I was surrounded by Ruthers and fourteen other guys. Well, thirteen now that I had left one of them unconscious. Fourteen enemies altogether. Fourteen people who could take me down. Fourteen targets. All of them convinced that I was one of the most dangerous, evil beings on the planet. Even if I had been in the mood or position to negotiate or explain, they wouldn’t listen.
And yet, I didn’t launch myself right back into the attack. Not as long as they were apparently going to wait for their leader to give the word. Instead, I summoned my special little stone and held it between two fingers close to my eye while turning in a circle. I could see Ruthers and a few others start a bit, but they seemed to realize there was no immediate danger, that I wasn’t using a spell or attacking them. Which made them shift from moving to defend themselves, to just trying to figure out what I was doing. Their eyes darted between me and the small army I had summoned, clearly trying to decide how to deal with this reversal. Why was I holding up a stone and looking at them through it? The whole thing was probably pretty confusing from the other side of it.
After taking in the whole group with my stone, I made it vanish like a magician, snapping my fingers and showing my empty hand. Then I turned that open palm over to start pointing. My voice was as even and emotionless as I could make it, as though none of this actually mattered. I tried to channel every bored DMV clerk I’d ever heard. “That one, that one, that one, and that one.” Ruthers was included in that list. “They get to live. So does anyone else who walks away right now.” I left the implied other half of that statement unsaid, allowing the child-killers to fill in the blanks.
You’d actually let them go? Fathom demanded.
No, I replied simply. But they won’t take me up on the offer anyway. This makes more of an impression on the ones I have to leave alive. They’ll spend the rest of their lives wondering why I singled them out to be spared. And about what might’ve happened if the others did leave. I can’t kill them, but I can fuck with their heads.
I mean, if you’re trying to fuck with their heads, my mind-mate pointed out, maybe you should look the part. If Laein finds out you passed up the chance to style on these fools…
Ruthers had taken a few steps forward, his eyes narrowed. “You want to talk about having a chance to walk away, Necromancer? Give us the location of a better target, and maybe we could see fit to come after you another time.” I could tell he was barely keeping himself from lashing out. Only the prospect of getting the answers he wanted was stopping him from doing his level best to pound me into pulp with his bare hands. Or, considering his powers, possibly his bear hands.
Oookay, time to sell this. Lifting my chin in this male body that had become increasingly familiar through all the times I’d used it over these past few months, I regarded Ruthers evenly. “A better target?”
My free hand rose in the air, while the eyes of Ruthers and every single one of his people followed it intently. When I snapped my fingers, several of them went to jerk forward in a counterattack, before Ruthers shoved his hand out to stop them. He was pissed at me and all Necromancers in general, sure. But he’d also decided I might be his chance to find Fossor himself, and that was making him hold back now, watching what I was doing.
Sure enough, that fingersnap wasn’t an attack. Instead, two ghosts appeared behind me at the signal. They held a long tailcoat between them, black with gold trim and gleaming buttons. As I extended my arms, the ghosts slid the coat onto me, allowing it to drop into place. The back of the coat fell to just barely above my knees, and fit like it had been perfectly tailored to me.
It had, of course. Laein had made sure of it.
More importantly, as soon as the coat was on me, the rest of the uniform seemed to appear as if by magic. In actuality, there were bigger on the inside pouches sewn into the inner lining of the coat, with open spots touching me. So when the coat was on, I could use my object-moving power to instantly transfer each of those clothing pieces where it was supposed to go.
And just like that, I had my black and gold coat, sleek black slacks, gleaming black boots that came up to just under my knees, a black vest with gold buttons to match the coat, and a positively frilly white silk shirt.
When I’d walked back into this town after these fuckers attacked it and started slaughtering everyone here, I was wearing simple, casual traveling clothes, things that would blend in pretty well. I didn’t want to stand out. But now? Now Fathom was right. It was time to send a message. Time to stand out even more than I already had.
While those men were reacting to my sudden change, I spoke out loud again, “I told you I’d show you a Necromancer if you were looking for one. But I wasn’t talking about Fossor. You came into this town. You hurt, terrorized, and killed people I care about. I’m going to teach you… all of you… what a very bad idea that was.”
Ruthers seemed to take in my threat, process it, and dismiss it. “You are alone,” the future headmaster and Committee member informed me in a dark, dangerous voice. “You are surrounded and no one will come to your aid. That is what you Necromancers are in the end, filth with no true allies.”
His words actually made me laugh, a reaction that seemed to take him and the rest of his people by surprise. “Alone?” I shook my head before rising to the full height of my male form, allowing them to take in the sight of my black and gold, almost Victorian-era suit (something that wouldn’t exist within the Bystander world for quite awhile). “See, that’s how I know you don’t actually understand anything about Necromancers. Because if there’s one thing we never are, it’s alone.”
Even as I said that, two things happened. First, my army of ghosts rose from the ground and out of the buildings. They had been positioning themselves and staying out of sight the whole time, ever since the anti-Necromancy field from those crystals went down. I had forty of them ready by this point, all given enough power to make themselves solid for several minutes at a time. And all given the freedom to switch back and forth between solid and intangible as needed.
Second, the small enchanted coins I had given several of those ghosts for just such an emergency triggered. They had been subtly scattered around this area over that whole time as well. As the spell on them went off, each coin produced several zombies that had been stored inside them. About thirty or so of them altogether. So a handful of mixed ghosts and zombies were standing between me and each of Ruthers’ men.
While they were still trying to decide how to react to suddenly being the ones who were outnumbered, I brought my staff out and held it in one hand speaking one more time. I didn’t raise my voice, but it was still deafening. Mostly because when I spoke, I used a little trick that made every single one of my ghosts and zombies speak in chorus with me.
“Walk away. I’m being very, very generous. More generous than you were to the innocent people you slaughtered in this place.”
As expected, none of them took me up on the offer. Ruthers was the first one to make a move, and it wasn’t to retreat. The man abruptly vanished from where he had been standing. No, he didn’t vanish, he just moved so quickly his form became a blur. He came right in front of me, his metal covered-fist lashing out in an effort to collide with the side of my head while he bellowed in rage. Not so long ago, that would have been enough to catch me by surprise and put me on the ground. Which wouldn’t have ended well, to say the least. But this time, as his fist was barely an inch from slamming into my skull, I managed to snap my head back out of the way. Call it a benefit of having sparred with Percy over these past couple months. I had told her not to go easy on me, and she took me up on it. I’d had plenty of bruises and cracked bones to prove it. But now, it paid off. Ruthers’ fist sailed past my nose while I twisted out of the way. At the same time, Fathom controlled my arm to point the staff at two of his men who had managed to bolt past my troops and were taking aim our way. She used my voice to call up and then trigger a spell that converted the ground into this very sticky tar. They dropped to their waists with cries of surprise, kicking and struggling uselessly. Their arms were trapped in the stuff. I knew from experience practicing with that spell that they wouldn’t be getting out of it any time soon. Obviously, that wouldn’t last, but it slowed them down for the moment. Which gave the ghosts they had bypassed time to catch up with them.
Speaking of which, my own troops were grabbing, hitting, yanking, clawing, and otherwise attacking the rest of Ruthers’ people. They, of course, retaliated. And they weren’t exactly helpless. That much became clear immediately, when they produced ghost-fire covered weapons. But we’d drilled through what to do in that sort of situation over these past couple months. The zombies took point, obeying the commands Fathom sent them so I could focus on my own fight. They covered for the ghosts, blocking those ghost-fire attacks. It still hurt the zombies, but they were effective meatshields for the ghosts, who could hit these guys from the sides to disarm them.
But I couldn’t think about that. I simply took in the fact that it was happening somewhere in the back of my mind, and then dismissed it for Fathom to keep track of while the vast majority of my focus was on Ruthers. He might not be a Committee member yet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t fully capable of ripping me apart.
All that had happened in the instant the new fight kicked off. I took in what was happening with my ghosts and zombies, as well as my own arm lifting my staff to send that spell at the few who had escaped, while my head was jerking away from that metallic fist that was trying to punch a hole in the side of my skull. In that same instant, his gun was coming up–wait no, it was a sword. He’d converted the gun into a blade, and was about to drive it right through my stomach.
My staff got there in time, barely. The shaft knocked his blade out of the way, sending it whiffing off to the side with a loud metallic clang. Just as quickly, Ruthers snapped the blade back toward my neck, but I ducked and pivoted under it, doing a full three hundred and sixty degree turn in the time it took his sword to cut through the air where my throat had been. He was already correcting, trying to bring the blade straight down into me. But I finished turning faster than he expected, my free hand snapping up to grab his wrist.
Fuck he was strong. It was all I could do, even with my own enhancements, to stop the downward thrust. He put everything he had into it, trying to force me to my knees through sheer overwhelming fury. If this kept up, he would put me down.
So, I didn’t let it keep up. Instead, I drove the end of my staff right up into the man’s chin as hard as I could. The impact knocked his head back, and rattled his teeth.
Unfortunately, before I could follow up with that, I sensed the man’s foot rising. I tried to twist aside from that, but was too slow. It took me right in the chest, the force lifting me off the ground and sending me flying over to crash through the wall of a cabin. A different cabin than the one I had blasted my way out of to make my reentrance a minute earlier. I ended up slamming into a table full of random dishes, scattering those in every direction while the table shattered under the force of my impact. Oww… that one hurt.
But I didn’t have time to gather myself. Ruthers was right there, his foot coming down toward my face. Before he could finish me off, I sent myself into the broken table. It was wood, after all. Ruthers’ foot came down so hard it would have punched right through my skull and popped it like he was stepping on a water balloon.
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Sending in myself through the shattered wood to the far side behind the man, I popped back out of it. I had the wild thought to grab onto him and use possession to end this immediately. But I wasn’t completely confident in my ability to wipe his memory without help from Tabbris, and that could cause some problems if he remembered being possessed by someone with Necromancy powers. Besides, as stubborn and strong-willed as he was, he might hold out against my control. And if he managed to win the battle of wills, allowing him to see into my own memory… no, it wasn’t worth it.
So, instead of trying to possess him, I triggered my rocket-burst to hurl myself forward, slamming into the man from behind with all the force I could muster. He was taken off-guard, and we put another hole in that cabin, this one on the opposite side from where I had entered. Bits of wood went flying in every direction as we exploded through that wall. Ruthers spun in midair, raising his hand to send a blast of fire through me. At least, that was what he tried to do. But I had already possessed one of those slivers of wood that was flying in a random direction, so he simply managed to set the cabin we had just burst out of on fire.
Popping out of that sliver of wood as it spun end over end, I slowed myself in the air by using my motion-resistance power on my own clothes. Ruthers was already reacting to my appearance, clenching his fist and snapping it upward while dropping. As he landed and slid across the dirt, the man created a collection of hard dirt spikes, which erupted up out of the ground in an attempt to impale me.
I wasn’t thinking, it was all instinct and reflexes now as I released that motion-resistance power and twisted to kick off one spike, used that momentum to send myself up over another, and sent a concussive blast from my staff to explode the next one just as I passed through the area it would have filled. It all happened in the span of about a second and a half, and I could hear Ruthers’ bellow of rage. The man was very angry about my decision to be so rude as to not simply let him cripple and then torture me into telling him where Fossor was.
Landing smoothly on the ground after avoiding or breaking all the spikes would have hit me, I brought my hand up. I had my new energy disc clutched in it, Fathom having spent the past couple seconds, while I was focused on dealing with those spikes, instructing it on exactly which effects to have and for how long. A snap of my hand sent the disk flying at the remains of one of those spikes. The frisbee-like disk was bouncy first, making it rebound off that stone spike to fly straight at Ruthers from the side. He was ready for that, of course, as evidenced by a long scorpion-like tail emerging from his back to lash out in an attempt to smack the disc off course. But right after it bounced off the spike, the disc had turned intangible. His tail passed right through it, making the man turn his attention more that way as he summoned some sort of forcefield. That was enough to stop the disc. But it had done its job, distracting the man ever-so-briefly. It gave me time to create a quick portal. Rather than going anywhere near Ruthers himself, it led… somewhere else. I stuck my hand through, did what I needed to, and then dismissed it.
In the distance, I could hear the rest of the fighting going on, and just had to hope that my troops were holding their own. They knew what to do. We had trained for–well, not this exactly, but for a fight. Seth and Doctor Manakel had been especially valuable for teaching them guerilla tactics for this sort of fight. They were only allowed to kill the ones I’d given them the all-clear to do so, but they could injure, even maim, and disarm the rest.
Turning his attention back to me by then, Ruthers came after me like a freight train. A pair of dark bat-like wings emerged from his back, flapping down hard to send him off the ground and straight at me. One of my zombies that happened to be nearby jumped in the way, but the man tore through it like the corpse wasn’t even there.
What he couldn’t so easily rip right through, however, was my bear-ghost-skeleton thing. Fathom had been positioning it over these past few seconds, and as the man let out a bellow from a few feet away, his eyes locked on ours, the thing erupted from the ground to crash into him. Ruthers had been so intent on me that he was taken by surprise and knocked to the ground with the glowing bear skeleton over him.
“I’m not exactly sure how many times I have to tell you Necromancers don’t fight alone,” I remarked, just as the bear-skeleton roared in the man’s face, “but maybe I should write it down for you.”
Ruthers’ response to the whole situation was to suddenly grow a couple times his usual size. His body was covered in hard crocodile-like scales, while his form was more like that of a large gorilla. And he still had both those wings and the scorpion tail. This had to have something to do with whatever he was a Natural Heretic of, I just wasn’t sure what that actually was.
Either way, that scorpion tail whipped up to wrap around my bear and tried to throw it out of the way. But I brought the butt of my staff slamming down onto the ground while summoning and triggering a new spell. This one brought out a whole new type of zombie: bugs. Yes, I had created a whole swarm of flying zombie bugs. Mosquitos, wasps, bees, dragonflies, horseflies, flying ants, and more. There were thousands of them, all pouring out of the end of my staff as I pointed it toward Ruthers. Just as his tail wrapped around my bear, the man was beset by tiny zombie bugs right in his face. He jerked a bit in surprise, quickly summoning that forcefield again which very effectively kept my bugs out. It even started heating up, incinerating them as they landed against it. But the thing was, I had a lot of them. They swarmed around his face, blocking his view. Every time he burned through one layer, there were more to take their place.
Granted, he would be able to burn through all of them in a few seconds. But that was a few seconds he couldn’t focus on me or the bear, which had jerked free of his tail. And that was basically an eternity in this type of situation.
By the time he did manage to burn through the last of the insects that I was willing to throw away for this, the skeleton bear had changed. It was glowing brighter, and had an addition in the center of it. Penny’s golem body, which I had taken to thinking of as Penny Dreadful to differentiate from the real Penny, was perched inside its rib cage. She was literally inside the thing like she was piloting a mech, her arms and legs sticking out partway into its own matching limbs.
Obviously, she wasn’t piloting. Mostly because she didn’t have any actual conscious thought. She was as much of a shell as the bear was. In this case, Penny Dreadful wasn’t so much a pilot as she was an engine. Or maybe more of a boost. She was an enhanced golem. And now she was being used to enhance this thing even more.
While Ruthers took in the fact that the bear he had been fighting now had a zombie girl inside it, a dozen more ghosts appeared behind and around that same bear. One of them was Seth. All twelve of them flowed into the bear’s body. Well, eleven did. The last, Seth himself, went into Penny Dreadful. He would pilot this thing, by possessing the golem inside it. The other eleven ghosts were functioning as even more batteries, boosting the bear’s power to more ridiculous extremes.
Ruthers was now facing a nine-foot tall brown bear monster with visible skeleton surrounded by a glowing energy-like transparent body, with my Penny Dreadful enhanced golem girl perched inside its rib cage, piloted by one of the best fighters I’d ever seen, and further empowered by almost a dozen other ghosts full of energy I’d been pumping into them for quite awhile now.
I could barely process what happened next. Ruthers summoned some sort of massive ball of ghost-fire and sent it straight at the bear creature. But Seth made the thing react with absurd speed and grace considering its size, spinning on one foot to make the flaming ball sail right past it while snapping a paw out to grab Ruthers by that extended hand. The Heretic was yanked off his feet and hurled bodily into a nearby tree so hard the tree itself was knocked over.
Not that that put Ruthers down. He was back on his feet with his shotgun in hand, firing several ghost-fire infused blasts in rapid succession while a bellow of rage escaped the man. At the same time, that long scorpion tail lashed out at me. He clearly knew I was the real target, but couldn’t actually ignore my gestalt monster.
The tail came blindingly-quickly, aimed to cut straight through my throat. But I’d been expecting something like that, and snapped my staff up while blurting the second half of a spell I’d already summoned. That bit of magic summoned a heavy boulder into the air between us. The force of the tail slamming into the thing shattered the boulder into dust, but also stopped it from hitting me.
Over the next thirty seconds or so, things went basically like that. Ruthers kept dividing his attention between trying to kill me, and trying to destroy the bear golem monstrosity. Or just evading/recovering from its attacks. Seth couldn’t actually kill the man, of course. So he had to hold back a bit. But he could hurt him. And hurt him he did, pounding that fucker over and over again. Meanwhile, I mostly focused on keeping myself alive. The whole point was to wear Ruthers down bit by bit. I couldn’t kill him, but I needed him to stop. More importantly, I needed him to be in such a rage that he wouldn’t see what I had planned until it was too late. I needed him as angry as possible, and the longer this went on, the angrier he was getting.
I also couldn’t wait too long for the next part. I only had so much power to keep my bear going at this level. Ruthers wasn’t a Committee member, but he was really strong. We could barely keep up with him. All the while, the rest of my undead army was still dealing with his other troops, steadily wearing them down and killing the ones who weren’t important to the timeline.
Starting to run a little low here, Fathom warned me.
Yup, it’s time, I agreed. Okay, now! With that, I sent the signal to Seth. He, in turn, immediately slowed the bear corpse’s last pivot, allowing Ruthers’ latest ghost fire blast to graze the thing. It wasn’t enough to destroy the creature, but Seth sure made it seem like it was. The whole thing blew apart in dramatic fashion, smoke and fire filling the air as if it had exploded completely rather than simply vanishing into the ground.
Ruthers didn’t seem to notice any discrepancy. He was so furious by then, and so emboldened by finally managing to destroy the thing that had been keeping him from me, that he didn’t even think about it. He just twisted back toward me, eyes blazing. His wings gave one hard flap, and he came at me like a freight train as his scream filled the air. He wasn’t going to stab me, or shoot me, or anything else. He was going to hurl himself right through me.
In that moment, the man was moving so quickly he hadn’t even bothered to really look at me until just before he would have slammed into and through my body. When he finally did, he didn’t actually see me. Instead, at that very second, he saw that first Heretic I had killed at the start of this whole thing, when I had first come back into the village. He saw one of his own men, holding up both hands with a panicked, terrified expression.
That was what I had done when I reached through that portal minutes earlier, when I had been prepping something, prepping this. We had been near where that first fight had happened, close enough for me to reach the man that way and absorb his body. Now, in this moment just as the bigoted Heretic was barreling toward me, I used the corpse-disguise power I’d inherited from the Revenants. I made myself look like him, and cowered before the man charging through me, a mewling, terrified cry escaping my lips at the last second.
Ruthers couldn’t stop himself, not with all that momentum and rage. He slammed into and through my body–or rather, the body I was using. I felt his fist go through my face, but in a detached sort of way. It didn’t hurt. The borrowed-corpse body just sort of blew apart as Ruthers himself went right through me, his furious bellow twisting into a horrified noise of grief and regret.
Of course, I wasn’t really dead. My own body reappeared immediately as soon as Ruthers was past, and I was already turning while he was still distracted by the thought that he’d just turned one of his own men into a fine red mist. It was my opening, the one I’d been working to set up this entire time. Before his brain could kick in properly, I was already swinging my staff, using my own rocket burst power on the tip of it, as well as the staff’s own kinetic charge. Between both of those and my own strength, the staff collided hard enough with the back of Ruthers’ head to knock him to the ground. I immediately followed that up with a golf-like swing from the staff and another burst of kinetic energy. That one caught the man in the side, sending him flying a good twenty feet before he crashed and tumbled through a collection of firewood.
Ruthers was a bit wobbly as he hauled himself back up, staggering a bit. One eye was swollen shut, and the impact from slamming through that wood had broken his nose even further. He was swaying, clearly barely able to keep himself upright.
Maybe that was why he didn’t see his next problem until it growled at him from one side.
Cerberus, in his large form. That meant he was bigger than an Amarok, with three giant robot-dog heads and a bunch of laser cannons. And right in front of him, almost as menacing in his own way, was the armored Eurso.
And yet, even they weren’t the real threat. At the last second, distracted as he was by those two, Ruthers seemed to realize his mistake. He started to pivot, but Percy was faster. Her hand caught him by the neck, and then she vanished into him.
She was only gone for a second, before his body collapsed and she appeared once more. “My goodness, Jacob!” she called to me over the sound of all my ghosts and zombies dealing with the last of Ruthers’ people, whose spirits seemed to have collapsed along with the fall of their leader.
“The things you get up to when left alone for five minutes.”