Ruthless V5-Interlude-The Unquiet Dead

The severed hand monster twitched in Zora’s pocket, and she quickly drew it out.

Its small mouth opened. The creature sucked in a tiny breath and then began to speak.

“The Panther Army arrived, but the Fisher King defeated them singlehandedly, forcing their Ruler to sue for peace.”

Zora grinned. It couldn’t have gone any other way.

There was a sound at the opening to the small makeshift hut, and she automatically turned to see who was there. Alice stepped inside, and Zora’s grin widened.

“Looks like James won his battle,” Zora said.

“Oh?” Alice said. “I mean, of course he did. I told you he didn’t need our help.”

Zora laughed. “You were so right, sweetie. Ready for our fight?”

Alice’s expression transformed in an instant, from a little smirk to a gritted tooth snarl.

“I’ve been ready for a month,” she said.

“I’ll rally the troops,” Zora said.

Alice looked a bit sad at those words but nodded. The women stepped outside, and Zora spoke into the open air.

“We’re invading the Obayifo’s land now,” she called. “Are you all ready?”

Over a hundred dead things rose up, along with thirty-two living humans who were simply responding to the woman’s voice rather than heeding a mystical command. All of the nearly a hundred fifty figures were those who the Obayifo and his minions had possessed until recently—or one of the Ruler’s willing followers.

All of them were those who the Obayifo had sent after the mother and daughter as they drew nearer his base of operations.

Zora and Alice had been forced to kill most of them. Only around a fifth of the group could be taken alive, the entities possessing them exorcised.

This had swollen the ranks of Zora’s undead force, but at a terrible cost in human life—tragic, considering that most of them had been possessed rather than willing followers. But the women did what needed to be done.

“We’re ready,” said one of the living. His voice was slightly shaky but certain.

Others nodded or muttered agreements.

“So be it,” Zora said. “This way.”

She turned, and without looking back, she started walking, Alice beside her. After ten minutes of walking, they both felt it as they passed into the home of the Obayifo.

There was a pressure in the air, and the environment changed suddenly and radically.

They had been in a forest, and there were still trees all around them. But now every tree around was dead or dying. The shrubbery on the ground was even worse off. The bushes and weeds had been reduced to withered brown husks.

“What happened to this place?” Alice said.

“The same thing the creature was doing to you,” Zora replied.

She did not add, And to me, through you, but that was true as well.

The Obayifo lived by draining the vital energy of hosts and those in close proximity. His territory was the same concept, enacted on a massive scale. There would be no beasts in this forest, at least none present of their own free will. There would only be these dried out husks of plants—things without the capacity to run away.

On the bright side, that meant the Obayifo had limited defenses—perhaps no defenses—in terms of minions. On the negative side…

[You have traveled far, Okomfo.]

On the negative side, Zora could feel the monster’s malignant presence soak every speck of dirt, every blade of dead grass, every particle of air that she breathed in. She had to fight the urge to hold her breath. It wouldn’t help.

As the cruel voice of the Ruler echoed through the air, reality seemed to warp with the sound of it. Day turned to night, and the trees near them started to lose their life force even more quickly, drying up visibly before the mother and daughter’s eyes, the bark peeling and cracking, leaves turning yellow and brown.

“I am no priestess,” Zora said loudly.

Alice blinked and shook herself as if she had been suddenly roused from a trance.

“He’s trying to get in,” she whispered. “He feels stronger here.”

Of course he does, Zora thought. That’s why we prepared for this fight.

[If you are not an Okomfo, who are you to harass so many of my servants? To enter my territory uninvited?]

The voice had become threatening, and Zora felt something changing in the air. Was the temperature rising? That had to be in her head. Florida air was always muggy anyway, except in the dead of winter.

She looked around and saw that, in fact, the humans who had accompanied her and Alice were all beginning to visibly sweat.

The Obayifo was raising the temperature.

And her glance to the side also revealed something else, which only a few others seemed to have noticed.

Will o’ the wisps. Flames floating in the air all around.

These were the Obayifo’s subject malignant spirits.

Zora suppressed the urge to smile and instead adopted a grim expression.

“Everyone, stay on your toes!” she called out. “It looks like we’re surrounded.”

[Too late.]

The Obayifo spoke in a tone of smug arrogance.

[My powers are at their strongest within my territory. You should never have come here.]

The will o’ the wisps shot forward from among the trees and began entering the bodies of those who had formerly been possessed, retaking control of them. They even entered the dead, which Zora had imagined might not be possible.

The Necromancer only deflected one of the little balls of fire, the one that had aimed for her daughter. She wasn’t letting Alice be retaken, not even for a moment.

In an instant, the possessed outnumbered those who moved under their own power.

The cruel laughter of the Obayifo echoed through the air, but it was no longer projected through his Ruler powers. The Obayifo was actually physically present somewhere close by.

Zora faced forward and saw the dark features of the Obayifo’s human face, only slightly hidden behind a small domino mask that she sensed was a magical item. He was tall and black, with a thick head of curly black hair. He wore a long-sleeved silk shirt and dress pants. The choice of clothing reminded Zora of a pre-System magician.

It was hard to believe that behind all that power, beneath his infiltrations into dreams and invasions of human bodies, this was just a fellow human. A human being who had been gifted by the System—or perhaps born, even in the pre-System world—with the capacity to bargain with dark powers. A capacity that had, through the System and the last several months, blossomed into a deep darkness.

How many lives have you destroyed? Zora wondered. Initially, she had thought that Alice was the only victim, or at least the first. Then she had researched the legends of the Obayifo. Now she knew otherwise firsthand. She had encountered too many others who had suffered at this Obayifo’s hands, or the hands of those spirits that followed him.

They were all around her even now. The possessed and the prematurely aged.

The network of the affected was probably beyond the hundred and fifty-something people here. They would all have friends, family, loved ones who had been touched in some way.

It would have been impressive if the achievement wasn’t so thoroughly evil.

“Let’s end this pointless bout of trespassing,” the Obayifo said. “Don’t worry, though. I won’t evict you. I want you to stay…”

More of the will o’ the wisps swarmed around Zora and Alice. The Necromancer was able to deflect them away from herself with her Mana, and she batted away two from her daughter, too. Alice also blasted a handful with light magic, and Zora thought they were probably permanently destroyed—but she also saw that two had managed to sink into Alice’s back.

As Alice’s eyes began to glow, under the influence of the Ruler once again, Zora bore her teeth in a snarl.

“You will regret that,” she said quietly.

“I doubt that very much,” the Obayifo replied, his features twisted in a broad, ugly smile. “All of you, take her! We will see how long she resists communion with us once she can no longer—”

Zora began to sing, and the Obayifo stopped in mid-sentence.

The words were old, in a language not spoken on Earth before the System, and Zora’s voice was rusty and tired, but the lyrics came out clearly nevertheless.

The effects were instantly perceptible. The Obayifo’s whole body shook. So did the bodies of those who had been possessed by the spirits he had called upon.

“How can you affect so many at once?” he demanded through gritted teeth.

Zora made no reply, only kept singing, even as the air changed around her.

Rather than merely baking her in an exaggerated version of the usual muggy Florida air, the atmosphere now drained something more essential than sweat. Zora could feel her skin slowly drying and wrinkling, her thick, dark hair growing more fragile and perhaps turning white.

She continued singing, and to the sides, she saw her allies taking action. The minority who were not possessed had broken away from the more or less paralyzed folk inhabited by the Obayifo’s minions, and now they charged at the Obayifo himself.

The Ruler, enraged, could only respond with slow, jerky movements. He conjured balls of what Zora guessed was Soul Mana. The color was right. The volatile black-orange of a burning photograph.

She adjusted the pitch of her song for a moment, just a single high sharp note, and the Obayifo’s hand slipped. The ball of magic he was about to throw slipped and collided harmlessly with a dead tree, scattering into nothing.

Zora’s allies continued charging at the Obayifo, but the Ruler tore his attention away from them and fixed his eyes on Zora.

She avoided his gaze for a few seconds, opened her Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions, and dumped out the main contents it was carrying—the main items she had purchased from the System Store in her preparations over recent weeks.

Clay jars with their lids open.

The jars and lids fell out, in their hundreds, in piles that were far from neat. But thankfully none of them broke. That was one of the two enchantments on the pottery Zora had brought to this confrontation.

She had not used them once, on a single spirit she had expelled all along her path here, all to give the false impression that she did not have a way of dealing with these spirits for the long term.

As the Obayifo saw what she was doing, he roared incoherently.

Two of Zora’s comrades reached him, and they pulled the Obayifo’s arms behind his back. Their holds barely budged him, but he could hardly bring his superhuman strength to bear with Zora’s song still ringing through the air.

“Look at me, woman! Look at what you’re fighting! Witch. Sorceress. Exorcist!”

He was still far from the mark, but Zora finally made eye contact with the Obayifo and gave him what he wanted.

“Yes. Yes!” His eyes glowed, and he cackled wildly. He thought he had won.

Zora felt his soul pulling at hers, dragging her to some other plane. She went with him without resisting, but she kept part of herself back. She had worked with souls often enough that she could manipulate her own slightly, too. Could tether a piece of it to her physical form, even as someone else tried to steal her away, at least for a little while.

With what was left, she began drumming her foot against the ground, a slow but steady rhythm. The spirits started to loosen their holds on the flesh they had possessed, drawn slowly out by the Necromancer’s voice and drumbeat, but Zora barely took note of it.

She would have to count on her allies to do the rest. With her body’s movements set in a simple pattern, all of her immaterial self went to face the Obayifo in the other place.

Zora found herself in a dark field. Above her head, stars twinkled in a black sky, the only source of life in the space.

A wind whispered across the tall grass in front of her, and Zora saw him.

The Obayifo appeared, in this place, as a giant thirty feet tall, bare-chested but still masked.

There were no more words.

The figure charged at her, holding balls of unidentifiable black Mana in both hands as he did so. Zora reached deep within and found her own power.

She made the spirits of the dead appear in this place, and they flew to intercept the Obayifo.

He slowed to meet her summoned minions, and small orbs from the black Mana balls began detaching and shooting toward the spirits.

On contact, the orbs and spirits destroyed each other. Zora felt each lost spirit as a blow to her total power, and she quickly changed strategies, silently ordering them to hit the Obayifo from the sides.

He flung one of the black balls of Mana at Zora, and she simply ran away, slipping off to the side.

The ball missed her and turned in midair to follow. Zora felt she was too slow to dodge again, so she summoned another spirit to shield her.

She felt the blow as spirit and energy made contact, and an explosion threw her onto her back.

As she leaped to her feet, she noticed that the stars appeared to be winking out, one by one.

Zora looked to see how the spirits were faring against the Obayifo, and she was just in time to see the last two burst, blown apart by his black orbs.

She tried to shrug it off and summoned more spirits, but inside, she was shaken. She couldn’t feel those spirits at all anymore. They had been bound to her, and this place was not real. Was it? They should not have been permanently destroyed.

The sacrifice would have been fine, but she could not detect whether the Obayifo had weakened at all. He stood across from her, grinning and seemingly daring her to make the next move, clearly in his element.

All she could think to do was throw more dead souls at the Obayifo and hope they would slow him down.

The next several minutes felt like an uncomfortably short battle of attrition.

He burst layer after layer of Zora’s carefully collected spirits, and after a certain point he simply ignored them. The spirits didn’t seem to be able to do any harm to him. He focused on throwing orbs of the black Mana at Zora, and she was forced to shield herself and expend her own spirits rather than risk taking a blow from whatever that power was.

The Necromancer was beginning to feel the fight was hopeless. It wasn’t even a fight, after all. Just a slow, crushing grind as he broke her defenses down.

Soon there would be nothing left.

Another spirit exploded, too close to her face this time, sending her rolling backward.

The Obayifo advanced, sprinting eagerly—and suddenly, Zora found herself in her own body again.

She saw the Obayifo still held in the arms of the men who had restrained him, with two more now grabbing him, one holding him around the neck and the other adding a second restraint to his right arm.

But the Obayifo was lit up brightly now. The blinding glare of Alice’s light magic held it in what looked like agonized paralysis.

That was what broke his hold.

Zora had just enough time to think that, and to smile at her daughter, before she turned her attention back to what she had to do. Her helpers, the others with her and Alice, were closing the last of the clay pots—sealing the spirits that had followed the Obayifo inside of them.

There would only be the leader left, and there would be no second chance like this.

Zora reached into her Small Bag of Deceptive Dimensions, drew out an iron sword, charged across the distance that separated her from the Obayifo—ignoring the slight pain as she briefly crossed through her daughter’s beam of light—and stabbed the Ruler straight through the chest.

Did I hit the heart?

She had only a moment to wonder.

[You killed Obayifo Sebastian Barrick, Lv. 41!]

[...]

Those who had held the Obayifo’s limbs staggered away from it, and reality returned to normal around them—night turned back to day—as notifications began to stream across Zora’s field of vision. Levels, achievements—but she focused on only the most important announcements.

[You have slain the “Ruler of Dark Spirits!” Required conditions met. Title acquired: “Ruler of Baleful Spirits!”]

[Title adapting to you…]

[Title acquired: “Ruler of the Unquiet Dead!”]