Rimelion: The Exploiter

She handed the spyglass to Lisa, who took it and raised it immediately, and Lunaris watched Lisa’s expression shift, the bubbly energy compressing, the court mage surfacing.

“The dead zone is bigger than the reports suggested. The miasma’s almost at the river.”

Lucy nodded. “Aye,” she said, and for once the pirate voice was quiet, almost conversational. “I’ll anchor ‘er here, upriver of the worst of it. Close enough to reach ye if things go sideways, far enough that me native crew doesn’t breathe that muck.” She looked at Lunaris. “I’ll have a boat ready for yer landing party.”

Lunaris nodded. She felt the mantle on her shoulders, the weight of it, the warmth of it. “Okay,” she said. “Get us to shore.”

The boat was small.

A rowboat, really, wooden and creaking, lowered from the ship’s side on ropes that the crew handled fast. The landing party climbed down one at a time, Lisa first, landing with a grace that made the boat barely rock; then Ian, who landed with considerably less grace and grabbed the gunwale with both hands; then Poundcake, who descended with the unhurried serenity of a man who trusted boats the same way he trusted ovens; then Fty, who sat down, placed his staff across his knees, and immediately began scanning the shore.

Lunaris went last.

She stepped into the boat, felt it dip under her weight, felt the water shift beneath them, and sat down. The mantle pooled around her on the bench, silver fabric over old wood.

Lucy leaned over the rail above them. The pirate's voice was gone. What remained was the paladin. “Good luck, Lunaris,” she said. No me Queen, no aye aye.

“Thanks, Lucy.”

An old sailor took the oars. His face was weathered into a topographic map of decades on the water, and he said nothing, just pulled, and the boat slid away from the ship’s hull and into the current.

The river carried them south.

The shore grew closer, and the green grew thinner, and the air changed. Lunaris felt it before she could name it; a weight in her lungs, a taste at the back of her throat, something old. The old man rowed with steady, even strokes, and his face showed nothing but his pulls got shorter as they approached the bank, as if his arms knew something his expression wouldn’t admit.

[Miasma field: All stats -1%]

The boat scraped the gravel.

Lunaris stepped onto the shore.

The ground was solid under her boots, but it felt wrong; dry in a way that had nothing to do with weather, brittle in a way that had nothing to do with season. The grass here was still alive, still green, but it was thin, clinging to the soil as if it knew something was coming and was holding on out of stubbornness rather than health.

Behind her, the boat rocked as the others climbed out.

Lisa stepped onto the gravel, and her nostrils flared. Her eyes, green and soft a moment ago, shifted to alert. The fire mage reading the air for threats the way a hunting dog read it for scent. “The mana here is wrong,” she hissed. “It’s... thin. Like something’s drinking it.”

Ian landed beside Lunaris. His jaw was tight, his eyes moving across the tree line, and for a moment he looked less like the fumbling daggerboy who couldn’t stop blushing and more like someone who had fought in enough dangerous situations.

Poundcake stood on the shore and breathed. “The oven is cold,” he said. “But something burns beneath it.”

Fty was the last off the boat, and his staff touched the ground with a wave of light surging into them.

[Miasma field negated!]

“The land is saturated,” he said. “Death magic. Deep. Whatever Veranthos did, it didn’t stop. It’s been building.” He looked at Lunaris. “I can already feel it pressing against my wards.”

Lunaris faced south.

The hills rolled ahead of them, still green here, still holding, but she could see where the color began to leach away in the distance, where the gray started, where the world stopped pretending it was alive. And beyond that, barely visible through the haze, the dark smudge of the mountain.

The tower she couldn’t see from here, but she knew it was there. She touched the mantle on her shoulder.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s move.”

The terrain changed in stages, each one worse than the last.

First the grass thinned, then it yellowed, then it stopped pretending.

What replaced it was spent soil that had given everything it had and been asked for more. The hills were the same rolling shapes they’d been from the ship, but walking across them felt different. Like crossing a room where something had died and been cleaned up, but not well enough.

Fty’s ward pulsed faintly around them, a thin shell of light that flickered at the edges. Every few minutes Lunaris caught him adjusting his grip on his staff, small corrections that meant the ward was costing him more than he wanted anyone to notice.

She noticed.

The first undead appeared twenty minutes in.

Three of them, shambling across a ridge to the east, moving in the loose, disconnected pattern of things that had forgotten what legs were for. They turned toward the party.

Lunaris drew her rapier and longsword.

She didn’t need both. The first undead reached her, and she sidestepped its lunge, rapier threading through the gap between its jaw and collarbone, longsword sweeping through the second one’s knees in the same motion.

Ian took the third, and his draw was fast, the Quick-Draw enchantment on Veer’s daggers shaving the hesitation she was used to seeing, the blades appearing in his hands as if they’d been waiting. His strike was still sloppy, still more commitment than technique, but the dagger punched through the undead’s temple with a force that surprised them both.

“Okay,” Ian said, staring at the crumbling remains. “I like these daggers.”

Lisa didn’t even bother. With a wave of her hand and the scattered remains caught fire, burning to ash in seconds.

They pushed on. More appeared. Singles, pairs, a cluster of five near a dead tree that had calcified into something closer to stone than wood. The party cut through all of them without slowing, and Lunaris felt the rhythm building, the old familiar tempo of her blades working in concert, rapier stitching and longsword sweeping, the mantle flowing behind her.

It felt good.

It felt too easy.

“I don’t like this,” Fty said, echoing her thought with the timing of someone who’d been thinking it longer. “Scattered patrols without coordination or response to engagement. These aren’t defenders. They’re—”

“Leftovers,” Lisa said.

“Perimeter noise,” Fty agreed. “The real defenses will be deeper.”

They crested the next hill, and Fty was right.

The valley below was dead. The gray that Lunaris had seen through the spyglass made real and close and terrible. The soil was the color of old bone. Nothing grew. The air had a visible quality here, a faint shimmer that wasn’t heat and wasn’t light but something between, the miasma thickening into something you could almost see.

And in the center of the valley, standing on a raised mound of packed earth, was… someone?

[Cursed Necromancer Lv.30]

Type: 2-uncommon | HP: 600/600

Its hands were raised, palms open, and from each finger thin threads of dark energy stretched outward like puppet strings, connecting to the undead that surrounded it in concentric rings.

These were not the shamblers.

These undead stood in formation. Rows. Ranks. Armed with weapons: swords, axes, pikes… They stood with the rigid attention of soldiers awaiting orders, heads tracking the party’s approach with a synchronization that made Lunaris’s skin crawl.

She counted. Thirty. Maybe more behind the mound, where the terrain blocked her view.

“That’s an NPC,” Ian whispered. “The necromancer. Look at the tag.”

The necromancer’s head turned toward them.

“YOU TRESPASS,” it said, and the voice came from everywhere and nowhere, resonating through the dead soil. “THIS LAND IS OURS. TURN BACK OR BE ADDED TO THE GARRISON.”

Lunaris raised a hand. “We’re from Rimebreak,” she called out, and her voice sounded thin against the necromancer’s. “This territory falls within our kingdom’s borders. We’re not here to—”

“THIS LAND IS OURS,” it repeated, with exactly the same intonation, exactly the same cadence. “TURN BACK OR BE ADDED TO THE GARRISON.”

“It will not negotiate,” Fty said flatly.

The necromancer’s fingers twitched.

The undead moved.

All of them. At once. These came fast, breaking formation into a wave that poured down the mound toward the party in a tide of rusted steel and dead hands, and the puppet strings pulsed with each step, dark energy feeding coordination into limbs that shouldn’t have been able to sprint.

“Positions!” Fty barked, and his staff hit the ground, the ward flaring bright, green light pulsing outward. “Lunaris, Ian—hold the front flanks! Lisa, I need time for—”

“I know!” Lisa snapped, and her hands were already moving, fire building between her palms, but not the instant casual wave she’d used on the shamblers. “Give me thirty seconds!”

The first wave hit.

Lunaris met it head-on.

Rapier and longsword, the Chronosblade’s rhythm singing through her arms, each cut precise, each motion flowing into the next. She took the first undead through the throat, pivoted, swept the longsword through two more at the knees, rapier catching a fourth that had tried to flank.

The mantle flared behind her with each spin, silver fabric tracing her movement like a brushstroke.

Ian was beside her, fighting with the desperate efficiency she’d seen before; Veer’s daggers flashing, and the Quick-Draw effect turned his frantic style from a liability into something almost viable.

They killed five.

Eight more pressed forward.

They killed those, and six rose from behind, filling gaps, maintaining pressure.

The necromancer’s fingers danced, and the undead adapted, shifting around Lunaris’s cuts instead of charging into them, circling, probing, looking for the healer behind the front line.

“They’re going for Fty!” Lunaris shouted, because she could see it; a group of four breaking left, another three breaking right, flanking wide around the melee to reach the anchor in the back.

Poundcake moved.

He stepped forward, placed himself between Fty and the flanking undead, and did something. It wasn’t dramatic. He set his feet, settled his weight, and breathed out.

The air changed.

He sent them a skill notification.

[The Proving]

All dough must answer to the baker’s hands. Generates an irresistible gravitational compulsion on hostile entities within range, drawing them toward the caster. The hearth welcomes all, whether or not they wish to be welcomed.

The flanking undead stopped, their heads turned.

Their bodies turned.

The puppet strings connecting them to the necromancer strained, dark energy flickering, but the pull was stronger, or rather, it was different, operating on a frequency the necromancer’s control couldn’t override.

The undead weren’t being commanded to go to Poundcake. They wanted to. Something in the magic, in the warmth of it, in the ancient simplicity of it, bypassed the strings entirely.

They came to him.

And he was ready.

The first one lunged and Poundcake sidestepped by the width of the blade, caught its wrist, and redirected it into the second.

The motion was effortless, unhurried, the economy of someone who had been doing this, or something like this, for longer than he’d been baking.

His palm struck the third in the sternum, and Lunaris heard ribs crack and the undead flew backward, bowling over two more.

A fourth swung an axe, and he caught the haft mid-swing, pivoted, and used the undead’s own momentum to slam it into the ground with a force that cratered the dead soil.

He stayed planted, the Proving’s warmth radiating outward, and every undead that tried to circle the party found itself curving back toward him instead, drawn in by a gravitational pull that smelled faintly, impossibly, of fresh bread.

Every single one that reached him stopped there.

“How is he doing that?” Ian gasped, parrying a sword thrust that would have taken his ear off.

“He was military!” Lunaris shouted back, rapier threading through an undead’s eye socket. “Before the monastery!”

“He’s a baker!”

“He’s both!”

The necromancer’s puppet strings were vibrating now, dark energy pulsing faster, and more undead were rising from the edges of the dead zone, pulling themselves from the gray soil as if the earth was giving birth to them. The numbers weren’t decreasing.

They were growing.

“Lisa!” Lunaris called.

“Ten more seconds!”

The wave pressed harder.

Lunaris felt her arms burning as fatigue crept in.

Beside her, Ian took a hit across the shoulder, not deep, a glancing slash from a rusted sword, and Lunaris saw the green flash of Fty’s heal lance into him from behind, knitting the wound before the blood could flow.

“I hope Lisa can make it,” Lunaris whispered to herself.