“People are coming fast!” Jessica suddenly said.

“How many? Which direction?” I asked.

“Five, wait, more! Directly in front of us three blocks.” She pointed at the direction we had been clearing towards when we encountered the Ghastly Miscreation. “We have fifteen seconds, twenty maximum. They know we’re here,” Jessica added.

I wasted no time at all in summoning my skeleton warriors from the corpse of the Ghastly Miscreation. The berserker axe I was saving for a general was equipped onto a skeleton warrior and then everything was recalled with Vast Shadows. If they were enemies, I didn’t want them to have an idea of what kind of abilities I could use until a fight broke out.

“We’re friendly until we can’t be.” I looked at Richard and Anna. They weren’t aware of how we did things yet, and Jessica needed no reminder. I did my best to clean myself up and recovered my defenses with a fresh coating of Bone Armor. “Anna, stay towards the back behind us.” As a wizard she was especially susceptible to surprise attacks.

Within ten seconds, the first of the newcomers appeared about a block away. It was a man crouching behind a car and eyeing us suspiciously. As soon as he realized we knew they were there, he waved to someone out of sight and they came out in a group. “Five in front of us, three more scattered to the left and right of them, watching,” Jessica said.

I put my hands up “Friendly!” I yelled out. The people coming at us looked odd. As they got closer I realized they had wiped charcoal or ash on their faces, almost like battle paint. Even weirder was the clothing they all wore: pure white, well as white as you’d expect. Not only that, some of it wasn’t even clothing but instead was clearly white bed sheets they had wrapped around themselves.

As they moved towards us fearlessly, a prickling on the back of my neck grew. These people were bad news, the question was whether they had bad intentions, too.

“I’m getting freaky religious crazy vibes,” Richard whispered from behind me.

I almost lost my cool in that moment. It was careless to say something so stupid when you didn’t know if the person in front of you was friend or foe. There was no end to the rare and unusual skills people could have, super hearing could be one too. My mouth almost opened in frustration, but instead I snapped my finger behind my back.

As they got closer, I expected them to stop, but instead they kept walking. A few seconds more would be uncomfortably close and even Jessica had enough of it. She nocked an arrow and pointed it directly at the person closest to us, “You’ve come close enough. We’re friendly, but not naïve.”

They did stop, but remained uncomfortably silent. Their eyes looked us over in an almost deranged way. Finally, the frontrunner, wrapped gloriously in a white bed sheet, spoke. “Do you believe in God?” He asked.

The atmosphere was stifling. I was confident in our abilities, but I truly didn’t want to fight someone for no reason. It was too easy to lose your life at low level. “What can we help you with?” I asked instead. I didn’t want to answer such a nonsensical question.

“You can’t help me. It is I who has come to help you.” The man said. “I take your non-answer as a no.”

“I appreciate the offer, but we are fine on our own,” I said. “We mean no harm and just want to be on our way.” I was conscious that the rest of our party was merely three blocks away or so. This timing was terrible.

“We belong to the true believers,” their spokesperson said. “It is us who will be saved when the Rapture comes.” I was at a loss on how to respond, but it seemed he didn’t want an answer. “Any who don’t join us will not be saved, and those who aren’t saved are simply demons.”

“We aren’t demons.” Anna said from the back, “we don’t want any trouble.” The way they were acting was so insane that I feared trying to reason with them would get us nowhere. He hadn’t come out and said it outright, but we were demons in his eyes: enemies.

“You’re right, you’re not demons yet.” I felt a sigh of relief for a mere moment, “but you will become one in time. That is why you will come with us, you can still be saved.”

“No one is going with you,” Jessica said firmly and aimed at his heart. I was ready to summon my undead squad at a moment’s notice if I needed to. If they pushed the issue, blood would spill, and it would be more theirs than ours.

“Don’t hold back if any of them start casting,” I said to Jessica loudly enough for them all to hear.

“Oh, I won’t.” She responded in kind.

He paused in thought for a moment, “You won’t come with us?” The four behind him started to fidget with impatience, placing their hands on weapon hilts. This was going to end in a bad way. “We don’t want to hurt you, but you leave us no choice.” His voice was filled with fake sincerity that made me sick. “Take them!” The four beside him rushed past to grab us.

It had become us or them, and Jessica didn’t hesitate or aim to wound only. An arrow went directly through the head of the foremost and dropped her to the ground: a causality on their side in under a second.

The other three paused for a moment, and it almost seemed like they would retreat. It was natural to fear death. “Don’t stop!” cried their leader. “Death in his word will only allow you to see God sooner.” And as if a spell had been cast, the remaining three started running in our direction again.

Jessica exhaled through her teeth as she nocked another arrow and drew back the string of her bow. I let my undead warriors run loose and sent them forward. “There’s a lot more on the way now!” Jessica said. “We have to run.” She didn’t hesitate to let loose another arrow, which found itself embedded deeply into a thigh, before turning tail.

The unease in my mind confirmed that that this was dangerous, and even if we took only one casualty in thwarting them, that would too much to bear. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. “Run!” I yelled to Richard and Ana. My undead were a wall of death in front of these cultists and I wasn’t pulling any punches. My orders were clear: kill all enemies attempting to pass them.

Jessica dropped a Quagmire trap after ten feet or so and then sprinted ahead of us, “Follow me.” She had radar, and was taking us directly to Maria, Alan, Thomas and Lucas. I hobbled as best I could with my leg in bad shape, but even at my slow speed, we were buying time for ourselves thanks to the Quagmire. The wall of skeleton warriors threatening to chop them to pieces helped as well.

We moved three blocks over in a flash and rushed for the park the others were fighting in. There we spotted them striking the finishing blow on a Blood Lich. “We gotta go!” I yelled. They looked at me like four deer in headlights, completely lost as to what was happening.

Jessica reached them before I could, “Enemies coming, we have to go,” she said urgently.

Alan paused, “Can’t we just fight them?” he asked.

“Human enemies, and more than ten.” Jessica didn’t wait for a second response and simply ran right by them.

Somehow, they were still standing there in a stupor, “What are you waiting for? GO!” I shouted as I reached Alan. I cast Vast Shadows and pulled my undead back, only to find that half had already been dispatched.

“Just make it a few blocks!” I said. Once out of the city we could move through open grassland and into rural neighborhoods.

Alan grabbed all the loot on the floor and then started to rush after us. “Where are we going?” he shouted.

“I don’t know yet, just follow Jessica!” I called back.

Her speed was remarkable, and the gap between someone that had put stats in physical attributes and one that hadn’t was becoming very clear. I almost couldn’t keep up, and my hobbling wasn’t helping either. “Are you hurt?” Thomas came to my side after taking notice of my slow pace.

“Just a small wound,” I replied. “Let’s deal with it when we’re out of this mess.” The problem with putting our heads down and running as fast as we could is that we ended up aggroing monsters. But Jessica didn’t hesitate at all. Instead, she kept going through dangerous sections of mobs, much farther than among them, in fact, than I thought was necessary.

Fortunately, outside of dungeons, mobs had a certain radius on their aggro. An invisible tether or leash if you will, that they eventually reached the limit of. So although our charging through clusters of monsters built up quite a train of them in our wake, they eventually lost interested and drifted back to their original places. Far from being a crazy strategy, triggering mobs was creating concentrations of monsters, including one group with over twelve members. And it was possible that having to wade through these trains would deter our new adversaries from chasing us.

After rushing six blocks towards the outskirts of the city Jessica turned abruptly down an alley, waving for us to follow her. By then, my leg was screaming for me to stop and I felt dizzy. I had lost a good amount of blood already, enough to make physical activity rough.

I felt like I was going to fall at any moment, and as I almost stumbled over myself an arm came under mine. In fact, it was both Alan and Lucas on either side of me. “No you don’t,” Alan joked. “Just a bit further.”

We cut through the alleyway and Alan and Lucas hoisted me up atop a dumpster that was pushed up against a stone wall. Jessica was already waiting on the other side of the wall and behind her were open fields with farm houses in the distance. I felt oddly about letting Jessica catch me like a princess as I hung down the far side of the wall, but I couldn’t land on my own feet without howling in pain.

“Hurry, I’ll catch you,” she said. There was nothing for it but to let go and fall into her arms. Alan and the rest tumbled over the wall with nowhere near as much grace as me a moment later. “They’re still coming,” Jessica said with a distant expression. “Less of them now though.”

It seemed like our crazy sprint had caused a bunch of the pursuers to fall behind, but they were still on our trail. “One of them can clearly track and it has to be someone close,” Jessica added. “Unless they have a special skill that isn’t tracking, but something else.”

“Move to open field.” I suggested. “The person tracking us won’t have cover from your arrows, and they may choose to not follow.”

“You can barely support yourself.” Thomas was on my side poking and prodding at my thigh. “Heal probably won’t stop you doing permanent damage to yourself.”

I knew he was right, as I could feel the sharp stabs of pain. The bandage was slowly trying to heal my broken muscle and tissue, and at the same time I was breaking and tearing it with my haphazard running, “Just a little further,” I forced through gritted teeth.

No one moved, not because they wanted to disobey, but because they were worried about my well-being. “It’s move to where Jessica can pick some of them off before they reach us, or we fight to the death here. Will my leg be of any use if we’re all dead?” I asked sarcastically.

That got them moving, and Lucas and Alan continued to support me as I hobbled through the grassy field. It hadn’t been grazed or maintained in some time, and the grass came all the way up to my knees. Moving through wasn’t easy, and I instinctually scanned for snakes or predators as we ran.

We made good distance, at least a hundred yards from the city wall we had jumped, and there we set up and turned to wait. I pulled my minions from Vast Shadow and spread them around us, while Jessica nocked an arrow. It took ten or fifteen seconds for us to spot the first of the cultists peering over the wall. He acted as though fearless, but I’d never met someone not scared of death.

Jessica released as soon as that man slid down our side of the wall: she closed her eyes in concentration and then the bow twanged. There was a flash of light on the person’s chest, bright and blinding. An explosion of red gore tore through a white shirt and they collapsed with a hole where their heart was. That was all it took for the remaining pursuers to lower themselves back to the far side of the wall, rather than come on to us.

They were oblivious to the fact that Jessica could hit them there too, so long as she could imagine where her arrow would materialize. She’d seen their faces, their clothes; she knew the wall and the dumpster. It might not be easy, but that was enough for her to materialize an arrow and do serious damage, if not kill.

“Does anyone want to explain what the hell that was just now?” Alan asked. It seemed for now we were safe from their pursuit.

“Religious sycophants,” Richard answered. “I’d bet my left nut they were responsible for all this arson and vandalism too.”

“They attacked you?” Lucas asked.

“They were going to kidnap us,” I said. “We avoided fighting until it was clear that’s what was going to happen. No one here is at fault for this.” That got some skeptical stares and a nod. It was hard to believe someone would chase us for no reason, but here we were.