The team slowly advanced towards the new Gate. It had opened merely three hours, cut some poor sod in half, and as a result of the spilled blood, had started spawning in N-Class critters almost immediately.

For all that a prepared Normal could normally kill anything in the N class, a Saturday afternoon in a shopping mall did not really feature too many of those ‘prepared Normals’. With the resulting deaths, the first Dire Skeleton had appeared appeared after only half an hour.

Kendra was quietly forming a spell to cut through the swarm of Reanimated Hands that was between them and the portal when all of the undead around them went berserk. 2 seconds later, she and her teammates were in the fight of their lives as the Gate started pumping out a necromancer’s reserve forces. She flung the half-formed spell into a pack of ghouls that came crashing out through the ceiling vents, [Cast Spell] triggering an Emanation of the Cutting Winds.

Sure, bits of rotten corpse were raining around them, but her brother was causing much the same with his [Whirlwind Sword].

She started cycling through her powers. [Magic Bolt] Cooldown, 3 seconds. [Piercing Command]. Cooldown, 5 seconds. [Pulsing Flare], Cooldown 3 seconds again. [Magic Bolt] again.

[Burning Tentacles]. She disliked using that too early, but she had just used Pulsing Flare, and the Skeletal Monstrosity that had just spawned in would need serious fire power either way. The cooldown on burning tentacles was an hour long, but she grinned happily as the tentalces exploded out of the slowly moving flare.

“[Cast Spell] off cooldown” She absently told the others. “Emanation, Bright Blizzard” Cuan snapped, as he smashed his shield through another ghoul.

Kendra sighed, and kept up the monotonous Magic Bolt-Piercing-Command-Pulsing Flare chain in the background as she started calculating her spell matrix.

It took her almost three minutes, but the Gate just kept dumping creatures out.

She had stopped firing off anything except Pulsing Flares a while ago, and now they stuck to the newly dead, the walls, the ceiling - and then, when she finally used [Cast Spell], instead of a single orb of shining white snow, several dozen erupted throughout the centre of the mall.

The undead were ripped into frozen dust within moments, while Kendra and her team hunkered down behinds Cuan’s [Sphere of the Guardian].

The air was refreshingly cold when the sphere dropped, and everything was painted delicately in white frost that hissed when some of the smaller undead that had been able to find cover in tiny spaces or under the remains of their fellow enemies moved.

They usually did not survive the ice suddenly sublimating into the radiant light that was anathema to their existence.

The team rushed towards the gate, and started setting up sealing pillars as the next waves of monsters were spawned in and immediately burned away by the cover she had just summoned.

And then, her brother was dragging her out, her ears ringing. Cuan was carrying Lana, the party’s scout. Behind them, a pillar of light fell out of the sky, as blazing geometrical designs dissipated across it.

She could hear gunfire in the distance, and a quick [Scry] later, she could also see the banners of the Confederation of the Black Gate - A death cult that had sprung up in the Southern United States, and drifted all over the world, preaching the superiority of the undead.

Although Kendra was pretty sure they were the patsies of some organisation from the Planar Depths instead - It would explain where they kept getting reinforcements, given that they were almost universally reviled.

“What… The fuck?” She snarled, putting 2 and 2 together.

“We got very lucky… Although the Sealing failed. Apparently whoever got caught up at the start of this mess is still alive.” Her brother answered. “Probably a Confederate sympathiser or something insane like that.”

There was a good bit of anger and a drop of hate there, as they ran for friendly lines and what had once been a pleasant town became a deathzone.