Anne was once again travelling through the ‘Belt’ of the Unknown, staying close to where it bordered with the ‘Deep’, the truly deadly part of the Unknown, for maximum protection against any of her would be pursuers. A number that she believed had risen quite a bit after her success in creation and failure in control was found by authorities and her specific mana signature was found on it. She was honestly a bit torn at the possibilities that came with this. If her signature did linger on it until the point of termination and the thing has failed to wreak any havok, she would truly look the fool. But if it did reach a sentient settlement, she would get instant infamy and maybe even get her ranked raised beyond that of Amber, granting her quite a bit of satisfaction regardless of bringing more heat onto her back. Her more excited self back then was not ready for the increase in priority on her capture. That had lead to her getting apprehended and losing all of her amassed forces to escape the previous year. All of those undead creations and general level undeads she painstakingly designed and made, all gone because a new thorn popped up in her sides.

Elizabeth Leone was her name, the prodigy of exorcism and holy magic her title.

‘Just my luck to run into another black haired bitch, as if Amber was not enough’, she thought to herself, ‘could have kept going with that new force and smack the smug silent bitch for daring to take my first staff from me’. Her own grumblings were soon interrupted when her scouters detected her newest thrall-to-be.

“Alright you lazy bums, get into formation, we have something.”

Her newest force was only fifty strong, but with the tip from her previous tool, she had quite a fine lineup. Three death knights with better coordination, technique and armor than most formed her frontline. Three death maidens, ghost that she purposefully made less beautiful and decorated with more maid-like clothes than the usual pompous dresses decorated by bones and skull, formed the necessary ranged attack and immobilization corps in her army. She had four more advance undead in the form of revenants: fast, physically powerful red veined ghouls all equipped with the finer tools she looted from overconfident bounty hunters. The rest of her numbers were filled out with undead creations that varied in power and effectiveness.

All three units got into their position with the death knights walking ahead, the death maidens following behind and the revenants taking to the trees and flanks. The resurrected corpses fell into their appropriate position following the death knights or death maidens based on how far they can attack from. Anne herself simply hung back to cast debilitating hexes or to empower her own undead with necromancy should the need arise. Her quarry was soon visible to her eyes in the dying light of the day and she could only offer it a sneer.

Its eight razor sharp legs digging grooves into the tree it was crawling on and its decapitated prey lying right below it, the arachnoid lowered itself slowly onto the corpse of the mulsef, unaware of the silent corpses moving in its direction. The fine hairs all over its body does manage to detect the vibrations created by some of the more robust of the undead creations and the spider dropped the half-eaten meal back down onto the forest floor and retreated up into the dense cover of leaves. Anne had no qualms against this and simply had her undead surround the tree completely before telling them to close the distance on the larger than average arachnoid.

Anne decided to simply forego getting a new minion from the fact that it was going to be an insect. She opted to just have the insect killed as painfully as possible and got a bit closer to enjoy the view.

This proved to be a mistake when the monster showed surprising intelligence in making a direct beeline for her position through rapid jumps.

The creature got almost within striking distance of her, when a revenant swooped down in time to impale it over a halberd. A small bit of inchor and venom still managed to squirt onto her dress.

“Urgh. fucking dirty insect, couldn’t even die properly.”

She incinerated the organic construct with a small [life removal] on her hand. She turned back to the corpse to consider what to do with it. The old option of just having her creatures tear into it was still there, yet she found her enjoyment waning at the thought that the bug was already dying in its skewered state and any torture she deign to inflict would not last.

Her conundrum was solved when her more distant scouting crows, left to detect any tails she might pick up, alerted her to a small group travelling through the forest.

She turned back to the bug and smiled.

“It’s around time for me to have a bit of fun, isn’t it. And the bug will be used just fine.”

That said, she had the revenants pull the arachnoid fully down from the shaft of the halberd and have the rest pin it down. She constructed a standard magic circle to extract essence for a summoning, but removed symbols to condense it into crystalline forms and added more priority to transferring the monster’s traits over to the essence collected.

The spider was soon reduced to nothing but a roiling ball of liquid. She beckoned one of the more useless goblin corpses over and removed it’s head. A quick application of [life removal] and all of the rotting tissue was burned off leaving a clean skull. The spider’s liquid was injected into the skull through where it connected to the spine and Anne plucked a rotting chunk out of the once-again-dead goblin to use as a cork. With her preparation completed, Anne ordered her minions.

“Alright, only the revenants and death maidens will go with me, the rest, go back to that cave I have as a base. Now get moving.”

Anne soon turned around and headed closer to where the ‘Belt’ met Citengord. She sent out more crows to start checking on where her newest targets were moving. She found, to her pleasant surprise that they were now settled down for camp, making them easy targets for an ambush. Even better news was that their overall looks only hinted at their nature as a standard party of mercenaries doing work in the ‘Belt’ and not a hunting party for her full of priests and holy magic users. She took extra care to sneak one of the crows as close as possible to check on their equipment.

She got it within proximity of the camp and observed the two men on their first watch. One was muscular with a tattoo that ran from above his left eye, over his bald head and down his neck made up of symbols that could not be identified from the distance. He had on himself a mixed set of plate and leather armor and carried a fairly large claymore on his back. The man next to him provided some contrast with his lankier frame and thick head of brown curly hair. He was wearing lighter attire with a mottled grey under-armor covered by a moss green overcoat. There were no visible weapons on his body, but Anne could guess that some of the folds in his cloak held daggers.

Their lackadaisical poses had her a bit disappointed. Her forces most likely won’t be used to their full potential against this. Still, she erred on the side of caution and sent the crow deeper to scout.

The first tent was empty and probably belonged to the two outside. The second one held the two magic users of the group with one thin boy in glasses sleeping under a desk full of alchemy materials and an orange haired mage using one of his robes as a blanket. She only needed to glimpse at the third’s content of priest robes and very large gun to make that her prime target for assault when she sprung her ambush. She still sent the crow to the last one just to make sure.

____________________________________________________________________________

John had always been a light sleeper, so when he heard the light flapping at his opened tent, the teen rubbed his head of curly brown hair sleepily and rose from his sleeping bag to check things out. He was immediately shocked out of his sleepy state when he first smelled the terrible rotting odor brought in by an errant gust of wind. His own father’s teaching on adventuring kicked in at that and he scrambled to get the tent’s other occupant to awaken. Pulling on her head of red hair for optimum responsiveness, John finally got the rest of the body out from under the heavy blanket covering it.

“Get up Rachel. Get up.”

“I’m up. I’m up. What is it?”

“I think there are undeads around here.”

Rachel gave a tentative sniff of the air and frowned with her eyes still closed.

“Come on John. There is no rotting smell in the air and I don’t hear any shambling outside.”

“But I heard some movement outside and I definitely smelled something.’

“What did the movement sound like.”

“Um. Flapping?”

“Flapping? As in the flapping the tent might make when a wind comes in through the tent and blowing in the smell from our waste hole?”

“Come on. You know I don’t make those mistakes.”

“Alright John, I believe you, just give me a sec.”

Rachel gave her face a good light slapping before she shook the rest of the sleepiness away.

“Alright. So there are some sort of undead outside this tent right?”

John nodded.

“Ok, I’ll grab my bow and arrow and you ready your daggers.”

The two were soon equipped and headed outside of the tent. John immediately did a perimeter scan of where they were. He found nothing and soon directed his gaze to the other tents to find them still intact. Rachel only took one look around camp before turning to the first watch.

“Hey, Misters Max and Tom, did you guys see anything around camp?”

Both men snapped to attention, turned their eyes onto the surroundings and placed their hands onto their weapons. The bald man turned to Rachel and spoke briefly.

“No. Was there anything at your tent?”

She hesitantly answered.

“No, there was nothing.”

Both of the men relaxed their stance.

“Ok? What are you doing out here then?”

She shrugged.

“I thought it was our turn to stand watch.”

“Well, it is Agnes and Martha for the next watch. And you volunteering for an earlier watch is not going to make me ease back on the exercises tomorrow.”

She laughed a bit awkwardly.

“Haha. Alright teach, see ya then.”

“See you too, Rachel.”

She walked back to John and he could only rub the back of his head.

“Sorry for that, but I knew I saw something and I can’t ignore it or something might happen to you or my dad.”

“I know, I know. Maybe you did, but it’s not here anymore. We should just go back to sleep. Teach is probably going to have me do more for pulling that and I am going to need the sleep for it.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine John,” she kissed him on the cheeks before going back into the tent. John took one last look at the dark and heard a rustling in one of the bushes facing his tent, but chalked it up to the wind like Rachel suggested.

He entered the tent again and, instead of getting back into his own sleeping bag, shimmied into Rachel’s. Feeling the comforting warmth of her body, he relaxed a little and pulled her closer to him.

“Come on John, not now,” she murmured.

“But I just wanted to say sorry again,” he whispered in her ear while snuggling closer to the crook of her neck.

“And you still smell so nice even after all that work in the day.”

“No John, we still have a watch later and I want to not look like an undead in the morning.”

John was still not deterred and his other hand soon found Rachel’s inner thigh. Softly stroking, he whispered to her again.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take the watch alone after and you can rest then. So what do you say?”

“Mm. Fine.”

____________________________________________________________________________

Anne laughed silently to herself as she saw the perfect happy subjects for her little experiment begin to get intimate. She moved onto the planning of the possible ambush. She laughed again when she thought of that. There was no real need for planning though it all. Most of them looked like pushovers and she already had the perfect timing to strike. Her crow was already looking into a tent with a calmly sleeping redhead and a still blissfully unaware imbecile basking in his own postcoital glow and gently running his hand through the girl’s hair.

Soon, the same idiot would be on watch and then she would have the opening she needed to strike. An added note was thrown into the orders to make sure to use non lethal methods. Missing a few normally was fine. Watching one of their loved ones tortured was usually enough, but not this time. Those numbers and that one handsome smiling face reminded her far too much of a certain set of servants. She could already see the faces from her past superimposed on each of them and shivered in anticipation.

Now all she needed to do was past the time from now until then. Killing time seemed to be a more problematic undertaking for her than actual killing and the ‘John’ fellow could not get to his shift fast enough. She was through with counting the scars and veins on her third revenant when he was finally taking center stage.

John walked up slowly to the fire, stretching his body while he moved and yawned loudly when he got to the fire. The two current watchers, the magic users, had a small discussion with him and he turned back to his own tent.

“Looks like they won’t be dumb enough to let a greenhorn like that watch over them,” she announced to herself before taking back her own words when John made a dismissive gesture with his hand and ushered the other two away.

“I stand corrected. They are that dumb.”

She shrugged and ordered her revenants to begin their preparation for the game. She distributed to them each a vial of the paralytic poison she made for cases when a live subject was needed for conversion or a ritual. The halberd, sword, spear and arrows of the four thralls were soon laced with poison. Two of the death maidens and three revenants joined Anne by her side as she walked carefully up to the camp. The remaining death maiden and revenant with the bow rushed on ahead to take care of the watcher. Said watcher was now preoccupying himself with a small block of wood and a knife. The sound of his tool taking away layers after layers of wood covered the sounds the last revenant made as it circled the treeline for a clear shot at John’s back. The death maide floated to the spot directly over John.

The shot was taken John found an arrow imbedded in his right shoulder blade.

____________________________________________________________________________

The night was going fine for John. Eddie and Harry questioned him a bit on why Rachel was not with him, but dropping a few hints at his good time with her was good enough for the two guys to go back to their tents and let him take over. He was not worried over the dangers that might be too much for just one guard. The sun was soon to be up in a few hours, most of the nocturnal monsters would be heading back to their lair so it was unlikely that anything would walk into camp. He convinced himself further that both Eddie and Harry needed some sleep, Harry in particular with his zealous brewing of potions for their whole group. He was relaxing there and decided a small carving for when Rachel woke up would score him some points to cash in later. The statue was coming together nicely into a small dog with floppy ears that Rachel always went to and pet when they hit the market back in Aros city.

He was finished with the body and moving on to getting more details on the head when he felt a sharp pain on his right shoulder.

He immediately tried to scream for the others to alert them to the assault, but found his voice just echoing back right at him and no response from the tents even after the fourth scream. Something was clearly keeping his voice from travelling further than the proximity of a few steps from his body.

John was quick to react and doved forward, ignoring how his body was a bit slower to react than his direct thought. He took in a breath, ready to scream again, once he finished his forward roll.

But it was too late, the poison had already taken effect and he could only get a garbed choke out before falling down. The numbness that started from his shoulder and eased the pain around the wound was now spreading to his entire body. His mind was not free from this either as his own thoughts began to slow down and get incoherent. It must be so when a little girl in a fancy black dress full of white frills walked into his sight, followed by three emaciated men with dark grey skin and a multitude of bulging red veins throughout their bodies. It was only after a second look at the hunched stalking forms of the men that John connected the dots. His earlier false-alarm was not so false afterall and walking through their camp was a necromancer, a rather experienced one with actual revenants under her control.

It was with that grim realization that John watched all three of the monsters head over to Agnes’ and Martha’s tent. He raged against his own failing body. His fingers and toes twitched along to the futile orders he sent to his limbs. Move was all he asked of them.

The minute movements allowed of him only grew slower as John watched them grab ahold of the tent flap.

Abandoning physical aid, John tried for simply a warning. Words of caution rang out fervently within his mind. None left his mouth.

The last undead entered the tent and John’s eyes slowly watered. His body shook in tiny whimpers, his expression of grief the only movement available to him. Tears clouding his vision, John blinked and turned his eyes upwards, hoping to find some miracle from above. His eyes only beheld another harrowing sight.

Three ethereal old maids flew out from the forest, chains floating from their wrists and ankles and a ring of vertebrae wrapped around each of their necks. The peculiar looking death maidens then floated silently over the tent his dad, Max, and Tom was sleeping in, the one with Eddie and Harry in it and finally his. Once where they wanted to be, the death maidens seemed to begin employing the same sound blocking veil around the three tents as a distortion of air pulsed through the distance between the ghosts and the ground.

John couldn’t keep his eyes open for when the first revenant tore into the tent before the control of his eyelids went away and he could only hear. He could only pick out the sound of a short struggle before the sound of the fire crackling by his side was all he could hear. The inner debate of whether him not hearing any sounds of parting flesh or broken bones was good or not was his last thoughts before the poison finally knocked him out.

____________________________________________________________________________

Anne had the revenants pile the two paralyzed women next to the down watchmen before having them start attacking the remaining tents.

The first to go was the one with the large warrior and skinny rogue. The death maiden fired off the first salvo of sound waves on top of the tent and blowing it off completely. The dazed and deaf men were soon set upon by the revenants, which quickly disarmed them and delivered nonfatal strikes with their poisoned weapons. There was no real resistance to be had with those two and she soon moved to the tent with the sleeping girl for the most convenience. With the same initial assault as before, the disorientated girl was soon pinned down by all three of the revenants. The girl, once she regained enough of her bearings, began to blindly struggle against her captors.

“Let. Go. Of. Me. John? Teach? Uncle M-”

Before she could continue calling out names for help, one of the revenants placed a hand over her mouth. Anne looked back over towards the death maiden assigned to the tent.

“I have acquired the voice that master required.”

Rachel’s eyes opened widely in panic at hearing her own voice.

“Good, now get over to the last tent and call them out.”

The maiden did as instructed and arrived outside of the tent while the one hovering over it switched off the sound obstructing barrier.

“Eddie. Harry. Get out here, It’s urgent.”

Scrambling could be heard inside as a head soon popped out of the tent.

“What is it Rachel? Harry will be right ou-”

Eddie could not finish his sentence when from his blind spot a revenant swung the shaft of its spear right into his solar plexus. His diaphragm in shock, Eddie was grabbed by another revenant to be neutralized and place with the pile of humans. His removal from the tent’s front also gave Harry a direct view of his friend being captured. He immediately grabbed a bottle from his table and charged out. The bottle left his hand and found the spear revenant’s back where it exploded into a ball of white fire, charring the revenant’s entire body. Harry was already readying a spell to follow up with his explosive flask when Eddie, with air back in his lungs, called out.

“You’re not a wizard, Harry. You can’t beat them back with spells. Just use your escape and run.”

“But-.”

Before Harry could refute, Anne’s hand fell on his other arm and he fell on his knees, seemingly exhausted. The [Life drain] only lasted until Harry fell unconscious and Anne let go.

“Alright, that volatile bastard taken care of and my revenant is only slightly crispy.”

She laughed lightly as the burned revenant shook off its destroyed layer to reveal pulsing red muscles and blood underneath.

“Guess I’ll have to skin one of these guys for a replacement layer.”

She shrugged before gesturing to the pile of humans.

“Alright, get them back to the lair. I can’t do good work out here.”

____________________________________________________________________________

John woke up from with a strange sense of lethargy within his body. He was about to just shrug it off on the great time he had with Rachel when he realised what he was lying on and looking at.

Cold hard stone lined the floor of his cave and droplets of water were dripping slowly down the mossy cave wall that he faced. He tried to stand up to realise that both his arms and legs have been tied together. He tried to turn his head and see if there was anyone else sharing this cave, but found, to his disappointment, nothing. He tried calling out next.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Ah. You’re finally awake. Quite a sleeper, aren’t you?”

“W..Who’s th..that?”

“Aw. You don’t remember me? I’m pretty sure you saw me walked into your camp.”

Only when he was picked up by a pair of calloused aged hands and turned around did John finally see his mysterious conversation partner.

“W...Wait. You’re that girl with the monsters.’

“I’d like to be called a woman. But yes, I am her.”

John was visibly shaking as he took in the moving shadows behind the girl and looked at the veiny arm holding him.

“W...Where... Where are the rest of us?”

“Oh. That. I came here just to get you for them.”

John gulped as the small monster’s mouth curve upward into a toothy smile. She moved on a head and his unseen holder moved to follow.

They exited his corner of the cave into a narrow corridor. The path was lit with small glowing pieces of blue moss on the floor, a sight John would probably enjoy if not for the light illuminating certain movements from in front that he definitely did not want to see.

The smell was also extremely terrible. The cave had no ventilation and the smell of death pervaded the entire underground structure. John was given a small bit of reprieve when they reached a wider part of the cave that had some breezes blowing in.

The reprieve was only temporary. With the glowing moss growing all over the floor, John was welcomed by waves after waves of walking corpses and resurrected mockeries of life. Each one of the lifeless eyes he saw all turned to him, the only life within this subterranean world of death.

They soon past that open area of death and re-entered a new corridor. John was finally welcomed back to the surface as the first lights of the sun hit him when they reached the first chamber of the cave on ground level. From his place, held upright with the ropes on his arms and the collar of his shirt, John got to see the many magic circles lining the place, the multitude of shelves carved into stone containing jars full of things that just made him want to throw up and all of the skulls laying around.

She took him out of the cave and John finally threw up.

In front of him, hanging off of meat-hooks from a tree, was a hideous corpse. It’s skin was flaking off in large pieces and in between the cracked and bleeding flesh were pieces of what looked like carapace and black coarse hair. From its ribs jutted out pieces of bones half covered in muscle tissue and fat. Its hands and feet all looked they were crushed together into pointed tips and all of the nails were fusing into each other and pulling free from their original position. The head looked to be flattened with a massive gavel with the forehead laying flat out and the skin stretched to its ripping point, revealing a flat piece of scalp below. The eye-sockets were in the middle of splitting into four and left eyeballs hanging out from their too wide holding places.

Yet the thing that made John lose his dinner was the normal clothes that was on his father the last time he saw him.

“That was a bit premature, wasn’t it. I can’t have you let it out so soon. This is only a failed product that never went through the binding process well enough. There is plenty to see.”

She pointed a hand in a trail that was revealed by two death knights pushing aside two bushes.

“No...Please...No.”

“But I insist.”

John closed his eyes and prayed for salvation from the god of fate Tein that Martha prayed for so many times before.

“Alright, we now come up to the next exhibit. A slightly better success with nice bonding of the two essence.”

John found his eyes cracking open slowly at her cheerful demeanour and the lack of an awful smell. He only managed to look at Martha’s still screaming face in the middle of a spider’s thorax before shutting his eyes again.

“But the bug to human ratio was still a bit off. What do you think?”

John did not reply, too busy trying to forget what he saw.

“Come on. It’s no fun if you don’t respond. The last time I did something like this to a party, the guy couldn’t stop screaming about getting me back for it.”

John still remained silent.

“Alright. If you won’t grow a spine then I guess we are moving on.”

They walked for a bit more into the forest and John swore to himself not to open his eyes for anything.

“Ok. I see you are pretty determined to ruin my enjoyment of this. So there will be a bit of coercion from now on.”

John felt an extra pair of hands grip his face. The fingers slowly repositioned themselves on his upper and lower eyelids and pulled.

With a flash of light, John’s eyes were pointed at the body of Eddie. Eddie’s torso was completely distorted and split up into a fleshy ‘X’ with his human arms elongated and split up to resemble a spider’s. His legs were fused into each other and inflated to make a pus and blood dripping facsimile of an abdomen.

“He was a much better success case with better ratios of bug traits. But the thing was still not stable. I tried to fix that, but the formula was ironically more unstable and that friend of yours, what was his name again?”

John whimpered out.

“Ha...Harry?”

“Right. Harry. He’s now down here, now. I would ask you to look,” the hand holding his head started to force it down and he only saw the beginning of something red when it eased up, “but there is not much to look at.”

John was only forced to look at Eddie, but he could still hear a wet plopping sound when Anne dipped her heels into a puddle of red blood and flesh.

“I tried it again on that big man too, but he ended back like the second specimen as a full spider. I was a bit disappointed and was prepared to lose the last specimen too. But then the most amazing thing happened.”

John was then taken to a much larger clearing. In the center was a clearly distressed Rachel screaming to be let go. She soon noticed him and her pleas changed.

“Please. Don’t show him this. Please. I can’t. I won’t struggle anymore. Just, Don’t. Please.”

John was slowly brought closer and she just stopped all begging and pulled her knees up to her chest to cover as much as she could. John could still see the hairy carapace covering her legs and forearms and the black claws her hands and feet sported.

“It’s ok, Rachel. You lived. That’s all that matters.”

She just muttered defeatedly.

“It’s not ok. I’m. I’m a freak now.”

She ducked her head between her knees and openly sobbed.

“Aw. But you are such a fine specimen. Just look at that perfectly melded carapace on your arms and legs. Not to mention the added appendages. Legs for days, girl.”

John was a little confused at her last comment until he noticed how Rachel was being held captive.

From her lower back sprouted four sharp blade like spider legs that were three times her length and a small spider’s abdomen leaking silk onto where she was sitting. Those legs were being held down by one death knight or revenant each. John’s stare lingered for just enough to meet Rachel’s own and her cries intensified.

“I knew it. I’m a freak now.”

Anne just tsk-tsked.

“You are such a bad boy. Making a girl cry like that.”

She pulled out from behind her a vial.

“And I know just the punishment.”

Before he could say anything, the liquid was forced down his throat while Anne ran her negative mana through his body.

“Now let’s see what you’ll be made of after this.”

An intense pain wracked his body and John spasmed once his body was freed from whatever was gripping him and allowed to fall. John’s consciousness lasted long enough to make out a large explosion that covered the sky and Anne saying:

“Well. There seems to be something else for me to do today. And grab me an umbrella when we go. It might be raining undead very soon.”