After going a bit deeper into the undeath terrain with Samuel, Bert, Garrick, and Bobby in command, the team was in the clear most of the time, as Bert reported all the abnormalities he sensed without veiling them in a gag.
They had yet to encounter any undead, as except for the 16 in the beginning, none could be felt or seen. Of course, they didn't even know if those 16 undead were killed or not.
The team, which had been alerted about the poison in the atmosphere, was moving cautiously wearing strange mechanical, triangles-filled, abstract art-patterned black masks, which reduced the poison in the air inhaled. Which meant that they didn't have a perfect way to defend themselves against poison, but since they had healers, they didn't worry about it too much, though it was only at the beginning when they didn't know the effects of the poison.
The weakest one of the groups was requested to take the risk, and understanding their situation, he agreed but soon came to regret it. "Huff.... Huff... Huff...." His huffs filled the solemn plight as severe exhaustion, muscle pain, headache, stomach churn, minor blindness, ki exhaustion, and many other debuffes assaulted the man.
He was having a hard time keeping up with the rest of his group, who were walking like snails in their minds. Samuel commanded the group to take a rest, and surprisingly, but not by much, the group slumped to the ground as soon as those words left Samuel's mouth, as if they had been waiting to hear that for years. Understanding that it was due to the low rate of breaths they were inhaling that the group was getting exhausted faster, Samuel too didn't mind them as he walked towards a tanker and sat with his back facing the tanker's back.
*
A few hours later, they recovered a bit of their stamina and got back on their feet; this time even the weakest one was wearing a mask. Again, strangely enough, they hadn't encountered any undead even though they were still, in one place.
Wary about the terrain and the sense of dread, Samuel continued to take a step forward, with his guard up and his grip tightly gripped around his battle axes. The deeper Samuel peered, the more clouded his senses became. Before his senses were cut off, Samuel turned to face the group behind him, and
Noticed that everybody had disappeared.
"?!!!" Samuel shuddered before drifting back, as if to avoid an unseen threat. Before he realised it, Samuel was stuck in a dense cloud of some strange toxin—a cliché plight that befell upon a protagonist in a few novels Samuel had read, but that didn't mean he wasn't terrified.
[Took you long enough to reach here.] An extremely ominous voice resounded in the dense cloud, and by the next instance,
WHOOOOSH-!!
A strong gust shot out at his face, and without him even realising it, his mask was cut in half as it fell on the ground without a single sound.
Doing his best to ignore the voice that had just sounded in his consciousness, "Everyone!!!??" Samuel roared, and an eerie silence responded to his roar, suppressing the anxiousness that had been clawing at his consciousness. Samuel contained himself and began to roar and search for his group.
Minutes passed, but he could see nothing, nor could he feel any presence near him, and at the right corner of his eyes, something zoomed,
And an abrupt thought to kill emerged in his mind, because he thought that if what he had seen just now was indeed an enemy, if he left it alone, his teammates would be in danger, but if what he had seen just now was his friend, then 'he had no reason to run away from me,' Samuel concluded, and with that thought engraved in his mind,
"VALKYRIE RUSH!" Samuel roared beneath his breath, and since he couldn't afford to waste any more time, he clenched his battle axes and spun! He spun continuously with a 360-degree swirl and continued to spin like a "top" as he cut through the dense clouds, which felt like cotton candy.
His vision clouded at extreme levels as his senses dulled strongly, and he became dizzy, not because he was spinning like a top but because of the toxins in the cloud that engulfed him. A certain fear began to devour him whole, and soon, the cut chunks of the toxic cloud began to seem like undead beings. Assuming that they were the reason that the toxic cloud engulfed "them," Samuel began slashing more fiercely.
"Arrrr...." Dying groans began to resound in the cloud, as Samuel could see the "dispersing," undead clearly now. Though he was still trapped inside the cloud, due to his fierce swings and spins, the cloud seemed to be getting pushed back.
Agitated and blinded by the rage about the fact that he fell into such a simple trap, Samuel, who was spinning like a top, gradually halted, tightened his grip around the battle axes, positioned himself with his right axe at the front and the left axe at the back, and channelled ki into his axes, which soon began to glimmer bright blue, and formed an additional layer of more sharper blades in front of the axes, which had extended out by 5 more inches, and tensed his muscles and core, nearly to his limit,
SWING-!
SLASH-!
And spun, swinging his axes horizontally, as a ring of bright blue dyed ki shot out from his axes.
SPLURT-!
SPLATTER-!!!
A loud yet subtle wave of splattering, of what Samuel assumed to be blood, sounded from every corner in the cloud, which satiated his ego and anxiety as he began to pace around in search of his teammates.
Hours later.
Samuel continued to pace around, yet he had stumbled upon no one, not even a bigger rock....
"!!!" Samuel finally realised that the small rock he had seen at the beginning was the only rock he had come across in a few hours, meaning he was either running in circles or he had been trapped in a strange phenomenon from which he wasn't able to move or get out.
Soon, he felt like his consciousness was trembling, and unable to take it anymore, he took out a recovery potion from his inventory and chugged it in an instant. His dulled senses began to recover at a stronge pace, and finally, he was able to think straight, and for a reason only Samuel knew,
He began to tremble violently.
Despair, at a level that Samuel hadn't felt even when his parents passed away right in front of him, washed over him.
A sense of dread, self-loath, grief, confusion, anxiety, fear, loss, and pain spiked with many dangerous thoughts and emotions surfaced in his consciousness as a single, soul-shuddering thought dragged Samuel to the depths of an abyss that even the devil might find terrifying.
'Undead....'
"Don't have bloo..." Samuel mumbled under his breath, and exactly when his consciousness was on the verge of breaking apart,
WHOOOOSH-!!
"WOOOOOOUUUUU!!!!" A ghastly voice sounded as a dreadful, humanoid figure's face zoomed out of the dense cloud and passed through Samuel's face, which twisted into a strange, dreadful, and fearful expression.
The face just now seemed like a ghost; it might be a Banshee, but he couldn't figure out what it was as fear devoured his mind and rendered him unable to think meticulously.
His fear was of two types; the latter was about the plight that had just swept past him, and he, for a certain reason, knew for sure that it was just the beginning, and whatever was going to be thrown at him next was going to be far more terrifying than what he had just witnessed.
And the former was an emotion he wasn't able to define clearly, but considering the plight, it may have been fear, which was about the fact that while he was clouded in the toxic cloud and when his senses were dulled nearly to a maximum level,
He, the vanguard for the vanguard, the leader of the group, whose back many trusted with their lives itself, had reaped them of the very thing they trusted him with.
Their lives.
Under the illusion created by his fear and ego, the undead he hallucinated while in the toxic cloud
Were his teammates!
The group that had determined to follow him to the depths of hell,
Was annihilated by Samuel himself.
At these thoughts, his mind ceased to function clearly, and
"S...l!"
A distant voice sounded from somewhere.
"Sa...l!!!"
The same voice sounded again.
"SAMUEL!!!!"
SLAP-!!!
"!!!!" With a violent shudder, Samuel jolted awake with a stinging pain assaulting his right cheek and instantly stood back on his feet as he gazed around with tears filling his eyes. His gaze flitted across the large group of fifty in front of him, and he wasn't able to hold back his tears as he rushed towards the closest one, Garrick.
SPLASH-!
SPLASH-!
SPLASH-!
He ignored the strange sounds trickling in his ears as he rushed towards Garrick and jumped on him, to hug him, with a bright smile on his face.
WHOOM....
SPLASH-!!!!
Strangely, he couldn't feel anything as he landed on the ground, summersaulting. Assuming Garrick had dodged his pounce playfully, while he wasn't able to see because tears were blurring his vision, Samuel supported himself with his hands, trying to get back up,
SPLASH-!
"Huh?" Only then did Samuel notice that his hands were submerged in an inch-deep puddle of crimson-red blood, which had dyed his body and face similarly.
"T-they m-mu-must have killed the undead.... Ha, haha, ha..." A strange, stoic chuckle escaped Samuel's mouth as he unknowingly began to deny reality,
Or what seemed to be reality.
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