Chapter 26: The Chief
Valens watched as hundreds of men filed into the opening, the undead ranks closing in and stretching in a line like a true army preparing for a battle. Scores of them choked the space around Oarfang, the air reeking of blood, sweat, and piss.
Meanwhile, Nomad gazed deep somewhere toward the undead lines. Celme was busy staring at her own hands, her blonde hair streaked with crimson blood, eyes blank as if her mind was somewhere else.
Then the undead army parted, and one man trudged out of their ranks.
Nomad tensed back.
Valens blinked. He had seen plenty of undead fighting around the cave, all favoring different weapons, clad in plates wreathed in greenish fog and their Resonance filled with a surprisingly peaceful rhythm. Scarcely he felt any spikes in their frequencies, as if the act of brutal combat was something like an everyday occurrence to them.
Not this man, though.
[Undead Chief - Lvl ???]
He was a mountain of steel lumbering toward them, that spiked mace glinting painfully sharp. The tip of it dented the ground when the undead stopped and leaned over the weapon, the thorns cracking the soil and plunging halfway in, kicking up a wave of dust as if the earth was somehow offended by the act.
“Lost your way, have you?” he said, voice raspy and tinged with a hint of fury. His emerald eyes glanced over Valens and Celme before fixing Nomad with a stare. Even with the helmet covering most of his face, Valens could feel the undead’s frown by how the light shifted in his eyes. He was pissed, through and through.
“Can’t say much. It’s a bastard of a cave, eh, chief?” Nomad gave him a dead look, then cracked a laugh as his grip on the sword loosened. He jerked a thump back to the holes across the cave, sounding greatly disappointed. “Must’ve hit a soft patch. When I came to myself I was deep in a maze. Had to rely on these old bones of mine to dig my way out.”
“Uh,” the Undead Chief grunted, raising one hand over his head and clasping it into a fist. A score of undead parted out of the green tide to the side, and trudged over them, all eyes down at their feet.
Valens arched an eyebrow when he felt their frequencies. There was a lull, a lazy cadence that barely sounded alive, disturbingly similar to that of a comatose patient. Unlike how Nomad and the chief’s Heartstones pounded in spiking waves across the Resonance, these undead were just like Necromancer’s Skeletons, save for a hint of consciousness around their stones.