[NR] Interesting Undead - Chapter 553

Jason, of course, spends a bit more time getting into specifics. Stuff like how to feel your own mind being physically warped by information and so on. Most of it is very niche, but you definitely want to know what to do before it happens. Not that he expects them to remember everything, but he does hope that some of it sticks so maybe one of them will remember when needed.

Then the three of them jumped back into NeoRealm and they each let out big sighs of relief that nothing messed with them while logged out. In fact, the forest had been oddly quiet for the last couple days. Though none of them wanted to test the theory that it was giving them a reprieve while they were being tested.

So without further ado, the third day arrives and soon after the seventh wave. This time it was the undead, which made Jason snarl under his breath. Despite his belief that the Deep Wilds truly wasn’t an entity in and of itself, it seemed to be quite handy at sending the tyrant’s trio after them. No one likes dealing with the combo of charms, necromancy, and summoning.

At least the undead in the first wave were of the more common sort, skeletons and zombies. Of course, they weren’t the common types of said undead, instead pulling from beasts instead of sapients. This actually being rarer simply because, for most beasts, a proper ‘burial right’ is simply being eaten or decomposing. You generally need either a desecrated area or some kind of raising effect in place to get them without a necromancer.

Though seeing as the Deep Wilds is functionally infinite, there should be more than enough undead beasts kicking around. There should even be entire undead forests out there. Which seeing as non-ambulatory plants are even less likely to naturally rise as undead, is quite the achievement. So thirty-ish undead beasts are almost unnoteworthy.

Doesn’t change the fact that fighting undead sucks. At least Jason has a good option in his stamina powered War Stomp. The runic bloom countering the undead in the same way certain holy magics and healing effects do. Not that he would trust it against the previously mentioned undead plants. They likely kept enough of their nature to not be instantly weak to it. Good thing that isn’t what they’re facing and so me makes quick work of the shambling horde.

It was with the second wave where it became obvious this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park. Neither Jason nor Courtney could identify the specific type of undead that attacked them. While superficially, they looked like either a skeleton with a bit of muscle or a zombie with most of their meat removed. In reality, what this represented was an undead monster that had some powerful muscles to boost the already powerful strength granted by its undead nature.

With how sparse some muscles were, you might suspect there were weak points to take advantage of. Except in reality, the muscles were the easier to damage parts. As was common with natural undead, instead of focusing on something specific, these undead simply kept improving their overall toughness. So the muscles were like tough leather and the bones like rock.

It was, of course, Rosha that suffered the most from these changes. Arrows did tend to be weaker against undead to begin with and the tougher bones meant they did even less. Good thing Jason’s War Stomp was still effective.

Not that Rosha stayed back and plinked away uselessly with her bow. After all, it isn’t just a bow. So, once it was near guaranteed that they would be facing undead this day, she switched it over to staff mode. She didn’t even bother keeping the knives attached, going for pure smashing power.

The one upside of these new undead was that they clearly counted as more than just one as the wave only had ten of them. This only made the wave easier in the sense that there were fewer monsters to keep track of. That, and Jason was able to headshot the lead undead with a flying kick.

Behind that, three of the undead focused on Jason, as the other six split up and charged around him to attack the others. The other three don’t allow this to split them. Instead, they focus on the undead coming from the left, leaving Lily to tank the ones on the right. She actually did a decent job of this. While she wasn’t really all that useful against the bones, she shredded the muscles which weakened them.

On the other side, Rosha took the lead with an overhead swing of her staff. Though it was a deceptive attack. Instead of going straight down and crushing the monster’s shoulder blade, she arc-ed it to the side and up under the skull. This smashed the undead’s spine, ending it.

Courtney, armed with just her daggers, is less effective. However, she does a decent job of holding off the other two undead beasts. This left Rosha the time to recover and come in with a wide baseball swing, smashing through one of the undead’s front legs. The jerky-like meat managed to hold the legs together, but wasn’t capable of holding it up.

Back with Jason, he fends off the two undead beasts while standing on one leg. The other remains up, striking out whenever they attempt to attack. Up until they showed an opening.

Then, as he finishes striking out with his leg, instead of drawing it back he uses it to take a huge step forward. Jason flows from that into a tight spin. This allows him to drive a kick through the skull of the attacking undead beast.

Once there was just a single undead, Jason is more than capable of handling it without a worry. From there, the wave soon fell as he was able to turn and assist the two on his left. Their undead fell quickly with the assistance and Lily had already weakened her three by quite a lot.

Jason stretches and lets out a deep breath. “Well, that was interesting. Wonder what we’ll see next? Not that I’m going to give any examples or what have you. No need to jinx things in a place where that could be a literal and direct thing.”