party made communication so much easier than my ventriloquist act with Hans. We were on a tight schedule, and the party chat would save me a lot of time.

Our first order of business was to loot Cordelia’s flask. If she wouldn’t come out to talk to me, then I would have to take her with me.Cordelia might want nothing more to do with me, but I rejected her rejection. She was the one who told me to grab anything worth looting, and her flask was valuable loot.

Before we left the room, I asked Abs to carry the half empty chest of attribute potions. She half carried the chest, and half rested it on her swollen abdomen.

My little entourage then headed back to the stairs, and back towards the training room that contained Voulos’ corpse. I noticed the screamer still following us, but it ducked out of sight every time we called out to it.

While we were walking, I asked Ghost to leave the woods to come meet us.

‘Ghost, come to the tower.’

‘Why?’ The reply came after a long pause. Hearing it speak for the first time, the mental voice was more feminine than I expected. From her height I had assumed Ghost was male, but her desiccated form made it hard to judge. It was mildly surprising, but less so that the rebellious tone her message carried.

‘Because… I say so!’ I finally replied. My nine charisma was hard at work.

‘Master says hunt in forest. Says report enemies.’ She replied defensively.

‘Master is dead. Enemies in woods. Not safe. Come to me.’ I tried again.

‘Enemies kill the master?’ She asked.

‘No, I did.’

‘Minions not allowed to kill master.’ She scolded me.

I wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with her unexpected resistance. This was actually the first time she had replied to me over the party chat. I had reached out before, but received only silence in return. At the time, I had assumed she wasn’t smart enough to hold a conversation, but perhaps I had underestimated her.

Ghost was old. As a zombie, I could judge the age of my kin at a glance. We had a tendency to dry out as time went on. It modified our underlying base attributes with hidden status effects, much like the stages of life mortals went through. The difference was that instead of going from [Infant] to [Elder], zombies went from [Fresh] to [Withered]. I couldn’t see my own life stage status; I didn’t have enough intelligence for that level of self-appraisal, nor did I have a necromancer skill designed to assess corpses.

Ghost was definitely [Withered]. Her skin was like a weathered parchment pulled over a skeleton. Perhaps that had given her more time to form a personality than the average zombie. Maybe she had got along with our temperamental master. He had left her to free range all over the forest, killing to her heart’s content. It was just about possible that she might want revenge for his untimely death.

I wasn’t smart enough to consider the risk of making an enemy of an old and powerful feral zombie. I just ploughed onwards.

‘You coming?’ I asked.

‘Why?’

‘To protect me.’ I replied honestly.

‘Why?’

‘I am the party leader.’

‘Why?’

‘[Pack Leader] put me in charge.’ I explained, glossing over the fact that I didn’t actually have the trait anymore.

‘Why?’

‘It’s an [Overseer] skill.’

‘Why?’

‘What? I don’t know.’ I was getting confused.

‘Why?’

‘Why not?!’ I almost yelled in frustration.

‘… Ok.’ She said, and that was that.

After that slightly bizarre conversation, I wasn’t entirely sure what Ghost was doing. That question led me to a new discovery within the party system. I found that if I focused really hard on Ghost’s location with the party box open, a secondary circular box opened up. The box that was a circle showed a drawing of my surroundings.

There was a little blue arrow at the edge of the circle pointing towards Ghost. It said that she was “31 km” away. I could make the drawing bigger or smaller, but I couldn’t make it large enough to show Ghost. It reminded me that there was still one random zombie left in my party unaccounted for.

According to the circle box, I was practically standing on top of the last zombie, but I still couldn’t see them. Perhaps they were a ghost like Cordelia: the blue dot marking them was translucent compared to the rest.

The last zombie didn’t reply to any of my messages, so I got back to the job at hand: looting Voulos of anything worth taking. With my party in tow, we went first to the ritual room containing Voulos’ corpse.

Voulos had three magic rings on his left hand I wanted to take with us, but Pecs took so long removing the first ring that I became inpatient, and told him to rip off the entire hand.

When Pecs waved the severed hand under my broken nose, I noticed that the flesh had torn cleanly along the line of an old scar. When I looked at the other arm, I saw the scar mirrored. It was a little strange, but I wasn’t going to complain about something that made our work easier.

Naked, headless, and starting to smell, we left our former master lying on the floor. My next idea was to find some of the cold storage rooms that Voulos stored spare zombies in. The issue with this idea was that I didn’t actually remember the keystone sequence for the storage room I had been in, or any other. The guess took us to an empty room, but the second took us straight into a trap.

Pecs was the only one of us with a free hand, not counting the severed hand he was carrying around, so he was the one who opened the door. The spike trap took him down to a tiny sliver of health. It would have killed him outright if not for the innate poison resistance we all had. Just a scratch of that poison would kill me, with my level one health pool.

As it turned out, what might have been a deadly trap for any living creature was a welcome stroke of luck. The door swung and a shambling figure sprinted forwards to activate an ability I was all too familiar with. [Corpse Explosion] flooded the corridor with nether magic, healing some of the damage we had taken.

The green cloud cleared, and I saw a dozen or so more figures shuffle-sprinting towards us.

“Stop!” I asked Hans to shout. Three overeager zombies ignored him and detonated on Pecs. The rest came to a halt before killing themselves, though the closest zombie looked like he hadn’t made up his mind yet.

“Master is dead. Listen to me. Follow me for brains!” Hans gave my rallying cry.

It was really that easy to take command of the small group. It helped that they didn’t have any interest in my own rotting brains, and they were naturally compliant. Compliant or not, unfortunately there was no room in my party for them. This meant that I had to relay my every instruction through Hans. It was frustrating.

Hans was good with simple phrases, but for more complex sentences, there was a lot of lag. Without [Pack Leader] pushing his wisdom up, his speech came out sounding stilted and unnatural. It made me determined to master the clicks, and obtain a translation skill. I would have to speak to Cordelia about it.

We were no closer to finding a cold storage room, but with the addition of the bombers, I had the beginnings of a respectable horde. Cordelia had said to look for loot, but having a good sized horde was just as important as a few magical baubles.

It was unlikely that I would guess the keystone passwords for the storage rooms, or any hidden treasure rooms. However, I realised that Voulos had been paranoid enough that the tower was probably absolutely full of traps. Voulos had been a necromancer who specialised in mass producing minions. My master had been a bit of a one trick unicorn so most of these traps probably involved zombies in some form.

With all that in mind, I gave up searching for a cold storage room and instead rampaged around, triggering as many traps as I could find. We lost two bombers to a fireball trap, and then another to a flesh-eating jelly, but after those initial failures, we hit gold.

I was losing confidence in my brilliant plan of deliberately triggering all the traps when the lead zombie stepped on a trapdoor hidden by a carpet. The trapdoor led to a pit that was absolutely filled with more zombies. It took some experimentation, but I used the hulks to fish most of the zombies out of the pit by using the bombers like undead ladders.

Organising the horde became difficult after that for two reasons, and our progress ground to a crawl. The first reason was that the pit zombies wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to boss them about. Even the promise of tasty, succulent brains did little to get their attention. Instead, I had to use my hired muscle to push them along. Once they got moving, they tended to continue walking in the same direction until stopped.

The second issue was how agonisingly slow they moved. The fast zombies above four dexterity didn’t have too many issues, but watching the slow zombies’ feeble attempts to conquer the stairs was just painful. It was amazing the difference a single point of dexterity could make. After wasting several long minutes waiting for the slow zombies to catch up, I decided just to leave them behind. That left me with a horde of a few dozen zombies to work with.

Time was running out. I checked my character clock and panicked when I saw it was coming up to half past midnight. I had planned to leave by midnight at the latest so that I was safely in the forest by the time the [Enforcer] spawned. It could spawn any time from one in the morning and onwards.

It was time to go. I called my horde to a halt as I tried to remember the keystone combination to the ground floor. To my growing dismay, I gradually came to the realisation that I had no idea what the code for the ground floor was. Voulos had never taken me out of the tower.

I ground my teeth in frustration as I failed to come up with a plan. The sound of grinding teeth reminded me of the hours spent training my [Bite] ability. The training room Voulos had used for that had been close enough to the ground that I remembered being able to see the grass from the window. More recently, I had levelled up my [Rush Attack] in that same room.

Remembering things was hard at the best of times, and harder still with none of my mental attributes past the mortal threshold, but after a few attempts I managed it. I lost another zombie to a spike trap, but it was an acceptable casualty.

The horde surged into the training room; they seemed to sense my growing sense of urgency. Pecs smashed the window, and I looked out below. We were about twenty meters from the grass below. It was the sort of fall that would probably kill someone that was low level, but was barely a hindrance to more powerful beings.

Unfortunately, only Abs and Pecs had enough of a health buffer to shrug off such a fall, and Pecs’ health was still in the red. I looked at the time and saw that one o'clock had come and gone.

The [Enforcer] could spawn at any moment. It might have already spawned and could be on its way right now. If it did, I hoped that the magical staircase would at least slow it down. It had confused the nether out of me, and I had seen how it worked.

Convincing Abs to jump out of the window took more work than I had expected. She was above the wisdom threshold, and that gave her a scrap of self-preservation. The more basic zombies would happily walk into blatantly obvious deadly traps without hesitation.

After plenty of reassurance and many promises, Abs jumped out of the window. She landed with the grace of a lumbering ox, but the fall only depleted a quarter of her health. Just to test how a regular pit zombie would hold up, I got Pecs to push one out of the window. It landed face first and died instantly.

So… pushing the horde out of the window one by one wasn’t going to work. I needed a way to cushion the fall, or otherwise reduce the damage taken. What would Voulos do? That’s when an idea came to me. It was stupid, and probably wouldn’t work, but if it did, it would be an exploit worthy of my unscrupulous master.

I hailed Abs on the party chat. She was a little reluctant to assume the role of giant pillow, but I talked her round. It took much longer to get the pit zombies to go along with my plans. I had to repeat it over and over, telling them to nod if they understood. That didn’t work at all, and all I got was a bunch of blank stares.

In the end, I had to waste over half of my wisdom potions just to get them nodding along with my plan. Desperate times call for desperate measures after all. Even then, it took what felt like a hundred repetitions to get them all nodding along.

Whilst I was throwing potions around, I risked consuming one of the scant charisma potions I had. It pushed me back over the mortal charisma threshold, and the fog over my mind cleared. The change was less extreme than the first time I had crossed the threshold. I had a hunch that I never really lost all of my previous genius, and that the system had merely locked it away from me.

The first zombie to follow Abs out of the window missed their target and went splat. They didn’t die outright, but they broke both legs. The next zombie had better luck, demonstrating that feeding it a wisdom potion hadn’t been a complete waste. Just before it hit the ground, it activated [Rush Attack] with Abs as the target. It took no damage from the fall. Instead. it dealt a small amount of bludgeoning damage to the hulk.

Overall, about half of my zombies made the jump successfully, including myself, Hans, and Pecs. I considered it a successful plan. All the bombers survived the fall, looking no worse for the wear. The floor was littered with injured zombies, but only a few had died outright. One underappreciated benefit of being a zombie was that if you didn’t destroy the brain, we could keep going like cockroaches.

It would be a shame to leave behind so many zombies after all the effort I spent rounding them up and herding them through the tower. A single [Corpse Explosion] could heal them to marching condition, and I had bombers to spare. I looked at my clock and saw that it was almost three o’clock. Time to get a move on.

Zed's end of chapter sheet:

King Zed ‘The Red’

02:49, 21th of Iosi, 1465 3A

Total Level: 1 (Copper)

Levels: Overseer 1

Experience: 1/100

Type: Overseer Zombie (C)

Attributes:

Resources:

Dexterity: 6

Stamina: N/A

Strength: 13

Power: N/A

Vitality: 15

Health: 30/30

Wisdom: 5

Willpower: 10/10

Intelligence: 5

Mana: 10/10

Charisma: 10

Soul: 20/20

Decay: 24% (Stage 0)

Affinities: Nether (100%), Poison (50%), Fire (-25%), Holy (-100%)

Titles:

King of the Braindead (Inactive): Access to Kingdom subsystem.

Red-Handed: +1 Intelligence, sets alignment as evil, hands are permanently dyed red.

Traits:

Made to Serve: +1 Intelligence, +1 Charisma, -1 Wisdom. Gives understanding of system common, and the primary language of its creator (Orcish). Is able to follow simple commands based on the creator's intelligence divided by ten (3 words long). Gives access to a portion of the knowledge contained within the host brain, better preserved brains retain more information.

Flesh Construct: Sustained by nether magic, does not need to eat, drink, sleep or breath. Does not regenerate Health. Does not use Stamina or Might, but instead uses Decay.

Overseer: +2 Charisma.

Not Braindead: +1 Wisdom, +1 Intelligence and +2 Charisma.

Skills:

First skill gained at level 5

Abilities:

Unarmed Strike - Copper - Level 1 (Unavailable):

0% Decay

1 Second Cooldown

Strikes at the target with an unarmed limb for 5 bludgeoning damage.

Dash Attack - Bronze- Level 1 (Restricted):

0% Decay

5 Second Cooldown

Dashes to a target within 3 meters for 9 bludgeoning damage with a chance to push back or knock over the target.

Poisoned Bite - Bronze - Level 2 (Restricted):

0% Decay

5 Second Cooldown

+1 Vitality and Bites the target for 9 piercing damage and a further 8 poison damage over the next 30 seconds.

Enrage Zombie - Bronze - Level 4 (Restricted):

50 Soul

No Cooldown

The user lets out a rage-filled shout at a target zombie to increase its Strength, Dexterity, and Vitality by +5 for 50 seconds.

Overseer’s Aura - Bronze - Level 3 (Restricted):

1 Soul / Second

No Cooldown

+1 Strength to all zombies within 13 meters.

Corpse Explosion - Steel - Level 2 (Restricted):

200 Mana

20 Second Cooldown

Explodes the targeted corpse to deal damage equal to the health it had when alive in a 2m radius. Any corpses in the range of the explosion have a 25% chance to explode as if targeted by this ability.

Attunements (3/0):

Ring of the Jester (Cursed): +2 Charisma but curses the wearer with [Jester’s Curse].

Princess Tiara: +3 Charisma and makes the wearer more attractive to Princes.

Intellect Ring: +1 Intelligence.

Status Effects:

Jester’s Curse: The target is cursed by the jester. The curse can only be lifted by a Sphinx’s laugh.

Team-Killer (358 days remaining): -2 Charisma

Charisma Potion (1 hour, 39 minutes remaining): +1 Charisma