Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 86: The Limping Return

Toren Daen

Our journey toward where the Unblooded Party had gone was a slow, fitful process. Several times I had to take short rests, fighting off the need to sleep. My leg ached like the devil, forcing me to rely on the Denoir heir's assistance to even move.

As we slowly moved up the floors of the building, I made sure to focus on my hearing, trying to listen for any shuffling corpses.

To my surprise, I heard none. Wherever we went, all we were greeted with were comatose undead, laying unresponsively on the floor. From the lingering mana around them and lack of wounds to the head or heart, I knew this hadn't been the work of the Unblooded Party and the others who had come through here before.

"What did this?" I asked quietly, unnerved by the abnormal display.

Sevren peered down at one of the corpses, its eyes open wide and unblinking. "After I ended that strange corpse that was about to kill you, all the nearby undead started acting strangely. Running into walls. Writhing on the ground. Or simply standing still, staring off into nothing. I didn't see what happened to them after that, but if I were to guess..."

Once Promise had speared the flesh titan, the thing that had been Alun's wife had pulled itself out of the sordid wreckage, ready to finish the job. But it seemed that whatever effect it leveraged over the masses of undead didn't just break at its second death. It had a catastrophic domino effect on those under its influence, not unlike how the death of an acidbeam hivemother crippled all the hornets connected to its hivemind.

I looked down at one of the zombies a ways ahead of us. It appeared to be a woman, but the thinning, patchy hair that seemed to be threaded through its decaying scalp could only tell me so much. The body was missing an arm.

I hadn't actually been able to recall much from the aftermath of that fight besides the pain.

Thoughts of that battle made me think of the aftermath, and the very-much-awake beast representing my basilisk blood. I felt a shiver of fear coat my skin in goosebumps as the thing pushed against my mind.

I didn't know what would happen because of this. Would the thing go back to sleep, returning to the status quo? Or was this permanent damage, caused by my recklessness and inability to trust Lady Dawn?

I swallowed, turning away from the corpse.

But as Sevren and I walked, I was surprised as the man slowed. Considering I had an arm slung around his shoulder, his body the only thing helping me forward, I was forced to halt my pace as well.

"What is it?" I asked, worried. I hadn't detected anything amiss, but Sevren Denoir had a strangely disturbed expression on his face. "What do you sense."

"I don't sense anything," he whispered, his eyes focused on the same undead I'd stared at before. "It's just... I think I recognize that body."

I felt my breathing ratched up. "What?" I said, some of my repressed fears about this zone rising to the surface once more. Alun's wife had been ripped away from the Twinfrosts, only to return as that thing. "You saw her die in this zone?"

"No," Sevren replied confidently, albeit slightly disturbed. "But I recognize her clothing and what's left of her hair. Look, see the eroded symbol on her gambeson? That's from Blood Hoarcrust. I saw this woman die in a convergence zone a few months back. Her team left her body where she fell, as is tradition."

I blinked, looking down at the body. This complicated my initial suspicions about how this zone got its monsters. After seeing what was left of Alun's wife–I was thinking of calling it a commander–I had the niggling suspicion that the undead who threw themselves at us in waves were sourced directly from those fallen in this zone.