Chapter 54: The Undead

Wu Qingsong finally saw the first practitioner of magic since coming to this world, but the individual who stood before him was far from impressive.

He resembled a furless dog, with a pointed muzzle and disproportionately large ears that stood upright. These features only served to make him look even more gaunt.

Rather than embodying the noble visage of a wizard, he looked more like a roadside beggar.

“Jackalman,” Nina whispered softly.

The man was dressed in a tattered robe and clutched a staff evidently made from an animal’s bone. He also wore a hat fashioned from the skull of an unidentifiable animal. Despite these trappings, nothing about him conveyed a sense of power or dread. 

Coupled with the words he spoke, Wu Qingsong couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was merely putting on airs.

Nina didn’t have the luxury to contemplate these issues as Wu Qingsong did. With a deafening yell, she swung her weapon to cleave a zombie in half. Astonishingly, the zombie’s severed halves quickly reattached themselves, and the creature clumsily rose to its feet again.

“Do you see? This is the mighty magic of the Batiz clan!” the jackalman necromancer exclaimed excitedly as if reveling in the debut of this particular skill.

“Target the heart! You must destroy their hearts,” Wu Qingsong urgently advised.

Thwarted in her advance, Nina and the team found themselves at a standstill. Skeletons began to slowly surround them, hurling themselves as living weapons against the wolfmen, who fought desperately to hold them at bay with massive wooden shields.

“Matthew!” Nina shouted urgently.

Surrounded by the protective shield formation that also enclosed Wu Qingsong and Liuli, a wolfman named Matthew let out a roar. Reaching behind him, he grabbed a Molotov cocktail, ignited it with a nearby torch, and hurled it unrelentingly at the zombies surrounding Nina.

This incendiary weapon had quickly gained favor among Nina’s resistance force ever since its initial deployment in the breakout from Rem City.

Particularly effective against lumbering soldiers weighed down by heavy armor, these Molotov cocktails had demonstrated their efficacy in the earlier elimination of a northern raiding group, which led to their production on a larger scale.

Among all the wolfmen accompanying Nina, Matthew was renowned for his accuracy and distance when throwing Molotov cocktails. Two fireballs flew flawlessly over Nina’s shoulders, making direct hits on the zombies, who were instantaneously consumed by flames.

“Foolish, to think that…” the necromancer began, sneering.

Being a practitioner of the magical arts, he wouldn’t make the same mistakes as a regular soldier and misidentify this as fire magic. He quickly surmised that it was likely a flammable substance.

However, what took him by surprise was that the flames didn’t extinguish as quickly as he had anticipated. Instead, they clung tenaciously to the zombies, eventually setting the fats within their bodies ablaze and transforming them into towering infernos.

“How… how can this be?” the necromancer shrieked, both furious and incredulous.

Matthew lit and threw more Molotov cocktails. At such close range, missing was almost an impossibility. The zombies transformed into enormous fireballs one after another, their actions finally hampered as they began emitting eerie, high-pitched wails.

Seizing this momentary advantage, Nina skillfully drove her sword through their torsos. Finally, the team resumed its forward momentum.

“Such trifling gimmicks,” the necromancer roared in anger.

Starting to chant an incantation, he unwittingly provided Wu Qingsong with a chance to shoot a crossbow bolt at him. However, the bolt narrowly missed its mark, skimming past the necromancer’s shoulder.

“You dare?” A look of terror flashed in the eyes of the Hu wolfman. “So be it, then. Feel the unbridled fury of the Batiz clan. Your souls will be torn asunder and subjected to eternal damnation in the depths of purgatory. You’ve invited this doom upon yourselves!”

His face twisted with manic fervor, he reached into his robe and pulled out a diminutive object.

A scroll.

“Stop him. Now!” Wu Qingsong yelled, urgency filling his voice.

Regardless of what that scroll was, it undoubtedly served as a trump card, one they could not afford to let him use.

Pivoting on her heels, Nina lunged forward like an arrow shot from a bow. Her shoulder armor effortlessly sent any intervening undead flying. Drawing a short sword from behind her back with her left hand, she threw it straight at the necromancer.

She didn’t expect the attack to be lethal, but if it disrupted his actions, that would be enough.

“Die!” 

At that moment, Wu Qingsong grabbed the crossbow that originally belonged to Liuli and pulled the trigger without a moment’s hesitation.

However, a transparent wave of energy suddenly materialized in the air just in front of the necromancer. The short sword hurled by Nina and the bolt fired by Wu Qingsong were both deflected, sent veering off course. Simultaneously, the object in the necromancer’s grasp began to emit an eerie, black glow. In the blink of an eye, a malevolent dark storm erupted, engulfing the entire valley.

Wu Qingsong instinctively wrapped his arms around Liuli, using his own body as a shield to protect her. A chilling, desolate aura swiftly swept through him, filling his mind with thoughts of utter despair and fleeting notions of suicide. When he raised his head, though, he noticed that all the wolfmen were still standing, each with a perplexing expression on their faces.

Luckily, Liuli appeared unscathed.

‘A curse?’ he taught.

“Nina!” he yelled, simultaneously delivering a forceful tap on Matthew, who was standing next to him.

“What… what’s going on?” Matthew finally snapped back to reality, allowing Wu Qingsong to exhale a sigh of relief. 

Although he wasn’t sure what had just happened, it likely wasn’t a spell aimed directly at humanoids. Their reactions might have been mere collateral effects.

“Look out!” Nina shouted.

Suddenly, the skeletons ignited with a dim, ghostly light, which also filled their empty eye sockets. What truly alarmed Nina, however, were the previously buried bones beneath the ground. These remains, from creatures long dead, began to stir and move.

The place must have been either a battlefield or a mass grave from ages past. Nearly all the ground began to quake, as countless skeletons clawed their way up to the surface, right from underneath Wu Qingsong and the others.

In their midst, the massive skeletal remains of some gigantic creature also began to animate.

As they moved, the entire valley seemed to vibrate.

“I was right! This is the very place where the allied forces were defeated by the elves years ago!” The necromancer broke into another fit of maniacal laughter. “Hahaha, no need for slow, tedious digging anymore. Arise, my army! Slay these wretched intruders!”