Pestilence: Rise Of The Pure Undead
Chapter 872 - 872: Steel

The death hunters were, as their name explicitly stated, hunters- Predators who tracked down traces of death's influence to destroy, they knew no mercy for their prey, nearly each and everyone of them had either been born to a family in which hunting the dead was a mission since generations, or had one suffered at the cold hands of undeads, and sometimes, both were true.

However, the hunt took its toll eventually, usually, it did not take too long for death hunters to begin to show signs of a certain sort of madness, the most common was memory loss, as they immersed themselves into an endless bloodlust- A never-ending thrill for the hunt- Trying to destroy creatures of eternity, of Oblivion… It often led to them simply forgetting why they had even begun to hunt to begin with, and simply keep going, without understanding why.

The hunt had to go on.

But it made no doubt that they were competent in their mission, five of them, cream of the crop amongst those that still lived, approached a group of three undeads, they had their ways to remain undetected even from the life-sensing corpses, and they took the preparation time they had to observe their opponents, all frowned however, the cadavers were not behaving in a manner that was expected of them.

They weren't moving further, they had just stopped heading from the north entirely and seemed to be waiting instead, simply standing near the western edge of the realm, the emerald void just a step away.

All pointed to the idea that the trio was expecting a visit, and not only that, but even that it was the point of their presence in the first, why else stop moving entirely otherwise? The only explanation was that they had been sent here with the express purpose of provoking a fight.

It was beyond suspicious and ill-concealed, but considering the area they were in, no undeads could be allowed to remain and go as they saw fit, so a fight had to break out no matter what.

So it was best to learn as much about their enemies as was possible before then, unfortunately, all three of the corpses were garbed in cloaks and hoods that concealed their appearances, each member of the trio seemed to be around the same height, and were currently standing whilst facing the green void, considering that it was broad daylight, they did not have access to darkness awareness, so if the death hunters maintained their stealth, a sneak attack should be theoretically possible.

But since they had no idea what sort of undeads they were facing, that might not necessarily be true, so all slowly prepared their means to attack from a distance, weapons coated with life force pulled out through their life arts, the materials used for their weaponry having been left to bath in pools of life mist for what had been years at this point, now, they just needed to strike and eliminate the fool undeads.

Without speaking a word, all three took aim, and fired at the same time, the instant even the smallest of noise escaped from them, the trio knew exactly what was going on, through undead synesthesia, they were able to know much about the source of the sound itself, and thus, they could not possible mistake those faint noises for regular forest ambience.

All three swiftly turned around, but did not have time to dodge, resulting in blasts of white mist to erupt alongside infernal flames that engulfed them.

"Direct hit for all of us" commented Rummy, though, they had targeted all three undeads at once, and not everyone amongst them could inflict a wide area of damage to strike the three enemies at once.

Within the flames, all three of the silhouettes of the dead were visibly as shadows, still standing as the one in the middle extended their arms to the side, and in an instant, right before the eyes of the death hunters, the other two undeads seemed to liquefy and be absorbed by the middle one.

The flames cleared, and what was left was much different from expected, the cloaks had burnt away, but even if they had not, the one the undead used to wear would have never been able to fit his body as he basically doubled in height, massively increasing in size compared to before, now only wearing some sort of ample pants that whilst flexible, reflected light like steel would.

In fact, the undead's entire body reflected light in this manner, for the corpse was made up entirely of reflective, chrome-like steel.

"Oh crap, I never thought I would see one of those again!" Tappduur exclaimed with a smile.

"The damned chromatic dungeon…" Échalas wasn't so upbeat however, by simple virtue of what they were made of, those had always been a pain to deal with, even the weak ones and the guy before them definitely wasn't what they were used to.

As far as they were aware, that old dungeon they were once rather familiar with had only contained skeletons with bones of steel, which were all of average height, even those wearing armour.

This one was nearly definitely more than two meters tall, and close to the three meter mark.

The undead opened and closed his bony hands a few times before slamming a fist into his palm.

"Mmh, I hate fresh meats like you" lunging forward, punching down at them, tearing into the ground as the death hunters dispersed and surrounded him in an instant.

All of them spoke in unison :

"Life, grant me strength" coating themselves and their equipment in life force, they had already done so for their sneak attack just now, but it did not hurt to refresh it, just in case.

The three vampire hunters took on more of a supportive role, as their specialty meant that they usually dealt with undeads that had much lower natural defences that that, the ghoul huntress did the same as her usual targets had even worse defences that vampires on average, the one that stepped up was Tappduur, the demon was the only one here who had actually made it his expertise to crush bones to dust, and flatten rotten flesh, focusing on dealing with the more common sorts of undeads, a little bit of steel did not scare him, in fact, the demon took it as a challenge.

"Let's see how much tougher you are compared to your dungeon-dwelling brethren, they could barely handle a single strike!"

The corpse scraped his metallic teeth, creating an awful grating sound.

"The majority of them were merely summons of Advisor Faraday, they do not count" the skeleton absolutely ignored the life-charged projectiles thrown by the others, and rushed right toward the red-skinned demon.

Tappduur grinned as he bared his warhammer.