Chapter 160

There was no time to think, not with the bolt all the way in the air. If she had, Zea never would have tried to stop it with her whip. The bolt was so small, and moving so fast. It would be impossible to hit it out of the air, even with her perception of 21 helping her follow its path.

She didn’t think; she just moved. The whip slashed up, impossibly thin but directed by her will to exactly the point where she needed it. The bolt came into the range of the razor prong aura and Zea knew exactly what would happen even as she watched it play out. She’d missed. The bolt passed by the aura, one side of it shaved down, and kept right on going. It was on target to strike her directly, right in the chest.

Then it wobbled in the air. With bare feet to go, it lost its trajectory and started to tumble. Instead of taking a sharp piece of metal between the ribs, the bolt struck her flat on the side. It hurt, and she’d probably have a nice bruise there for a few hours before her stamina healed it up if she survived the fight, but it wasn’t debilitating. More importantly, the quiver on the guard’s hip was empty.

She could still fight as long as she could power through the pain in her back. It didn’t seem so bad now, which probably wasn’t a good sign. Things were going numb and her heartbeat was pounding in her ears, but she didn’t have the time she needed to parse that. Instead, she scrambled to her feet and darted past the still-reforming undead she’d already cut down.

There was a look of comical surprise on the necromancer’s face when her whip lashed out and coiled once around his shoulder. Zea pulled, sawing off his arm. The severed limb hit the ground with a meaty thump and blood started drizzling out, but the stump on the necromancer didn’t have so much as a trickle of blood coming out of it.

“Well, that’s annoying,” he said.

Before Zea could follow up, a hand grabbed hold of her leg. The undead behind her pulled her off balance and threatened to drag her off her feet, forcing Zea to pay attention to it instead of the necromancer. She should have gone for the decapitation strike instead of dismemberment, but she hadn’t expected him not to bleed and she hadn’t exactly had a lot of time to aim.

The whip sliced through the wrist of the offending hand and Zea turned to finish the necromancer off for real this time. The man wasn’t even paying any attention to her, despite the damage she’d done. Instead he had a pensive look on his face as he considered his arm on the ground. Before Zea could attack again, she heard the click and twang of a crossbow being fired again.

She glanced over to see a different guard, one of the ones from closer to the front of the caravan who hadn’t made it off the roof of his wagon before Luke killed him, pointing a crossbow in her direction. The bolt was already in the air and too close for her to dodge it. Zea jerked to the side and cried out as it tore through her elbow. The handle to her whip went tumbling through the air.

Another guard stood up, this one missing an arm. That didn’t stop it from raising its crossbow and firing one-handed, but Zea ducked around one of the supply wagons for cover. For a change, there were no bodies near there, which didn’t mean that some of the ones walking around weren’t going to come after her, just that she didn’t have to worry about one popping up off the ground.

It was hard to stay on her feet, hard to think. Her right hand was worthless now, the elbow completely shattered and nothing below that moving at all. There were still two bolts in her back, and even without all of that, using the whip put a great deal of mental stress on her. There had to be a solution, but she couldn’t think of it.

The undead were closing in, but she had an answer to that problem, at least. It was going to be tricky to get them all in range, considering so many of them were using crossbows and had no reason to group up. Finding the optimal time to attack might be impossible. She’d have to settle for getting a clear shot at getting her whip back so she could finish hacking that necromancer apart.

The first guard came around the wagon, but he was clumsy compared to her. Even with her injuries, she easily kept out of his grasp. Then a second one appeared. And a third came around the other side of the wagon. Zea half expected a fourth overhead, but the wagon’s canvas roof stretched over a ribbed frame made that impossible.

It was a small condolence since the only way to escape was to run farther away from the caravan, where she’d be out in the open. If she was going to end this fight, she needed to get back to the necromancer and finish him off.

Zea reached into her pocket and brought out what looked like a balled-up strip of leather, loosely held in shape with a few rough stitches. It wouldn’t take much force to snap the threads on it, certainly not more than she could produce by throwing it into the crowd of zombies.

They just needed to line up right for her to use it.

* * *

Torwin couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or amused about the whole thing. On the one hand, he stood to make back quite a bit of money by not having to pay all the guards he’d hired for his caravan. The slaves were far more valuable, but it didn’t hurt to make a little extra profit.

But he’d hired those guards for a reason, and that reason was that necromancy wasn’t legal this far north. They weren’t too far from Naldrin, where he’d planned to unload the whole cargo, but getting them the last leg was going to be a pain. Reanimated undead lacked the abilities they’d had in life, no matter how fresh the corpse, and he could only compensate for so much.

Perhaps he should have stepped in sooner and tried to save some of them, but if he’d done that, then there’d be even more witnesses to take care of. No, in this situation it was all undead or no undead. He’d already sent a few to take care of the remaining drivers, annoying as it was. Now he’d need to drive the whole caravan himself for however long it took for another town to come into view, then stage the area to make it look like his guards had died fighting off bandits so that he could hire a new crop.

At least the payment would be significantly lower with most of the journey already behind him.

Absently, he reached down to pick up his severed arm. [Blood Adaptation] was keeping him on his feet and [Fractured Mind] kept him from feeling any pain at being… disarmed… but he should use [Reconstitute]to attach it again soon. It wasn’t easy to use it on himself, not nearly as much as commanding an undead to pull itself back together, but he wasn’t a master necromancer for nothing.

The girl who’d attacked him, some sort of mixed blood creature, he thought, was frantically trying to keep herself out of his minions’ clutches, but with so much raw material just laying around for him to work with, it was a simple matter to add a few more to his numbers. The other three were also on the verge of collapsing, their pathetic attempts at killing that which was already dead doomed to failure.

Torwin stripped the sleeve of his robe down his severed arm and slipped his own torso bare, leaving the loose robe hanging around his belted waist. The tricky part here was making sure he lined it up just so. With the undead, it didn’t much matter if the limb was off a few degrees. He was much more discerning when it came to himself. Two ranks in [Anatomy] were sufficient to confirm he had the limb held to the stump properly, and [Steady Hands] kept it still while he used his magic to reattach it.

At least the girl had made a clean job of it. He’d had a hand hacked off once with a rusty old cleaver by a little boy whose father he’d been doing an experiment on. That had been tricky to put back, what with all the filth in there and the jagged nature of the wound. It had taken him the better part of an hour to fix that little mishap, but this time, it barely took twenty seconds. Torwin made a mental note to collect that strange whip she’d used later. He might keep it for himself if it proved easy to wield, and if not, it would likely sell for a heaping pile of gold.

“Much better,” he murmured as he flexed the fingers on his freshly reattached arm. Each one worked correctly, confirmed one by one, and his wrist retained full range of motion. Nothing was wrong in the elbow, and while the shoulder was a bit bruised, it wasn’t pulling or tearing. All the muscles, veins, and nerves seemed to be functioning perfectly.

“Now then, what to do with you lot? Killing you would be too easy, but I do have a schedule to keep, after all. Hmm, I wonder.”

The distinctive twang of a crossbow caught his attention, not because it wasn’t a familiar sound in this battle, but because he knew exactly what his minions were doing at all times, and none of them had fired at that particular moment. Then he took an involuntary step forward as something tugged at his neck, and he had a momentary glimpse of the tip of a bolt sticking out beneath his jaw.

“How peculiar,” he tried to say, but his throat wasn’t working. Hesitantly, he reached up behind him with a hand and felt the smooth wooden shaft piercing the back of his neck. That explained that then. [Blood Adaptation] would keep him from bleeding out, but this was a step too close to decapitation for him to be comfortable with.

Torwin was no longer torn between amusement and annoyance.

* * *

Luke’s arms quivered from holding the crossbow, and he was so weak that the miniscule recoil was almost enough to rip it out of his hands. The pain was worth it, though. He’d put a bolt right through the necromancer’s throat. That ought to be enough to kill the bastard.

The zombies weren’t collapsing, but maybe without their boss around, they’d stay down once they were cut up this time. He glanced back at where Ruca and Val were surrounded by a circle of undead, both fighting back-to-back and slashing at any that got within range. It looked the same as it had the entire fight to him.

Then the necromancer grabbed the bolt from the front and pulled it all the way through his neck. He turned around and stared down at Luke with smoldering anger. “This is no longer amusing,” he spat out.

The bloodied bolt was cast aside, the necromancer took a breath, and the wound sealed up right before Luke’s eyes. The man’s whole body jerked to attention, like someone had run a current through him, and he got a wild grin on his face. Luke knew that look. It was one he was all too familiar with himself.

The necromancer had just activated [Life Surge].