Deacon didn't move. None of them did.
The stink was... awful. Something like mildew, sour meat, and old candlewax layered over everything. Even Bonehead's usual sarcasm was sealed behind a clenched jaw and furrowed-looking eye sockets as he lifted one foot and then the other, boots squelching slightly on some unidentifiable, half-liquid muck staining the surface of the dining table. "System damnit," he mumbled to himself, "I just got these cleaned."
"This is disgusting," Esmerelda muttered, covering her nose with the crook of her elbow, yet keeping her eyes open, watching for any sudden movements in the massive room they were teleported to.
Sam crouched down beside one of the nearby dishes, a gelatinous mass of greenish-black goo quivering faintly under a silver cloche. "Okay, okay, tell me I'm wrong, but doesn't this look exactly like the Meals of Atonement from Hex Theory Volume II?"
Jass peered over his shoulder, nose wrinkling. "Yes, but Meals of Atonement had twitching eyeballs and was served on obsidian plates. These are pewter."
"Kiss my ass," he muttered back. "Who cares about the plates, obviously, I was referring to the food and not the plates."
Not a second later after Sam uttered those words, both Sam and Jass ended up in a murmuring squabbling match with neither side backing down.
"That's not comforting," Deacon said, voice low as he stepped carefully across the table toward the edge, trying to get a better sense of the room, doing his best to ignore both Sam and Jass. The table was at least twenty meters long, surrounded by velvet-backed chairs, every single one filled with a corpse in varying stages of rot.
Some were skeletal, others bloated. A few had their faces dipped forward into their plates like they died mid-bite, which in Deacon's mind was quite ominous considering that they were surrounded by such food.
The chandelier overhead, a monstrous iron fixture thick with webs and grime, creaked ominously.
"Oh man," Bonehead finally said, "I think one of these meat piles just blinked."
Everyone froze.
Deacon held up a hand slowly. "Don't move and don't speak."
A long pause blanketed the air as all five of them cautiously looked around.
Then the corpse to Bonehead's left gave a tiny shudder, or at least that's what everyone saw it doing.
"Yeah, okay, nope," Bonehead said quickly, hopping away from it and pulling his daggers from his back sheathes in one fluid motion. "Fuck undead shit."
But the body didn't rise. Instead, its mouth slowly fell open with a faint, wet pop, and a beetle the size of a baby's fist scurried out across the table and vanished into a half-rotten fruit bowl.
"Okay," Esmerelda let out. "So… this is freaking gross."
"Yet," Deacon said grimly before turning to Bonehead. "Aren't you an undead as well? Why are you flipped out by another undead moving?"
"Fuck you," Bonehead immediately shot back. "These guys don't feel like undead at all."
"Then what do they feel like?" Esmerelda asked, frowning as Bonehead's words left them all confused.
"I don't know, but they sure as hell don't feel like any other undead I've met or killed before," Bonehead shrugged
Another chime in their ears drew all of them back to the System Notification still hovering faintly in front of them, bringing them out of their confused states.
Floor Four – The Trial of Banners:
You now stand upon the haunted battleground of Ashen Moor Fortress – a crumbling bastion wrapped in mist and buried in centuries-old regret. Once the seat of a proud and cruel noble house that protected the royal family of Thu'la by submerging itself in the necromantic arts and executing their cruelest acts. During a civil war, a great curse consumed the land, turning the moors into a fetid bog.
Now every hundred years, when the blood moon rises above the Ashen Moor Fortress, the Trial of Banners begins anew. Eight teams of five enter, but only two teams may emerge. The rules are cruel in their simplicity: have a total of four banners, and your team survives. If the timer runs out and you no longer retain ownership of your banner, you will receive a penalty.
The fortress is divided into four deadly zones, each shaped by the horrors of its past:
▸ The Outer Moorlands, where the cursed marsh wraiths wander.
▸ The Fortress Walls, where the skeletal archers never miss.
▸ The Courtyard, where banshees lurk in the overgrowth.
▸ The Great Hall, where the ghouls dine.
Banners may only be seized by rival hands, and in order for them to be claimed by your team, you must place an enemy banner beside your own. You are unable to move your own Banner.
Floor Completion Criteria:
▸ Claim three opposing team banners and have them placed beside your own banner.
Time Remaining: 00:05:00:00
Looks like we are in the Great Hall, Deacon mused to himself as the five of them immediately stood at attention as the corpses that littered the area suddenly became animated, and in their wake, they immediately caused havoc before snapping their focus on the five of them.
[Reanimated Ghouls Lv 8]
Deacon quickly unsheathed Echoform Reliquary in its dual short sword form from off his back and lunged forward, slicing off the heads of the closest ghouls. Jass wasn't too far off either, her glaive already bisecting two nearby ghouls attempting to push themselves onto the large dining table they stood upon.
Sam and Esmerelda were unleashing spells at both nearby and distant enemies; the bursts of wind cut against the moldy, wooden walls and rotting tapestries. Fire spells were consciously avoided, as none of them wanted to test if the age-brittled wood and mold-slick curtains were as flammable as they looked.
Esmerelda and Sam's Wind Arrows punctured and pierced through limbs and torsos.
On the opposite end of the chaos, Bonehead was having what he might later call "a fun time" if fun meant lobbing fragile vials of glowing green acid with enough force to shatter bone and melt sinew. He moved like a spider with a grudge, weaving between chairs and upending dishes into the faces of lunging ghouls. "You ugly knockoff undead bastards want seconds?" he shouted, hurling a bottle straight down a still-moaning throat before dropkicking the creature off the table, while still remaining on the table himself.
With a sharp exhale through his teeth, Deacon leaped off the large dining table and onto the tiles below. Ducking low under a swiping claw, Echoform Reliquary sang in his hands as it transformed into its Broadsword form and cleaved through a ghoul's torso before transforming right back into its dual short swords form.
One head. Two, he thought to himself, just as yet another ghoul came at him with its jaw unhinged and looking to him like it was able to easily fit his own head inside it. He met it halfway, pivoted, and drove his right blade up under its chin, through the roof of its mouth, before yanking it free in a spray of blacked blood.
Jass was to his left, with her glaive spinning in wide arcs like a scythe in harvest season. One ghoul's spine snapped clean in half as she slammed the haft into its back before turning the blade and driving it into another's eye socket.
Behind them, the barrage didn't stop.
"Left flank's getting heavy!" Sam called out, already casting another spell into existence, wrapping around his outstretched staff before it exploded outward in a three-point burst of Manabolts, each one finding its target with a satisfying crack of rupturing bone.
"I got it," Esmerelda snapped, adjusting her stance and lifting both hands to conjure a volley of Wind Arrows. The wind howled through the hall as her projectiles whipped forward, slamming into a cluster of ghouls trying to scale a collapsed candelabrum like it was some sort of siege ladder.
Bonehead, meanwhile, had apparently decided enough was enough.
"Alright, you slimy bastards," he muttered, flicking one last acid vial into a horde and watching it eat through half a dozen legs. "I can't continue wasting bottles on you."
He reached into his coat and drew out a handful of thin throwing needles, each one glinting with a faint green and purple sheen from the aflame chandeliers above.
The next few seconds were a flurry for him as he moved around the edges of the dining table. Each needle hit true, sliding between ribs, embedding in necks, slipping under armpits, or any exposed fleshy area of the ghouls.
His poison worked fast as the reanimated ghouls froze in place, their muscles locking, blood congealing in dark, jelly-like clots just long enough for Jass or Deacon to decapitate them with brutal efficiency.
"Poison's holding for five, maybe six seconds," Bonehead shouted over the din, "so don't waste it!"
Deacon didn't need to be told twice.
One paralyzed ghoul stood just long enough for him to sever both legs at the knees and follow up with a sweeping slash that took out three more behind it.
"Keep it tight!" he barked. "We're thinning them out as best as we can, but they're still coming, so keep in turtle formation!"
Esmerelda gritted her teeth and flung another barrage of Wind Arrows into the fray. "How the hell are there this many? This hall isn't that big to have them keep coming at us in swarms!"
"It's like they're coming out of the damn walls!" Sam shouted back.
As if on cue, a section of decayed brick burst open near the fireplace, and three more ghouls, these ones looking far more bloated than the others, spilled out like clowns in a car.
Bonehead rolled his eyes. "Fuck you Sam, you just had to say that, didn't you?"
"Focus!" Deacon growled, slicing clean through a ghoul's midsection and spinning to intercept another. "They aren't that strong considering the lack of armor or proper attacks, crush any crystals you have for active regeneration if you're falling low."
***
The last ghoul collapsed with a wet, lifeless slap, its torso cleaved diagonally by Echoform Reliquary in its broadsword form. A heavy silence blanketed the Grand Hall, which was only interrupted by Deacon's Echoform Reliquary shifting back into its dual short sword form.
Deacon stepped back, wiping his blades against a halfway moth-eaten curtain. "That's the last of them. For now, at the very least."
Bonehead was already crouched by the table, picking up any of his unshattered vials and muttering curses under his breath about wasted acid. Esmerelda stood to one side, breath short, her palms glowing faintly with residual wind energy.
"We need to move, but we need to have guards around the banner," Deacon said as his gaze flicked towards the large ink-black banner with the name of their Party embroidered in gold thread, Ravenlight. "It would be best for two people to stay behind and guard it, while three people go out and hunt for banners."
Bonehead raised a hand without even looking up. "Not it."
"You're staying, along with Esmerelda," Deacon said flatly.
"What the hell? Why am I–" Bonehead complained, while Esmerelda nodded acknowledgement with Deacon's orders as Party Leader.
"Because you're better suited to protecting the banner with all the traps you can set up with your poisons and acids," Deacon cut in, turning toward him. "Also, did you finish making something that would allow Jass and me to deal damage to wraiths and ghosts?"
"Oh, and we need something to knock out the other teams so they don't do anything dumb when we beat them," Jass piped up.
"Fine," Bonehead groaned before pushing himself up and started rifling through his Spatial Satchel. "And yeah, I finished it," He pulled out three dense, rectangular blocks that looked like chunks of frozen soap, each one a pale, translucent blue with tiny iridescent streaks running through the surface like trapped lightning. "Spectral Grease. All you gotta do is coat the blades of your weapons in it, and it'll make your blades able to hurt them."
He tossed one to each of them – Deacon caught his midair, and Jass snatched hers without looking midair as she hopped off the table.
"Wait, what about my magic?" Sam asked, brow furrowed. "I don't use a blade. I use this." He held up his staff.
"Yeah, well…" Bonehead scratched the back of his skull, unbothered. "Manabolts seem to hit spectrals just fine. Dunno why, and don't care really. Everything else probably won't land, so just don't use any elemental spells, and if you're tapped out, grease the staff and bonk them on the head like you're breaking open a piñata."
Sam groaned, tucking the hardened grease into his own satchel with a grimace.
"As for knocking out, just pour half a bottle's worth into someone's mouth and that'll keep them knocked out for like 4-5 hours," Bonehead said as he passed the three of them three bottles of purplish liquid each.
"Do we go now?" Jass said as she both finished latching her glaive back to her back harness and putting away the items Bonehead handed to her.
Deacon gave a tight nod before glancing at Esmerelda. "Hold this place, and make sure Bonehead–"
" – doesn't try to experiment on anyone we knock out," she cut in, adjusting her gloves with a slow, menacing pull. "I've got it, Captain."
They didn't waste another second as they were already on a timer.
Deacon took the front, Jass flanked his back left, and Sam was on his back right; all in a triangular formation. None of them said a word as they reached the heavy double doors at the far end of the Great Hall.
With a grunt, they pushed them open.
Only to freeze as charging down the corridor toward them were three cadets covered in blood and guts, one of them clutching a banner across their back, all of them clearly just as surprised to see them.