Raksha cut the ghouls in pieces and charged into the chamber. Sadea followed. A tide of dead flesh began to pour in behind them, but she turned and strafed the top of the doorway with a bolt of lightning. Permacrete cascaded downward, sealing the entrance.

Husbanding the fading remnants of her strength, Sadea struck down the few corpses that made it through with tendrils of electricity spiraling from the tip of her staff.

Looking back over her shoulder, she saw Raksha charging at a man clad in necromantic work robes. A bone-white collar lanyard adorned his collar.

That could only be Chief Erban, or whatever was wearing his flesh. The robed figure raised its head, as if to speak, but Raksha was having none of that. The martial scientist hurdled a trio of leaping ghouls and brought his sword around in readiness to strike.

Beams of black light burst from Erban’s corpse-gray fingers. They fizzled out of existence before they touched Raksha’s skin. He roared and hacked off the chief’s arm. His backstroke beheaded Erban. Not content to stop there, Raksha proceeded to literally dismember the necromancer, before spinning on his heel to cleave the ghouls he’d hurdled out of their pursuing pounce.

Blinking, Sadea walked over to him. “Well, that went much better than I’d expected.”

“Something’s wrong. Those creatures attacked after I cut down this… thing.” Raksha gestured at the moldering chunks of cloth and carrion that had been Erban.

Sadea took a deep breath and swept her gaze around the chamber, taking in its vastness. The initial intake chamber would naturally be the biggest room in the entire mortuary. After all, every corpse was brought here first upon its arrival. The dead had been stacked in countless massive industrial steel bins ten times the length and four times the height of a full-grown man. An intricate system of chains and pulleys suspended the bins in midair, where each container awaited their turn for their contents to be emptied and sorted.

Now, every bin was empty. Untold thousands of lifeless eyes returned her regard. An ocean of carrion hands reached for them. A chorus of gurgling, hate-filled groans rose into the fetid air.

“We’re not done yet,” Raksha snarled, raising his sword once more. “Get behind me and regain as much of your strength as you can.”

“Very valiant of you, but we don’t exactly have the time to fight a million corpses.” Sighing, Sadea tucked her staff into her belt and held out her arms. “Pick me up.”

“What?”

“Do it! And see if you can jump to one of those bins, the higher the better. I need a better vantage point and a moment or two to think.” She raised a finger as Raksha sheathed his blade and moved to her. “And don’t even think about slinging me around like a sack of tubers like you did just now. I’ll bite you.”

After several moments of fussing and grumbling, during which the dead tightened their ring around them, Sadea finally managed to convince Raksha to hold her in a bridal carry. Grimacing in discomfort, Raksha leaped high, clearing a cluster of corpses and kicking a pouncing ghoul out of the way. He landed on top of a tall steel shelf, similar to the one Dimas and Alexei had used to block off the entrance to the furnace chamber.

Corpses immediately began climbing after them. Raksha’s next jump took him to the rim of a steel bin nearly thirty feet from the floor. The massive container swayed on its hinges as it took their weight, but the martial scientist maintained his balance perfectly, establishing a steady perch on the precarious surface.

“Nicely done,” Sadea congratulated him. “Now hush, and let me concentrate.”

“Whatever you’ve got in mind, you’d better do it quickly.” Raksha nodded at the corpses and ghouls swarming up the chains and the lower bins.

Sadea clapped her hand over his mouth and focused her mage-sight. It was hardly the sharpest of her metaphysical senses, but she was close enough to pinpoint the torrential source of the unsanctioned necromantic energies.

There. Across the length of the vast chamber, nearly a hundred feet away. A heap of corpses, limbs and torsos fused together in interlocking weaves of gray carrion, inert and immobile amidst a sea of swarming limbs and broken grins. Black light, visible only to mage-sight, pulsed from the rotting mass, its radiance waxing and waning as if in time to some eldritch heartbeat.

Thirteen robed figures surrounded it. They raised their hoods, baring fleshless heads, and returned Sadea’s regard. Black light blazed in their empty eye sockets.

Sadea grunted. Those were wights. Judging from their robes, they’d been necromancers in life. Now, their psychic capacities were slaved to a demon’s will. This meant that the robed entity Raksha had cut down earlier was a wight, too. Their presence wasn’t much of a surprise. If the demon could create an entity as formidable as a revenant, doing the same for lesser undead creatures such as these was surely within its power.

“Over there!” Sadea pointed, but Raksha had already spotted the wights and the carrion heap. He leaped from his perch onto another steel bin twenty feet away, swaying with the motion of the chains and the grasp of climbing corpses as he landed. Sadea yelped, but the martial scientist’s footing was sure.

“I see it. What’s the plan?” he asked. “Get you close enough for a bolt of lightning?”

“I don’t think that’s going to be enough. We’ll have to get much closer than that.”

“Works for me.” Raksha slung Sadea’s feet over his shoulder so that her head hung downward, freeing up his sword arm and drawing another startled yelp from her. She growled and snapped at him, her teeth clicking shut on empty air an inch from his midriff.

“What the hell’s wrong with you, woman?”

“I said I’d bite you if you tossed me around!”

“I need to wield my sword!” he protested, drawing his blade.

“Whatever. Are you going, or are we staying here to die?” she asked, nodding at the first of the ghouls that had crested the bin rim that they were standing on.

Raksha hurled himself off the bin, kicking off its steely side to propel him to another. Sadea’s vision spun as the martial scientist twirled through twenty feet of empty air. Then she heard the dull leathery rasp of boot heels against plate steel. She regained her bearings in time to realize that Raksha was somehow running along the length of a bin, his body perpendicular to the floor a long drop away.

“Ah! How?” she yelled.

“Just using the Harmonic Palm with my feet instead of my hands to adhere my aegis to the steel.” Raksha’s breath came in harsh rasps. “Didn’t know it’d work, honestly, but it did. Not easy, though.”

When they arrived at the end of the bin, Raksha leaped onto the next and continued his gravity defying run. This time, a swarm of ghouls intercepted them, having arrived at that bin first. Reaching behind her, Sadea grasped her staff with one hand and thrust out her other, palm open. A net of crackling electricity materialized before them and swept out into the mass of pouncing ghouls. They shrieked and fell apart into ashes.

Two got through. Raksha beheaded one and crushed the other’s skull with the pommel of his blade just before its claws could reach Sadea’s face.

Warmth leaked from the corners of her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She knew it wasn’t tears, given its stickiness and the reddish streaks it left on her fingertips as she wiped her face. That lightning net had caused another minor brain bleed.

She glanced at the martial scientist. His features were pale and beaded with sweat. The heat radiating from his body seemed to fade with every passing heartbeat.

They were near the end of their strength. They’d have to make do with whatever they had left.

And it would have to be enough.

Raksha crashed down onto the floor ten feet away from the closest wight. The undead creature raised its hands, but he swept forward and beheaded it.

Its robed kindred were beyond his reach, however. Raksha dumped Sadea onto the floor and turned his body to shield her from the wights’ life-draining sorcery. Beams of black light arced from their gray fingertips and cascaded harmlessly off the martial scientist’s aegis.

Sadea drew her pistol from her kilt and downed a wight with a headshot. She repeated it eight more times before her weapon clicked emptily. Raksha charged and cut down the closest two.

“Last one!” he cried, raising his blade.

The last remaining wight had not unhooded itself earlier. Something was wrong. Sadea’s eyes flashed to the lanyard at its collar. Pitch black. She’d been mistaken earlier. Senior necromancers were the ones that wore bone-white lanyards. Several of the wights they’d destroyed bore similarly hued lanyards on their collars.

Which meant…

“Wait, idiot!”

The hooded figure raised a hand and clenched it into a fist.

Wreathed in a telekinetic field of immense power, the steel floor plating beneath Raksha ripped free from its bed of rivets and permacrete. It coiled in on itself, turning into a spike, before hurtling into the martial scientist. Raksha tried to parry, but the sheer weight and force of the projectile smashed his blade aside. Then the spike punched into his rib cage before exiting through his back in a shower of flesh and bone shards. Still impaled, the martial scientist tried to continue his faltering charge before sinking to his knees. Blood poured from his mouth.