More corpses burst into sight, and Raksha charged into their midst.

Sadea wasn’t a necromancer, though she was very familiar with the Discipline of necromancy. After all, it was the most widely practiced type of sorcery in the Hegemony, and reanimated corpses, human and beast, all played crucial roles in everyday life.

Her beloved Pieter, for instance, was one of the finest reanimated horses in the province. She’d picked him out herself from his stable, a mighty stallion in the prime of his life, and then he’d been slaughtered and reanimated by a highly competent team of necromantic craftsmen. Now, he served her forever, the best hundred credits she’d ever spent.

On the other end of the spectrum were the shambling corpse-slaves littering every Hegemonic establishment that could afford them. Viktoria’s brutish puppets would lie somewhere in between, she supposed.

Corpses reanimated in accordance with Church dictates were deemed sanctioned, and they bore a very distinctive, standardized signature of psychic energy. Needless to say, this did not apply to the ones piling onto Raksha as he hacked them to pieces.

“There might be something to what you were saying just now,” she mused, futilely trying to shake off a layer of corpse ash from the top of her boots.

“Yeah?” Raksha had a dozen corpses hanging from his limbs. As their broken teeth and bony fingers scraped uselessly off his aegis, he peeled them off and decapitated each one in a grim, workmanlike manner.

“The unsanctioned dead here are suffused with psychic energy that is similar to the chimera’s, which means that even after we’re done here…”

“There will be more to do, elsewhere.” Raksha smashed a crumbling skull against the wall, spilling its stinking brains all over the permacrete.

“More money to make, you mean.” Sadea strode past the gore-soaked martial scientist. They’d arrived at the elevators. There were two small passenger ones and two much larger carriages meant for freight. She pressed the call button for one of the passenger elevators.

The button lit up. Machinery grumbled from behind the steel elevator doors, signaling the approach of the carriage. Raksha sighed.

“What’s the matter? Scared of small spaces?”

“Only if I’m in them with you.”

“Oh, come on!” Sadea punched him playfully on the shoulder. “Still bearing a grudge about the bathtub thing?”

“Who wouldn’t? You electrocuted me!”

“Yeah? Well, you assaulted an intimate part of my anatomy! Me, a fair and modest maiden of impeccable repute and virtue!” Sadea pointed to her rear, noting how Raksha’s gaze trailed to it before he caught himself and rolled his eyes.

“Fine. Not my finest moment.” He folded his arms. “Won’t happen again.”

“We’re even, then?”

Raksha glared at her. His left brow twitched. Eventually, he sighed again. “Sure, whatever.”

“That’s the spirit!” Sadea punched him again. “Now, come on, don’t be so glum. Give me a smile!”

“We’re fighting reanimated corpses that want to eat us, and we’ve got to kill something powerful before it’s too late and everyone in town dies. That sure brings a smile to my face.”

“It should!” Holding her staff between her knees, Sadea stood on her tiptoes, pinched Raksha’s cheeks, and pulled. “So turn that frown upside down!”

He brushed her hands away with an irritated grunt, but Sadea spotted the faintest glimmer of mirth tugging at the corner of his lips. “Are you always like this in battle?”

“Yes. In bed, too.” She winked at him but got little more than a wry look and a scoff in return.

The elevator chimed, then. Sadea took up her staff.

“Alright! Time to kill!” she declared.

“These things are already dead,” Raksha pointed out.

“Hush, you wet blanket! That’s why nobody likes you and you have no friends!”

But the elevator doors in front of them didn’t open. Raksha came to the same realization she did.

“That chime didn’t come from…” he began, turning on his heel.

The doors of both freight elevators slid open, and a tide of dead flesh poured forth, entirely unlike the corpses they’d been destroying. Naked or clad in sackcloth, these creatures crawled on all fours, and every limb ended in a splayed cluster of claws. Fang-filled snouts of rotting bone protruded from their faces, and their yellow eyes blazed with a cunning beyond feral rage and hunger.

“What the hell are these?” Raksha raised his sword.

“Ghouls!” Sadea raked the front ranks of the creatures with a bolt of lightning, burning them down into ashen piles, but more of them hurdled the smoldering remains of their fallen brethren and reached for her with their claws.

Stepping in front of Sadea, Raksha cleaved a trio of ghouls out of the air, then scythed his blade across a row of snouted faces. Diving low, a ghoul fastened its jaws on the martial scientist’s ankle. Another raked its claws against his side. He kicked the creature biting him away and dashed out the brains of the one that had clawed him with the pommel of his sword.

A ghoul pounced onto his chest but failed to bring him down. Its jaws snapped at his face. Raksha seized it by the scruff of its neck and hurled it into the incoming horde, tripping a few others but doing little to stem the tide.

Grunting, Sadea pulled a wall of lightning into existence, its edges stretching across the width of the elevator lobby, and shoved it forward. It incinerated every ghoul it touched, and upon reaching Raksha, it folded over his body and resumed its passage toward the open freight elevators.

The ghouls shrieked at the sight of their impending extinction. They scrambled back, fighting among themselves to escape the lightning web. Eventually, they returned to the freight elevators, huddling in frenzied panic.

Their efforts were futile. Flexing her will, Sadea broke her lightning web into two smaller halves and sent one spinning into each elevator. The ghouls howled and clawed against the carriage walls as Sadea disintegrated them with her electric might.

“Phew.” She wiped her brow with the back of her wrist and ignored the drops of blood that fell from her nose to spatter against the floor. “That took a bit of doing. I definitely didn’t expect to see ghouls.”

Raksha was breathing hard, too. He had open, bleeding wounds where he’d been bitten and clawed. His face was pale and sheened with feverish sweat.

Sadea scanned him with her mage-sight immediately. Ghoul venom, present in their teeth and claws, turned any victims somehow left undevoured into one of them within minutes. It was a physical infection as much as a spiritual one. If he were to turn, the kindest thing she could do for him was to give him a quick, immediate death.

To her surprise, Raksha’s soul remained untainted, and as she watched, the lacerations on his flesh healed. The martial scientist coughed, then flicked the ichor from his blade.

“Those things can cut through my aegis. I’ll remember that next time,” he said.

“Hey, Vicky. The unsanctioned necromantic energies are going to get stronger as we go lower, right?”

Yes, that’s very likely. You’ll be getting closer to the source, after all.

Sadea adjusted her grip on her war-staff. “Before these ghouls appeared, we’ve seen only reanimated corpses on this floor so far. They are the weakest, simplest type of necromantic constructs. The elevators came from a lower level, where the necromantic energies are stronger, and they brought ghouls. This means that we can expect more of the same as we proceed and maybe much worse as we get deeper.”

“I don’t think the necromancer and the garrison will be able to hold back creatures much tougher than the regular corpses. If they get past us…” Raksha said.

They will breach our defenses and annihilate the town. You must do everything in your power to stifle the passage of the unsanctioned dead.

The freight elevators chimed again, and their doors slid shut. Whirring machinery and the lights on a wall-mounted control panel displaying the carriages’ floor locations indicated their descent.

“Looks like someone or something is going to load up another batch of ghouls, or worse, for us to play with,” Sadea grumbled.

Raksha thrust his blade through the gap between an elevator’s doors, levered enough space for his fingers to find purchase, and yanked them wide open, exposing the whistling, empty shaft.

“Destroy it,” he demanded. “That’ll slow them down.”

“How’re we going to get down, then?”

He nodded back in the direction they’d come from. “Saw a sign pointing out stairs back there. Fewer things can fit through a stairwell than can be loaded onto an elevator.”

“Ugh!” Sadea hurled a ball of lightning right through Raksha’s body. It passed into the elevator shaft and detonated, snapping the pulley cables snapped and cascading chunks of permacrete downward.

Sadea destroyed the other freight elevator in a similar fashion, then turned to Raksha.

“That should do it. Let’s leave one of the smaller ones intact so we can ride it down.”

Before he could reply, the passenger elevators chimed. Their doors slid open. Their interiors were packed with ghouls.

“No! Goddamn it!” she cried, raising her war-staff. “I don’t want to take the stairs! I hate stairs!”

Several minutes of fighting later, they took the stairs.