Luke awoke sometime later to careful prodding done by the reinforcements sent by Norwich. Groaning, Luke rolled onto his back and sat up. He looked down at his legs to see them still healing, but the necro-fire was gone. Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly cast a healing spell and watched his leg's skin and muscle grow back. Once he was in tip-top shape again, he stood and surveyed the reinforcements. He was not impressed but needed them nonetheless. The trick with fighting a lich was finding their phylactery, which he had a general idea where it could be, but he needed more hands, which came in the form of these reinforcements.

Luke then spent the next three hours directing the search for the phylactery around the general area the soul went to, which was within a 10km radius. Luke knew that the lich would still need surface access, given that he wasn't able to teleport. Luke also had a maximum of two more hours before the lich was reconstructed and most likely killed everyone searching for him. It was almost entirely luck-based, but that was the best Luke could do as light was terrible at search spells.

Luke desperately searched for the lich while directing everyone else to do the same. In the end, he was too slow and the lich most likely revied. There was one good thing about lesser liches that worked for Luke, though. Every time they died, they got a fraction weaker, and Luke could easily kill the lich this time.

After another 20 minutes, Luke found a cave that reeked of death and knew this had to be the place. Casting a simple light spell to hover above his head Luke took each step carefully, knowing that liches often traped their layers with powerful magic. Luke slowly shuffled through the cave, relying on his perception and magic senses to detect the traps. So far, he was over 100 steps into the cave and had disarmed around 30 traps. Luke smirked; this was the place after all.

The traps had included the classic arrow trap while it also included the horrifying pit of necro-fire, which would have killed Luke in a second. Each step in here was dangerous and must be taken with extreme caution, and that was why Luke reached the phylactery five hours later with his mind rightfully jumping at everything. Over that five hours, Luke had barely avoided death so many times that it was becoming almost second nature to look at everything around him for a small while before taking one step and repeating the process.

When Luke's eyes found a large vase in the center of the room absolutely filled with magic, he panicked. It had been well over the time required for the lich to revive, and Luke didn't think he was here. That meant... Luke's face paled as the thought popped into his mind. The lich was out there hunting down his subordinates while Luke had been trying to get to the phylactery. With some cursing, Luke threw caution to the wind and cast a Strenght infused light beam at what he hoped was the phylactery. The bright light seared his vision for a second as it melted a hole through the vase. Some liquid poured out phylactery, but Luke wasn't able to see well after his spell. What he did feel was the mass of undead currently digging through the earth right to where Luke was.

That had most likely been a trap, but Luke was still betting it had been the real one. Replicating that kind of power to match a phylactery would have taken years for something at the liches level if it could be done at all. Luke then turned around and ran like hell through the cave system he had just spent so long getting through. He made sure to step only where he had before as he booked it to the entrance. The undead burst out the ground back in the phylactery room and trampled over each other to get to Luke.

Thanks to Luke's high dexterity, he quickly outpaced the zombies and made it to the entrance in minutes. Once he reached the entrance, he turned around and waited for the undead to get closer. He only had to wait for a second as the decaying undead rushed towards him like a wave. Luke's smirk came back as he channeled the Emperor through his body. The feelings of grandeur and power filled him as he infused the Emperor into a domain of light. This time the spectral Luke leaned back and laughed as the dead plowed over each other to get to him. When they hit the domain, which generally just lit up the area, they burst into the same white flame as before, with Luke's spectral copy laughing them all the way to hell.

For ten minutes, the dead charged to their deaths in a suicidal display. Once the last undead's soul was burnt to ash, Luke dropped his domain. Sweating and out of breath, Luke fell to the ground gasping. Channeling a spell had a significant tax on the body. Often it wasn't worth the spell's effects, but Luke was forced to use it this time as he had to make sure that every undead went back to their natural state, dead.

In minutes Luke was back on his feet, sprinting towards where everyone was supposed to meet up with visions of death clouding his mind. Each step he took, another face popped into his mind with the knowledge that they were most likely dead. Soon he burst into the campsite to see everyone alive and well, singing songs around a campfire and drinking the night away. Soon the mage, James, in charge of Norwich, noticed him, stood up, and walked over. He threw his arm over Luke's shoulder and shoved a cup of something alcoholic into his hands. His breath smelled of booze and berries as he spoke. "Luke, where have you been." He says, exasperated. "Once you left, one of those undead you were talking about showed up. Almost took Jerry into the light, but we managed to bring him back." James stopped and threw up, thankfully, away from Luke before continuing. "That undead wasn't too hard after that, with just some excessive fire magic and a lot of things that are probably still considered war crimes, we managed to burn its body to ash," he said the last words with a wave of his hand. "Oh ya, at some point, it started to scream about something being broken or something. Then he started to throw around some REALLY mean words about you." James continued rambling as he brought Luke to one of the open seats, but Luke's mind had completely shut down as he chugged the entire mug he was given.