His face was deep in the earth and his tongue was shrivelled from the sand. He gagged and spat, using his arms to simultaneously push himself up. His eyes were strained and raw, as if he had just woken up from an uncomfortable dream. Perhaps he had.

When he had no saliva left to spit, he rubbed his hands on his trousers and used them to wipe the grains off his tongue. While he was doing this, he noticed how cranky his body felt, as if it was covered to the brim with rust. His shoulders kept locking in random positions and his fingers moved erratically. Breaking out of a fit of coughs, he pumped his chest out and pulled his arms back as far as he could go, as if they were taut strings being stretched. A thunderclap started from his back and ran down his spine.

His eyes went wide as if he’d just snorted a line of cocaine. His pupils swelled and devoured his irises, making his vision vibrant and sharp. He felt a sharp sting of pain and then a tsunami of pleasure wash over him, sending his body and mind into euphoria. He looked down at his hands and was amazed at the number of pale stains over his milky skin. They were obviously from Pete’s treatment and yet he hadn’t noticed them till now. He thoughtlessly cracked his knuckles, releasing even more thunderclaps, before feeling a similar add-on to the euphoria, albeit smaller.

He then tilted his head down, towards his legs. Just like his hands, despite being milky white, there still were pastel stains ranging down both of them. Expectant, he raised one leg and shot it down, feeling the euphoria before hearing the thunderclap this time. He did the same to the other leg, and stretched the rest of his body, before staring wide-eyed into the sky.

He had never noticed it before but all the clouds looked devilish, echoing the barren, inferno-filled world the apocalypse had brought with it. It was so bright, so blue, so beautiful. He raised his fist and stared at it and the sky behind it. It was shaking from side to side, filled to the brim with energy and excitement. He couldn’t stand around; he felt far too energetic, far too deep down in euphoria to swim back up.

He dashed and immediately found rocks, apathetic of their size or shape. He hastily dug holes and placed them inside, making sure they were nested before making links with all of them. He placed mental resistances against them and then began to shoot lightning bolts at them, his teeth quaking with excitement. The pools of lightning built up, gaining momentum and fervour, a vicious, vicious fervour. His barrier crumbled down, piece after piece falling. And so, he let down the whole thing.

His shout was quiet, basically mute compared to the thunder. He was like a reverse pylon, an arc of electricity shooting out of his body into the clouds, lighting up the surrounding skies in a menacing flash of light. He fell limp like a piece of wood. But the lightning wasn’t done just yet. The potential difference between his body and ground was so large that the energy that had slipped into the ground came back, barraging him with another hit of electricity. His body violently convulsed, a plaything to the world’s forces.

Time passed and he woke up again, his mind and body in a worse state than before. He eventually got up and stumbled around, falling onto his face many a time. But the pain was nothing, nothing compared to what was coming. He shook his body and stretched it, and the bones cracked. The pleasure made him gasp for breath, completely drunk on the intense euphoria.

Time passed, and time passed. The cycle repeated itself and he fell further into depravity, his appetite for pleasure growing. However, as if in a cruel twist of fate, the more he did it, the less pleasure he got, making each experience worse than the last. Yet, he couldn’t stop; of course, he couldn’t stop. An unmeasurable time later, he got back to his feet, Orena’s armour already far past ruined. His mind was sharp, focused on one point: lightning pleasure. But he knew he wasn’t going to get it anymore; his body was already tempered to its maximum, there were no impurities left to clear.

So, he sat for he could do nothing else. He knew his ego would come and rescue him sometime in the future, and when that time came. When that time came…

****

Orena followed the other two down the unorthodox path. Tanya had a ranger class and so she led them, following the necromancer’s tracks. As for Moonshine, she listlessly whistled, uncaring of the noise she made.

Orena knew Tanya well; she had been one of the powerhouses when the Yora village had still been the Yona village, early in its infancy. She was good with the bow, although she couldn’t even put up a fight against today’s powerhouses, whether it be people like Caleb or Moonshine, let alone monsters like Sofia, Pete or Stanis. Or the necromancer woman.

As for Moonshine, she had come with Richie, the portly man. At first, Orena had assumed her to be Richie’s sugar babe, a leech that just lived off of his power. But it was soon after Moonshine had arrived that Orena had drastically changed her view of the red-headed woman. No, she wasn’t selling her body to survive, far from it. She owned her own destiny and her proficiency in gravity control was something even Caleb struggled with, let alone anyone else in the village.

Tanya had a longbow hoisted across her back and Moonshine had a shortsword by her belt. Orena had a long, simple spear in her hands. She wasn’t worried about meeting the necromancer lady, after all, what was the worst that could come of it? Death? As much as she wanted to live, she wasn’t scared of death either. As long as it would rid the village of the plague that infected it, well, that was enough, that was worth dying for.

Tanya raised her hand and signalled to stop. Orena abruptly stopped and gripped her spear, while Moonshine peered over Tanya’s shoulders, looking for what had scared her.

“What is it?” she asked after finding nothing out of the blue.

Tanya pointed in the distance, further than Moonshine could see. “Either someone really hated that body, or, more likely, it was used even after its death,”

Orena nodded. Although she couldn’t see the corpse in question, if Tanya could see what she had just described, then it only made sense to stop.

Moonshine looked between the two. “Let’s just go. The necromancer hasn’t sensed us yet, has she?”

“No,” Tanya replied. “But I can feel a wicked aura here. She will be able to see us soon enough I think,”

“Well, the thing is you she can’t see us and you can’t see her here,” Moonshine said, “So let’s get going,”

Orena felt sweat drip into her grip as she walked. Even when facing Stanis, even when he had been threatening her, she hadn’t felt this scared. But the aura this place exuded, just like Tanya had said, was simply wicked. Orena had no idea how Stanis had fought the necromancer, let alone how they would manage to escape if negotiations did go wrong.

In little time, Tanya stopped them once again. “I can see walking corpses there,” she said as she pointed into the distance. Once again, neither Orena nor Moonshine could see what she was talking about.

“What are they doing?” Moonshine asked.

They waited as Tanya watched the corpses for a few minutes. “I don’t know. They’re doing a lot of things but it looks like their main purpose is to collect corpses. A battle went down here not too long ago,”

“Then let’s go further in,” Moonshine said.

Tanya turned wide-eyed towards her, staring with shock.

“What?” Moonshine asked back. “Orena, prepare yourself for battle, same with you Tanya. No point in standing around when we came here with a purpose,”

The trio walked closer and closer, and soon Orena saw the corpses as well. They were clearly not human and they were clearly not newly-born zombies, but the corpses they carried were quite recent like Tanya had said.

“So, what are you doing here looking for me?” a soft voice came from behind them.

Orena immediately shifted her body around and snapped her spear out, ready to strike. Tanya fumbled but similarly nocked an arrow, and Moonshine turned around looking largely unconcerned. Despite all three of them having their mana spread out around them, they still hadn’t detected the woman sneak up on them.

There she stood, blonde hair brushing over her shoulders. She gazed at them with piercing, blue eyes. Around her stood only one zombie and yet Orena already felt damned…