“Serenity!” Andarit’s voice floated in from behind Serenity. “Is there something else in there?”

She must have finished off the fire-spitting giant zombie. Good.

“There’s someone up this tree,” Serenity called back. “I’m trying to talk him into coming down.”

The man-shaped figure hadn’t moved. Serenity knew that whoever it was was still alive, for whatever that meant with a patchy Life-and-Death Vital Affinity. The question was why the person was hiding in a tree.

“Is it the man who messed with the wardstones?” Andarit asked as she arrived behind Serenity.

Serenity glanced over his shoulder at Andarit. “Messed with the wardstones? I didn’t realize someone had. They were still maintaining a ward. Is that why it was so weak?”

Andarit shrugged. “Irma was swearing about someone breaking the ward and running away.”

Andarit already knew the name of the female guard? How had she picked it up so quickly? He hadn’t been gone all that long. Serenity shook his head in amazement.

Serenity looked up in the tree again. The person up there still hadn’t moved. This still didn’t make any sense. “I doubt it. Did she say which way the person who broke the ward ran?”

“No.” Andarit moved forward, a little closer to the tree than Serenity. “Your eyes are still creepy, even if they are a different color. Where did you say the person was?”

Serenity ignored the comment about his eyes because it wasn’t like he had a choice in how they looked when he was using his active Magesight and it was important to be able to see whoever had attacked him. Instead, he pointed towards the odd Vital Affinity in the shape of a person.

Andarit walked to the base of the tree and looked up. “Huh, I think I see a skeleton … no, wait. That’s someone with Swamp Rot.” She paused for a moment, frowning. “You’re right that he can’t be the one Irma was talking about. No one would miss Swamp Rot that far advanced.”

Andarit backed away from the tree until she reached Serenity, then whispered. “You should just put him out of his misery. There isn’t a cure for Swamp Rot.”

So of course she was asking him to do it. Well, she was both young and noble; there was a good chance she’d never actually given anyone mercy. Even so, Serenity didn’t think he would be in this case.

Andarit claimed “Swamp Rot” was incurable. Serenity strongly doubted that was the case; far more likely, they simply didn’t have a good enough healer available to try. Serenity knew Blaze was on his way, and Serenity trusted Blaze far more than he trusted rumor, especially on a low-grade declining world like this one.

Or perhaps it was something he could do something about himself. It did seem to have a connection to Death, after all, and he was very good with Death. He’d probably still have to wait until Blaze arrived; a destructive healer really did need a constructive healer on hand to clean up after them.

“Is the Swamp Rot some kind of Death-based infection?” Serenity had to assume that the strangeness in the man’s Vital Affinity had to be connected to the “advanced case of Swamp Rot” Andarit had seen.

Andarit frowned. “Maybe? I know it makes people start to look like and act like undead, only they’re still in there. For a while, at least. Eventually they just …” She trailed off and shifted uncomfortably. “It happens when you spend too much time in the Dead Swamp or fighting creatures that come out of it. If you find it fast enough sometimes you can cut off the affected limb but usually it’s too late and you turn anyway.”

That sounded an awful lot like a Death-based infection.

Serenity headed towards the base of the tree. Before he could do anything, he needed to get the man out of the tree.

“You’re going to try to help him, aren’t you?” Andarit sounded frustrated. “He’s dying. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it. We’ve tried.”

“You have,” Serenity agreed. “But I haven’t. I have some skill with this sort of thing; on top of that, I want to find out what all this was about. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense?” Andarit sounded confused, now.

Serenity grunted. Climbing the tree wasn’t difficult, but Andarit sounded especially dense, far more so than usual. “Too many undead. Especially too many at that low a Tier. Something made them all attack, all at once, and I haven’t found a controller yet. There was a weak lich but it wasn’t in control of anything. It almost seemed like it was delaying me. Yet something pulled a lot of them back to make those giants.”

“They do that.” Andarit still sounded confused. “A lot of undead rise in the swamp, then they come out in a horde. The easy ones usually lead, with the hard ones behind them.”

That sounded about right for either a monster wave or a dungeon overflow. If it was a monster wave, Andarit might be right about the lack of a dungeon, at least one that could be found; high mana zones could easily create monster waves. Serenity wasn’t certain how many high mana zones were actually surface dungeons; he’d always thought they were different, but his experience with Aki had shown him that he was probably wrong about that.

Serenity shook his head. Didn’t she see what was wrong with that statement? “So where are the hard ones?”

“Uh, the giants?” Andarit sounded doubtful even as she made the suggestion.

“Really? Those slow things that I could lead around by the nose? Yeah, they’d probably hurt if they hit you, but it wasn’t hard to avoid being hit.” Serenity was probably not being entirely fair; the giants were a perfectly good effort if they were created by a Tier One or more likely Tier Two necromancer. They’d even be somewhat threatening to combat-proficient people at that Tier, since most wouldn’t have anything like his Lure to distract them. They were still remarkably low-end for a planet like Zon.

Many of the dungeon bosses Serenity had fought back on Earth would have been more of a challenge, and they were Tier One.

Andarit didn’t reply to that, but Serenity was confident he’d made his point. He pulled himself into the tree.

When he was about halfway to the infected man, Andarit called out a warning. “Don’t let him hit you! It can - Swamp Rot can move that way.”

“Thanks for the warning.” Serenity had already guessed that. He wasn’t worried about it; as he’d told Andarit earlier, he was essentially immune to Death-based corruption of any sort; his Eat Death skill would simply take care of it. There might be a problem if it were significantly higher Tier, but that wasn’t the case here.

Realistically, he wasn’t entirely certain what would happen then. He’d never had an Incarnate before; since he returned from Tzintkra, it seemed like Death-attuned mana simply did what he wanted it to, even without using a proper spellform. He was still using spellforms for precision, of course.

When Serenity pulled himself up close to the huddled man, he could hear the man muttering. “No. No. Bright, hungry. Wrong. No. Food. Hungry. No. Don’t. Want.”

That explained why the man wasn’t moving, at least. He was trying to control himself or perhaps control the Swamp Rot. Serenity took a good look at the man now that he was close; he could see what Andarit meant when she said no one would fail to mention his condition. He looked like a patchwork of a normal man with an undead creature; in places, bones were showing while in others the flesh was simply withered or visually rotting. Serenity didn’t smell any actual rot; instead, it seemed like certain types of zombie, whose appearance of rotting flesh was just that: an appearance.

Serenity spoke softly. “Could you use some help there?”

The man’s head whipped around to stare at Serenity. His eyes displayed the characteristic blue-white fire of Vital Sight. His face was mostly intact, but part of his lips were missing and Serenity could see broken and jagged teeth through the missing skin. “Food!”

The man threw himself at Serenity and clamped his mouth down on Serenity’s upper arm. His teeth even managed to crack Serenity’s armor-self’s scales in a couple of places. Neither was significant, but Serenity could feel a Death-based something try to force its way into his armor-self before it was immediately cleansed without any particular effort on Serenity’s part.

Andarit’s warning came to mind. Serenity was pleased he’d been correct that he was immune but was significantly less pleased to have a limpet attached to his arm. “Get. Off.”

The infected man didn’t let go.

Serenity growled deep in his throat as he tried to push the man away. “Let go.”

Serenity was stronger but he wasn’t willing to actively hurt the other man. He was able to tear the man off his arm, but when he did the man simply latched on somewhere else. This repeated several times, with Serenity’s opponent missing more often than he hit and doing very little damage even when he did manage to bite something, but he succeeded at ticking Serenity off.

Serenity triggered his Gaze of the Origin to emphasize his words. “Let go. Get off me.”

This time the man froze and let go of everything, backing away from Serenity. He was about to fall off the branch when Serenity grabbed him.

Had he really just followed Serenity’s instructions without any thought? Serenity frowned then settled on an easy way to test that. “Hang on to the tree.”

The man reached over to the nearest branch of the tree and grabbed on to it. It wasn’t enough to support his weight.

Serenity blinked, surprised. Why did that work?

Gaze of the Origin

When you choose, you can infuse your gaze with the power of your connection to the Origin. Effects vary. Power depends on Ambit.

There was nothing in the Skill description that gave Serenity an idea. Every time he used the Gaze, he got different results. This time, he seemed to have gotten thoughtless obedience. He could work with that, but he’d have to be careful. If nothing else, he didn’t know how long it would last or how the man would react once it wore off. “Climb to the bottom of the tree then stay there.”

He watched the man start the climb then called out to Andarit. “He’s coming down. It’s probably safe but keep an eye on him just in case. Don’t get too close, he’s definitely infectious.”

Serenity could see Andarit back up. It brought a grin to his face.

Serenity followed the strange man down the tree. When he got to the bottom, he took a good look at the man. He was just as horrifically mixed up between undead and alive as he’d seemed earlier, but now Serenity could make out his clothing or what was left of it. He had a tattered cloak, a pair of mostly-shredded pants, and a single boot that had seen better days. The foot without a boot appeared to be bone instead of an actual foot anymore.

Serenity had the sinking feeling that if he removed the Swamp Rot, the man would simply die in a lot of pain. There was no way his body was in good enough condition to recover without massive healing that Serenity couldn’t give him.

Serenity could probably wholly convert him into an undead being of some sort, but he wasn’t willing to do that to someone without their consent. Whatever was going on with the infected man, Serenity didn’t think he could actually give consent; between whatever the Swamp Rot was doing to his mind and the fact that Serenity’s Gaze seemed to have put him under a compulsion of some sort, he just wasn’t there enough.

On the other hand, he probably could answer some questions. “Why did you come to the edge of the swamp?”

The man looked at Serenity. “It called. Food called.”