Titan: A LitRPG Adventure (UnderVerse Book 4) Jez Cajiao (top ten books of all time TXT) 📖

finding their natural places easily, with Grizz on the front line next to Lydia and me, Jian protecting the archers and Arrin, and Yen and Tang on either flank, able to see better than the rest of us with their elven heritage.

The room we were in now was considerably larger than any we’d been in yet, with sections of sagging ceiling hanging low over us.

We moved out from the small corner we’d been fighting in and took stock of the larger area. Keeping the newly-made entrance behind us, and the wall to our right where the majority of the Naga had slithered up from, we were left with a huge space that vanished upwards, interspersed with sections of the old floor above that jutted out, creaking and groaning ominously. Even my recovered DarkVision and Fireball weren’t enough to dispel the darkness to show the entire room.

“Something’s out there,” Yen called softly from my left, drawing her bowstring back and sighting down the arrow as Tang called out from the right.

“Here, too,” he said calmly, and I heard Arrin start to cast, building a spell ready.

I held the Fireball in my right hand still, so I called out to the group to be ready as I threw it forward, angled up, just in case whatever was out there wasn’t hostile. A few seconds later, it slammed into the far wall, bursting and cascading flames out from the point of impact as the barrier shook slightly.

Below the flames, exposed for us all to see, were dozens of crawling, stumbling, and blindly staggering undead. The corpses ranged from rotting and skeletal to almost fresh as they shambled forward with mindless hunger, hunting the living.

The flames guttered out, and the room was plunged back into darkness, lit only by the distantly flickering flames of something that smoldered away fitfully.

“Well, that’s not good,” Arrin’s voice remarked bluntly before Grizz called out. The usual joking and cheerful tones I was used to hearing from him, as one of the youngest members ever to grace the Dravith Praetoria, were lacking as he spoke up, determined and ready for the fight.

“We need light, sir, and somewhere to fall back to. It’s unlikely for us to have been so unlucky as to just stumble into the main concentration. This appears to be a full infestation of the dead, and we’re just seeing an outlier.”

“Arrin!” I snapped. “Here, start charging these up!” I called as I tossed the bag of magelights at him. He released his spell, sending five Magic Missiles flaring out into the darkness. Two hit their targets, one blowing off an arm and the other slamming into a ribcage and detonating, smashing a staggering skeleton apart in a shower of bones. The remaining three flew straight and true, impacting walls in the distance. One hit a doorway, exposing a hallway that was filled with the shambling figures, and Yen swore, putting her bow away and starting to build a spell.

“We need to bleed them, Jax,” Grizz said seriously, his voice professional. “We’ve encountered this kind of thing before, and we either retreat and get more forces to deal with it, or we bleed them of as many as we can, and continually fall back. The real risk from shamblers isn’t the individual, it’s the fact that there’s hundreds or thousands to each of us. They can afford to make a hundred mistakes, and all they lose is time, until the Necromancer resummons them. We make a mistake, we lose someone.” His expression was uncharacteristically grim.

“Okay, people, aim for the head, kill as many as you can, then we fall back and climb back up to the floor above.”

“They’re getting closer…” Tang warned, drawing his bow back and firing a single shot out into the darkness.

“Then let’s go play!” I snarled to the group, leading the way forward, Lydia and Grizz going with me as the others used ranged weapons to start cutting the undead down.

I rushed at the oncoming horde, my DarkVision bringing them into sight as I ran. They were slow, weak looking things, most didn’t even have weapons, but here and there, I could see the glimmer of metal, and identified swords, shields, and spears, as well as a surprising number of other weapons being carried, dragged, or brandished.

The first few shamblers I reached were barely intact, almost entirely skeletal and clearly held together by the magic that reanimated them. They clacked their teeth as they ‘saw’ me with their glowing eyes, and suddenly, they sped up.

Whatever was controlling them clearly started taking a hand as the general lethargy seemed to drop, and the corpses straightened and rushed forward.

I spun my naginata around, sweeping out long and low from right to left in a rising arc, smashing one’s legs apart and sending it cartwheeling away as I swung on. The next was hit in the hip and knocked backwards, and the third, as I spun around, received the weighted, metal-clad base of the naginata smashing into its skull, shattering it and sending the bones clattering to the floor in a spray as the animating force lost cohesion.

I heard grunts and clatters from either side as Lydia and Grizz went to work, and I flipped my naginata around, pushing a touch of fire into the weapon and igniting it. I stabbed out, driving the tip of the blade into the next closest shambler’s face, feeling the bones shatter, then yanked back and twisted, slamming both arms out straight. The naginata snapped diagonally between them as I hit two skeletons at once, their questing hands reaching for me as I threw them backwards.

I twisted and kicked out, staggering another undead. The light grew behind me as Arrin filled magelight after magelight and threw them outwards, illuminating the room more.

The fight was close in and was only growing closer as more and more of the undead seemed to awaken from the unsteady general undead reminiscent of old horror movies, into the terrifying, fast and determined kind. More and