FROST
Chapter 106: Corridor of Graves

Chapter 106: Corridor of Graves

Caspian sensed it the moment he stepped beyond the flickering reach of the fire wisps and into the true shadow of the dungeon. The air grew heavier, as if soaked in memories and malice. This part of the dungeon was old—older than any map had recorded, older than the reigns of kings, and certainly older than any light that had dared remain.

His boots scraped against the cold stone as he moved further in, and that’s when he saw them—dozens of bodies strewn across the ground like discarded dolls after a brutal war. He paused.

Some were collapsed over rusted weapons, others impaled on spikes driven straight through their ribs, and many more simply rotted where they had fallen, limbs twisted at unnatural angles. They looked long-dead, left to decay in this forgotten crypt.

Imps, ogres, even twisted hybrid creatures he couldn’t immediately name—what they shared in common was death. The room was filled with it.

Caspian’s eyes narrowed.

He didn’t need to touch them to know. The corpses weren’t fresh—but they hadn’t decayed like natural bodies either. They were preserved by something darker. Stilled, yes. But not at peace.

Then it began.

Mana, thick and rancid, crept up from beneath the stone, seeping through every crack like venom from the earth’s veins. It didn’t strike like lightning nor fall like rain. It pulsed. Ancient. Feral. Wrong.

And as that corrupted mana pooled into the corpses, their bodies twitched.

At first, a finger. Then a jaw.

A cracked skull rolled sideways, eyes glowing with a pale, demonic shimmer. A bloated imp let out a wet gasp, twitching as its broken wings scraped across the stone. An ogre’s crushed ribs heaved open again with a grotesque crack, as if drawing in breath it no longer needed.

Caspian grimaced as he reached for the sword at his belt.

Of course. Of course they were going to rise.

And rise they did.

One by one, the corpses stirred back to life—or rather, to something mockingly close to it. Eyes glazed, limbs stiff, mouths drooling with old blood. Imps crawled up the walls, their spines bent in ways no living creature could endure. Ogres rose slower, but when they did, it was like the dungeon itself groaned with their weight.

The hallway transformed before his very eyes. What had once been a forgotten corridor littered with long-dead corpses now pulsed with grotesque life. A graveyard only moments ago, now twisted into a battlefield reborn—an echo of ancient wars, now resurrected to test him.

Caspian took a single step back, grounding his heels against the uneven stone. The scrape of his boot echoed softly before being swallowed by the guttural moans of the undead rising around him. His hand tightened around the hilt of the last sword he carried—a plain weapon by royal standards, but forged in sacred fire and honed through war. It would have to do.

He dared not call on his magic. Not yet.

Even as the corrupted mana surged around him like a tide of poison, he knew: one wrong flare, one reckless surge, and the fragile balance of this evil realm might collapse. His father had taught him that.

King Luscious, the King of the Northern Skies, was a man of vision and restraint—a ruler who understood that power meant little without discipline.

As a child, Caspian had trained under him in the art of wielding royalty magic, especially within volatile domains like the demon realm, where balance was not merely a matter of etiquette but of survival. The arcane threads here tangled with ancient curses, long-buried contracts, and blood-oaths that echoed through time.

"Magic in the demon realm," his father once said, "is like fire in a dry forest. You may light your way, but it will burn everything around you if you’re careless."

Now, standing amidst the creaking of reanimated bones and the foul stench of death-turned-motion, Caspian understood his father’s words more than ever.

He exhaled slowly.

No magic. Not unless absolutely necessary.

His enemies hissed and groaned as they advanced—imps scuttling like malformed insects, ogres stomping with bones jutting from their flesh, and disfigured beasts wearing the faces of things that should have stayed dead.

Caspian raised his sword.

No spells. No blessings.

Only steel, instinct, and the teachings of a king who once ruled the skies with his will alone.

And so the son of Luscious stood alone in the dark, blade in hand, as the dead closed in.

Let them come.

The first imp lunged—snarling, its jaw dislocated, and its limbs twitching at unnatural angles. Caspian sidestepped with surgical precision. His blade flashed in a clean arc, severing the creature’s head with a wet snap. The corpse collapsed midair, twitching as black blood sprayed in spurts across the stone floor.

Another came—a bloated ogre with one eye hanging from its socket, dragging a rusted cleaver behind it. Caspian didn’t wait. He charged, blade low. The ogre raised its weapon too slow, too heavy, and in that breath of hesitation, Caspian slid beneath its swing, driving his sword deep into the ogre’s exposed belly. He tore the blade free in a burst of rotting innards and ducked as a skeletal beast leapt from the shadows.

The air was thick with decay and the buzzing of flies. The walls pulsed as if the dungeon itself fed off the violence.

They lunged at him in waves—imps with rotted limbs, ogres with cracked jaws still gurgling old war cries, all bound by necrotic magic. Their numbers filled the corridor like a tide of decay. But not a single claw grazed him. Not a strand of his hair was touched.

Caspian moved like a shadow with a blade, fluid and precise. Every step was measured, every swing surgical. He ducked beneath a club made from a snapped femur, sidestepped a leaping ghoul whose body was half ribs and rage, and severed another before it even finished rising.

He had seen worse. He had survived worse.

By sixteen, he had already faced creatures that tore through platoons—ice dragons with frost breath that froze blood in a heartbeat, fire drakes whose scales were hotter than molten steel. At eighteen, he had ventured alone into the underworld’s abyssal ocean to claim the fabled Black Pearl, guarded by a serpent so massive, its body could coil around an entire temple.

The pressure crushed his lungs. The darkness was total. His blade dulled halfway through the fight. But he held his breath, outlasted the beast, and drove steel through its eye in a single, desperate strike.

That battle nearly cost him everything.

But this? These reanimated beasts, all bones and borrowed breath—this was just another warm-up.

Caspian breatheHis blade sang as it struck metal, bone, and sinew alike, dancing through the mob with the grace of a seasoned warrior. He weaved between clawed hands and snapping jaws, ducking low, rolling to avoid a broken spear that whistled past his ear.

A dead knight lunged from behind, armor creaking as it moved, mouth full of worms. Caspian twisted and met it with a quick backstep and a low parry, driving his sword up beneath its chin and into the cavity of its skull. The knight’s eyes flickered with lingering will before they dimmed.

They kept coming.

A wall of rotting imps surged from the corridor like a living tide. Caspian narrowed his stance, sweeping his sword into a high guard. He stepped into them, slicing with measured strikes—no wasted motion, no flourish. His footwork was steady, ingrained through hours upon hours of brutal royal drills.

He felt every bone jolt under impact. He could feel the vibrations in his arm each time his sword cut through something solid. But he held firm. This wasn’t a fight to win with power—it was one to survive with control.

"Focus," he muttered. "Balance. No magic."

A zombified ogre crashed toward him again, this one wearing what looked like a crown of thorns made of its own bones. It roared, the sound gurgling from its ruined throat. Caspian ducked beneath its swing and leapt upward, scaling its back in three quick steps before plunging his sword through the base of its skull.

It staggered, groaned, and collapsed with a bone-cracking thud.

Caspian rolled off its back and landed in a crouch.

Around him, bodies piled—some still twitching, others motionless. His arm trembled from exertion. His breath came in tight, controlled gasps.

He looked ahead.

There were more. Always more.

But Caspian—son of Luscious, bearer of royal blood—and beautiful face and toned body—is not one to lose to mere zombies.

He adjusted his grip on the hilt, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and readied himself once more.

If the dungeon wanted a battle, then it would have to earn it.

He would not fall today. Not by magic. Not by fate. Only steel. Only will.

The groans of the undead echoed like a cursed symphony, crawling across the stone walls of the corridor. Caspian could hear them—hundreds of shuffling feet, bone scraping against bone, jaws snapping with blind hunger.

His knuckles whitened around the hilt of his blade.

One breath in. One breath out.

Another wave surged forward—faster this time. Smarter. The imps began crawling along the walls and ceiling, limbs bent at impossible angles, their glowing eyes fixed on him. The ogres herded behind them, like siege beasts in a line of undead infantry. In the flickering gloom, their rotted skin seemed to ripple with malignant life.

Caspian didn’t flinch. His boots slid slightly on the blood-slick floor, but he anchored himself with the precision his father once drilled into him.

They came.

He moved.

The first imp leapt from above—Caspian side-stepped and pivoted, thrusting his blade clean through its abdomen mid-air. He didn’t wait for the next. He dropped, swept a leg beneath two more approaching from the front, and as they fell, he followed through with a swift double slash—neck, chest—sending them twitching to the floor.

One ogre howled and charged, its arms like slabs of meat, dragging a chain of skulls. Caspian met its eyes—cloudy, dull, but furious. He ran forward, faster than the ogre expected, and ducked low, sliding between its legs. He slashed the tendon behind its knee, and as the beast crumbled down with a roar, Caspian turned, leapt, and buried his sword through its upper spine until it hit bone.

The sword stuck.

Caspian grunted and yanked. It didn’t budge. Behind him, the next wave was closing in—too fast to wrestle the blade free.

Without hesitation, he let go of the sword.

He spun toward the nearest imp and, in one fluid motion, grabbed its broken rusted dagger from its belt. It hissed at him, but he plunged the weapon into its eye and kicked it back into the swarm.

Now dual-wielding two scavenged blades—a bent dagger and a chipped short sword from a fallen knight—Caspian adapted.

A new rhythm.

A new dance.

He fought in tight arcs, slashing and stabbing, ducking beneath swings, leaping between crumbling stones. His cloak was in tatters. His hands were bleeding from shallow cuts. A gash marked his right shoulder where an imp had nearly sunk its teeth.

But his eyes burned—cold, sharp, royal.

He thought of his father’s voice again. "In the demon realm, power corrupts if you don’t control it. Any fool can use magic. It takes a king to endure without it."

And endure, he would.

Caspian slammed his boot into a crumbling jaw, shoved another creature off with a shoulder, and ripped the bent dagger free from a third imp’s throat. His muscles screamed, but he kept moving, cutting, breaking, pushing forward.

The corridor began to shift. The air twisted, the ground groaned. He could sense the dark magic recoiling, testing him—questioning if he would crack, if he would unleash the dangerous royal mana burning just beneath his skin.

He didn’t.

Instead, Caspian picked up another sword from a broken corpse. Heavy. Cracked.

It would do.

"Come on," he whispered through clenched teeth, blood dripping down his jaw. "You want me? You’ll have to work harder than this."

And the dead answered.

They rose again. All of them.

A hundred moaning, snarling, clawing monsters in a corridor that reeked of curses and blood.

"Ahh damn it!" He groaned.

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