Chapter 139 – Puppet play

The Zombie Apocalypse was Ugy's idea, which he borrowed from one of the nightmare stories Noah had the misfortune to plunge into while opening the so-called Mangas that the Comment Section screen in his mind realm led to.  The idea brought shivers to Noah as he was reminded of it, but that made it the best choice, if even witnessing it in a story brought him nightmares, he could only imagine what it would do to the people that would actually live through it.

The theme of infinitely multiplying undead monsters quickly plunging the whole world into chaos was one of the most often used in the horror stories that they could watch.

But the principle behind the zombies of those stories was a lot different from the ones common to Noah's world. The undead monsters could only occur in dungeons and labyrinths where the corpses of the people that died inside them were imbued with the dark energy over a long time filling the rotten tissues with the wicked power of the dark god and animating them to follow his will like all the other monsters.

The main issue here was that they were scarce as it was rare to leave corpses behind when someone died attacking the dungeon. Adventurers took it as their motto to bring their dead ones back or destroy the corpse to not allow it to become undead. The second factor was that corpses need a long time to be animated. Far longer than in the nightmare stories that made Noah sick and trembling at night.

Because of that, the zombie horde capturing cities was a bullshit idea no one in this world would take seriously. A single mage could wipe out hundreds of them with magic easily before the corpses with their rotten muscles could even approach the city wall. No amount of corpses on their dead dragging legs with rotten muscles could challenge a peak-level warrior that could slice off the top of a mountain with a swing of the sword. And there were quite a few such warriors in every country, The Archduke that Noah met in Vespertine mansion being one of such warriors.

The very idea of Zombies multiplying from a mere bite or scratch was nonsense to this world, where viruses were an unknown word. Most diseases were cured with potions, while curses could be taken care of by the holy magic of priests and clerics. Poisons were another story, but again they were not capable of something like that.

There were of course very old legends and stories telling of hordes of zombies and other undead, at the times when dungeon breaks had just begun. The corpses of people that lived freely in the world in great amounts at that time died from the sudden disaster by the millions creating mountains of dead bodies abandoned to just lay and rot.

With people's main task being to escape the monsters, no one realized that they would face the second disaster of Undead armies led by Vampires, Ghouls, and Liches that were born from those mass graves that the cities of that age, with buildings reaching the clouds, had become.

But these were the legends. Undead armies destroyed over and over through the ages in their fight with humanity that gained systems and magic were unable to be restored to their glory as all the corpses able to be animated in those cities finally were used up.

It was still possible to meet an army of undead of course even today but for another reason. They would have to be animated with magic, meaning a lich or a necromancer would have to be present to pour magic into the dead bodies. In that case, it was just enough to dispatch them to topple the army, turning it back into corpses.

So when the zombies started to appear it was inevitable that people would look for the necromancer that would have to be nearby. This would endanger Brianna that was behind this chaos.

Noah had to make people believe something they have never even imagined in this world - that zombies could multiply with a bite. To believe it, the idea of it had to be reintroduced to people in such a way that they came up with the conclusion for themselves. For that, Noah had to show the people how it spread right before their eyes. He needed to show them the Zombie apocalypse in its full glory, the way he saw it in the story world.

And Brianna's puppeteer skill was perfect for this as long as no one had enough time to think calmly and realize what was going on.

First, the corpses of the assassin squad that Noah killed in the forest to save Samantha and her friends started to appear far away from Brianna as the medallions he had a connection to were spread around the room quite some distance from her.

As the dead bodies started to plunge into seats under which the medallions were hidden when Noah willed to take them out of his dimensional pocket at their location, Brianna reattached the puppeteering string to them and pulled the medallions back to herself to not leave any evidence behind.

With the puppeteering skill controlling the dead bodies, they were of course a lot different than real zombies of this world. Slashing, piercing, burning, and beheading them was of course useless as they never had any core or magic inside them. They were mere puppets animated with her magical treads and controlled with her puppeteering skill.

And as puppets, they were not limited in speed or strength as the real zombies made of rotten flesh. Their power came directly from the magic she poured into them. While their speed depended only on her reflexes. She could simply throw them into the air and make them levitate if she so desired, their limbs had no meaning to their movement at all. The reason they acted like humans, running, jumping, and biting, was merely a facade to make them look like zombies.

Brianna was of course master puppeteer with decades of experience in the craft, but there was still a limit to the number of bodies she could control, which was the main giveaway to the fact that this apocalypse was just a play. No one would believe it if they stopped to increase in numbers after mere ten animated bodies or if their amount never varied. Thankfully Zombies were dead bodies that were not moving like the living humans, so she could double the number of controlled puppets by sacrificing the intricacy of their movements, making her control over their bodies quite sloppy.

The next important point of the play was that the people bitten were soon animated as zombies as well. This brought enough terror to not realize that sometimes these newly made zombies were not quite yet dead and were controlled with her puppeteer strings forcing them to do what she bid them to.

As the chaos began, no one noticed an additional woman slipping into the room out of void space, when Priscilla appeared near one of the medallions and started to help out her sister. Her skill was not as high as Brianna's as she was more inclined to study weaving, but she studied the craft of puppeteering under her mother's strict instructions for decades as well, so her skill mastery wasn't low at all.

Once the mob was bound by horror, there wasn't anyone sane enough to realize that the disaster spreading in the room was but a puppet play.

"Roar!" Screamed a giant lizardman jumping on the scene from behind the stage carrying a big bundle of cloth strapped behind his back. It quickly rushed into the crowd of guests and bit onto one of the guards that rushed into the hall when the chaos began, tearing off his whole hand at the shoulder.

With a slam of its tail, it shattered the skull of another human that was unlucky enough to be nearby. Then he jumped over the crowd smashing into someone with his monstrous weight when he landed, killing the unlucky person immediately.

With just a few leaps he was over the whole hall and rushed to the exit where the team of guards tried to squeeze through the mad rushing mob of guests trying to escape even if they had to step over the head of another.

As the guards were unable to take a proper formation, the lizardman that jumped at them with another monstrous roar, killed them one by one, pulling their whole attention at himself, but then zombies jumped at their unguarded backs, tearing their necks with their bloody teeth.

Brianna and Priscilla held at the back of the rushing crowd pretending to be a part of the horrified guest group, and stealthily slaying some of the strongest fighters in the hall that could pose some threat.

The unfortunate defenders never saw what hit them as their throats suddenly split or their heads rolled.

Arachnas threads were not just invisible and durable, they were extremely deadly as well. Controlled through the magic, the threads could do almost anything, from bending and flying through the room to freezing in mid-air, with their thin, sharp points facing outward, piercing through the heads and eyes of all who run into them head-on.

Within just a few seconds after the first attack, the hall turned into a bloodbath, plunging the crowd into panic, and making everyone unable to think straight and find the perpetrators. Getting out was the only collective thought.

But once the people escaped the auction hall, their situation did not improve. The scene of screams, burning buildings, and roars of monsters waited for them outside the mansion.

Some woman in the crowd screamed that it was a dungeon break and the already horrified crowd did not dwell on it for long taking it as a fact. With their faces full of fear, everyone quickly scattered in different directions, rushing for the dungeon exits they knew. No one cared about items and lots that were left in the auction house's vault, all they wanted was to get away as quickly as possible. No one also noticed Samantha, Kate, and Danyella in auction house guard equipment joining the escaping crowd and rushing away from the mansion.

*****

As the chaos proceeded in the outside world, Noah swiftly made his way through the vault, where he locked himself after pretending to be a porter with Brianna's puppets as a company for some time. Helping Samantha was of course his priority, but he was not going to leave all these goods to just lay around when he had the chance to rob it clean.

It was time to see if the description of his Homework folder claiming that the dimension pocket had no limit was actually true.

One by one the items disappeared without a trace making the smile on Noah's face wider with each passing second.

He stuffed everything that he could and finally found where the limit lay. As the count of different items in the folder increased severalfold, he saw that his mana started to be slowly consumed just to hold the items in his folder. The consumption was not critical but with all the use of potions to restore mana when monsters were transferred in bulk from Moonhowl labyrinth to the Black Market dungeon, he already had a severe potion intoxication that even slime in his mouth struggled to cure him from quickly. So it was quite taxing on him if he kept consuming more potions to keep the stolen goods in his pocket.

"I suggest you stop here. You should conserve your energy. You might need it when you escape." Said Ugy suddenly.

"I can manage. Just a few more mana potions. I'll just take a little break until slime cures me of potion intoxication before we get out of the dungeon." Answered Noah having a strange feeling that Ugy was hiding something…again.

"About that… You may not have the time to rest…" Said Ugy, with a strange hesitation in his voice.

"What do you mean?" Asked Noah with suspicion creeping into his mind.

"User, I did not want to bother you while you were busy with the plan, but…we have a problem." Said Ugy with hesitation.

"Spill it." Said Noah crossing his hands.

"The dungeon. It is crumbling."

"I see." Answered Noah, with a strangely calm voice. "And why is it crumbling when I got here?" He added not hiding that he was implicating something.

"I am not at fault!" Said Ugy. "It was all those crazy people in CS!"

"So my gut feeling was right. We are the reason for it. What did you do?" Asked Noah with a sigh.

"There was a skill code I was making, but there was some information we were lacking so it was inactive. But you know how one of my functions is to constantly monitor and analyze the information we get from CS. Suddenly those crazy bastards started to throw all kinds of crazy ideas that I unconsciously analyzed and bam the conditions have been met and that skill activated. It totally wasn't my intention." Explained Ugy, pleading his innocence.

"So what does the skill do?" Asked Noah

"Sucks." Answered Ugy.

"You suck! You crazy bastard, what kind of explanation is that?"

"It sucks the energy similar to vampiric sucking, your corrupting touch skill, and malignant aura skill. These skills were at the core of the creation of the new skill. And right now it sucks the energy of the core of this dungeon."

"But I don't even know where that core is." Said, Noah.

"We are inside the dungeon. Its floor, walls, ceiling, the very air we breathe. It is all connected to the core. And you are pulling the energy from the core through the dungeon that connects you with it."

"You mean something like that would happen in every dungeon?" Asked Noah.

"Not unless we get close to the core room…By close, I mean within one floor of it. And this defective dungeon is just one floor in total."

"So what will happen when I suck out all its energy?"

"My calculations show that the dungeon will collapse under the weight of the ground above us. This cave's ceiling structure is too weak to support the weight."

"Hold it! Collapse? But this never happened when adventurers destroyed dungeons!"

"Yes. Because the walls were so imbued with magic they stayed indestructible for months or even years. But that's not quite our case." Explained Ugy. "Once you are done with the core, you will suck the dungeons' energy dry."

"Oh damn! How much time do we have?"

"That's the problem. I don't know. So you'd better get the hell out of here as soon as possible." Said Ugy.

At that moment they heard the vault door starting to open.

"Ok. Now it's really time to go." Said Noah and willed himself to get into the mind realm before transferring toward one of the medallions in the warehouse where they met Theron. As they appeared in the dim room the dimension crack in the auction house vault connecting to Noah's mind realm closed, making it impossible for anyone to trace him anymore.

"By the way, what's the skill's name?" Asked Noah

"Passive skill: Dairymaster."  The system announcement sounded in his head.

"Huh? That sounds weird. What is it derived from?"

"Best performance milking equipment. It will squeeze out what other milkers can not." Answered Ugy as if reading an ad from a brochure.

"WHAT THE FUCK? YOU WILL NOT NAME MY SKILL LIKE SOME COW-MILKING DEVICE!" Screamed Noah in his mind.

"The name has been registered. It can't be changed." Answered Ugy. "And who said about cows? Cows are not the only ones that can be milked."

"You son of a…." Swore Noah for a few minutes.