As it turns out, zombies aren't quite as scary as TV sold them as.

  Now, Marcus knew these things weren't actually zombies, but wights (Zombies were apparently a different, rarer, and far more dangerous type of undead. Another thing TV got wrong), and that a regular, Veiled human would have a much harder time dealing with them than he did.

  But still, with all the gravitas this quest had gotten, it was a bit disappointing just how easy these things were to kill. Breath. Slash. Kill. Breath. Slash. Kill. And so on and on. He had gotten three already, and the thing was already starting to get repetitive.

  "WOOHOO!"

  …Well, to him, at least.

  "Lyle!" he called, looking up to see the floating form of his bunk-buddy, who was currently in the process of performing a mid-air somersault. He had to put some extra volume on the call so it would pierce past the whistling of the wind. "Come on, man! Get your head in the game!"

  "My head's in the game!" playfully protested the Dragon Blooded of the Wind, punctuating it with a deep breath and another flip. "I'm just testing stuff out."

  "We did that before coming here!" reminded the blond Dragon Hearted, slamming the butt of his glaive (technically a sovnya, according to Ms. Montenegro, the order's blacksmith) for emphasis. "With Mr Kurt and Ms. Mila's instruction. Now stop goofing around and do your job already!"

  "Okay, okay! Jeez…" Driving his attention back at the half-buried mound, Lyle spotted a wight crawling its way out. It looked pretty much the same as the others they had faced already: rail thin, with skin so dissecated it looked like papyrus stretching over its frame, and clad head to toe in a crumbling set of viking armor, complete with a round shield of rotten wood and an oxidated axe. From the small sections of its chest visible through the holes on the chainmail, one could the black-green glow of necrotic magic coloring the flesh of its chest.

  "Okay then," said Lyle, eyes intent on the monstrosity. "Doing my job right about…" He pulled his right leg, which had been morphed into a mass of roiling wind, back, and drove his upper body forward in an imitation of a soccer player. "Now!"

  With a sound alike a whip's, Lyle kicked at the wight's direction, shooting a mass of pulsating air from his leg. This wind-blade crashed againt the undead's skeletic shins, splitting both like pieces of celery. Without a scream or a change in expression, the wight fell flat on its face.

  It began crawling towards them immediately.

  "…Lyle," Marcus called again. "Do you know where you have to hit a wight for it to go down?"

  "In the chest!" came the answer in a more-than-a-bit annoyed tone. "Come on, dude, I'm not that dumb! We were told like a half hour ago, for Pete's sake!"

  "Oh," hummed Marcus. His eyes went to the crawling wight, then back at Lyle. "So…?"

  "So I missed, okay?" Lyle said, looking away to hide the blush creeping up his face. "The thing was very far away, and it is the first time I do something like this! Cut me some slack, man!"

  "Ahhh," Marcus hummed in understanding. "That's fine, dude. Nothing wrong with failing. Uhmmm…come on! Try again! I'm sure you'll get it this time."

  Lyle looked at him with scepticism for a moment. Then, he smiled, and threw another kick, sending another slash the wight's way.

  It took the thing's sword arm, carved a gash in the grass below it, and nothing more.

  "…You know what they say, right? Third time's the charm!"

  Lyle gave Marcus a thoroughly unimpressed look as a response. Then, with a sigh, he allowed his legs to turn back into flesh, desdending slowly to the ground. He rose his arm to the sky the moment his naked soles (His shoes and socks hung from his belt) touched the grass and, with a deep inhalaion, turned the whole limb into a whirlind, from fingertips to nearly the shoulder.

  Under normal circumstances, Marcus knew, Lyle would have only been able to convert about half of that, reaching the elbow at most, before the process diluted too much of his lifeforce into the atmosphere for Lyle to sustain it. The whole thing was, according to Lyle, like watering down his very blood.

  But now that Pneuma was on the table, amplifying his 'od' as well as his hold on it?

  Letting the air out his nostrils, Lyle brought his arm down in a wide sweeping motion, sending the biggest blade yet at the undead. It was the most precise yet too, and it got the thing right between its hollow eyes. And then it kept going. And going.

  It crashed against the mound's side with a blast of sound, leaving the vivisected remains of the wight behind.

  "Would you look at that?" Lyle asked as his arm went back to normal. "Third time was the…ugh…charm."

  "Are you okay?" asked Marcus worriedly at the Dragon Blooded.

  "Fine," Lyle said, waving a hand. "Just a bit woobly, that's all."

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "You should be more careful, dude. That's your life-stuff you're using."

  "Okay, mom…"

  Marcus was on the verge of protesting when the walkie hanging from his hip buzzed to life.

  "Marcus? Lyle?" came Jason's voice. "You kids okay there?"

  Picking the device and putting it up to his face, Marcus answered. "We're fine! Lyle just went a bit overboard with a wight, that's all."

  "Hmm, I see. Say, how many have you guys gotten yet?"

  "Four. I got three and Lyle got the other. Why?"

  "Because Malia and I got six in total, and Mila got five. Based off this mound's size, I calculate tat there are about four of five more in there, not counting the chieftain."

  "Oh! That's good then. We should be wrapping this up pretty soo…wait. Did you say Ms. Mila took five out? Like, on her own?"

  "Yeah," said Jason. "Are you really surprised? She's on her home turf, her use on Pneuma is quite refined…"

  "No, not that. I know she's tough. I meant…if she did it alone, then what the heck's our captain doing?"

  "…You mean Kurt, right?"

  "…Yeah."

  A chuckle came from the speaker. "Well, he saw that we were dealing with the perimeter just fine on our own, and decided to-in his own words, mind you- 'go make himself useful'."

  Hesitatingly, Marcus asked the obvious question. "Doing…what, exactly?"

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  As Kurt made his way between the empty niches that lined the mound's inner walls, ears properly boosted to detect anything that'd try and get the drop on him, his eyes remained fixed on the central colum of the structure, where their prize laid.

  He had already driven Silver Demon through the chests of three unawakened wights, and was pretty sure only the chieftain and him remained within the structure. Pretty soon, it would be just Kurt.

  The mound's central colum was a cylindric stone structure so wide that it would have taken two or three people to envelop it. A reverse alcove of sorts had been carved onto it, leaving a diagonal surface of roughly two meters of length and 60 degrees of inclination onto it, upon which an iron coffin carved with actual, norse runes, the symbols all suffused with necrotic energy so thick one could nearly taste. It felt like bugs crawling on his skin to Kurt's aetheric sense.

  Bringing his sword up in a long point guard, Kurt pressed it against the iron container's surface. The effect of the mithril blade on the necromantically charged metal was instantaneous and very volatile: the flows of power between symbols ran wild and snapped in multiple showers of sparks, causing the glowing runes to either lose their power or to accumulate too much of it. The first ones just died out, while the later's burst into black-green flames that, despite them lacking any real heat, Kurt still leaned back to avoid it as much as possible.

  Finally, the enchantments that held both halves of the coffin together died down too, and the top of it fell onto the floor with an enormous knell. From within the coffin's now exposed interior stepped out a figure that had nothing to do with wights it had commanded in life.

  Now, when people think abot necromancy, they think of death, skeletons and rot, and while it sure as hell could cause the first and animate the second, it didn't really have much to do with the third. Rot was, after all, a process of life: bacteria, worms and insects that worked together to feed off the mortal remains. It was not pretty, but it was life and, as such, as incompatible with the energies necrotic as any other living thing. The reason wights looked the way they did was, if anyting, that they hadn't received enough of it over the centuries.

  The draugr chieftain befor Kurt hadn't face such scarcity, and it showed.

  Standing nearly six feet six and clad in surprisingly pristine armor and carrying an equally glimmering greatsword, the chieftain looked as human as an undead killing machine could: its eyes remained intact and placed in a face that, apart from some waxiness in the skin, could have even been considered good-looking, with the man-thing's raven, shoulder-length hair, which emerged from within its helmet's edge, helping create that 'pretty boy' picture.

  A draugr. A 'perfect wight' of sorts created from suffusing a body in necrotic magic in its entirety, so that no singular 'core' formed. This made the flow of magic throughout the body smoother and more efficient, ramping up the resulting undead's power considerably, aswell as ensuring it didn't have a singular weak spot that could be hit for insta killing damage.

  Kurt had faced exactly one of these things in his life, the year before. The fight had been extremely difficult, and that was against an imperfect version of a draugr, whose conversion had been screwed by the mithril buckler it had been buried with. (Which would eventually be reforged into Silver Demon)

  So this fight ought to be interesting.

  Giving a step forward, the draugr brandished its sword, bringing it down on Kurt's head. Bursting into motion, Kurt took a step of his own, bringing his sword up. There was a cling sound and a shower of sparks as both blades met near their guards.

  The weight that befell Kurt was tremendous, enough to drive his heels onto the stone floor. But he had faced much stronger blows and, more importantly, could dish them as well. Taking a half-step to his left, Kurt let the greatsword slide along Silver Demon's length, driving it to the floor. Then, once its weight had been lifted off him and his sword, Kurt pulled his blade up in a burst of of-flare-boosted strength.

  Crunch.

  That, of all sounds, was the one the thing's wrists emitted as the mithril blade cleft through them. Both its hands fell onto the floor, still gripping the greatsword's handle, and neither of the stumps bled. Nor did the ones at the end of the draugr's arms. The thing might not have rotten, but biology still had some grip on it; without any sort of metabolism sustaining it, the blood had curdled withing its veins to a clay like consistency.

  Undeterred, the draugr lunged for Kurt, arms wide open as if preparing for a hug. Falling onto a bow-legged stance, and with his sword poised forward, Kurt struck again, twice over.

  Sling. Sling.

  In two flashes of silver, the draugr's kneecaps had been obliterated, and it fell flat on its face. Kurt then knelt besides the still-struggling undead warrior, and pinned it down to the floor via driving his sword right through the small of its back (which did not stop its legs's kicking, as the undead no longer controlled their bodies through their nerves) and placed his hand on the uncovered back of its kneck both holding its head down and making a screen appear before Kurt's eyes.

  Draugr Warrior

  Quality: Uncommon

  The reanimated and soulless corpse of an ancient viking chieftain, its body has been suffused with necrotic magic to the point that the whole of it has turned into a battery for it.

  An item screen, Kurt noted. Neither the draugr nor the wights had triggered a 'being' screen to Kurt, and this was clearly the reason, As far as his powers were concerned, most likely due to their soullesness, they were not beings, but objects. That was something Kurt had encountered also just once before, when he had faced that alchemichal construct back in…

  …back in Phoenix.

  He shook his head to dismiss the thought. He had pondered on that night more than enough already.

  He got up, yanking his sword from the draugr's back with one hand, and procured a black staff from his inventory with the other. He pointed it at the draugr's body and, letting the carved patterns along its surface explode with red light, conjured a Blowtorch atop it, directing all of its heat towards the undead.

  It took Kurt all of ten seconds and three swipes along the thing's spine to burn the whole of it to a carbonized crisp. Brutal, but the bare minimum if you wanted to 'kill' a draugr.

  With this done, the boy drove his attention back at the central colum. He reached, stored his staff back, threw the coffin away with his now-free hand and, partially guided by his aetheric sense, kicked a particular spot of it.

  The stone crumbled before his foot, turned into dust and peebles by the blow, and with it fell the artifact that had been holding all of the place's enchantments together. It was a scrimshaw, a whale's tooth whose surface had been decorated with artistic carvings. Normally a fairly beautiful (if problematic due to the whale-killing involved) form of art, this one failed to live up to that standard for two reasons: One; the carvings on it depicted scenes of carnage and the undead rising and other try-hard-evil kinds of things. And two; the thing was positively oozing necrotic energy. It wasn't even storing it anymore. It was making more of it, generating it.

  Reaching for his inventory yet again, Kurt materialized on his hand a pair of steel tongs, and picked the artifact with them. The energy of undeath licked at the metal with greed, but did nothing despite its intensity, which was normal. By itself, the power of undead could do two things: consume life and animate corpses, and nothing more. Even if you got all of it in the world, you couldn't use to so much as open a door.

  So Kurt pushed the tongs and the scrimshaw back onto his inventory, making the both of them dissapear, and walked out the mound.

  "Everything okay?" came Mila's voice from above. She was sitting on one of the branches of a tree close to the mound. Five thorougly mutilated wight carcasses laid at that same tree's feet.

  "Everything okay," he answered. "Chieftain destroyed and relic secured. Can you tell the rest?"

  Nodding, Mila reached for the walkie by her side and did just that. Not even a minute later, the other four members of the Order of Myra's newest (and only) task force reached their position, and their respective screens appeared before Kurt's eyes.