"Kala! Cut from there to there! On my signal."
I pointed my left hand in a sweeping arc from left to right, marking an alleyway wedged between two collapsed shanties. Beyond its mouth, five undead lurked — fewer than any other direction I'd scouted. The rest of the settlement bristled with them.
"Let's move."
We started forward. I tracked the cooldown in my head, breathing steady beneath the chaos.
Four.
The alley yawned ahead, dark and smelling of rot and something metallic.
Three.
Kala fell into step beside me, his iris already cycling through targeting colors.
Two.
"Now."
Kala's iris flared crimson. A laser sheared through the alley from left to right — three skeletons bisected in a single clean stroke, their bones scattering like dropped dominoes. The two zombies took it differently. The beam cauterized smoking flesh as they skidded backward, muscles seizing, then recomposed. They kept coming.
One.
I grabbed Kala by the harness and activated Force Dash. The world blurred into streaks of gray and brown. Behind us, the ground erupted.
A tentacle — woven from bone and flesh fused together, ribs splitting open like cartilage wings before snapping shut around sinewy muscle — exploded upward where we'd stood seconds before. It lashed out in a devastating whip that sent shanty walls crumbling like wet paper. Another followed moments later, identical in its grotesque construction and destruction, obliterating whatever remained of the first strike zone.
Good thing that cooldown finished, I thought. otherwise we'd be those houses.
When the blur resolved, I released Kala and immediately drove my boot down onto a skeleton's skull. It crunched — absurdly loud, like stomping an oversized cockroach Kala had previously sliced apart. The creature was still crawling by its upper arms, legs paddling uselessly.
A zombie wasted no time. It pounced with spring-loaded agility, both hands raking the air, its rabid gurgling bubbling from a mouth full of black teeth. Full finesse. Like a ninja corpse.
Sorry, dude.
My attack line stretched toward me instinctively — red trajectories painting the air. I side-stepped at the exact wrong moment, my sword carving left to right across the thing's head. It came apart in a pixelated mess of rotten flesh and exposed bone. Another slash, down the center, splitting body from waist to shoulder. Finished.
Another zombie growled and limped toward me. Yep, limping — a blessing in disguise. Kala didn't miss. A beam punched a smoking hole through its torso, and it knelt mid-stride, falling forward in twitching collapse.
"Move!" I shouted.
But more undead spilled from the far end of the alley. Bones clattering. Rotting feet slapping dirt. A wave.
I glanced back — tentacles still thrashing behind us, the horde closing from both ends.
"Let's go inside the houses," I snapped at Kala.
He nodded, iris cycling back to standby blue.
I studied the buildings lining the alley. The walls were rough-hewn wood and splintered planks, weathered and gray. But the doors, the window frames, the barricades across every entrance — all sealed and barred with bones. Ribs interlocked like fence pickets. Femurs strained across thresholds. Skulls were stacked over doorways, eye sockets staring blankly outward. Whatever had built these defenses hadn't used lumber for the barriers — it had used the dead.
I looked to the other side. Same thing. Every structure along this street had been fortified with bone barricades.
"Something fishy is going on here," I muttered, a cold thread running down my spine. Whatever had raised these things hadn't just killed them — it had repurposed them.
Then the sprawl hit.
Goblin zombies crawled along the walls — twisted, imbalanced things with elongated limbs and too-many joints. They ran upright for a few steps, then launched themselves at us all at once. Behind them, more skeletons and zombies poured from the alley's throat like pus from a wound.
Kala zapped an aerial goblin mid-leap. It detonated like a piñata filled with gore.
A bone arrow — tagged instantly by my heightened awareness — drew a red line through the air, sponsored by my instincts, aimed straight at Kala. He was busy dodging and shooting, one undead after another, completely unaware of what was coming for him.
"Kala, something's coming towards you!" I shouted.
"Sorry K, am busy," he replied, not even glance.
I need to save my little dude.
He was three or four meters away. The undead, of course, wasted zero time. They zeroed in with chittering bones and guttural growls, a wall of hostility.
Their attacks bloomed around me like a spy movie gone wrong — red lasers darting from every direction. Slash. Pounce. Arrow. Crush. Each trajectory painting itself across my vision in violent color, demanding evasion. I wasn't dodging bullet fire; I was dodging death in every form.
I tilted left, crouched low, and dashed upward with my knife-sword pointing at the sky. It caught a zombie goblin mid-air, slicing clean through its skull and continuing down its entire body before it even hit the ground.
A red slash from a skeleton opened toward my waist. I summer-saulted — inverted, weightless — and slashed horizontally. The skeleton's head separated from its neck in an arc and landed somewhere behind me.
I landed skidding across the dirt, two arrows whistling past my ears with angry swishes.
Before I could rise, a zombie lunged, sword raised. I parried immediately, stepped to its right, slid my blade off its weapon, arced underneath, and carved upward through its leg. Then I spun — cleanly decapitating it. The head flew.
I kicked the nearest skeleton into its friends.
You should've seen me. I was poppin' hot.
"Kala, a tentacle to me!" I commanded.
He popped another zombie goblin like a stationary turret and extended a tentacle in my direction without looking. I grabbed it mid-flight and pulled him in like a basketball rebound, spinning to propel him skyward while weaving through more incoming attacks.
He shot upward faster than I anticipated — Force Throw amplifying the launch — which got him out of melee range. Good. Too good.
Hey, wait.
I'd forgotten the bone spell. My heightened awareness screamed a warning: DODGE ATTACK NOW!
Oh quack.
Deflect.
I rested my sword against my shoulders, blade pointing up, and braced for impact as the dead closed in from every angle.
Then came the sharp zipping sound — straight at me, impossibly fast. And damn, I wasn't ready.
The impact hit like a haymaker. I'd shielded myself with my sword, but the force traveled through it anyway, knocking the breath from my lungs. My world went dark and upside down as I was thrown upward into the spinning blur of fading light.
I drifted. Rolled across hard-packed earth. Crashed.
The thud of my sword landing near my hand was the last thing I heard before everything went blank.