The Accidental Necromancer
Not Exactly We Happy Few

Half an hour later Gren said. “They put her down here. See? That’s one of your Earth shoes.”

Sure enough, there was a bit of tennis shoe tread in the dirt where she pointed. I was glad Kathy wasn’t in a bag anymore, and that apparently she’d recently been well enough to walk. It meant we were definitely on the right track, too, and not following someone else who wandered off the road.

It also meant that they’d be making better time, and tracking by phone flashlight was slow going. If we had covered half a mile in that half hour, I’d be surprised. And the flashlights would run down the batteries in our phones.

I, meanwhile, was killing two birds with one stone. I was killing the grass behind us, which would make it easy for the trolls to figure out where we’d gone, if they came back looking for us in the morning as Gavabar had promised. And, since I was doing it with Life Drain, I was recovering the energy from walking and my mana at the same time. Charm was an expensive spell.

“They’ve got hours on us,” Gren said. “Unless they stop for a good long while, we won’t catch up anytime soon.”

“We could gamble that at this point, they are going more or less straight in one direction,” I said. “Walking a half mile with a burden like that, just to fake us out, seems like a lot.”

“Your call,” Gren said.

“Let’s try it,” I said. The idea that Kathy would just get farther and farther away didn’t sit well with me at all. We had to take some kind of risk.

From then on we picked up the pace. Now and then Gren would spot a shoe print, confirming that we were on the right track.

“She was dragging her feet here. I don’t know if she was trying to make it easier for me, or just resisting,” Gren said.

“Or unconscious,” Valeria said. “Or dead.”

I looked at her.

“Just being realistic,” she said. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“The tracks don’t tell us,” Gren admitted.

We kept on.

It was nearly three in the morning when we came across a small house in the middle of the hills. It was made of stone and mortar, so my guess was that it wasn’t a troll house. By this time we were using my phone, and my battery was at sixteen percent. Val and Gren had been gamely trudging on, but they were clearly tired, and I would have been too had I not been draining the grass as we went.

“Here’s another shoe print,” Gren said. “Dragging, again, which gives us direction. Straight for that door.”

The house had a heavy looking wooden double door, not quite as formidable as the one on the crypt, nor as large. It could be bolted. And we could easily be seen, if someone was keeping a lookout. I turned the light off.

“What’s the plan, cunning commander?” Gren asked.

I supposed ‘damned if I know’ wouldn’t qualify as a rousing pre-battle speech. Not exactly ‘We Happy Few.’ So I pulled out a knife.

“We bought this for you, Gren,” I said.

She took it. “Oh! And it’s sharp!” She found that out the hard way, by nicking her finger, but she didn’t complain, just licked it clean. “Thank you Abby! This is so romantic!”

There was a little moonlight, and I searched her face for signs she was being sarcastic, but concluded that no, she was just being Gren. “I’m glad you like it. Figured you should have it now in case there’s a fight. This place looks pretty isolated. I don’t know that we can exactly knock and say we were lost – but maybe we can. I have a spell that makes people inclined to believe me, after all.”

“Or we could ambush them when they come out,” Gren suggested.

“Then again, they could be doing all sorts of horrible things to her while we wait. Fates worse than death,” Valeria said. “Abby, don’t look at me like that! Also, there’s a window, so we don’t have to go through the door.”

“I’ll look through the window,” I said. “Stay here.”

“Abby, I’m stealthier than you are,” Gren said.

“When we both walk, sure.” But I didn’t walk. I used Dimension Step to cover the distance, and that made no noise. Then I peeked through.

It was dark in the house, and even adjusted to the moonlight, it took me a moment to see inside. Kathy was there, alright, lying on a bunk, tied up in a way that would probably make Valeria a very happy woman if it were her. Lying against that bunk another humanoid figure slept, but this one was big, had reddish skin, horns that spiraled up from his head, and a tail that was wrapped in front of his belly. His chest rose and fell. Half lying, half sitting as he was, it was hard to be sure exactly how big he was, but my guess was over six feet and over two hundred and twenty pounds. An axe lay at his side.

There was someone else there, too. I saw them move briefly, and then I couldn’t see them again. Had I been spotted? I signaled Val and Gren forward, in case things went south, knowing that Val particularly wouldn’t exactly be silent. She didn’t clank, but she rattled a bit, with all her armor.

There was something wet looking on the floor that I hadn’t noticed before. Wet, and red. A pool of blood. Oh no. Kathy.

The pool moved toward the strange man. It was too big to have come from Kathy, and pools of blood do not slide across the floor like that. Or if they did, they didn’t wait until I came along to watch.

Isn’t that beautiful? That kind of turns me on, actually.

Enash had been so quiet for so long I’d almost forgotten about him.

The man woke up, and looked straight at the window. He grabbed the axe, and threw it.

I looked right. Dimension Step. The axe crashed through the window, passing through where I’d been and Valeria barely ducked in time.

“Jump through the window and we’ll all fight!” I yelled. I never claimed to be a master strategist.

Valeria ran to catch up and pass Gren, and then jumped into the window. I guess she had the armor to protect herself from most of the glass that remained. Gren followed her, and I ended up being the last in.

By the time I vaulted through, Valeria was screaming and covered in blood. Or rather, something red and goopy, as if the pool I’d seen earlier had flowed onto her. She was clawing at her face, trying to get it away, and her scream was quickly silenced as the stuff flowed into her mouth. Some of it seemed to have seeped through the cracks in her armor, too.

Ah, it’s not a pool of blood, it’s a slime demon.

The more humanoid danger pointed at Gren, and a bolt of fire came from his finger tip. It hit her shoulder as she tried to charge him with her new knife. We should have had Gren sniping from the window, I realized. Oh well.

I reached into my bag for my katana, and teleported at the same time. The moment I reappeared, behind him of course, I whirled, swinging my sword, only to find Kathy looking at me with horror instead of the demon.

“Don’t!” she yelled.

I barely stopped in time.

Then ‘Kathy’ pointed at me and hit me in the face with a bolt of blinding, searing fire, and she laughed in a voice that was not like hers at all. “Haha! So gullible! Hahahaha! You could have had me!”

I dropped my sword when the fire hit me. A trained warrior I wasn’t.

Shapeshifting Demon. Very nasty sort, generally, even by demon standards. And probably grew up fighting dimension steppers like us.

Enash’s voice actually calmed me enough to think. Three against two, and we were still losing. And how could we beat a slime? Gren was still up, at least, and charging again. I could barely see, but I teleported to a spot to Gren’s left.

That worked, anyway. The shapeshifter, now himself again, whirled toward me.

Slimes are vulnerable to fire, and death magic.

I used Dimension Step again, to a place on top of Valeria and the slime, just in time to avoid getting fried. My skin felt like it was on fire still, and maybe it was. I just had to keep moving, somehow, and do what I could.

I touched the slime with my bare hand, and it felt like pouring lemon juice on a cut. But when I cast Life Drain, sweet healing energy moved into me.

My distraction had let Gren close, but he was too quick for her knife. Still, she rammed him with her unburnt shoulder, and sent him hurtling toward the wall. The slime oozed off of Val, moving faster than I thought it could, and toward Gren and the other demon.

Val reached up and touched me, and I felt her healing magic as my face stopped being in excruciating pain. Then she shoved me off her, just as another bolt of fire buzzed over me. She had to be in a world of hurt, as there were acid burns all over her chest and shoulders, and possibly under the armor, too.

Gren had fallen, her head was on fire, and the slime was almost on top of her. I wanted to go after him, but I was probably the only one who could hurt the slime. Dimension Step. Life Drain. I was sitting on the slime like a kid in a mud puddle, with my hands deep in goo, soaking up all the life energy I could from it. The slime smelled like raspberry jam.

Val charged the shapeshifter. I really wish we had a better plan than charging, but it was probably Valeria’s strong suit.

Kathy, presumably the real Kathy, was struggling against her bonds, and managed to get so far as to roll off the cot.

Val chopped the shapeshifter’s head off, and I breathed a sigh of relief for just a moment.

“Haha!” the shapeshifter laughed, revealing that he’d been bent over, with his head where his hand was and his hand where his head was. He was still missing a hand, which was gushing blood, but he was laughing about it.

He used his other hand to splash Valeria with fire, but she didn’t reel back, just swung again, this time for his midsection. He jumped to the side but still got hit as he shapeshifted once more. He looked like me, this time, and with two good hands.

They heal themselves pretty well. Part of why they are such assholes, they never pay the consequences for what they do.

Val had to be in incredible pain, from fire and acid, but still she kept on, looking to land that one good blow. A courageous, trained warrior. She was making him dodge her, at least, even if she didn’t connect. He kept shifting, changing into a thin troll, then a short dwarf – whatever he needed to do to make her miss. And he kept throwing fire at her, too.

The slime rolled across the floor toward her, and I crawled after it, draining it as well as I could. I was desperate. If both of them got on Val, surely she’d fall.

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