Pepper / INK /

Second battle

Everyone was looking for the missing police officers, but no one was looking in the right places. Everyone checked their houses, coming up with friends and family infected with plague. Some too far gone to save. And then there were a few who had actively engaged in the dark arts, and their houses were the worst of all. Like the scene of the second Inkwalker, they were bloody, and disorganized, and the sigils were all, if not evil, at least not benign.

When they finally found them, it was because the police officers attacked them. To say that they were out of their minds was an understatement. Their eyes were clouded black, and their hands moved in spells most of them didn’t know. The few who had committed the taboo, were obvious to see, their skin was pale, their eyes were blank, and they protected Jaaved. What they didn’t know was that the spell cast was not for them, it was on them. They were Becomers in the making, the moment they died, they would rise again.

The services officer stood among them moving them like puppets. And the men he controlled ran into the battle without a thought to their families. Without fear or hesitation, for all of that had been taken from them. There was only the promise of living forever. Immortality, the drug of the ill informed, many men had sold themselves for it, only to find that what they bought was not worth the price. The only immortality a Necromancer could give you was as an undead. The sick and twisted image of what you had been, denied even the safety of the grave.

Immortality was not a bad thing, but long life tended to come with its own problems, namely, that unless everyone you know is immortal, you will suffer loss. Everyone you love will grow old and die. And you will not. That is, perhaps the cruelest fate of all. To be denied even that. To watch them die and know you cannot join them. The only thing worse perhaps was to watch them die, knowing you cannot follow, and then watch them climb out of the grave pretending to be alive.

The Seven had been released, all but the Inkwalker himself. And it was the main body of them, Max, and Jessie and John and Kari who were confronted by these bent and twisted souls, Sebastian joining them a few minutes into the fight.

Max had his hands on the ground a moment after he saw them. From his hands grew the lines and swirls of protective sigils, a trick only a Keeper, or an Inkwalker, could pull.

And the other side countered, from the shadows they came shambling. A dozen of them, a hundred of them maybe, some still wearing no more than the morgue tag they had. Risen. These were the shambling dead. With no pain sense, no thought except to eat, and make more of themselves by biting others. It wasn’t a hundred percent chance of it changing you just by bite, but if these were newly risen, the odds were high. As their magic faded, they were less effective.

The other issue was that kit-blasters like those issued by the station didn’t work on the dead. There were no nerves to cause pain. There was no weapon that wasn’t magic that could harm the dead. They would simply keep coming. The risen, shambling, biting masses, they swarmed. And the Becomers, a more sturdy wall, those who seemed to have some mind left, but even then their mind was only for protecting the caster that kept them alive.

John saw what Max was doing and clapped his hands, placing them down to produce weapons from the stone and steel around him. The bladed weapons had protective sigils on them, meant to keep the horde, as such a collection of dead and dying were called, from being able to take them. The runes glowed as each person in the party grabbed one, except Max, who still knelt nearby. John picked up a blade and went to protect him. Defense spells were not one-shot you had to keep controlling them if you wanted any efficacy against multiple targets.

There was absolute silence for a moment before the hoard descended. And then it was mele, every man or woman fighting for their life. It didn’t matter if the corpse had been a friend of yours, right now it was kill or Become. There were things worse than death, every practitioner knew that. The thing worse was what they were looking at. Being paraded around as a weapon.

They tried their best to stay together, but they eventually got broken up. Two-by-two, they were forced to stand back-to back to slash at the crowd of risen. In a city this size, finding material for Risen wasn’t hard. And anyone who had seen the battle start fled in terror. The walking dead were a legend, a taboo so strict that few dared to cross it. Raising the dead was the ultimate desecration of both body and magic. Forcing the magic to work when the mind controlling it could no longer.

And then there were the police, sure to become Risen or Becomers when they dropped, it was only a matter of time. And if the battle didn’t kill them, and the spell against them didn’t kill them, the walking dead would pull them down to join them in the battle. And so it was that there were more and more of the dead than there were of the living, and nearly as soon as a body fell another rose.

A hundred to five odds were not good. They needed the Inkwalker.

"Inkwalker, we need you." Max said as he watched his friends stuck in their places, he was doing his best to shield them from being able to be bitten but even with the magic he was borrowing as a Keeper, it was very nearly at the end of his skill, when he felt something change.

There was a wave of moonlight around them, stronger than any they had felt in a long time.

The air seemed to suddenly be fresh as it turned, the ground seemed to tremble with magic, and the skin grew prickly with the gathering of the magic.

The battle turned with a crack of thunder and a bolt of lightening that hit the ground nearby.

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Next Chapter: To Protect the Seven