Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 77: Convenience

Toren Daen

I peered over the edge of the rooftop, looking at the milling undead below. Their skin was sloughing off, all in various states of decay. Instead of bright, shining violet, their eyes were dull pinpricks of purple. They wandered about lethargically, dragging themselves without purpose.

Most had cuts along their spines where half-decayed red runes stood out, making my head swim with questions.

"So they just stay in the streets even after losing aggro?" I asked Darrin, who was crouched by my side.

He nodded, his eyes trained on the next building. "Once they pop up, they don't go away until you cut off their heads or pierce their hearts. They're unrelenting, horrid bastards, but most are easy to fool."

I frowned. "Most?" I asked.

"The ones that chased us up the stairs back when I found you," Darrin said, "Those ones pop up if the mages they're fighting don't die fast enough. They're smarter, faster, and more deadly. You can avoid these grunts just fine by muffling your steps, but those ones will follow you even if you don't make a sound. And they'll compel the others to follow."

I remembered the zombies that had tracked us so far, only letting off once Darrin and I leapt to the walls of the skyscraper. Their skin hadn't been nearly as decayed as the other corpses, with most of them largely intact. What did that mean? Did these zombies lose their abilities as they decomposed? Or was it something else?

"So we stick to the rooftops," I said, "At least until the store I saw." I looked back at the striker. "How do you feel about being hauled through the air?"

Darrin's sharp emerald eyes flashed with something giddy. "Like you did to get me to the skyscraper's walls? I'd be up for that any day."

—

And so we found ourselves hopping from building to building. I pulled Darrin along, the man whooping in the air beside me.

It was a noticeable drain on my mana reserves to hold a grown man in the air, made even more difficult by the fact that he had to keep watch on his own mana constantly. If he let his focus slip for even an instant, his natural defenses would lash out at my control, ramping the difficulty up exponentially.

The striker seemed to be enjoying the ride far more than I was. I looked down at a street, a few corpses meandering here and there along the decimated pavement. I held my arm behind me, suctioning my hand to the bricks. The soles of my feet lashed themselves to the wall, keeping me from falling. I hung there like a certain web-slinging superhero, watching for any of the elite zombies that might see through my sound-dampening.

I was close to the store I'd spotted coming in. The signs of my previous battle were all around me: scorched earth, cuts in the building where the wind had ground against stone, and shards of metal still lodged in the street. I spotted the metal pole I'd perched on, cut cleanly through near the base.

And then I finally spotted my quarry. A bright sign illuminated a dark storefront, a splash of color amidst the ever-present gray.

Trader Joe's.

I looked down the street, keeping my eyes peeled for the elite undead who were smart enough to attack me on sight rather than sound. "See anything?" I asked Darrin. The sound barrier I maintained around us made it safe to talk, and it was always good to have a second pair of eyes.

"Can you float me around that corner?" he asked, pointing toward the edge of the building I was hanging off of. "We gotta check our corners."

I obliged, willing the mana carrying him to shift him further. The control aspect of my telekinetic spellform didn't have the same issues with power exertion over distance. The force I could exert with my pushes and pulls decreased linearly the further they got from my body. With absolute control, however, it was more complicated. The further the mana was from me, the harder it was to maintain: not in an easy-to-discern way like the other aspect, though.