The mist thinned as I neared the cathedral’s tall doors. They were open and unmarred in the sense nothing had clawed the surface into toothpicks like the city gate. My heart sank at the sight. Despite the destruction we’d passed to get here, I instinctively took this as a bad sign and took a knee off to the side.

  Unbidden and uncommanded, my hand went to a very specific part of my LBE, where I normally kept my grenades on mission. I winced at the instinctive, correct action. I might be on mission now, but those grenades were very much an entire world away at the moment. After short, quiet sigh, I thumbed my selector to fire and glanced over my shoulder at Tomas, who had stacked up behind me like I’d taught him to do.

  The bard dipped his head toward the door ahead and quickly nodded as he hefted the Benelli up and properly shouldered it.

  Now that the fog was thin, a previously useless option presented itself. I reached up with my non-dominant hand and tugged down the night vision tube. A quick twist on PVS-14’s control knob turned darkness to monochrome green. A second later, I’d twisted another knob, this time on the foregrip, and then I held up three fingers. A second passed, three became two. Another second. One.

  I squeezed the foregrip as I started forward and the VFG’s IR lamp sprung to life as I turned the corner. To the naked eye, the cathedral’s interior was darker than night. Thanks to that IR lamp, the interior was bright as daylight through the night vision, and in that green daylight I beheld dozens of pews that stretched into the distance. I beheld the skeletal heads poking up above each and every pew. My skin crawled and it felt like I suddenly had bees in my teeth.

  And then absolutely nothing happened.

  I’d been in an old cathedral back in my previous life and simply assumed the acoustics here were the same, which meant that if an ant farted anywhere in room, I’d hear it. The only thing that met my ears, aside from the sounds Tomas or I made, was silence.

  My sense of simple wrongness didn’t abate as I kept moving forward, kept checking corners as we passed pillars and pews, kept looking for movement. If anything, it got worse the deeper in we went. There were bodies by the literal hundreds, if not thousands, an ass in every seat. The place had been packed when the end came, and the entire time we advanced closer to the pulpit in the back, I swear I could hear the orchestral track they’d use if this were a movie to heighten tension, all high pitched, rapid strings.

  As I came up short of the pulpit, I eyed the corpse slumped over the altar. Something about the robes seemed out of place, but at the same time it’s not like I knew which deity was worshipped here. I slowly turned, playing the IR lamp over the skeletons in the front row and was just about to whisper something to Tomas when my lizard brain twitched and scrabbled at the controls.

  I drew in a deep breath of dusty, weirdly damp air to calm my nerves. Relax. You’re just imagining things. Undeterred, my lizard brain demanded I check anyway, regardless of the probability. I knew I’d be creeped out until I satisfied the urge to double check what I couldn’t see in the monochrome green.

  “Light, watch your eyes,” I whispered. Tomas acknowledged with a quiet noise. I closed my darkness-adjusted eye, tilted the NVG up, and squeezed the pressure pad controlling the visible light lamp on my VFG. And stood there. In sudden horror. I recognized the uniforms worn by those in the front row. My mouth sprang open, lizard brain now firmly in control. “Fuck. Tomas, we need to—”

  A scrabbling noise, something light yet hard scraping against stone, echoed out from behind me, from the pulpit. Words now firmly forgotten, I proceeded entirely in autonomous mode. The visible light snapped off as I let go of the pressure pad. I jerked my head forward using momentum to bring the NVG down, all the while I spun, tightening my finger on the trigger.

  The skeleton, now standing behind the altar, adjusted its robe as its skull swiveled in my direction. Runic patterns along the cloth flared to light, illuminating the darkness with a baleful violet and green glows. Something about the patterns, their miniscule size and dense packing, seemed magnificently familiar, yet unrecognizable at the same time.

  I blinked, not believing what now stood before me, as reality rippled and deposited a long, heavy staff into its hand. That was the moment everything clicked. I knew who this was, or rather, had been. “Tomas—”

  The room strobed with a single, blindingly bright flash as the discharge of a high brass slug from a three-inch shell deafened me. The skeleton’s head disappeared in a poof of white dust.

  “What the fuck was that!?” Tomas bellowed, his voice distant and tinny. I could barely hear my ears ringing. Tomas had been only a few feet behind me when he lit off the slug.

  “WHAT?”

  “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT, SAM!?”

  I stretched my jaw and my ears painfully popped. “I thought you said skeletons didn’t exist here, Tomas.”

  “THEY FUCKING DON’T!”

  “Well, that one certainly fucking doesn’t anymore!” I agreed vigorously as I slipped over the low railing separating the pulpit from the rest of the room. “Watch our ass. If there’s anything still down here, you just rang the dinner bell.”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Without much thought involved, I stripped the skeleton of everything in its possession and hastily stuffed it all, staff included, into Schr?dinger’s MOLLE pouch. Only one thing went into the pouch on my chest where I kept the map: the skeleton’s ring and the fingerbone still in it.

  “Uh, Sam? We’ve—ah, we’ve got company. A lot of company.”

  My attention came up, rifle moments behind, and I loosed a tired sigh as the IR lamp illuminated the crowd filling the rear most pew as they stood as one. As I unleashed the single, simple word that came to mind, the residents of the second to last pew began to stir. “Fuck.”

  “What do we do, Sam?” Tomas hurriedly asked, his voice now higher pitched with incipient panic.

  A meme jumped into my skull, a scene snippet from the end of the old 80s movie, The Last Starfighter, one I had to brush aside because it was probably true. We die. Refusing that simple statement, my eyes flew to the walls to either side, and upon spotting the simple wooden door that certainly led to the priest’s quarters, I darted forward. “FOLLOW ME!”

  I won’t lie. I kinda hoped the door would crumble like everything outside when I shouldered it. If anything, that would’ve been convenient in a certain immediate need kind of way, so naturally that’s not what happened. I tried the handle, but it didn’t budge.

  A single round of .308 into where I guessed the lock was and a hefty boot convinced it of the error in its ways. The door snapped open, whipping into splinters as it did so to reveal a confluence of hallways, one that ran left/right and another that continued forward. The stairwell in the distance made my decision for me. “WE ARE LEAVING! MOVE MOVE MOVE!”

  I spared a glance to ensure Tomas was following before my feet moved on their own at near warp speed. I slowed only at the bottom of the stairs where I spun about, rifle up, and motioned for Tomas to keep running. “UP! GO GO GO!”

  Once Tomas was clear, I started up, two or three steps at a time.

  “Where are we going?” Tomas belted out, not sounding the least bit panicked anymore.

  “UP!”

  “How far?”

  “To the top!”

  We made it up a half dozen floors before Tomas slowed, now panting, and leaned over the railing to look up. “Uh, Sam, I can’t see the top floor from here.”

  “And?”

  “We’re trapped.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.” I leaned over the rail, first looking up with the IR lamp, then down at the base of the steps. They were still clear. “Keep moving. If we’re lucky, they can’t leave the fog.”

  Tomas spared an instant to squint at me before resuming the climb. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I mean, it’s a possibility. Either way, there are several thousand of them down there. We’re not going to outrun them,” I noted, a slightly edging toward winded myself. “We can at least limit how many can get to us at once up here. If this goes all the way to one of the bell towers, they can’t flank us. Well, there’s always plan B at that point, too.”

  “Jump to our deaths?” Tomas asked with a sarcastic laugh. “At least it’ll be quick.”

  I snorted and paused at the next landing to check if anything had cleared the bottom yet. Nope. I didn’t want to tell him that we were well and truly fucked if these things were more than reanimated corpses. We might be able to take down a good number of these things if they were just run of the mill skeletons, but we’d get slaughtered in seconds when the front row joined the fray if it turned out they were closer to what they’d been in life. I had zero illusions how trying to fight two dozen, minus two, members of the House of Silence would turn out.

  We made it up a few more floors before Tomas stumbled to a halt. “Fuck it, Sam, if I’m going to die, I’m not dying tired. What was plan B, anyway?”

  A quick glance to the ground floor showed the bottom of the stairwell was absolutely packed with skeletons, shoulder to shoulder, and the milling mass coming up the stairs only grew with every heartbeat. My hand went to my chest pocket as I flashed a shit-eating grin. “The same plan B every infantryman has, Tomas.”

  His mouth opened to ask the obvious question as I produced a single item, one of the small gems Fiachra had warned us at great length to avoid damaging if we wanted to survive. “What’s that?”

  “The last fuck I have to give—” Angry sparks of multiple colors flew when I bashed the gem against the stone exterior wall and then held it out over empty air. I grinned as it fell from my hand. “—and there it goes.”

  Horror descended on the bard’s face. We both leaned over the side. I counted seconds as they passed. Despite seeing nothing below, I felt a silent shockwave push the air violently upward. I had just enough time to realize I hadn’t felt it with my skin, but my soul, before the pressure shifted from blow to suck and a blinding light bloomed below us. Instinctively, I threw myself back against the wall, not far from an opening that only had an empty window frame as fog streamed in through it, sucked down the shaft toward the light.

  Outside, the world erupted into brightness. When I poked my head into the opening I beheld a literal wall of ghostly white flame that left black trails in my vision as it swiftly spread away from the cathedral, apparently eating at the fog like a slow acting, ground-clinging fuel-air munition.

  Blinking and rubbing at his eyes with the back of one hand, Tomas half turned toward me, the shotgun in his hands forgotten. “What the hell was that?”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “Ding, bitches!”

  “What?”

  I suddenly remembered the only person in this world who’d get the reference was Jenna. “Don’t worry about it.” Another glance at the window showed the light outside swiftly fading. “So, I say we give it a minute, just in case that’s eating the air too, and then we get the fuck out of here, back to high ground.”

  Still blinking, Tomas swallowed a few times. “Yeah, sounds like a plan. Not going to argue.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I think. I don’t feel right.”

  I triggered Object Query, but a quick scan showed nothing new on his trait list. A second later, I realized I’d largely been ignoring that tool. I took a look down the stairwell. Other than the impression the stairs simply vanished toward the bottom, I was happy with what I saw. There were no skeletons.

  “Take a seat, we’ll move out when you feel up to it,” I added while pulling out the ring and fingerbone.

  [Ring of Return – Prototype (3 of 5) – Assembled as a proof of concept and given as a gift to a loved one, this single-use ring has long since served its purpose. The enchantment may be spent, but it still periodically leaks mana.]

  Recognizing my impression had been correct, I gritted my teeth together. That was one of the brothers. My eyes drifted down the details pane for fingerbone. “Uhm, Tomas, have you ever heard of an artificial archlich?”

  “Artificial what now??”

  I hadn’t mentioned, much less explained Object Query to Tomas and wasn’t sure explaining right now was a good idea. “Lich.”

  “I heard you the first time. Aren’t they all artificial?”

  “I guess you have a point.” I sank to the floor, dimly realizing that the adrenaline high was starting to fade and Tomas wasn’t the only one who needed a minute.