Snow crunched underfoot as the group pressed into the mining town, flanked by more buildings that had either been destroyed by combat or the elements. They found more bodies in the snow, frozen completely solid. Many of them were no longer in one piece.

  The Oracles, as ever, stood a comfortable distance from the Wardens as they picked their way through the remains of the town.

  “Back when I passed through here, they had teams of people working on keeping the place from being frozen over. Things being as bad as they are now... feels like the place must’ve been overrun more than a week ago,” Kim noted.

  “How many people were living here?”

  Kim shrugged. “Didn’t get an exact headcount. It was a pretty active mining colony, so maybe two hundred people. That’s just a rough estimate.”

  “So... We could be dealing with over a hundred of those corrupted miners?”

  “Likely not,” Iosef replied. “I imagine a large part of the residents here were converted. Of those who did not escape, others would have been killed in the fighting, damaged to severely that even undeath could not put them back together. And it’s likely a contingent of those corrupted have likely wandered off from here anyway, seeking to spread their vile essence to others.”

  “And that’s... the normal modus operandi for these things?” Riley asked.

  “Usually,” Iosef and Arubis said in unison.

  “Seems like it’s only Rot in this region. Nothing tied to Death to raise these corpses,” Kim said.

  Several portions of snow surrounding them suddenly exploded outward. More miners, their bodies bloated and blackened by horrid growths. Some of them still had their faces exposed, but their eyes were vacant and devoid of anything that could be considered humanity.

  Riley cursed and jerked back, avoiding the earth-shattering smash of a pickaxe. His shotel swept upward, cleaving though the frozen flesh of the miner’s arm and severing it at the elbow. Even losing an arm, with black blood spraying onto the snow, the poor deformed bastard barely managed a moan of pain.

  Grimacing, Riley spun and cut deep into his neck, carving deep into the oily flesh. The miner thudded onto the snow with his head only partially attached.

  The hatchet had been a damn fine weapon when Riley got it. A workhorse axe that had helped him immensely. But there was a world of difference between it and the shotel, he noted. This was blade built for killing, not a tool repurposed as a weapon. Granted Riley had no clue who had actually forged the thing in the first place, and doubted he wanted to know, but their craftsmanship truly was impressive.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He raised his arms to block a swing from another miner, but the immense strength behind the pickaxe launched Riley back, his body bouncing and skidding along the snow and kicking up great white clouds on either side. Through the chaos of his own tumbling vision, he could see Kim fighting two at once, expertly batting their swings away with her blade.

  Riley forced himself to one knee, his vision still shaking, as the miner moved toward him as quickly as his frozen, disfigured legs would carry him. He raised his staff, firing off a burst of Flesh-Rend that only lasted for two seconds. The miner’s skin bubbled and burst, strips of skin peeling away, yet this only made him stumble briefly.

  They felt pain, but the sensation was so dull that even Flesh-Rend barely got a reaction from them.

  Still, that brief moment of distraction allowed him to rush in, cleaving the poor bastard’s skull in two with a well-aimed chop. More oil-like blood sprayed outward, coating his sleeve in the dripping excess. Riley grimaced, but it was a mild reaction.

  Inwardly, he was starting to worry about how little the gore phased him...

  More frozen monstrosities emerged from the snowbank, each deformed in a unique way but all of them possessing the strange black growths of the Rot. For as strong as they were, their slowness meant that they weren’t too threatening so long as Riley didn’t let himself get blindsided. Each one dropped a crisp 200 Essence on death, leaving Riley with an extra thousand Essence by the time the ambush had been dealt with.

  He stood in place, huffing for breath, as the blackened tumors slowly dissolved away from the freshly-deceased bodies. Kim, conversely, stood tall and confident. A few puffs of steam escaped from the thin gaps in her faceplate.

  “You good?” she called.

  “Yeah,” Riley replied in between huffs of breath. “These people, are they still...conscious when they’re possessed? Is being possessed by the Rot like being overtaken by cordyceps fungus?”

  “Like what?” Kim asked, incredulous.

  “It’s a type of fungus back on Earth. Tends to grow on insects, turning them into ‘zombies.’”

  Kim shrugged her broad armoured shoulders. “I wouldn’t know, I’m not much of an expert on that kind of thing. But if you’re wondering if the people we killed could have been cured, don’t. There isn’t any known cure once the infection gets in that deep. And if you’re afraid they’re even aware of what’s going on, well that doesn’t seem to be the case. Any mind or awareness they may have had is gone... killing them is a mercy, frankly.”

  “I guess that’s something,” Riley replied. “C’mon. We oughta move further in.”

  They did just that, their pace slow and measured. All was silent around them, save fir the wailing wind. The snowfall was growing slightly heavier, the cold flurries forming a pale dusting on Riley’s black robes.

  Eventually they reached the middle of the mining down, where a handful of the buildings were still largely in tact. A few old lanterns, still lit and casting hazy yellow light through the mist, showed the winding, carved path down toward rows of tunnels and caverns.

  A Lodestone protruded from the earth, only a short distance from a snow-encrusted brass statue of a crowned knight. Riley touched the stone and took a moment to read the text engraved at the base of the statue.

  ‘Our lives and our labour for our Empire.’

  “Guess the people out here were loyal, at least,” Riley said, taking a few steps from the Lodestone. “Fat lot of good it did them... these poor people. Where to we go from here?”

  “There’s a lot of ground to cover. This place isn’t exactly small, ya know? And at least we have a Lodestone now, as a bit of a safety net.” Kim hummed and scanned the snow-crusted environment, paying particular attention to any shaded regions her gaze swept across.

  Riley grunted. “Might be some worthwhile supplies to grab too,” he noted. Try as he might, he couldn't ignore the occasional rumbles of protest in his stomach. “Guess we should split up to cover more ground?”

  Under normal circumstances, Riley would have considered splitting up to be a foolish and suicidal move to make. A bad movie cliche that would get at least one of them killed. Now, however, he found himself slightly more open to the idea. As Wardens, they were functionally immortal. Why not take the risk?

  A small chuckle echoed inside Kim’s helmet. “Hell, works for me. You check these buildings, I’ll take point in the nearest tunnel. We can probably make came in on of these buildings come nightfall anyhow.”