[Enemy]

Tormented Flesh

S3 Horror

Skills:

Raise the Tormented

???

Power: ???

Constitution: ???

Agility: ???

Magick: ???

~

“Why does it have to be zombies?!” shouted Vernon, wailing like a little kid. He was the ranger, the sharpshooter, though hardly sharp in the head. Unfortunately, while most rangers could produce their own ammo using a skill, Vernon couldn't. Thus, he resorted to limited, physical ammunition. He was aware of it too. He panicked, not blindly firing, but too carefully firing, ensuring that every bullet struck something, and that’d better be a kill.

Althea cursed him for his caution but couldn’t exactly blame him for it either. Not when her heart was pounding, experiencing her second go-around with this Slayer thing. The first was shamefully Julius High where she blitzed through, caring only for her life. This time, she had a proper team.

A thrash of electrified chain tore through a weak, peeling neck of a young man. It walked headless for two more steps then dropping, the muscles twitching like a dead fish. Althea was disgusted by this sacrilege. Using their own dead as puppets? She hated it, but only they could put them into rest for the final time.

Due to her inexperience as described by [Feeble Channel - Lightning], she needed to consciously maintain the infusion. She focused her Krait, the organ that allowed magic, and allowed the System to automatically manifest the magic for her. The energy surged. Its intensity. Its warmth. It had a similar feeling to jogging; it’d take some time for her to tire. How long? Who knows.

Two bodies returned home, a man and a woman, both ripped through the waist and their torsos twisted on the ground. In a brief moment of clarity, all they could do was stare at each other, dead eyes into dead eyes, until death reclaimed them. Althea let the chain go lax, resting on the asphalt. Who knows. If they knew each other or if they didn’t. Who knows.

“Duck!” cried Vernon, who shoved her head down before she could respond. He fired a series of three shots to her left, made her ears ring, but she distinctly heard the sound of two bodies dropping. She would’ve scolded him for firing so close but now wasn’t the time.

All she mustered was a nod. He nodded as well. Althea faced the oncoming foes. Their faces were haunting, former people of this world just like her. She choked down the painful thoughts, casting them away with every flourish of the chain. One swipe felled one young man, took his left leg clean off. Another wrapped itself around a fat man’s thick neck. She tugged and off it went.

But then, there was a little girl, squeezing through the legs of adults she didn’t know. Althea hesitated. Half her face lost its skin, exposing her muscles underneath and her pink-gray teeth. The roundness of her eyes were revealed, the balls twitching, searching for something. Althea prayed to whatever god existed, then gave the girl rest.

Another wide arc crackled through several bodies, all of them in different shapes of dead and decaying and miserable. Through the arms, the chests, their soft, brittle bones and non-functional organs. They experienced a second, final death.

The Tormented Flesh lamented again, screaming. Althea hunched over, wincing, clasping her ears in a pitiful attempt to block out the awful noise. Horrendous, it was sickening. It was a cry of the unfairly deceased, tugging at her conscious. They begged her to listen. Listen to them. Listen! They were the choir of the fallen, the people, those who were punished for simply being brought into unfair circumstances. At the wrong place, at the wrong time, too weak to stop anything. They shouted at the heavens and hells at the callousness of tragedy. There, shambling from the streets beyond, from the ruins of the famous Gallery, through the back alleys and broken décor, the dead came and walked and shambled, in misery.

The monstrosity sang, and there! the tormented and the flesh descended general upon Dawns, centralizing here at the epoch, at their caller, bearing a great resemblance to apocalyptic times this experienced twicely by Althea. The heat of life hissed from exposed skulls, from gray matter. Her core shook, rumbling in the same waves as the voices’ timbre, yet on different scales, of keys.

“Shut up…” Althea muttered, shaking her head. “Just shut the fuck up!”

Althea fell to one knee, and she couldn’t rest a second before something tugged at her arm. Her mind snapped back to reality. The [Lightning] infusion vanished but she made for a whip, halted, seeing Vernon. He yelled something, something in panic, and she figured since one good look around told her that things were getting worse.

Much worse.

“We gotta go! More of ‘em are coming, Thea!” came Vernon’s voice, alive. She never would’ve thought that she’d enjoy hearing his stupid voice. From his S68 rifle, gunspark blasted from the barrel, hot. Casings popped out from the chamber and bullets sheared through rotting corpses, oftentimes hitting other targets beyond. Above the gunfire he pleaded again, and she stood, and she nodded, and they ran.

The zombies were already a slow, dense thicket; that was, before the Tormented Flesh’s call. Now the number doubled. It was like a parade for Thanksgiving or New Years Eve. Some holiday this was. The crowd here wanted blood. Their blood, so commanded the flesh-thing. It was too many for everyone to handle. For Alba, for Kaiya and her team, even Jury.

Jury was strong, split between her twelve Jurors. Everyone fought a fair bit away from the Tormented Flesh, thirty or so meters away from the intersection if Althea hazarded a guess. The Jurors made up the majority of the perimeter’s strength, allowing for a pocket of space. Each one glew gold and red and blue having channeled something special in their pearl-steels, and they fought passionately against the swarms. But there were too many, and the Jurors were ill-fitted for large-scale combat.

If a daring swordswoman like her was ill-fitted, then Keen was more so. Having training in kenjutsu (or whatever Miyamoto-esque arts he practiced), he did best against single opponents. Not hundreds of them. While his kills were clean, his stamina drained with every corpse. Already, he was showing signs of fatigue. Delphian fared better but not by much. A conjurist as Althea suspected, specializing in water and other relevant elements, yet her conjurations were simple: balls and small lances. Kaiya was better. She was an esper with a visible ocean-blue aura wrapped around her body. Parts of the aura were torn off and used as projectiles, cutting through hordes of zombies.

As Althea retreated with Vernon, their side of the line collapsed in. Vernon swore under his breath and pushed her back, firing without measure into the growing crowd. Now it was the time to blindly fire, it seemed. She thought about reactivating [Channel - Lightning] but realized the futility of it; staying their ground was a poor, poor choice.

They needed a way out.

She found the nearest Jury and yelled about an escape route, but Jury looked at her blankly because neither heard what she just said. Escape?! Althea shouted again, the word scratching her throat, but the zombies too wanted that, loudly. Jury understood that time and looked around for an exit; however, nowhere was clear. They’d needed a dramatic change, and fast.

Think, Althea! Jury was more than strong enough to carve a path towards somewhere safe, or where death wasn’t imminent. It’d take a majority of her Jurors to do that however, thus compromising what little space they had now. Althea theorized what could happen after the fact, but many of them resulted in bad endings.

What could they use? Althea searched, and found one more article that was just as common as broken glass and standing cadevers: cars, parallel parked along the sidewalk, each disturbed from their initial spot one way or another. She had an idea. Before any of the Jurors could act, she yelled at Vernon, Cover me! He had no time to ask and came along.

Althea reached the nearest car several feet into the street—a navy sedan, glassless, having nothing but a mess inside, and she slapped her left palm on a warm puddle of red paint (she said to herself). There.

[Skill Activation: Runecrafting - Gravity]

From her palm, a blue runic circle began to be inscribed from the inside-out, enveloping the width of the sedan’s roof. It had a simple design: within the outermost circle lied another, the line disrupted by smaller, periodic circles placed throughout the circumference with each containing their own unique glyph. Lines connected these glyph-slots like a nine-dot password you’d find on certain phones, and this configuration allowed [Gravity].

Here goes nothing!

[Rune: Decrease Gravitational Pull]

And the sedan lifted itself like it was the lightest thing ever. The mass hadn’t changed; rather, gravity decreased its hold.

Clear! shouted Althea, waited about half a second, then kicked it as hard as she could. The tires screeched first, skidding light scorches on the asphalt. The car slid until its rubber struck the curb, tilted up, then falling back on all fours. She cursed out loud. She wasn’t strong enough. Zombies were coming in by the moments. A few at first. Then that few will multiply dramatically.

The nearest threats got a hole in their chests, each needing one or two shots before being put down permanently—Vernon. Althea went to kick again, but something pulled her back. Above the zombies’ groaning, she heard: “I’ll take care of this!”

It was Kaiya. The same ocean-blue color jolted through her eyes, a clear sign of her psychic energy emission, and the sedan lifted from its wheels, enveloped in the same energy. She roared and pushed the vehicle forward, crushing every zombie in its path and slamming into the storefront ahead, shattering bricks and foundations. It pulled back, totaled, dripping oil and metal. It was put on the sidewalk and once more, and Kaiya exerted a fiery amount of energy to send its carcass barreling down the street like a man running from the cops. It spun around and around, knocking into thin trees and the store-edges, over corpses. It was an act that gave everyone a precious few seconds.

“There!” she said, pointing towards the storefront where its door was just as wide. Inside were zombies; compared to the streets however, it was a light day for the owners. Kaiya ran in first, tearing the zombies apart as she approached. Althea came next. She knew this place. It was a coffee shop. The name escaped her, but she had ice coffees here with Leona numerous times.

The melancholy realization wore off once Vernon ran past. This place didn’t matter anymore. She needed to survive a zombie apocalypse after all, a thought she didn’t think she’d have. Althea followed him.

Kaiya found the back stairs leading to the roof, hovering by the doors, and pulled the two in as they ran by.

“What about you?!” he exclaimed.

“I’m making sure everyone else gets in! Go clear a path towards the roof!” she ordered. They froze in place. Althea herself didn’t know if it was from doubt, concern, or nothing at all. Kaiya glared at them. “GO!”

“C’mon, Thea!” led Vernon, snapped out of his rut. He took the lead, the first to bolt up the stairs taking two at a time. Althea did as well, surprised at her own dexterity in the midst of combat. She looked behind at Kaiya one last time, yelling something at the others.

Let’s hope for the best, then.

The stairs took them to the second floor, opening to a large space with extra chairs and lounges and shelves with various things—storage. No zombies. Althea searched and found a steel door to their left, a sign bolted to the top of the doorframe: a green man going down greener stairs. “There!” she cried.

“I got it!” Vernon dashed over. He pushed but the door wouldn’t budge. He saw the locking mechanism up top and fiddled with it, but no progress was made.

“We don’t have the time, Vernon!” exclaimed Althea.

“I know that!” Finally, he flicked a lever and kicked the push-bar. Soon as he did, a dead man squeezed through the gaps, gnarling. Vernon swore and the rifle did too, a bullet to the brain and that was that. “C’mon!”

Vernon jumped over the corpse, holding the door open for Althea. They were in the emergency stairwell now, and the only way was up. Where the zombies couldn’t possibly reach them.

Vernon took the initiative. Rounding the corner, a woman reached for him but found the hard butt of the rifle, knocked sideways. He stuffed the barrel into her mouth and pressed her against the wall, fired, clicked. Empty. The magazine dropped and another took its place, popped in. Vernon leered back, racked the chamber, and finished the job. The woman collapsed, fell down the stairs towards Althea; she had to move to the sides to avoid her.

Althea was almost impressed.

They scaled the stairs together. Another zombie—a skinny middle-aged man this time—gargled for Vernon. His rifle was aimed down; instinctively, he shot out the man’s knee. He tumbled towards Althea who used the momentum to knock him over the railing.

The rooftop was in sight, a single door away from a respite. Vernon exasperated a grateful sigh, rammed himself shoulder-first. Unlike the last one, this opened smoothly—a breath of fresh air. He stumbled into the clear roof, no zombies in sight, and sat down, laid down, gasping.

Althea propped the door open with a nearby brick, watching for the rest of the party. “We’re not done yet, Vernon!”

“Why can’t we be?!” he complained. “Insects, now zombies?! Please tell me that the others are right behind!”

“Uhm…!” Althea waited to answer. For the first few seconds, no one came. Ten seconds, and her heart rattled. A brief terror of dread choked her, contemplating the worst, but from the bottom, she saw a familiar length of black hair.

Kaiya had Keen’s arm around her shoulder. The latter was injured, bleeding profusely from his side. Bitten, probably, but there was no virus to worry about. Maybe. Behind him was Delphian: shaken but relatively unscathed. Lastly was Jury, who returned whole it seemed, undeterred.

Althea let them in and kicked the brick. She applied [Rune: Increase Gravitational Pull] on the door to prevent any zombies from opening it.

Now. Now they were safe.

Keen was laid on the ground, gasping between a hiss and a groan. Delphian gave Uprise a [Healing Potion], and she forced it down Keen’s throat. The wound began clotting.

“Jury,” called Kaiya afterwards, “how’s the rest?”

Jury was reading a screen. “It seems we’re not the only one hit. In fact, every group is reporting the same thing: the enemies they killed are being revived. And civilians. Even OU. We have dead there.”

“Don’t tell me they planned this…” Althea asked, but it was likely to be a rhetorical question. From the Tormented Dead’s status page, one of its skills was revealed. Must've been something powerful because Dawns was a large area, and picking up every eligible dead was a gargantuan task.

“Is it Pereyra?” Delphian asked after.

“It can’t be.” Vernon sat against the roof’s ledge, occasionally looking over. “Pereyra’s spying, Tewfik’s cutting, gotta be another Comet ‘cause of course it is! God, give us a break or something!”

Jury opened her mouth to admonish Vernon, but she closed it. She must’ve felt the same way. “We’ll find a way to kill the Tormented Flesh. If we can’t do it now, then we’ll lose Dawns before Pereyra and Tewfik can lay a finger on it. We—“

A thud landed behind Althea, then again, both on the bulkhead. She shrieked and clamored forward. Everyone (but Keen) drew their weapons upon the surprise.

But they were friends: Problem and Damien. And Damien was flat on his face.

“Problem!” Jury hollered, “we have callsigns for this! Use them!“

“Next time.” Problem hovered down to common ground, leaving Damien on the bulkhead. “Fayer and I were on the roofs after completing our mission. When the commotion began, our position happened to work to our favor. We noticed you relatively soon.”

“Glad to hear you had an easier time,” Vernon bitterly said. “We got surrounded immediately.”

“Well, Fayer had a difficult time coping with pseudo-flight.” Problem glanced behind them; Damien was dead. “And he calls himself a conjurist, that demon. Anyhow, tell me the details of the necromancer.”

Jury nodded. She brought Problem to the ledge closest to the Tormented Flesh. “A Comet likely did this. They piled, what? Hundreds? Maybe a thousand bodies? It seems to be the source. A cursed being perhaps? Is it plausible?”

“Plausible, yes. There’d be plenty of negative energy here with it being a horrible tragedy. The deaths of innocents are commonplace; the fuel is there, all you need is an experienced outdoorsman to start the fire. But there’s one problem: natural magical formations occur in, well, magical worlds.

“And if you haven’t guessed, we—oh? That’s interesting.”

“What is?” Kaiya asked.

Everyone lined up against the ledge with Jury and Problem. Below, a majority of the zombies were no longer pursuing them. They shambled towards their master. They climbed the pile of gore, dug a space for themselves to lay and integrate into the master-flesh. They long since abandoned their agency to instead incorporate themselves as agents of the greater whole like roving ants.

Althea wanted to puke.

“They’re assimilating into one entity,” concluded Problem. “That’s concerning.”

Within a minute, there was enough mass on the Tormented Flesh that it began to shift, and it moved. A bloated mess of red amalgamation. Legs paired with arms, some flesh piles had multiple eyeless holes and mouths, and steam hissed from every open pipe. It bit and slapped and kicked, all horrible, horrible sights.

Then the screeching, nails-on-a-chalkboard sound. It wailed again, taking Althea back to Julius High, and now to here, where the common people were enslaved, absent from life.

When the sound ended, the Tormented Flesh lifted itself. Several hundred feet supported its weight.

Problem hummed, sounding both worried and intrigued. “I believe we should retreat.”

The mountain rammed itself into the nearest building. The force behind its charge was enough to skin the entire front off, sticking itself with bricks and rebar and concrete and wood, like the amalgamation was a soup and everything else became ingredients.

“We should really consider retreating.”