Author’s Note: I promised some action, but I have no experience with fight scenes, so please give me your opinions on it and what I could do to fix them. Also, I’m posting this early because there won’t be a chapter next week.

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The horse beast didn’t stop for hours and didn’t seem to get tired, even with all the running it did earlier. The ride was pleasant and allowed Azad to enjoy the scenery for once. The area he had been dropped in was truly beautiful, and if it wasn’t for the fact that it was so huge and he had no proper equipment to safely travel such an environment, Azad would have loved to be here. But as he didn’t have that, he never really paid attention to the beauty.

While Azad was contemplating whether he would have had an easier time even if he did have the equipment, the horse suddenly stopped.

“What’s wrong horse? Something there?” Azad asked the horse beast.

Azad looked in the direction the horse was facing to see what had caused the unplanned stop. In the middle of the road was what looked to be a body. It looked to be old, and had some of it had rotted away, revealing yellow bones, which were oddly new looking despite the apparent age of the corpse.

“Something doesn’t feel right about this. The corpse is giving off an unsettling feeling, like I should avoid it.” Azad said to no one in particular.

Despite Azad’s instincts telling him to avoid the corpse, he decided to investigate. He hopped off the horse, and made his way over to it. As he got closer, the feeling got stronger, and more disgusting. It almost made him turn back. Almost.

While it was true that the feeling the corpse gave off was horrible, it just made Azad more curious of its origins. Blair didn’t agree though, and chose to hop off their perch on Azad’s head, and back to the horse beast. Azad ignored this and closed the remaining distance and examined the suspicious corpse.

It certainly looked like nothing more than an old rotting corpse, but it was oddly intact for there being no shade and constant heat from the sun raining down on it. Azad finally decided that he had seen enough and tried to back away from it, but something made him freeze in place. The corpse had twitched.

Azad had flashbacks to all the zombie movies he had watched, and immediately tried to run away, but the corpse had leaped up and grabbed his leg.

“Oh fuck no!” Azad screamed in fear and anger.

Azad looked down at the zombie thing, and saw it attempting to bite his ankle

“Fuck off you undead freak!” Azad kicked the zombie in the face, causing it to lose its grip and tumble a bit. Azad took this chance to gain some distance from it, expecting that it was going to get back up. The zombie, following Azad’s expectation, got back up at surprising speed.

“Aren’t you supposed to be slow and shamble? “Azad asked the zombie.

“SSSSSSOOOOOOUUUULLLSSSSSSS” The zombie moaned at Azad.

“Great, a zombie that doesn’t just eat people, but their souls as well. Fuck my life!”

The zombie began charging at Azad, preparing to swing what looked like an old pickaxe. It was covered in rust and had an old wooden handle. Once again, the zombie surprised Azad with its speed, but it wasn’t that fast. Azad prepared to block the swing and starting reinforcing himself.

Once the zombie had reached him, it swung the old pickaxe at his head. Azad stepped in and hit the zombie’s forearm with the back of his own forearm, and hit the zombie in the chin with his palm, imitating what he had seen actual martial artists do.

The zombie’s right arm broke from the hit, dropping the pickaxe, while its head was snapped back while it flew back a few feet landing on its back. It laid there motionless for a moment, before getting right back up. While it seemed to be moving just as fine as it was before, its neck was clearly broken, with hits head still flung back, as if it was looking at the sky. It reached for its head, and snapped it back into place with a sickening crunch, and looked back at Azad. Its head now hung loosely, which made it seem even more like a zombie.

It stared at Azad for just a few seconds, before its head started darting around, as if looking for something, and stopped when its sight landed on the pickaxe that was on the ground. Once it had spotted it, it didn’t hesitate for even a moment, before it began sprinting straight for it. Azad wasn’t about to let it regain its weapon, so he also raced towards it, and managed to grab it before the zombie.

But once he did, he was overwhelmed by an intense feeling of darkness. Pure darkness. It was even more horrible than the feeling he had felt before. It was like it was trying to consume his soul, and take his body.

Azad fought back by instinct and flooded the pickaxe with his mana. This seem to do the trick, as the darkness was forced away from him, and out of the pickaxe.

“NNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” The zombie had suddenly screamed, as if it was feeling unbearable pain. Before it could even finish screaming, it began to wither to dust on the spot.

Azad was speechless, but also slightly happy. He had just wo his first fight in this world, and it filled him with a sense of pride. It took him a bit to come back to reality, and he looked at the pickaxe in his hadn’t. It hadn’t withered away like the zombie had. Instead it remained and even seemed to become newer. It was less rusted and the long wooden handle was no longer rotting. It still looked old, but not ancient.

“Fuck it, why not? Let’s just use this as a weapon for now. How hard could it be?” Azad had no idea.