Chapter 131: Dread
The room was black. Like, ’can’t-see-your-own-hand’ black. And then two green eyes opened right in Nox face.
He didn’t even have time to think. He just reacted, throwing a punch with a Brutalizer-clad fist at where the eyes were. His fist hit nothing but air. The eyes were gone.
"Show yourself, you cowardly pile of bones!" Mela’s voice yelled from somewhere to his left.
A dry, rattling laugh echoed from everywhere at once. "Patience, little elf. You will all have your turn to die."
A skeleton lunged out of the darkness, its rusty sword swinging. Nox sidestepped, but another one came from his right. He blocked its attack, the clang of metal loud in the suffocating dark.
’I can’t see shit. This is a nightmare.’
He tried to use his senses, to feel the mana in the room, but it was all a chaotic mess of stale, dead energy. The Grave Lord was a high-level necromancer; he didn’t just command the undead, he commanded the very death-stuff in the air.
"Nox!" Serian’s voice was sharp with alarm, much closer than he expected. "Behind you!"
He spun, and a huge, two-handed axe swung by a skeletal champion sliced through the air, missing his head by an inch. He stumbled back, right into another skeleton that grabbed his arms from behind.
’Crap.’
"I am the master of this tomb," the Grave Lord’s voice whispered directly in his ear, even though the green eyes were nowhere to be seen. "Every shadow is my ally. Every bone, my soldier. And you, little whelp, you are merely trapped in my web."
He struggled against the skeleton’s grip, smashing its skull with a backward headbutt, but two more immediately took its place, their bony fingers digging into his arms. He was being overwhelmed.