The Oracle Paths

But that still didn't explain why dead people were coming back to life. Jake had witnessed firsthand how this Wengol Player had summoned an old jar to poison or curse all these Wengols, and their vital signs were somewhat inconsistent.

Their body temperature had not changed, but their hearts were no longer beating. What seemed to animate them was the black gas that had taken up residence in their bodies. Yet the gas soon evaporated from these victims, dispersing into the atmosphere as if it had never existed.

Only Jake and Ruby with their special eyes could see how the gas coalesced again once it was camouflaged by the dark clouds, the black snake streaking westward like a flicker of shadow. Presumably the direction to which the Wengol Player had teleported.

Jake was looking forward to chasing it down and asking it some questions, but he was too busy purging the battlefield of Beholders. Since he had disposed of the first devil-eye, the hundreds of Beholders scattered throughout the area had begun to stir.

These creatures were not fleeing, but they had ramped up the power of their large-scale mental entrapment and miasma collection speed. Each of these little demons had turned into a sort of vortex ravenously sucking up all the miasma and negative thoughts in the vicinity.

Locating them had become child's play and even ordinary humans and Wengol warriors could now see them. Alas, very few still had the sanity to care about them. Those who could were either completely petrified of terror or had retreated to their respective camps, mentally preparing to perish by fighting to the death.

Fortunately, this was not the case for two Mutants. Jake and Ruby's chilling efficiency in swooping down on these vortexes like a ghost and obliterating the Beholders inside with a swipe of their claws or sabers bordered on the divine, and their lightning-fast movements accompanied by shockwaves and afterimages soon left deep trenches and craters all over the plain.

With this vortex of miasma and negative thoughts, killing these tiny demons was no longer so easy. Jake didn't have time to watch Ruby and he could only hope that there wouldn't be too many collateral victims.

At first he tried to implode them with his telekinesis, but he soon realized that their Spirit Body was impregnable, protected by copious and impenetrable spiritual energy.

"Damn it!" Jake seethed as he angrily clutched his sword.

[No choice, you'll have to kill them manually.] Xi commented snidely, much to his chagrin.

With a single stride, Jake vanished from his position and reappeared behind one of those eyeballs levitating twelve meters above the ground, flicking his saber forward. Before he could even reach his target, overwhelming negative thoughts assaulted his mind, dislocating his will to vanquish the enemy.

His eyes widened, his pupils narrowed, sweat covered his palms and forehead, his shoulders hunched and uncontrollable spasms made his saber holding arms tremble. Sheer terror.

Just as his mind was beginning to take in the magnitude of this dramatic change, his heart raced, his mouth went horribly dry, his jaw clenched, and his muscles tensed, a hatred and bloodlust surging up within him that threatened to overtake him. Sheer anger.

Then out of the corner of his eye, a patch of skin from the ample bosom of a young Lodunvaliese woman soldier flashed into his field of vision and his gaze was immediately drawn to her lips. His senses were heightened and an unpleasant heat flush went up to his face, his crotch becoming brutally stiff. Sheer lust.

Other primal emotions, in their rawest form overwhelmed his mind, mixing with each other, mutating and influencing each other to produce more complex but equally alienated feelings such as cruelty, sadism, lust for killing, until all that was left was an explosive cocktail engulfing his soul and threatening to consume him forever.

Forcibly suppressing his body's abnormal reactions, Jake forced out all the distractions with one exhale, but he couldn't shake off the whirlwind of emotions so quickly. All that fury, all that craving, all that trepidation... it had to be vented somewhere!

SLASH!

His arms suddenly stopped shaking and his blade swung down with a ferocity unlike his previous attack. The demonic eyeball bulged with incomprehension before being cleaved in half. The vortex scattered and the suction force sucking up the miasma subsided.

"Phew..." Jake exhaled as he wiped the sweat dripping from his forehead. When he inspected his sleeve, it was completely soaked. What was most uncomfortable was that he still had his erection and his heart was still thumping. " You sick bastards."

Forcibly controlling his blood flow, Jake stilled his body and mind then charged toward another Beholder, mind-conditioned this time. It was as perilous as ever, but by using his telekinesis to attack from a distance, he managed to limit the damage.

Glancing fleetingly at Ruby to see how she was doing, his barely contained rage threatened to overwhelm him again. Her flushed face, her constricted pupils, her bared teeth, her trembling arms, her heaving chest betrayed the same signs of excitement as he had earlier. But while he was trying to fight these symptoms, she was letting them have an almost complete hold on her.

With each swipe of her claw, a Beholder was pulverized, but the seven or eight humans and Wengols fighting nearby were also annihilated. He didn't mind when they were undeads or irrecoverable lunatics, but a quarter of these victims were completely sane.

The most revolting part of all this was that the silver glow traditionally pulsing in her eyes when the Digestor was in control was absent, suggesting that she might actually be under the influence of these miasmas.

Jake breathed in deeply for the umpteenth time to restrain himself from attacking her instead of the Beholders, but an unforeseen twist prevented him from considering that option for good.

For even after their bodies had been cleansed of the black gas, the infected Wengols were still as strong as ever. He expected them to collapse to the ground or revert to their former selves, but certainly not to continue attacking their peers as if nothing had happened.

Their physical strength and stamina seemed to have almost doubled and their inexpressiveness was matched only by their inability to feel pain, or anything else for that matter. The only downside was that these Wengol zombies were undeniably slower.

And that was a very good thing! Or the rest of the sane soldiers would have been overwhelmed very quickly.

If Jake wasn't mistaken, all those Wengols were indeed dead. Although it looked like they were killing each other, the situation was very different from the killing spree instigated by the elusive Beholders.

Another crucial point was that the dead coming back to life were not only part of the Wengol camp. Those affected by the gas had indeed become walking dead, but the corpses in the human camp were also starting to rise one by one. This was not the work of the Beholders, nor of the cursed jar, but something else even more wicked.

His forehead scrunched up, Jake noticed especially that these new zombies and other lunatic warriors and civilians on both sides were not trying to avoid each other, not hesitating to slaughter one another frantically whenever they crossed paths on the battlefield. As soon as one of these berserk humans or Wengols died, they were quick to rise up and join the ranks of the Undeads.

Dumbfounded, Jake watched helplessly as an army of 60,000 aliens collapsed in a matter of seconds. Encompassing one of these Undeads with his mental sense, then another Wengol driven by rabid rage, then a third Wengol still sane, but also alive and well, the hypothesis he feared was confirmed.

"A Death Mark." Jake took a deep breath to calm himself as he recognized the rune. It wasn't exactly the same as the necromancer's that Nelekai had cast in the Dungeon Digestor, but the baleful, unnatural energy was exactly the same.

Problem was, there were no necromancers around. So when had these Death Marks been implanted?

Jake didn't have the nerve to claim himself infallible. He didn't doubt for a second that a very powerful necromancer could cast this massive Death Spell right under his nose. But at the time, Nelekai, who was a Sixth-Ordeal Player, had not been able to fool his senses. His Death Spell was an antonym of the word subtlety.

It could only mean one thing. Unless the spell caster had such expertise and power that Jake failed to notice, in which case he'd better get the hell out of there, then all those Death Marks had been implanted long before this battle... On both sides.

His mind spiraling as he tried to derive all the conclusions from this inference, Jake's face turned pale as he imagined the mastermind's degree of scheming and forethought behind it all.

"We've fallen into a trap." Jake realized, his heart sinking in his chest.

But what else could he do? Ruby was right. Other than slaying the Beholders within his reach and saving what he could, nothing at all.

'If only I'd had more time to master my Rune Engraver Soul Class. Maybe I could have erased those Death Marks before they activated.' Jake lamented as he continued to kill the remaining Beholders faster and faster.

His efficiency was only increasing, but the rate at which the number of Undeads was increasing was far greater than the rate at which he was wiping out these demons.

When he and Ruby defeated the last Beholder, only 2,400 refugees and 300 elite Wengols from the Protectorate brigade remained. This handful of die-hard survivors now faced over 60,000 undead.

All those who had lost their minds and given in to their murderous and fornication urges were dead.