Azreal the Arch-Angel, Holy avenger, Last Arch-Angel of his Lord. The last to fall helping the Human followers of his Dead God escape the hordes of undead that plagued the early centuries of the Omnipocolypse. The only one to willingly Fall, He begged the darkness controlling the hordes for a chance at life rather than die. A Demi-Lich answered the Call and created the half Zombie fallen Angel form he still uses over 2 millennia later.

The Demi-Lich had him kill or convert all the humans he had been protecting, it only took him a decade to track them all down. He served the lich as faithfully as he had his previous God for the entire rest of the Omni-pocolypse itself and then another hundred years after the great stabilization.

This time was largely a learning experience for Azreal, he no longer felt responsible to help the weak. He learned about the thousands of types of monsters plaguing the world from the hundreds of religions, books, myths or other things that once influenced the collective human unconscious and what the humans had “faith” in. which is why the end of it all ended up being called the Omni-pocolypse; every way humans thought the world as they knew it would end came true in one way or another. Some people of his previous faith even got raptured in an attempt by their god to save the souls of his followers. This ended up being a bad move on the part of his God.

First of all, the soulless bodies became early zombies, and his faith got blamed, so they had no mortal followers left in the material plane to support the heavenly plane Azreal had called home for his entire life at that point, and so like 97% of other versions of heaven, hell, or most other afterlives; his home plane collapsed into the material world. Most of it ended up as a huge Island in a growing Lake Erie. But less then a week later the island was destroyed in nuclear fire, killing most of the angels, and his God while Azreal had been on a scouting mission. He Kept protecting surviving followers as they moved through the horrors and chaos of the Early End. Until the events with the Liches army freed him of his previous obligations and allowed him more ability to think and ponder this new world.

He was also no longer the strongest, not by a long shot. In this new environment, he was like a mid-range Predator, free to feed on all creatures weaker than him, but still weary of the top predators.

Top Predators like the Colossal Crimson Scorpion that showed up one day. It rose from the earth like a beautiful woman leaves the water, hills and fields flowed off it’s back like water leaving the 20-meter tall beast made of a crimson metal taking up half a hex. It accused the Lich of breaking the laws of decency agreed upon by the gods, demi-gods, or other things of A-Rank or higher. Then with one quick swipe, it devoured not only the lich but the liches soul as well, the phylactery the angel carried in case the Master ran into trouble crumbled to dust after the Crimson Scorpion devoured his soul, then the beast turned its All-Knowing penetrating gaze onto Azreal. It briefly told him the rules B rank or higher entities use to keep fights in the higher Ranks from destroying too much of the world. Then it sunk back into the earth and burrowed away, leaving a crater and a stunned angel Where his master and his master's army once stood.

Azreal decided there and then to do whatever it took to survive and thrive in this new world, maybe even find his own path to divinity someday.

He spent much of the next thousand years, experimenting on Zombies. No one cared about them, no group would hunt him down and kill him for abusing Zombies, like a god might where he to terrorize settlements of weaker people like; humans, gnomes, faeries, or even goblins.

Eventually, he found a way to use Zombies to fuel his dwindling Divinity. He could use a low-level light spell called “restore corpse” to increase a zombie's maximum health pool. It was normally used to prepare the dead for funeral viewings. Purify corpse made sure all transmittable diseases were eliminated from a body, these spells are so weak that most zombies could resist it being cast on them passively, but he found he could order the zombies under his command to not resist any spell that he cast on them. This made it so that he could repair zombies to a condition like what they had in life, rather than the normal dark magic way of healing zombies which only restored to the state they were in when animated. This spell could also be used to repair a corpse to reduce the cost of resurrection. The other spell could even remove the zombie virus from their system. These fully repaired and cured zombies evolved into High Ghouls, which restored some degree of sentience to them, but still kept them under his control. Finally, he ordered the High ghouls to believe in him, and then seeded a half dozen colonies of these newly devout high ghouls, and even left them tools to make more zombies into high ghouls.

Source of faith power finally restored he could grow his powers of light and divinity right alongside his powers of darkness and death. And by keeping them both close to the same strength the chance of one side of his power ripping the other apart and killing him was nullified. The diversity of his powers was staggering, he could smite evil, and his power’s definition of evil included members of other faiths, a throwback to his original God’s crusades. He could also control an army of the dead, and grant them a lesser version of his smite evil power. His favourite ability that he had developed after a thousand years of experimentation on the dead, he discovered that he could attach parts of other corpses to his zombies and customize them.

He had made thousands of tank zombies, over the years, some designed to just be walls of flesh, others, giant men with armour replacing their skin. He made hundreds of Zombie runners, some modified for speed and maximum infectiousness, a dozen strains of zombie virus kept in stasis under their nails, so that a single scratch from a modified runner is worse than a neck bite from a basic zombie. Some runners he modified to work better in urban environments, like his four-armed and four-legged “arachnid” series.

Eventually, these experiments gained him the C rank class Flesh Shaper which allowed him to add parts from non-humanoid bodies, Slime goo, put in to replace the “fat” of his tank zombies and make them more springy. Claws and stingers from giant bugs added to his Infectious runners, he even found a way to make his armoured tank zombies regenerate their armour. He also experimented with screamers and other rare zombie variants, but he eventually destroyed them himself rather than listen to the awful things. His best Rare zombies were often too valuable to have as a part of his disposable army, so he often upgrades them and sends them to the closest high ghoul colony. Like his witch zombie turned High Ghoul High priestess.

That did mean he often sent away his best warriors, saving them for a real battle. he usually only kept six to ten of them as an honour guard. As a real battle had been the last thing he had been expecting this day. It was an ordinary day on an easy mission, essentially, a ‘milk run’. Or at least should have been.

Sure he was collecting something he needed to complete a hundred year research project on the exploding child zombies, the system tried to keep them alive, but it only made them better weapons, able to reform using the necromantic energies of killing someone in a blast of death energy and necromantic goo with as many strains of zombie virus as the child had encountered.

The miraculous little monsters even had a built-in Limit Break on their power allowing them to infect higher-ranked creatures(like exploding, killing/turning their parents, then reforming allowing the whole zombie family to join the horde). But the necromantic energy requirements to re-form go up as they increase in level, meaning explosive zombies rarely got past the mid D ranks before not being worth the energy to re-form. And the best you could hope to infect was a mid C rank monster with an attack like that, something he could accomplish easily with his nightmare feathers. And only children could become explosive zombies, it was truly the most difficult type of zombie minion to get into the C-Ranks because they start below D-Rank. He needed a powerful child with natural abilities that synergize well with the explosive zombie child power set.

The half Troll, half ogre-mage child was the results of these experiments, a full-blooded troll child was immune to even his feathers, or rather, the natural regeneration powers of a troll make their immune system extremely powerful. So he tagged the troll girl he failed to infect and captured her again as an adult, forcing her to birth a child sired by an adult ogre-mage male he had captured for this purpose. He hoped the ogre's blood would weaken the natural regeneration in the child enough for infection to set in, while the natural magical talent would help the child master the dark energies of a zombie faster. Adult trolls and ogres also very often reach C-Rank, up to 90% of them that get to C-Rank just by ageing and staying healthy. So the possibility of a C-Rank Explosive Zombie that had lesser troll regeneration to help it reassemble itself easier and faster, plus Ogre-Mage’s magical talent and the natural spell blood boil, to boost the explosive effects dramatically.

He had not the patience for the living to raise the child though, so he took it to an orphanage on the edge of one of the poorest cities in the region. He had planned on waiting till the girl was 5, but he grew paranoid that the child would grow too powerful to infect as well, so, at 2 and a half years, he decided toddlers could walk towards a foe and explode, and that was all it needed to be able to do. So he sent a basic raid to collect the child and create a few dozen new explosive children to use as a control group whose data he could compare to the hybrid child.

So, of course, he had a horde of low-grade zombie level the stupid fucking orphanage. Only, get this; some stupid FUCKING ORC ran off with his prize and few other insignificant children. Just sprinted away with the key to creating a high ranked Zombie/Ghoul army slung under one arm like a fucking roast pig.

Fine, fine. This was fine, he had lots of runners to stop them from getting anywhere dangerous, he sent his fastest ahead to make sure the battle didn’t stray into the Lifeless ruby red desert Hex nearby, he shuddered to think of that thing waking up because Azreal had disturbed Its peaceful multi-century slumber.

He had the rest of his zombie spread out and stop the Orc from doubling back to the city, while his runners corraled him into a hex full of ruins he would almost certainly try to hide in.

Yup, there the foolish creature goes to make his last stand in the ruins of a candy store. His horde surged into the store only to find an open hatch in the back room leading to a vast underground cave system, it might even connect to the large Ant nest that ruled this hex. He could not wait to be careful, he had arachnid style runner wall climb down after the Orc while tank zombies ripped the backroom apart to make room for a fat tank to squeeze down the hole. Then he used its rubbery slime/fat that can absorb most kinetic damage as a landing pad for hordes of weaker zombies to flood the tunnels that the fool had escaped into.

Oh, glorious, one of his Arachnid series runners landed a direct hit on the heart of the boy on the Orcs back, sure he can run a little faster now, but the hit to his morale was obvious. It was only a matter of time now, so he called the scorpion zombie back to him on the surface for an upgrade.

While he waited for the test subject, he pulled the same huge scorpion corpse he had extracted the tail from, out of his shadow pocket, the tear in reality remaining open as he summoned a blade of light and carved chunks of carapace off of the corpse’s torso and legs. The chosen pieces hovered in the air, light magic burning away any flesh not wanted and reshaping the pieces into plates of armour to upgrade his zombie with. He tossed the rest of the corpse back into the dark tear in space.

Soon his work on the plates was complete and his test subject was eagerly awaiting his upgrade. First, he used a light magic blade and his Reshape Corpse skill, to flay the skin from the 8 limbed zombie. Once all the flesh was exposed he began floating the plates into place and reshaping the muscles a bit to get the most range of movement out of this new form, the armoured clawed fingers would cling to walls more easily, even granting an ability to dig a little, he even added the vibrational sensitive organs on the underside of the scorpion to his zombie granting it a lesser tremor sense ability. A very successful experiment to help take his mind off the Orc aggravating him for a few minutes.

He moved his senses back to his zombie horde in the cave, his much-diminished zombie horde, he saw the piles of dead or disabled zombies around the bottom of the shaft and thought they were missing the landing pad, but no, where were all these bullets coming from, he looked through the eyes of one zombie and saw a woman with machine guns embedded in her arms mowing down his horde. Just as it seemed that numbers would begin to overwhelm her, she grew spider legs, her arms shifted into dual Gatling guns and her legs fucking fell off and turned into 2 mini laser turrets.

What was this bullshit?