Chapter 49: Chapter 46: Zombie Warfare

Soul magic tolerance advanced to level 10
Evolution conditions met: Soul magic tolerance ranks up to soul magic resistance
There are no classes of magic more insidious than soul magic, whose effects can extend even beyond death. While users are routinely hunted down and executed in almost all civilised lands, there are always the few evil beings who escape the net. You have fallen victim to such a being, experiencing the pain as he tried, and fortunately failed, to rip all memory, ego and autonomy from you, well earning this upgrade from tolerance to resistance. This skill offers some protection, should outside influences attempt to interfere with your soul.

...What the fuck? I stared at the message in utter horror. If that dagger had stabbed me, from the sound of that description, it would have turned me into a complete vegetable, with no amount of respawning being able to fix it. Would it have been recoverable at all? Even if my resistance skill levelled, I couldn't imagine it being able to return lost memories. I'd have completely forgotten my quest, my name, where I came from... Presumably by ego it meant personality, and I didn't see that as being any better than losing my memory. Autonomy was more or less what I'd lost right now. Thank goodness that was the only one of the three that had taken effect.

Right then... Upstairs was off-limits, but how would I prevent him reaching me down here? He didn't come in person this time, but there was no guarantee he wouldn't the next. He'd sent some sort of trusted subordinate, but with that having failed, I wouldn't put it past him to make a second attempt.

I guess the obvious solution would be to find my way to floor four and get the heck out of his range. He apparently couldn't just casually wander down here, or he would have already been down here looking for me instead of sending a team in his place. The next question would be whether to go after my zombie twin first, or to search for the way down.

Given that I didn't know where the exit was, and that the throne room seemed like an obvious place for it, going after my zombie twin needed to be my first move. I peered at my map for a bit, counting up the number of rooms I needed to pass through. This was going to take a lot of tunnelling.

With my resistance evolution, I could finally stand and use skills again, although doing so still twinged, even through pain immunity. It was enough to get started, so I pulled my pickaxe out of my item box, and focused my class-boosted physical abilities on tunnelling.

Unlike the commander, who managed to dig under a wall in under a minute, it took me hours. At least to start with.

New skill gained: Mining
Even the most talented of blacksmiths can't forge a sword from thin air. People may look down on manual labour, but that doesn't make it any less vital. This skill will aid you in identifying promising ore veins, and knowing where to strike to mine effectively.

The skill's description said nothing about directly boosting my mining speed, but my speed instantly doubled nonetheless. Given that I'd never touched a pickaxe before and had no real knowledge of how to use it, a little artificially injected information went a long way.

And speaking of a long way... I completed tunnelling under the second wall, and did a bit of maths to work out how long it was going to take me to get back to the throne room, even with my increased speed. It was going to take days. I was going to need sleep. That wasn't something I wanted to do right now, so I activated trigger respawn instead before starting on the next tunnel.

Mining advanced to level 2
Mining advanced to level 3
Mining advanced to level 4
Soul magic resistance advanced to level 11

Bah... Another soul magic resistance level. I still wasn't completely free of whatever I was hit with, then. At least it wasn't slowing me down anymore, but I didn't like the idea of lingering effects from the universe's most insidious class of magic.

A loud groan from behind distracted me from my mining, and I spun around to find a zombie crawling into my tunnel. I quickly dispatched it with a pickaxe strike to the head, failing to unlock any new skills for my effort, then quickly jumped back out of the tunnel. When I'd entered the room, there had been no exits, just like every other room I'd tunnelled into so far, but the presence of a blighted husk implied that the walls had been opened. Sure enough, I made it out of the tunnel to find all four walls open, with dozens of zombies pouring through each one.

So, having failed to contain me with the floor's structure, whatever intelligence was controlling this place had decided to send in a zombie army. I would just have to hope the zombies were a limited resource; they had never seemed to return to the areas where me or my evil twin had cleared them out.

The horde was too dense to flee, so I backed away into a corner as I armed myself. No way would I be able to fight all these off, but as long as I took out a decent number with each respawn, I'd get there in the end. Hopefully. I still needed to assume I was under an arch-mage enforced time limit. How much longer did I have left on trigger respawn? It was actually rather close. Could I survive until then? Preferably without getting too badly blighted?

Acknowledging the inevitability of everything, I fought the zombie horde, managing to dispatch dozens of the things before they managed to dig their way between my chitin plates and through my silk armour to start doing real damage. A bite to the ankle failed to penetrate far, thanks to my toughened skin, but it still disabled my foot and flooded my leg with blight. While trigger respawn was close, I wasn't going to survive the five more minutes it needed. What a waste of an hour... I stashed all of my equipment, and let the zombies do their worst, hoping they'd cause enough damage for my corpse to not reanimate.

Thanks to pain immunity, being eaten alive by zombies wasn't too traumatic. Certainly not the worst experience I'd had since I arrived here. I had a rating system for that, too, and my current top three were the first time I'd been eaten by the tree, the more recent soul shredding, and that time I was eaten by the first spider. The commonality wasn't pain, but rather the helplessness. I could face any bad situation as long as I knew I could escape it.

One thing being eaten alive by zombies did supply was an abundance of blight.

Disease nullification advanced to level 29

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Which did nothing but help me level my resistance. By the point I'd died, there was no way my corpse was in good enough condition to form another sapient zombie.

On the bright side, I didn't wake up to Mru'walyn standing over me. On the downside, I woke up to the walls of brick having been replaced by walls of zombies. They weren't doing anything other than standing completely still and silent, just far enough away from the barrier that I couldn't spear them from inside its protection.

I decided to try hit-and-run tactics, stepping out, swinging my sword and jumping back in. I drew my blighted sword, jumped out, decapitated two zombies with a single swing, then jumped backwards. Straight into a wall.

Cunning... Being too far outside of the barrier for me to attack from within also meant that I had to cross past where the wall would have been if there was still a wall. They'd used that to trap me. I hadn't heard the wall appearing at all, and sense mana or sense presence had picked up nothing. One second there was nothing, and the next a wall had decided to exist.

Alas, the mystery of how the maze worked needed to take a back seat to the hundreds of zombies that were once again trying to eat me. I held out as long as I could, but I stupidly hadn't repaired my armour since the last fight, and only managed to take out a dozen before they started inflicting wounds. At that rate, I'd have to die tens of times to clean them all out, assuming there wasn't anything producing more. Not as bad as the centipedes would have been, but still a pain in the arse.

Sword proficiency advanced to level 18
Proficient blocker advanced to level 19

Another death, and another awakening. Another pair of skill levels would hopefully help, and this time I repaired the damage to my armour, too.

Improvisational artisan advanced to level 14

These zombies were good for improving my skill levels...

Once again, I made my way out, this time edging my way towards them sideways to keep the room exit in sight. It stayed exactly where it was, and no wall sprung into existence. I killed zombies, jumping back towards shelter whenever they got too close, until the moment I was forced to spin to dodge a blow. The opening between the two rooms had left my field of vision for less than a second, but in that time, the wall had reappeared. So the walls could only be messed with while I wasn't looking? The zombies were certainly looking. Why didn't they count?

That time I managed to kill a few dozen of them before they pinned me down and started breaking through my armour. I wanted to work to increase my average lifespan, dammit, so why does it seem like it's getting shorter? The last few had been on par with a mayfly. A female mayfly.

A particularly industrious zombie got a bite in to my throat, and my life was over once more.

Proficient dodger advanced to level 17

I opened my eyes to a fox-kin. I didn't think he was anyone I'd seen before, but I couldn't devote much of my brain power to facial recognition on account of the amount that was focused on the dagger that was already plunging towards my heart. I'd item boxed my armour to save it some damage once I was pinned down, but it was but a moment's effort to restore it, lifting myself slightly off the ground as a nice, thick plate of the giant centipede's chitin appeared between me and the dagger.

Not that it helped much last time...

What else could I do? I wasn't in contact with the statue so I couldn't use fast travel. No time to move my arms. I could at least pull a couple more things out of my item box, layering my shield over my torso, and bringing out my blighted sword point first, right into the path of his arm. I activated trigger respawn, this time changing my respawn point to upstairs. There didn't seem any point sticking here now that it was compromised.

How were these bastards bypassing the barrier? And I guess this meant that the warrior commander hadn't prevailed against the arch-mage. At least this new intruder seemed to have killed all the zombies for me.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion as I watched the wrist plunge into my sword. A dull clang suggested there was metal beneath his robe, but it wasn't enough to turn the blade, which pierced right through. He lost his grip on the dagger, which continued to fall point first into my shield. I saw a searing flash as it hit, but the expected pain didn't come. Instead, my limbs fell limp, and my vision, still spotty from the light, twisted. The brickwork of the catacombs was replaced by natural grey stone, and the face of the unknown fox-kin replaced by that of the very well known Mru'walyn.

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