Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead

"Yeah, the death force isn’t in abundance, but it isn’t slipping away from the severed limb, and it seems like it is truly operating of its own volition, the undead isn’t willfully trying to move his arm at all, it’s basically it’s own undead" a woman dressed in all white wearing a mask crossed her arms, her white robes flowing all over the place.

The man with red skin, peeled off the sleeve and glove still stuck to the self-efficient arm, brushing away the rot as it bursted with black blood like ripe fruits.

He and the woman inspected the skeletal arm with interest, watching as small bumps of rot grew back naturally on the arm, despite no longer being able to produce rot as efficiently anymore, the arm still blistered with some anyways.

"I would wager that this undead is fairly new, very new in fact, which is weird, being so intelligent from the get go, I would suppose that it is an incarnated undead, that it kept all of its memories and personality from when it was alive, but its behaviour says otherwise, still, undeads like skeleton and zombies, when they have great intellect, they usually stay low, move to a place reeking of death and wait there to naturally reinforce themselves…" the man spoke thoughtfully.

He was an experienced death hunter, one specialised in dealing with skeletons and such, he carried a heavy warhammer with a peculiar shape, more resembling the sort of mallets used for constructing things rather than a weapon.

It was as easy as breathing for him to tell that something was off with this undead’s behaviour.

"Huh, could it have been ordered by something higher placed than itself?" the woman tilted her head a bit, not afraid as the arm suddenly tried jerking around and grabbing her face.

"I have to say though, doesn’t that death force seem weird?" she added after a few moments, death force was something she was commonly confronted with, her specialty laid in culling ghouls of all sorts.

Death force was always roughly the same thing, it had much less differences between individuals compared to life force, this one however, it felt distinctively different.

"Reminds me of the death force I sensed back in Gruyere Plains…" her expression under her mask twisted.

The man’s face similarly turned awfully serious, as though he had just been announced a terrible news.

"Are you certain about this Latir-e-se?" he looked down on the undead’s arm.

"It’s not quite the same thing, but it does share something with Vwoldtnir"

The two stared at one another for a second before someone else spoke up.

"Are you saying this measly skeleton’s death force is similar to that of the Grand Ghoul’s? One of the oldest undead lords?" three people had showed up, all three dressed similarly to one another.

The speaker was the man in the middle, he had dark hair reaching down to his nape, to his right, the creepy vampire huntress, Rummy was flicking her lenses on and off repeatedly for no particular reason, to his left, an older man that resembled him a fair bit, with grey hair of the same length, but with beard, he were a hat concealing his eyes.

"Tappduur, Latir-e-se" he greeted them with a nod.

"Échalas, Rummy, Abraham" the two greeted them in the same manner.

Robert was wrong with his assessment of the death hunters, vampire hunters were in fact, the most numerous group amongst them, those that focused on any other sort were actually much more rare.

"I only caught a glimpse of Vwoldtnir back then, he didn’t even bother to fight or say a word, he just went away without a care" which was a good thing, back then, when she had just begun as a death hunter, the mere presence of a lord had frozen her in place.

"So, if you are correct, I suppose we can assume that this skeleton has the potential to become a lord?" Échalas rested his chin in his hand, this certainly brought the whole situation several notches higher.

"We can hardly explore the Elephant Cave System without breaking an ankle and turning into minced meat by falling, so what do we do? We can’t possibly hope to guard every cave entrance connected to it either" the old man, Abraham spoke his piece, already thinking about slaughtering the supposedly, would-be lord.

"We can try to find the place it came from, it might be crawling with other undeads" Rummy raised her hand at that idea, waiting from everyone to acknowledge her, she coughed a few times and pointed into the distance.

"I heard from a group of four adventurers that there was a dungeon discovered just a little while before the undead showed up, it is considered mostly empty but not everything was checked out" the death hunters looked at one another.

"Let’s go then" Échalas led the way and everyone followed without questioning much, Tappduur nailed the arm right back to the barn.

’Mmh, I don’t know who the lad that did it first is, but he must have some impressive arms’ he praised whoever had subdued the stray limb first before going his way.

They went past the burnt down tavern, a temple of booze reduced to ashes was quite the poor sight, guards were busy trying to get the charred corpses back without letting them crumble to pieces.

The easiest had been that of the owner, since he had been thrown outside, the fire that killed him had died off faster than that of his business, the bodies inside had mostly been left as nothing but charcoal skeletons.

"This skeleton is also not afraid of fire, they are generally wary of getting burnt, this one doesn’t seem to have weakness for it" Tappduur muttered to himself, noting that his fiery breath may be of little use against it, where they to somehow cross paths one day.

Just as he finished speaking, he felt a drop of water hitting the top of his bald, crimson red head.

It had begun raining.