We met up with Tylie in the courtyard who was surprised to hear that the captain wanted to speak with her. While we were waiting, I decided to check what Soul Cores had Levelled Up since I hadn’t checked them since Logging into the game. I knew that I only had to get two more Soul Points to Level Up my Ranger Core, so I expected to see that. I was also hopeful that I had also managed to increase the Level of some of my other Soul Cores.

Congratulations your Ranger Core has reached Level 4!

Please pick an upgrade from the choices provided.

Increase HP by 20

Increase SP by 20

Soul Points: 14%

Congratulations your Medium Armor Core has reached Level 5!

Please pick an upgrade from the choices provided.

Dash: Provides a brief boost of. Doubles your movement speed for 3 seconds. Cost: 10 SP. Cooldown: 30 sec.

Increase SP regen by 0.5

Soul Points: 21%

I considered my options for a several moments before my eyes finally lighted on the small section at the bottom of the notifications.

“Looks like they rolled out that Update,” I mentioned to Katy who nodded in agreement.

“Yes, they rolled it out last night,” my AI agreed. “There were a couple of other minor changes as well, but you probably won’t even notice them.”

“I guess I’ll ask if I notice anything different then,” Warren chuckled as his wife rolled her eyes at him.

I shook my head in amusement before turning my attention back to the two notifications. After considering my options I decided to pick the HP boost for my Ranger Core and the Dash Skill for my Medium Armor. I had several Soul Cores that could be used to increase my SP and SP regen so doing that wasn’t really a priority right now.

Once I’d finished doing that, I brought up my Status to have a look.

Name: Zeke

Level: 10

Next Level: 11%

Health: 255/255

Combat regen: 2 per sec

Spirit: 245/245

Combat regen: 3 per sec

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 13

Agility: 12

Constitution: 9

Intelligence: 11

Charisma: 3

Physical Defense: 27

Magical Defense: 15

Physical Damage:

1 Handed 11-16

2 Handed 14-20

Magic Power: 13

I was pleased to see that I had also Levelled Up at some point since I had last checked, despite the fact that I had lost 33% of the experience that I had earned. I honestly couldn’t remember when that had happened since things had been so hectic up until Katy and I had been killed. However, even a small increase in power like this one was good to see.

“So, it seems we’re working together again,” Tylie said as she exited the main barracks. “We should meet up with Evie and get to work.”

“Sounds, like a plan to me,” Warren agreed as he rose to his feet. “Let’s go. I’ve already asked her where she is.”

Some of the other guards bid us farewell as we left. Once we were out on the street Warren started leading us in the direction of one of the gates where Evie was waiting for us. Standing just behind her and to the side was an older man who had what looked like a rapier hanging from his waist.

“Hello everyone,” Evie greeted us as we approached. “I would like to introduce you to my AI partner. This is Harrison.”

“It’s nice to meet you Harrison,” Kelly said with a pleasant smile. “Are you planning on joining us today.”

“I’m afraid not,” Harrison replied. “I’m not really suited to combat, so I’d just slow all of you down. I’m planning on sticking around here and slowly gaining experience from some weaker enemies so that I can unlock my Crafting Skills. I think that I’m going to pick the Merchant Skill which will increase the size of my Inventory and will allow me to obtain more money for the things that I sell and pay less for the things that I purchase. I believe that will be the best use of my Skills.”

“That seems like a good idea to me,” I agreed. “That would give all of us more time for other things.”

“Agreed,” Fern nodded before gesturing to her own AI companion. “And this is Hannah by the way. Maybe it would be best for me to leave her in your care Harrison.”

“If that is acceptable to the young miss,” Harrison replied as he turned towards Evie who nodded in agreement.

“That might be for the best,” she replied even as Hannah pouted at Fern.

“But I want to stay with your big sis,” Hannah whined. “Why can’t I come with you.”

“Because we’re probably going to be fighting undead monsters that are around Level 10,” Fern sighed. “We know that you want to help but it’ll be more helpful if you get a bit stronger first.”

“But aren’t Gordy and Petra going with you guys?” Hannah asked. “They shouldn’t be much stronger than me. Why do they get to go?”

“That’s a fair point,” Warren admitted much to the horror of Gordy. “Maybe you two should go with Harrison and Hannah as well.”

“I think you may be right,” Petra agreed as she attempted to hold back her laughter at the look on Gordy’s face. “What do you think Kelly?”

“Hmm, well you two are stronger than Hannah and Harrison are,” Kelly replied thoughtfully. “That’s probably a good idea. Maybe you two can come with us tomorrow.”

“Please tell me that you’re joking,” Gordy burst out. “I want to fight something with a bit of backbone not fluffy rabbits.”

“It’s just one more day Gordy,” Warren sighed. “And no one said that you had to kill the rabbits. There are plenty of other weaker monsters that a group of four can fight.”

“I actually suggest that you fight those stronger monsters,” I agreed. “That way you can fight with us sooner. We’re going to be spending quite a bit of time travelling back and forth so you should be able to Level Up faster than us anyway.”

“That’s a good point,” Petra agreed as she grabbed Gordy’s ear and dragged him over to Harrison and Hannah who was still pouting at Fern. “Let’s go you lot. We should get going so that we can get strong enough that we can help our partners. Shouldn’t we everyone.”

“An excellent idea,” Harrison agreed. “Come along Hannah.”

“Why are acting like you’re older than me?” Hannah asked as the four AIs walked off. “We’re all the same age.”

“Your friends are always so interesting Zeke,” Tylie laughed. “Are they really all the same age?”

“They’re spirits,” I replied as I glanced sideways at Katy who rolled her eyes at me. “So yes, they are.”

“How intriguing,” Tylie mused before shaking her head. “Shall we get going?”

“Yeah,” I nodded before realizing something. “Wait, are the undead even active during the day in this world?”

“Sort of,” Tylie replied as we followed her down the road that led out of town. “They can move around during the day, but the sunlight damages them slightly. That’s why we’re going to one of the homesteads that has already been raided first. Because of how busy we’ve been preparing for the attack we haven’t had time to examine it properly, so the captain and Harmon asked me to check it out since we had some time before nightfall.”

“I see, are you hoping to find where the people are being taken?” Kelly asked thoughtfully.

“Yes, it’s been a few days, so we probably won’t find any tracks but it’s still worth taking a look,” Tylie agreed. “It will probably take about an hour for us to get there. So, we should probably get moving.”

Sure enough, it took us almost an hour for us to reach the homestead that Tylie was referring to. We did encounter some monsters prowling the road, but Tylie scared them off instead of letting us fight them. This annoyed Warren a little, but he had to agree that killing a few weaker monsters was a waste of time when there were a bunch of undead going around abducting and killing people to increase their numbers.

The site of the homestead was quite shocking to behold. Most of the animals in the nearby fields had been slaughtered and left to rot. Their guts had been torn out and strewn around the fields. As for the buildings some of them had been burned down but the main house was still standing. It had been covered in what looked and smelt like a mixture of blood and feces though which caused Evie to turn green and start retching as soon as we were close enough to smell it.

Fern decided to stay behind and look after Evie while the rest of us searched the property for any clues as to where the undead had taken the farmers and what they might be doing with them. It was an incredibly unpleasant experience and for most of it we all thought that it was also a waste of our time. Then Warren came across something interesting and called us all over.

“What did you find,” I croaked through the foul miasma that permeated the property.

“Now, I’m not an expert but this print looks pretty weird,’ Warren said pointing at a muddy patch of ground. Sure enough, there was a large print that was about three times the size of my hand and seemed to come from some sort of large animal which struck me as odd because the wagons that the skeletons had used were self-propelled.

“It looks like a hoofprint from a horse,” Kelly said as she crouched down next to it. “But if it is then the horse would have to be almost twice as large as any horse that I’ve seen.”

“It’s from a Hellsteed,” Tylie said as she frowned down at the hoofprint. “That’s the only thing that it could be.”

“What’s a Hellsteed?” I asked curiously. “Does it have something to do with the Dreadknight that we found in the barrows?”

“Yes,” Tylie agreed. “A Hellsteed is a massive skeletal horse created from the corpses of seven different horses and the souls of three people. It’s quite unusual for a Lich to bother creating something like that and it’s even more unusual that it would be here.”

“Could they have been short-handed for some reason?’ I asked. “Maybe they attacked multiple homesteads at the same time, and they didn’t have enough undead to attack all of them at the same time.”

“Perhaps, I can’t really think of any other reason that they might be doing that,” Tylie agreed. “It still seems like overkill though.”

“What if the Dreadknight was here to meet with someone?” Kelly asked. “That might explain why it would be here.”

“That’s a possibility,” Tylie admitted. “But who would they be meeting here.”

“Whoever sent the assassin that killed me,” I replied without thinking and everyone turned to stare at me in surprise.

“That would make sense,” Tylie agreed.

“By the way did you ever find out why the Theocracy of Garros sent him?” I asked Tylie. “Or if they were even the ones that sent him?”

“No, we have our suspicions but it’s hard to interrogate a dead man,” Tylie sighed. “He was a member of a fairly well-known organization of assassins which only serves to make things even more complicated. The Kingdom doesn’t really have any connections with them and even if we did, they would never reveal who hired one of their assassins.”

“As I recall he was a human too so that doesn’t really narrow anything down,” I sighed sadly.

“That’s right,” Tylie agreed. “Honestly, it’s even possible that he was hired by a noble within the Kingdom to cause chaos. But I don’t think that it’s particularly likely.”

“This sounds like a pain,” Warren grumbled irritably. “Let’s forget about all that for now and see if we can find any other clues.”

We all nodded in agreement and spread out once more looking for anything that might be interesting but to our disappointment, we didn’t find anything before Tylie decided that it was late enough for us to move on.

“The homestead that we’re headed to right now has been mostly evacuated since we let them know that other homesteads have come under attack,” Tylie explained as we headed down the road towards the new homestead. “But some of the farmers decided to stay behind to try and fight off the undead.”

“That seems foolish,” Kelly mentioned. “Is this homestead well-defended?”

“Not really any more than the others were,” Tylie sighed. “However, the owner of the homestead is a retired soldier and he convinced some of the men that he hired that they would be able to hold out against an attack if they knew about. If there was a group of ordinary monsters running around attacking homestead, he would probably be correct but there’s no way that ordinary farmers stand a chance against a platoon of undead.”

“So, he’s an arrogant idiot who’s probably going to get his employees killed if we don’t get there in time,” Warren growled as he increased his pace. “Really wishing we had some horses at this point.”

“We can move more stealthily this way,” Tylie pointed out. “Besides, I made sure that we had enough time to get to the homestead before nightfall.”

“Oh, I figured you had,” Warren replied with a smirk. “I just want to get there a bit earlier so that I can punch that idiot right in his arrogant face.”

“I’m not sure that I’d recommend that,” Tylie replied drily. “While you’re not wrong about him being arrogant he’s quite a bit stronger than you. So, I wouldn’t really recommend it.”

“Well as long as he waits until we finish our job, he can try to kill me if he wants to,” Warren grumbled. “That would only set me back a few days. His employees can’t come back.”

“Hopefully, it won’t come to that,” Fern said. “Besides, we could probably use the help considering how things went last time.”

“I think that the caravan that we ambushed was made up of several groups that had attacked different homesteads and trade caravans,” Tylie pointed out. “The group attacking this homestead shouldn’t be anywhere near that big. However even though I don’t like what Lionel is doing I won’t say no to any help he’s willing to offer us.”

“Is Lionel the owner of the homestead?” I asked curiously. “Do you know him?”

“That idiot is my uncle,” Tylie admitted with a loud sigh. “He’s not a bad guy and he was one hell of a soldier. Sadly, he’s not the brightest individual.”

“I see,” Kelly nodded. “Do you have any idea how he might’ve prepared for the attack?”

“He’s an earth mage so he’s probably made a lot of pitfall traps and fortified the homestead as much as he could, but he doesn’t have most of the equipment that he had while he was in the army, so he probably won’t be able to do all that much,” Tylie replied. “In fact, I suspect that they’ll have pulled back to the main house and fortified that as much as they could.”

“How well armed do you think that they’ll be?” Kelly asked. “Surely they must have weapons if they live this far out of town.”

“Yeah, they have some weapons,” Tylie agreed. “But since they’re all farmers they probably don’t really know how to use them. Normally the wards on the property will keep most monsters away so they aren’t really used to fighting unless something goes wrong.”

“I see,” Kelly nodded. “You mentioned wards. How effective are they normally?”

“Most wards really only distract monsters if they get close,” Tylie explained as my ears pricked up. I had been meaning to learn more about this subject since release day, so I was quite interested in what she had to say. “I don’t really understand how they work but most monsters just aren’t really interested in getting closer to them. Stronger ones might actively scare monsters away but those are incredibly expensive, so most farms usually just get the distraction wards. Unfortunately, distraction wards aren’t always effective. If a monster is focused on something else like prey, then it can enter the wards and once inside the wards lose their effect. They also don’t work on a monster that doesn’t care where it’s going like a Terror Bird or intelligent monsters which is why towns and cities use other methods to defend themselves from monsters.”

“And even those aren’t completely foolproof either since the Lich is somehow able to mess with Polson’s Warding Crystal,” I concluded. “Your world is a lot more dangerous than ours is.”

“It is?” Tylie asked curiously. “I’m sorry if I’m being rude but we don’t really know much about your world.”

“Hmm, how best to describe it,” I mused thoughtfully. “We come from a world where magic doesn’t really exist. Instead, we use technology to do the things that humans can’t normally do like fly or travel to other worlds. Also, it would be more accurate to describe Katy and our other ‘spirit companions’ as a type of man-made construct rather than a normal spiritual entity.”

“Wait, humans can fly in your world?” Tylie asked interestedly.

“Sort of, we have these giant flying machines called planes that we can travel in,” Kelly explained. “As for personal flying machines, they exist but they’re much more expensive and much less useful.”

“Interesting, only extremely powerful mages can fly in our world,” Tylie said. “But what about monsters. How do you fight them without magic?”

“We don’t really have monsters in our world,” Warren explained. “There are some pretty dangerous animals like tigers, but they only live in certain countries and aren’t really that common anymore. We don’t have anything like the Rabbit Matriarch that we killed or even the Javelin Toads that we hunted when we were training.”

“I see, is that why you travel to other worlds?” Tylie asked. “So that you can kill monsters and save people since you can come back to life after being killed.”

“In most cases yes,” I nodded. “A lot of us aren’t really challenged in our everyday lives back in our world which is why we visit other worlds. Other people have other goals though and not all of them good.”

“Yes, I’m quite aware of that,” Tylie replied drily.

We continued our conversation about the real world while we jogged down the road towards the homestead. It was almost another whole hour before it was finally in sight, and we came to a halt to survey the defenses that Tylie’s uncle had set up. Tylie had mentioned that her uncle was an Earth mage, so they weren’t surprised to see the earthen bulwarks that he had set up or the stake lined ditches in front of them. Tylie was actually quite impressed with how large and sturdy looking the bulwarks were but from what we could see there weren’t anywhere near enough men to defend them.

“Hail the wall!” Tylie shouted as we approached. “It’s Tylie. Can someone get my uncle please?”

One of the farmers shouted back that her uncle would be up in a moment and a few minutes later a grizzled looking man in dark robes appeared on top of the wall.

“Evening lass,” Lionel shouted down as one of the farmers threw a rope ladder down. “Why don’t you and your friends come on up.”

“What are you thinking Uncle Lionel?” Tylie asked once she had reached the top of the wall. “There’s no way that these men can hold off a group of undead the size of the ones that have been attacking your neighbors.”

“We’ve fought them off so far,” her uncle responded as the few farmers in earshot muttered angrily. “We can handle twenty Skeletons.”

“Those were just probing attacks then,” Tylie responded. “The other homesteads were attacked by more than 50 undead and not all of them are skeletons either. We were at old man Sven’s farm earlier and there was a Dreadknight there. Do you think that you could hold one of them off?”

Lionel paled slightly as the farmers started looking around nervously like they were afraid to see the massive monster that we had discovered in the barrows barreling towards the wall that we were on.

“Are you sure Tylie?” he asked. “Why would such a powerful undead be attacking farms?”

“We’re not entirely sure,” Tylie replied. “But consider yourself warned. If we get attacked tonight, there are probably going to be a lot more undead which is why we are here. “

Tylie proceeded to introduce us to Lionel who seemed interested to hear that we were Outsiders but before he could ask us any questions one of the farmers on the opposite wall shouted that he could see a group of undead coming our way.

When we got over to the other side of the wall Lionel started cursing loudly. Thankfully the Dreadknight didn’t seem to be present but there was a large horrific looking creature that seemed to have been cobbled together from multiple bodies with a few siege weapon parts thrown in for good measure.

“Damn it, they have a Siege Thrall,” Lionel growled once he had finished cursing. “Looks like you were right Tylie. I hope you and your friends are ready for a fight.”

“Looks like we’ll have to be,” I replied as I pulled my wand out of my Inventory. I hadn’t used this weapon often but since we were going to be fighting from the top of a wall it was the best option that I had.

“Good, I have a few things to prepare,” Lionel nodded. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Having said this Lionel started climbing down the stairs behind us while the farmers started rushing around grabbing their weapons and strapping on their armor in preparation for the coming battle.

“This is going to be a rough one,” Warren sighed as he took one of the spare wands that I was carrying around in my Inventory from me. “What do you think our chances are?”

“Pretty good if we can survive till dawn,” Tylie replied. “I hope you guys got a lot of sleep last night.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Evie replied. “We’ll be fine. I’m more worried about the farmers. They don’t look they’re going to last.”

“That’s a good point,” Kelly agreed. “We’ll have to pick up the slack.”

I nodded in agreement as I eyed the panicked looking farmers. Most of them were armed with either crossbows or bows but there were a couple who had armed themselves with cheap looking wands as well. All of them also had a sword hanging from their waists in case the undead managed to climb the walls but hopefully that wouldn’t happen. There were about fifteen of them which meant that even with us here they were outnumbered more than two to one. This was going to be an interesting fight since I had no idea what the Siege Thrall was capable of, but it was also going to be excellent practice for when the undead finally started marching on Polson.

“Alright then,” I said as the first of the Skeletons stepped into range of my wand. “Let’s do this.”