Desmond crash-landed back into consciousness. Nothing felt right. Everything was slightly off. "

  Welcome back to the world of the living... well, living is a bit of an overstatement," He heard Eno's voice ringing in his ears. "That ark gunner cooked you all the way through."

  He moved his hand into his field of view just in time to see the cooked meat of the flesh that used to be his fall off.

  "Yeah, sorry about that. There wasn't a chance in the abyss that you were going to be among the warm living again after a shot like that. Welcome to the undead."

  He cursed internally. It wasn't unexpected. In Vashall, a soldier's duty to the crown did not end in death.

  "Thankfully," his necromedic continued, "I had anima jars for all of you."

  Looking to his left, he witnessed her putting A cap on a small obsidian jar. The runes carefully embossed into its surface glowed with power until the jar was sealed once more. Seconds after, Martin stirred. Eno held his chest down.

  "Easy there, Martin. It will take a bit for you to acclimate."

  Desmond could hear the soft groaning from his heavy weapon specialist.

  He gave silent thanks to the Lord of Gears. He still had a chance to get his soldiers back safe. Taking a moment to right himself, he looked around. "Private Argalia, what's the situation?" The pained look on the Vulpi's face told him all he needed to know.

  "Not good, Sarge. I'm out of rifle ammo; Quint nearly killed herself keeping this building together." She seemed to be going through a mental checklist he couldn't see. "The biggest issue is—"

  Before she could finish the sentence, a thunderous boom swept through the lowest floor. The private caught herself on a pillar before regaining her footing. "Seems they have called in an artillery strike on this area." To push her point home, a quartet of explosions went off nearby. Desmond nodded and pulled out a piece of bone that had more complex rune patterns in it.

  "...Pinned down and need assistance." Heinrich felt like he was going to crush his coffee cup between his claws. The recon mission was not going well. "Hang tight, Sergeant, we're coming."

  He ended the message spell. The lieutenant spoke up, "Sir, we don't have anyone nearby. Our other teams are currently engaging with another push happening on the south side of the city.

  "I know," he says, walking out of the makeshift command center.

  "Then who is going to help them?" the ivory Vulpi asked as he followed.

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  Heinrich walked into the armory just off the HQ and grabbed his staff. The staff had the skill of a Felide with an enormous ruby clutched in its teeth. It was mounted on a hexagonal bone wood staff. The ruby clutched in the teeth of the Felide skull glowed with power.

  "Me."

  "You’re in charge until I get back, Benson," he said as he patted the stunned lieutenant's shoulder. Without saying more, he walked out of the command center.

  Outside, Heinrich cut the connection from the necromancers' network. He would need full access to his nethergy pool if he was going to get them out of this cluster. With little effort, he shifted his anima links from the shield network to his staff. Within seconds, the staff backfilled his stressed reserves with an influx of nethergy. Fully topped off, he quickly chanted the spiritual wards needed for short-range River walking.

  Wards locked, he focused the nethergy to razor point and cut the air in front of him. Like a zipper, the River opened in front of him. His prepared wards stopped any spirits from spilling into the living world as he walked into theirs.

  In theory, you could get anywhere in existence through a Riverwalk. Reality meant that anything more than a shallow dip was an exercise in insanity. True monsters existed in the depths.

  Focusing on the anima links he shared with all the necromancers in Four Rivers, he found Eno's link and pulled. Seconds later, he was back on the banks of the River, stepping back into the real.

  He was on a rooftop, and immediately, he noticed the scale that covered the building was cracked and warped. Its sinew matrix was stressed to the point of breaking. With a thought, he connected his staff links to the building's matrix and flooded it with nethergy, rewriting it as he went. Within seconds, the building was stable again. An impact rocked the building, a near-direct hit from artillery. Twenty meters to the right, and it would have landed directly on the building.

  Lifting his staff above his head, he opened the animus gates that connected the ruby to his staff. He began to chant. Above the building, an enormous osetoarray began to take shape. Neon Radiation bled off the array above as the State necromancer poured nearly half of the gem's reserves into the spell.

  "Once more into the breach!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.

  Every corpse within a kilometer radius of the array lurched. Their movements stuttered and stopped at first as the sinew matrix commands took over, unlike when an anima jar was used to create an undead from the soul of the deceased. A mass revival did not have a soul to drive the body. These undead were driven by a predetermined set of commands at their creation that the mindless corpse would follow until its destruction, orders given to the corpses en-mass march on the Revolutionaries’ entrenched positions.

  Lupo was having a good morning until the horizon started bleeding. There had been rumors a State necromancer was in the city. The ivory shield around the new HQ had withered weeks of bombardment without a hint of decay. They now had confirmation. He checked the ammo belts to the machine gun he manned. A siren blared through the trench line. His head snapped to the city, and he saw it. Hundreds of soldiers wearing both Imperial uniforms and their own charging their lines.

  He pulled the trigger, and the gun spat electric fury into the advancing undead. Electrically charged rounds cut through the advancing waves of undead. Within thirty seconds, he chewed through four hundred rounds of ammunition. He and his loader frantically worked to load another belt of ammunition. They switched to acid-laced rounds as they were supposed to work better against the undead. Five and a half seconds, the belt of 12.7mm acid-tipped rounds were loaded.

  He looked back at the advancing undead, and they entered their firing range. He saw the men and women he had served with getting gunned down by their former allies and the people they killed only hours ago. Ten seconds into his second round of automatic fire, his gun stopped. Looking down, he saw his machine gun had a misfire. He manually cycled a round, and when he looked up, he was staring down the barrel of a rifle, and then... nothing.