She lay there in the dark

Her and the others.

She, the boy and the ancient spider…and the not kobold, squatting in the small space beneath the wreck of the truck-waggon.

Her Majesty was completely still; The benefits of her new form aiding in her attempt to remain silent as her flesh, bones, and organs had long since been replaced by the charcoal grey substance that was the boy’s shadow stuff.

The minuscule sound that would have been produced by these elements even when moving would have been negligible even in the worst circumstances; the rush of her blood as it flowed through her veins, the noise of her beating heart, the sound of her skeleton moving as the cartilage that connected her bones creaked and groaned as she turned back and forth, all this would have been nigh undetectable to even the most sensitive of ears, and now, with her transformation into a shadow demon, even that was no longer a worry.

But even with all that, it was still not enough. She was still too noisy. Everything was too noisy.

Her.

The spider spinning its web.

The boy doing nothing but lying there in the dark, the sound of his breathing grating on each of her nerves.

…she wanted to strangle him; Right then and there.

She knew that his death would have resulted in her own, but still…she wanted to.

The boy’s lack of care was a result of the spider spirit sapping his willpower, the drain leaving him lethargic and apathetic to everything around him even to the extreme danger that lay nearby. He would rouse now and then when something caused a spike in his emotional state but beyond that, he just did not care and was even now beginning to fall asleep, again.

And once again, she screamed at him. She had no problem with him dozing off, but the boy made strange, growling sounds when he was unconscious; Something that he called snoring.

She called it a liability, something that was certain to alert anyone nearby with its volume.

And the enemy was so close.

Her Majesty was trying to keep as still as humanly possible. She would have preferred to have been doing it as inhumanly as possible, but the fear coursing through her was making every desire of hers, every thought running through her head extremely hard to control, agitating her mind to the point of madness.

Stress; It was a new experience for her.

A new and unwanted experience.

The army of the local people had attacked the army of the boy’s people. What, exactly, the difference was between them, she could not say, humans being so foreign to the snake turned shadow demon that they may have well been the equivalent of the snake’s version of aliens or Old-Ones.

But she did know one thing: The locals had won.

They should not have, though. The army had certainly brought the right numbers to go against decently levelled adventurers, roughly three hundred soldiers to every person from earth, and they had the variety in units and tactics to adequately counter the majority of the abilities that the adventurers could use against them; but they had still gone in blind.

The members of the caravan had long been used to the tactics deployed by the army; Though to a much lesser extent, the many bandit groups that had assailed them over the years being comprised of deserters and outcast from the various local military forces, these groups often deploying the very same tactics used against them today, minus the restrictions that bound the army proper, that is. A fact that served to greatly diminish the effect of the army’s attack on the caravan. A fact that the local army was still largely unaware off, thinking instead that the people from Earth had been secretly preparing for a confrontation between them.

Further debilitating the effects of their actions was the addition of the many refugees who served to act as a buffer between the adventurers and their attackers, as well as the foul-up of the army’s mounted cavalry who had ridden into the temporary encampment with the mind-set that they were traversing through an open field rather than an urban environment, the mounts falling as their feet became entangled in the cloth and rope that comprised the majority of the camp’s ramshackle shelters.

She too had her part to play in the army’s vexations; her venom felling many of their mages; a delightful memory which did much to calm her down during this stressful time.

All these elements had served to cripple the attacking army’s heavy hitters, which in turn forced them to rely on the sheer numbers of their basic foot soldiers, sending them in wave after wave. Driving the wretched infantry to their slaughter as the barely tested adventurers who had bunkered down at the heart of the temporary shantytown bombarded them with both [SYSTEM] enhanced spell and ability that felled many of the attacking forces before they even came within range of them.

The tides slightly turned when the army’s forces were able to engage the adventurers directly, melee combat being a dire affair that placed the two forces more or less on equal ground.

The attacking infantry having a slight advantage in fact, as the people from Earth tended to heavily favour long-range magic-related classes over those of the warrior type. This was due to the annoying fact that, whether they were level one or level one hundred, an arrow or sword to the head would kill any one of them just as easily as it would have any of the locals; Melee fighting in this word bearing little difference to the perilous engagements of Earth, albeit rather more colourful as spells replaced bullets and grenades.

Still, the adventurers would have won, the losses on the enemy’s side being far greater than that of experienced on that of the adventurers.

But then the army had resorted to covering the area in a cloud of poisonous gas, a noxious substance that paralyzed anyone that came in contact with it, whether through inhalation or by absorbing through the skin.

Local, soldier and refugee, and foreigner alike had dropped like flies, blanketing the area with their limp forms.

The still silence that followed continued for an hour, the noxious fumes needing that time to dissipate enough for the army to risk sending their still unaffected forces into.

From there on, it had been an outright slaughter.

A slow-going one, but still, a slaughter.

The army initially focused on securing their own people, upending vials of strange liquid into their open mouths. Presumably some sort of antidote as moments later the formerly paralysed soldiers began to twitch, life returning to their loose hanging limbs; Once done, they began to focus on dispatching the refugees.

That action had confused Her Majesty and the boy when they first witnessed it; Surely the wiser choice would have been to aim for the more dangerous adventurers?

Perhaps the people in charge were more afraid of the possibility that a witness would escape, a refugee being more able to hide themselves within the local townships than a foreigner, rather than having to waste more of their soldiers’ lives in taking down someone from earth?

Whatever the reason, the army committed themselves to the act, A number of soldiers moving along the winding, grass and refugee covered rows that served as the camp’s streets, methodically slitting the throat of each person they came across. A second pair of axe-wielding soldiers following the throat cutters would then proceed in severing the still dying refugee’s arms and legs from their torsos with cold, mechanical precision, also moving on to the next body when they finished.

The bodies and limbs would then be separated by two more groups, each taking their respective payloads to a series of huge pyres that had been erected around the perimeter of the killing field, to be tossed on to the high burning fires.

It was then that Her Majesty’s boy realised what was happening. A realisation that would have quickly been forgotten had their shared link not made her aware of it, the boy slipping back into a half-sleep as his lethargy once again took over.

A mental scream from her had him explain a moment later; albeit without much enthusiasm.

With so many dead bodies, each the result of an untimely and fear-filled death, a large number of zombies would undoubtedly arise from the fallen masses, much like what had happened with the those taken by dust storm a week earlier.

The army must have long since streamlined the practice of corpse disposal; first crippling the body by severing the limbs to give the soldiers time should one of the undead rise up, then followed by immediate incineration of the body.

That would not necessarily guarantee anything as the fires would mostly only burn the flesh, undead skeletons not being unheard of in this world, but those were an exceedingly rare type of undead and even if a few should rise, the majority of the bodies would remain still.

It also explained why the heads were left untouched.

The undead, for some reason, were more dangerous when their heads were removed, the theory being that whatever it was that caused zombies to reanimate no longer had to try and think with a lump of decayed grey-matter; A risen headless-corpse capable of matching a levelled adventurer in some cases, whereas an intact body would behave with the same limitations as one of the stereotypical zombies from Earth’s entertainment.

She and the bay had encountered a few back in the city. Wretched things. The creatures projected some type of field that drained anything nearby of their energies. Magical, spiritual…even body heat was not safe from their presence.

And if you got two or more of them in close proximity to each other that power grew stronger. It was what made the undead truly dangerous. A vengeful necromancer, a person from Earth, had attacked the city when it had still been ruled by a faction of the locals. Her army had tainted the land, sucked it dry of its vitality and left a desolate wasteland that it had still yet to fully recover from.

Another threat for Her Majesty to be aware of.

But the army outside still remained the most pressing danger.

The army’s progress in their grim disposal was excruciatingly slow, a heavy pressure pushing down upon those who were witness to it; Not merely straining Her majesty and the boy, the spider having no care beyond the spinning of its webs and the new not kobold not having the attributes to even be aware of what was happening, the men of the local army were visibly affected, even to someone…something as inexperienced as Her Majesty, the expressions on their faces dour, the muscles beneath drawn taut with tension.

It was not solely due to the numbers involved; Still active summons, hastily erected fortifications made of ice, earth, and substances that defied classification, as well as the still hazardous remains of the caravan’s shantytown proved to hinder the soldiers’ progress, each adding unnecessary risk and delay to every task.

And, of course, there were still the adventurers to deal with.

Some of them were still standing, not many, but some, their levels and resistances having helped them endure the effects of the gas; but only partially. Alone, hobbled, and no doubt overcome with the realisation that they were going to die, those few still capable of offering resistance did not do so for long, the once inferior soldiers now more than a match for them.

But that was not to say that they went down without a fight. Having nothing left to lose, those still standing held nothing back as they released the full extent of their abilities upon the approaching forces. The last stand was both bloody and brutal, the army taking a further beating that reduced their numbers greatly. But any comfort that should have come from that was greatly diminished with the knowledge that the enemy had to have had accepted that they would have to sacrifice many of their people to succeed before they even embarked upon their campaign.

The losses would cost the army, but there were always more humans.

And the remaining adventurers fell, one by one.

Her Majesty had remained in hiding beneath the ruins of the truck-waggon that had been their home rather than try and assist those few adventurers that remained, only daring to venture out briefly to scout the immediate area around their hidey-hole before returning; The number of soldiers remaining still far too great for her to have had any hope of attacking without being discovered. If she had successfully eliminated all the enemy’s beforehand, then perhaps it would have been a different story; but she had not. And there was no telling what they would do once they became aware of her.

No, showing herself would only have resulted in her inevitable discovery and the possible discovery of the boy.

She knew that as long he survived that she was practically immortal, capably of being brought back again and again so long as he was willing to invest power back into her; But while she was capable of resurrecting, he was not, and the boy also lacked any real capability to defend himself. The reason he had remade her in the first place, in fact.

So, she remained in hiding, keeping as still as the dead…the proper dead; Not moving an inch for fear that any sound, no matter how slight, would alert the entire army outside, bringing their wrath down upon she and the boy with all their fury.

It was a terror she had never known before, one she never wanted to experience again…actually, she would if it meant that she and the boy could have gotten out of there alive.

She did not like terror, not one bit.

As she was learning more and more about humanity and all its eccentricities, in that moment, Her Majesty was starting to learn what it was to pray, to beg anything and everything in existence for help. And what it was like to have those prayers go unanswered.

She lay very still, worrying and praying; Hoping against hope for the many enemies outside to disappear.

Her Majesty no longer possessed any organs, the parts having been replaced when the boy turned her into a shadow demon.

But she nearly suffered a heart attack when Goodie farted.