At a certain point, questions stopped being productive.

  One spooky town plus one missing hunter plus one panicking Tenebres meant it was time to kill something.

  Or. Wait. They were fighting undead, right?

  Time to… re-kill something?

  Sure. That worked.

  Allana’s hands twitched, and she cursed when her daggers didn’t appear in them. Gotta get used to that. Instead, she reached to her belt and drew her two plain steel knives.

  “Where?” she asked Tenebres.

  “I… I think… this way!”

  The boy took off running, guided by… however it was his connection to his weird eye monster worked. Allana hadn’t asked him too much about it, she just trusted that he was right.

  But quickly, she grew frustrated. Adrenaline sang through her body, filling her with the need to run, to fight, to move, but she was stuck following Tenebres. And while her friend was many things–intelligent, cute, talented in bed–no one would ever call him athletic. Between Allana’s stronger build and her new speed boon, it was increasingly difficult to stay behind him.

  As such, she was relieved when he finally managed, through grit teeth and heaving breaths, to tell Allana, “The inn! From before!”

  That was all she needed. Allana lengthened her stride, quickly leaving Tenebres behind–and almost as quickly realized that she had only the vaguest idea where the inn was.

  “Okay… high ground!” Allana cast her eyes around, and finally fixed her gaze at the tiled peak of a nearby house, one of the few in the town not capped by thatch. Hopefully the roofing was sturdy enough to support her.

  [Trick Step] - Active, Movement - Instantly teleport to any point within a minor range. Line of sight required to trigger. Lesser stamina or focus cost.

  There was that sickening moment of disorientation, and then she was standing on the roof, legs spread to straddle its peak. Allana took only a second to shake off the dizziness, and looked around.

  There! A few streets away, she could see the wide central boulevard of Geltis, and the massive, burnt out skeleton of the inn. Pleased, she took off running again, leaping when she reached the edge of the roof to land on the next house over. Unfortunately, this one was thatch, and she immediately sank up to her knees in the loose straw roofing.

  “Fuck!” Allana cast her eyes about, and the world spun again, and she was back on the ground. Her steps jarred as her limbs tried to adjust to the flat street again, and Allana staggered, trying to get her balance back.

  Gotta keep practicing that, she noted. So far, her attempts to use Trick Step had only been against Tenebres’s imps, flashing behind them to attack, or to the side to dodge their attacks. When she landed on ground about level with her origin point, the disorientation wasn’t crippling, but going from flat road to peaked roof to crumbling thatch and back to flat road had thrown her balance wildly out of whack. At least she had her coordination boon to keep her moving.

  She started running again, turned around one building, then Trick Stepped through a cluttered alley to come out on the central road of Geltis. Not far away was the squat ruin of the inn, and crouched on all fours in front of it was what could only be the ghoul.

  It was very different from the barnacle-encrusted undead that Sloan, the necromantic fishmonger in Emeston, had used. Unlike those bare skeletons, the ghoul still had some muscle and skin, rotting though they were, clinging to its body, showing twisted ruins of the features it must’ve held in life, preserved no better than the shell of the building behind it.

  The ghoul bore no weapons and wore no clothing (though thankfully, rot had claimed whatever bits it might’ve once had) but when Allana approached it, she saw that the undead bore teeth longer and more crooked than any living person. Its nails were similarly long and yellowed, as if they had continued growing despite its putrefied state.

  The undead monster crouched over the corpse of the laconic old man who had directed them to the Humps earlier. His half-whittled stick lay a few feet away, doomed to never be finished.

  “Okay, yeah,” Allana said out loud, her voice far more reasonable than the anger budding in her chest, “Tenebres might’ve had a point.”

  Then the ghoul leapt at her–and sailed through empty air.

  That trick, at least, Allana had gotten down pretty quick.

  As the ghoul looked around, trying to find Allana, she recovered her balance behind it and swung both of her daggers down in swings aimed for its back. Both blades sank into the rotting flesh of the undead–by about one finger’s length. Then they stopped, with a feeling vaguely like she had tried to stab a wet log.

  “Potency,” she muttered as a curse. The undead must’ve had some magic imbued into its very body, giving it some innate resistance to her mundane daggers.

  The ghoul may not have had time to respond before Allana’s attack hit, but it certainly had plenty of time after the futile pair of stabs to whirl around, rotten nails flashing. Only her coordination and speed allowed Allana to keep the undead from ripping her throat out, but it was still fast enough to leave a pair of deep cuts.

  [Poison Immunity] triggered

  Minor quintessence spent to negate grave rot.

  Allana’s eyes went wide as the words popped up, and she desperately rolled backwards. She hadn’t expected the damned thing to have poison, but Allana had yet to encounter a poison that could punch through her blessing.

  [Poison Immunity] - Passive, Triggered, Healing - Quintessence is consumed automatically to negate poisons affecting you. Cost is relative to potency and volume of the poison. Mundane or tier one potency poisons are negated at no cost.

  Still the ability had almost killed her–in that moment of distraction, as she tried to read the notification, the ghoul had almost landed a much more vicious hit. Can’t afford that kind of distraction!

  [Poison Immunity] notifications disabled

  Okay, sure. That worked.

  The undead didn’t give Allana much time to think, pursuing her with mindless hunger, overlong teeth gnashing as it tried to pin her down. On the brightside, its attacks had little more luck than its poison. Allana’s natural skills, combined with her coordination and speed boons made her all but impossible for the creature to catch. On the other hand, though, her attacks were just as futile, her daggers unable to do any real damage to the ghoul’s reinforced flesh.

  Time to change tactics. When Allana had faced down defensive abilities like this before, like when she had fought Vernen back in Emeston–a flash of guilty pain, no time for that–she had relied on Sneak Attack. But without her gift of stealth, that was no longer an option. So she needed to try something else, something like…

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  Like an assassin would, Allana thought sourly. It was the best bet she had. Even if she couldn’t poison the ghoul’s necrotic blood, she could weaken it, attack the weak points it relied on to slow it down.

  Allana made some space, baiting the ghoul down the street, and when it pounced, she Trick Stepped again, appearing behind it. The momentary confusion and the loss of focus both sent her vision spinning, but she was still crouching and swinging before her eyes had even focus, both daggers working to slice just one of the tendons on the back of the ghoul’s feet. It was like cutting hempen rope, but she made some progress even through the potency of the undead.

  “Hey! What is that thing!?” a rough voice suddenly called out.

  Allana cursed and sprang back as the ghoul whirled around, ignoring what would’ve been a cripplingly painful wound on a living person.

  “Is that ol’ Petir?” Another voice called.

  “It is! That thing killed Petir! And now it’s trying to get that girl too!”

  Apparently, Allana’s fight had begun to draw an audience.

  “Not good,” she muttered to herself.

  A handful of decrepit villagers had come out onto the street, having apparently finished their dinners or otherwise been drawn by the sounds of combat. Already, dark mutters and angry looks were building, and people were starting to pull out worn knives and unlimber heavy tools.

  “Really not good.” None of these people would have the blessings or abilities of a battle-gifted. They’d never be able to keep up the speed and ferocity of the ghoul–especially as they lacked Allana’s immunity to poison.

  Apparently, whatever intelligence drove the ghoul came to the same conclusion. It looked from Allana to the villagers–and then it turned on them instead.

  “NO!” Allana didn’t think about doing it, but suddenly she was between the ghoul and the closest villager, the disorientation of Trick Step completely ignored as she caught the ghoul’s pounce and threw it back to the street. It landed more scratches on her arms, but its claws weren’t sharp enough to truly hurt. It must’ve depended on its poison for that–and as promised, no notification informed Allana that the poison had been countered, though she could feel the vague tug of her quintessence pool shrinking.

  Even at a larger dose, she could handle the grave rot for some time yet. “You need to run!” Allana called back to the villagers. “Leave it to me!”

  Allana didn’t wait for a response. She was already charging the ghoul, even as it scrambled onto all fours again. Even if she couldn’t hurt the damned thing, she could slow it down. She dodged another wild series of attacks, then Trick Stepped again–almost out of focus–and swung her daggers in a perfect cross. This time it worked, her blade cutting through the remainder of the ghoul’s tendon.

  The undead, apparently immune to pain, didn’t respond to the cut, but when it spun around again, its crippled foot gave out beneath it, sending it staggering to one side. It worked! The ghoul was already recovering, adopting an uncanny three-limbed crawl, but if she could cut the other tendon, she could really slow it down.

  Of course, she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that with her focus running dry and her stamina dropping from her Trick Steps.

  Allana grit her teeth, braced herself, and then a large man stepped up from behind the ghoul and drove a sledgehammer straight down on its back.

  Idiot! Allana thought. I told him to run!

  And yet… the attack was more effective than she expected. It had clearly broken the ghoul’s spine, and many of its ribs, and even if the undead didn't actually need its nerves to move around anymore, the damage had further slowed it down.

  Enough so that, before the ghoul could get back up, another villager drove the tines a pitchfork through one of its arms, and a heavy woodsman’s axe swung down to cut off the other.

  Allana blinked. “Do your attacks have potency?”

  The first man grunted in an affirmative. “Gift of the laborer. It gives a potency boost when using tools. I always used it for breaking magic rocks and cutting down imbued logs–turns out its got other uses.”

  “Apparently,” Allana said, stunned.

  Then the man calmly, with workman-like ease, picked up his sledge and drove it down on the ghoul’s head.

  It stopped struggling after that.

  Allana blinked again down at the limp corpse. She had thought of the villagers as fairly helpless in the face of the undead, but they weren’t. Or at least, not completely. Taken by surprise, or even in a fair fight, Allana had no doubt the undead could’ve torn through them. Potency and brute force were fine and well, but without someone like Allana to tie up the ghoul and give them an opening, they likely would’ve gotten themselves killed before they could’ve had the chance to hit back.

  But still. The citizens of Geltis were far from helpless.

  “There more of those things?” the man with the hammer asked.

  Shock raced through Allana. Tenebres! He fell behind! “Yes!” she told him. “At least two more–”

  “Lana!”

  Allana whirled around at the sound of Tenebres’s voice. The boy staggered out of an alley, down the road, blood dripping down his arms. Not again. Behind him, an older couple followed, with an unconscious figure slung between their shoulder.

  An unnerving cackle emerged from the ally, followed by a sudden flash of brilliant light. The red imp, Allana thought. Things had to be bad if Tenebres had invoked one of his fiends in town, in full view of strangers.

  “Two more coming!” Tenebres called as he came down the road, staying close to the elderly couple and their impaired burden. “I tired to slow them down, but–”

  Another cackle was cut off suddenly, and then more ghouls came loping out of the alley. One was missing an arm, and the other was scorched black, but neither seemed significantly slowed down.

  “We’ll play it the same way,” Allana told the villagers. “Wait for me to make an opening, then hit it hard.

  “And the second?”

  Allana showed her teeth. “My friend and I can pick up the spare.”

  #

  Had Allana been told the day before that villagers would prove better at killing ghouls than her, she would’ve laughed it off. But now, seeing the simple efficacy with which the residents of Geltis wielded their tools, Allana couldn’t deny their effectiveness.

  Even more, she was surprised at her lack of chagrin. Given how useless her new skillset had proven against the undead, Allana felt she would’ve been perfectly within her rights to be upset, but instead, she was pleased. She didn’t need to kill (or re-kill, or whatever) the undead. She just had to fend them off, her prowess and poison immunity allowing her to keep one of the ghouls busy until the villager with the pitchfork could pin it against a wall, letting the others make short work of it.

  While they did, Tenebres and Allana took down the remaining monster. Strong and fast as the ghoul was, it had a hard time breaking loose of Tenebres’s slime and tentacle monsters at the same time. Once Allana borrowed an axe from the unconscious hunter Tenebres had rescued, it was simple enough to cut the thing’s head off, potency or no potency.

  “Poor girl,” one of the older women clucked over the hunter’s slumped form in the aftermath.

  As far as they could tell, the ghouls had taken her by surprise while she sat alone near the Humps. Tenebres’s flying eye had just happened to catch a glance at them dragging her away after the two of them had split up.

  “Will she be okay?” Tenebres asked, his expression worried.

  “Oh, she’ll be just fine,” the crone reassured him. “I’ve still got some reagents lying around, and Elsa is stronger than she looks–give it a couple days, I’ll get her back on her feet.”

  Tenebres looked relieved, and Allana didn’t know if she was supposed to be jealous or not. “I think we could use some treatment too, if you don’t mind,” Allana pointed out. The ghouls hadn’t been able to pin her down to finish the job, but their overgrown nails had still left some nasty scratches, while Tenebres’s arms had been carved up by his gifts yet again.

  The sullen suspicion they had originally been greeted with was nowhere to be seen in Geltis’s residents. The people were still dirty, and tired, and few–but they were no longer hopeless, no longer scared. After months, or even years, of loss, they had finally gotten the chance to fight back.

  Allana saw the pride she felt reflected in Tenebres’s small, satisfied smile.

  “Where to next, for you two?” asked Belden, the large man with the hammer.

  “We’ll rest up for a day or two, I think,” Allana said.

  “And keep an eye out for any other ghouls,” Tenebres added.

  “Then… we’re off to Culles. To put an end to all of this for good.”

  After all–that was what adventurers did. And after tonight, Allana decided, adventurer was a much more satisfying path than assassin.