Chapter 24: Interlude one – Ghost Hunting – part 2/2

As we entered the mansion we were surprised to see someone waiting for us since we hadn’t been told we would be getting further help. As soon as they saw us they spoke up ‘Oh, you must be the adventurers that my mistress sent for.’ She was quite plain looking, wearing a standard maid outfit, had short brown hair that wouldn’t get in the way of their tasks and were average height. ‘My mistress sent me here to take you to where the sightings were most common, just follow me.’

At this she turned around and started walking off before Monsoon stopped her ‘Hold on a minute, Lotus didn’t say anything about someone helping us.’ I had the same thought and would have said something but Monsoon got there before me. At this the maid turned back around.

‘Oh, it must have slipped her mind I am terribly sorry’ The servant said, ‘She hides it well but she is still mourning her father and so is quite forgetful at the moment.’ The explanation didn’t sit right with me but I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it. No one else said anything either so after a minute of silence Monsoon just said ‘ok then, well thanks for your help, please lead the way’

At this the servant once again turned away from us and started walking deeper into the mansion, with us following close behind this time. The mansion was quite dark as all the curtains had been shut but luckily they still let in enough light that we could still see what we were doing. The servant led us down a maze of corridors and stairs for a good five minutes until we came to a door into one of the bedrooms.

By the looks of it this was probably the late master’s bedroom as it was so enormous. It had a king sized bed with luxurious covers, bookshelves that covered two of the four walls and a massive walk in closet covering another one of the walls. The last wall had plenty of windows that overlooked the courtyard, we couldn’t see into the courtyard as the curtains had been closed like everywhere else in this mansion.

‘This is it, just step in and the ghost should show itself quickly’ The servant said while waiting at the door ‘Now that I have shown you the way here I will leave and wait at the entrance for when you return victorious.’ Something about the way she said this made my instincts flare up but, again, I couldn’t put my finger on what was causing it so we all walked through the door.

Once we had all entered the room I felt magic go off behind me so I looked to see what it was only to find that the door now had a transparent barrier blocking us in and the ‘servant’ had changed into something else. The only thing that I could tell by looking at her was that she was clearly undead. She had grey skin that was sunken into her bones, as if all her muscles had atrophied away, her eyes were now completely white, not having and pupils or irises. The made outfit she was wearing had changed into tattered clothing that would have left her with no modesty if she had been alive.

While we were walking into the bedroom she had pulled out a short wand made out of dead and rotting wood that she was now using to channel some short of magic as a sickly green vortex started to surround the end of her wand. I saw that it was pointed at Galan and I tried to push him out of the way but I was too slow as a the vortex became a laser that hit Galan and wrapped around him slowly withering him down. Luckily it didn’t kill him out right but after the laser had stopped he still looked heavily injured and on deaths door.

‘It’s nothing personal, I just can’t let anything hinder my experiment’ she said, her voice now a gravelly tone that made my skin crawl ‘If you had come even a day later you wouldn’t have found me but now you will need to die. I would say sorry if I cared at all.’

In a rage I turned into a bear before striking down the barrier as she jut stared at me with an uncaring apathy. The barrier didn’t even flicker as I hit it as I was too weak to do anything to it. As I was doing this I heard Monsoon from behind me exclaim ‘Shit this is a trap, we have another issue here’ They stopped talking for a second to think before saying ‘DD and Stryf switch. DD you can try and blink to the other side of the barrier and just keep that thing off of us while we deal with the [Wraith] in here and try to get to you. Stryf you get over here and keep this [Wraith] off of our backs while we support you too.’

Over the year that we had been traveling together I had learnt that Monsoon was a great tactician so I trusted his orders and, even though I didn’t want to, I turned around and swapped positions with Dust and charged at the [Wraith] that had appeared out of the floor. At the same time Dust ran past me and I soon heard the telltale pop of her activating [Quick blink], as I didn’t hear any swearing I trusted that she had managed to get to the other side of the door.

During this time Galan had recovered enough to use a spell in conjunction with [Dual Cast] to enhance my claws and DD’s dagger so that we would be able to do full damage to our enemies. This was good timing as a second later I reached the [Wraith] and swiped at it twice, both of them hit as he didn’t seem at all interested in trying to dodge. Unfortunately it didn’t seem like I did much damage even with the enhancements. As I went back down to all fours Monsoon finished casting his signature spell as a lance of water went through the [Wraith]’s chest leaving a hole.

Now that I was next to the [Wraith] it started to wildly attack me, striking me three times in quick succession. Thanks to my enhanced hide each hit didn’t deal much damage by themselves but I could tell that I wouldn’t last long like this. Galan was enhancing our strikes but if he went down the buffs would disappear so he used his magic to wrap a barrier around himself that made him harder to hit.

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Since my claws weren’t doing much damage to the [Wraith] even while being enhanced I coated them in acid before taking two more swipes. The [Wraith] was all in on attacking me while leaving itself open so I got two pretty deep swipes on its arms, causing it to recoil slightly. I couldn’t afford to look behind me as I had to give the [Wraith] my full attention but I trusted that DD would be fine as she was incredibly nimble and hard to hit. This was helped by the fact that none of had received anymore attacks from the doorway and I could still hear pops every few seconds.

Monsoon acted next by sending out two whirlpools at the same time, they converged with the [Wraith] in the middle of them. It had clearly received heavy damage as it started to slow down its attacks a bit, it still managed to get three more swings at me though. Two of them hit but just as the sword went down to hit me a third time I rose up and bit the hand with my mouth, causing it to drop the longsword. While it was disarmed I quickly clawed it two more times.

By this point the [Wraith]’s bright blue shine had dimmed considerably which, I hoped, indicated that the fight would be over soon. DD was still fighting alone so I wanted to get to her as fast as I could and I was getting close to going down myself.  Now that it was without a weapon I thought the hard part was over but I quickly realised I was wrong as it created an exact replica of the longsword it had been using before striking me three more times.

Monsoon started to cast another water lance but they used their new [Minor Fire Magic] ability to take away the heat in the water and freeze it before shooting it out at the [Wraith]. Usually the lance would just fall to the ground when the attack was finished but freezing it caused the lance to explode on impact doing even more damage. I could see that the [Wraith] was almost dead so I decided to end the fight here. I started to channel the rest of my mana into my strongest spell as I struck twice with my claws to conceal the spell and just before I had to go back down on all fours I finished casting my spell and a streak of lightning lashed out at the [Wraith] causing heavy damage as it wrapped around the [Wraith] and made it start spasming as if he still had muscles.

Monsoon and Galan both realised what I was doing and started to channel a single spell between them, Monsoon made the base spell and Galan poured his mana into it causing it to grow into something that neither of them could cast by themselves at their current level. Just as the [Wraith] was about to break free of the lightning they finished the spell and a huge tidal wave appeared in the room that went from one of the walls to the opposite wall. The tidal wave washed over me without doing anything but the [Wraith] was picked up by it and was slammed into the opposite wall with such force that it instantly vanished.

Seeing that the battle in the bedroom was finished we all turned around to see Dust still fighting the ‘servant’ that tricked us. They both looked heavily injured but the undead creature was worse for wear than DD and as we rushed to start attacking the barrier the creature turned towards us before speaking in its guttural voice ‘It seems like I have failed once again unfortunately. You all are extremely lucky that what I was doing here wasn’t important enough for me to have backup.’ The undead creature didn’t look angry just slightly annoyed that its work had been delayed ‘well I can see that I won’t take any of you down if I stay here and there is no point in dying here so I will be saying my goodbyes now.’

With that the undead creature channelled another spell for a second and before any of us could stop it they vanished. As soon as they were gone the barrier dissolved and we rushed to check on DD. She was quite hurt, but nothing life threatening, so we stopped for a good ten minutes while Galan healed us up before we went back to Lotus’s house to see what the fuck just happened.

‘I am extremely sorry that this happened and I swear that I didn’t know anything about this.’ Lotus said, clearly distraught ‘I will need to get another autopsy done on my father to see if this thing was actually the cause of his death. Once that is done I will send any information that I find to you. But until then,’ she paused as she opened a drawer from her desk and grabbed two bags filled with coin, putting them on the table in front of us ‘the first one is the previously agreed upon reward for this Quest, the second one is compensation for your troubles.’

No one said anything as we studied her to make sure we weren’t getting tricked again, once we were all satisfied Monsoon grabbed one of the bags and started to count what was in it while saying. ‘You won’t mind if I just check to make sure you aren’t swindling us, right? We don’t know if you were involved in this trap after all, even if your involvement is highly unlikely.’ Monsoon quickly finished counting the coins before saying, ‘It is all there, pleasure working with you. I will be looking forward to seeing what you find out.’ Before grabbing the second bag and turning around before leaving with the party following him.

As we were leaving the Lady’s residence we received a notification that none of us were expecting.

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