Chapter 226 (5/19): Hunting Squad

From the few necromancers there were in the city, the hunters learned that it was impossible to hide from undead within a certain range. That’s why the undead hunting squads prioritized speed.

“It’s likely that we’ll only have one shot before the army arrives. Heading there and back, and out again will mean that the army will already be on our doorsteps, so let’s make this strike count!” Lavitte shouted.

By noon, the hunting squads set out with their own parties. In a guerilla style battle, it was best to move as small, flexible units, and the larger parties split up into smaller groups of no more than a handful of people.

The Fleeting Leaves didn’t have that many people in the first place, but they still split into two. Each team had a balanced makeup, with the first team— Team Lavitte— consisting of Lavitte, Eva, Marion, and Justin for one precision striker from long range, two close-quarters disruptors, and one wide-area bombardier. The second team— Team Celaen— consisted of Lucienne, Celaen, and Duura: one close-quarters disruptor, one precision striker, and one bombardier.

“For now, we’ll stay close, and although we’re two individual units, we’ll still back up each other, got it? If one of us retreats, the other will cover and then retreat as well.”

“Yessir!”

Although at first the several hundred hunters stuck together, once they entered the forest, each squad went their own way until the dense forest made an impenetrable wall that blocked each parties’ view of the others unless they were intentionally staying together. Soon, all Lucienne could feel of the other parties were their mana that were getting smaller and fainter as they got further away.

They traveled at a slow, but steady pace, unwilling to tire themselves out before the fighting actually began, and thus they took regular breaks as well. With all the pauses, it was dawn the next morning after a brief nap when Justin held up his hand, and both teams ground to a halt.

“What’s up?” Lavitte asked.

Thanks to Lucienne’s introduction as well as Camilla’s request to look out for some people that happened to fit Justin’s description, the party accepted Justin as one of them quite quickly, and now Lavitte was gazing at Justin with a serious look on his face, without a hint of mistrust.

“There’s undead ahead. Really faint, but there’s a lot. Seems to be the vanguard,” Justin said. “Since they’re all stuck together and not just wandering around, then it’s clear that there’s something guiding them, which means there’s a greater undead somewhere out of my sensing range.”

“Our first prey then,” Lavitte said. “Let's act according to our plan. Let’s move.”

When Celaen nodded, Team Lavitte charged on ahead with the vampire siblings in the lead, while Team Celaen made a slight detour. This far away, they haven’t entered the life-sense range of the undead yet, so stealth was still possible.

With Lucienne guiding them, Team Celaen circled over to the undead cluster’s right side, waiting to strike when Team Lavitte got the undeads’ attention.

As they waited, Lucienne closed her eyes, feeling for the undeads’ movement and reporting them to the team’s captain. “They’re almost entering the undead’s range… the undead seem to have detected them… they’re now engaging.” She paused as something new appeared at the edge of her senses— something much bigger, grimmer, and more threatening than the mass of undead which was all she had been sensing. “There’s one greater undead among them. A jack-class lich.”

“Bone or flesh?” Celaen asked.

Lucienne hesitated, thinking back to the differences and threshold for both kinds of magic-wielding undead. “I think it's a zombie lich…”

“That’s not good. Aren’t that hard to pick out from the rest of the undead?” Celaen sighed and hefted her bow helplessly. “Hopefully that boy from Lavitte’s team will know what to do and maybe he can take out that lich from afar.”

“Hmmm.” If it was Justin, then he’ll likely be able to do it, since he was an archpriest in training, and one specializing in firepower at that. His skillset was also uniquely suited to taking out threats before the rest of the fighting could start. “Naturally, it’ll be best if he can do it.”

“Right. Duura, you ready?”

The orc nodded at Celaen’s words. “Of course. Time to char some flesh and bones,” she said in her deep voice, thumping her staff on the ground. “Let’s go!”

With one more check on her senses to make sure that everything was as it should be and that nothing was sneaking up on them, as far as she could tell, Lucienne pointed Celaen in the right direction toward the undead horde that consisted of several hundred lesser undead and a single jack-class zombie lich.

“Zombie lich…” As she ran, Lucienne remembered a certain other zombie lich she knew of: Kagriss. They didn’t exactly see eye to eye, but now she found herself wondering how Kagriss was doing in Camilla’s mother’s city. “Hope she’s fine. Well, now’s not the time to think about it!”

Team Lavitte had already started fighting. She sensed the telltale flashes of magic of various elements. Flashes of red from the vampire siblings, streaks of green from Lavitte, and of course, the bright golden magic that exploded like flares in the dim dawn sunlight.

Several explosions rang out in rapid succession and with Lucienne’s senses, she could easily tell that Justin was aiming for the zombie lich, having identified her earlier. However, at that range and with the zombie lich’s nimbleness, he seemed to be having a difficult time actually hitting.

At this rate, Justin will have to get closer or he’ll either run out of mana or the lich will escape. Lucienne could not allow that.

“Celaen, Duura, do you still need me to guide you?” she asked.

“Huh? Not really. We can both sense their disgusting mana from here,” Celaen said. “Do you need to do something?”

For someone as gentle looking as Celaen, she certainly didn’t hold back. Lucienne nodded. “I’m going to go corner that lich and help Justin land a hit. If there’s nothing else…”

“We’ll be able to handle ourselves,” Duura said. “Go.”

“Thank you!”

With a slight nod, Lucienne split from her party and summoned her shield. She had previously kept it in her blood to keep the weight down, but with battle so close, she’ll need it. Holding the shield up in front of her, she charged through the underbrush toward the flashes of golden light and where she felt the zombie lich was running.

Meanwhile, Celaen and Duura broke off and headed toward the main conflict where the mass of several lesser undead had been gathered.

Taking a slight detour, Lucienne came up from behind the zombie lich. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

The lich glared at her but said nothing. Lucienne frowned. Compared to Kagriss and Camilla, this zombie lich had empty eyes. It was like she was looking at a mobile corpse, which wasn’t exactly wrong, but from her experience with Camilla, greater undead should be much more lively…

“They’re not Camilla, nor are they Kagriss!” Lucienne snapped to herself. “Focus!”

Gritting her teeth, Lucienne coated her sword with holy mana and slashed out at the lich. Thanks to her training with Camilla, her control over her mana and her raw power had increased greatly. There was so much power covering her sword that the lich jumped back, just barely avoiding a blade of light that extended half a sword length from Lucienne’s physical sword.

However, that jump back placed him right where one of Justin’s soaring orbs of holy light was flying, and the explosion of holy magic hit him square on the back, throwing the lich forward a few steps.

“That explosion was puny!” Lucienne grumbled to herself. “Look, that barely even scratched him!”

She reversed her slash and swung at the lich again, but the lich stopped himself just in time, jumping over Lucienne, making her eyes widen in surprise at the lich’s agility despite not being a fighting-type undead. She shook her head. “No… if it’s something that Kagriss can do, then I shouldn’t be surprised.”

As another orb of holy light flew at her, or more accurately the lich that was now behind her, she stepped to the side and let the ball explode against the ground in a blinding burst of light. “You’re not getting away!” she shouted. “Stay here!”

Concentrating magic in her legs, she shot forward in a sudden burst of speed with her sword sticking out beside her, aiming to bisect the lich as she passed. However, the lich spun out of the way. Her eyes narrowed and she dug her boots into the soft forest floor, stopping herself instantly and threw herself at the lich.

Black light gathered at the lich’s hands as he backed away, but Lucienne simply held her shield up in front of her and let the black magic disperse over the thin film of holy magic she coated over the metal.

She pressed forward with a bash of her shield, knocking the lich back. A wave of magic pulsed from her shield, further disorienting the lich. However, Lucienne wasn’t done yet. Taking advantage of the stumbling lich’s inability to recover or dodge in midair, she took another step forward and cut off the arm that the lich had thrown up to protect itself.

It was like she was cutting through a thick log— difficult, but not impossible.

The limb went spinning through the air.

“Ha!” she cried, and finished the brief skirmish off with a kick that threw the lich back against a thick tree trunk. The lich hit with a gasp as all the air in his lungs flew out of his mouth. A moment later, a huge column of light descended from the sky onto the lich, charring the pine needles of the trees. Finally, the column exploded and Lucienne had to hold up her shield to shield herself from the intense heat.

When the light finally faded, Lucienne lowered her shield and looked at the remains that were left of the lich. The skin was practically melted off, with none of the humanity the lich had regained with his reanimation left behind.

Offering a brief prayer for his soul, Lucienne stepped forward and cut off the lich’s head. There was still a decent amount of residual mana remaining that marked the head as the head of a greater undead, though if she didn’t hurry, that too will fade soon.

“Alright… time to head back,” she said, placing the head in a bag that she slung over her back. “A thousand bloodstones… although this may not be the most respectful way to treat a body, it is what it is in.”

As she turned to return to her team that were still cleaning out the undead horde, she felt another presence at the edge of her senses, rapidly heading her way. Alarm bells went off in her head as she counted one, two, three powerful mana signatures, and from the speed the signatures moved at, and the nimbleness with which they moved, it was clear that the approaching undead were no ordinary undead.

They were probably a trio of zombie warriors, jack-class.

So that’s what it was: a few hundred lesser zombies and their commanding lich as a vanguard and early warning, then a response force of a few jack-class warriors as backup to wipe out anything the vanguard encountered but could not handle.

Certainly, against a regular force, that was deadly to face, but the force that she was a part of wasn’t planning on staying.

With a grim smile, she turned tail and headed toward where the battle between the Fleeting Leaves and the undead vanguard was being fought. With her absence, Team Celaen had merged back with Team Lavitte, with two disruptors, two precision attacks, and two bombardiers… from the looks of it, she was the extraneous one.

Lowering her shield, Lucienne charged through the massing undead with the help of her magic. With their commanding lich dead, the undead lost their cohesion and were now mindlessly charging toward the nearest target.

A few reacted to Lucienne’s sudden presence behind them, but with a shell of holy magic that surrounded her as she ran, the zombies and skeletons were simply shoved out of the way. It helped that Justin and Duura saw her and changed their bombardment targets to the undead in her path, making it much easier for her to part the sea of bodies. “Move, move, coming through!”

With a final burst of magic, she scattered the bodies in front of her and rejoined the Fleeting Leaves. She quickly turned and faced the horde again, fighting side by side with Eva and Marion to prevent the undead from reaching her comrades behind her.

That was just her stalling, however, as she caught her breath. As soon as she felt like she was getting enough air again, she half-turned. “Lavitte! There’s three zombie warriors coming up behind me. All of them are jack-class. What should we do?”

“Three?” Lavitte’s eyes narrowed in thought. However, he didn’t let his arrows stop. Another enchanted arrow flew from his bow and slammed into the ranks of undead. Where the arrow landed, magic spread into the ground and roots of the surrounding trees broke out, tripping the writhing undead.

Some of the roots even wrapped around the undeads’ bodies, immobilizing them or crushing them altogether. The next instant, a fireball or blast of light from the bombardiers reduced the undead to ashes.

“I think we can take three. What do you guys think? Ten seconds and if the vote is not unanimous, we retreat now,” Lavitte said at last. “I’ve never fought three jack-classes before.”

When the leader couldn’t make a decision, he delegated it to his subordinates instead of forcing a decision. That wasn’t a bad way to lead in Lucienne’s opinion.

Personally, she thought they could do it— one disruptor for every undead warrior, with the other four supporting them or preventing the remaining undead horde from overwhelming them. It’d be a hard fight, but what was at stake was not just the bounty on the undeads’ heads, or even their own lives.

The lives of the entire city was at stake.

Three jack-classes that they managed to wipe out here were three less that they needed to contend with later on when the undead were massed and sitting right outside their front door.

Taking that into account, Lucienne’s mind was made up.

Ten seconds passed in an instant, and when the time finally came to vote, there was not a single vote in opposition.

Lavitte broke into a smile. “Very well then… we stay.”