I pulled my zombie scout back into the shadows to wait for a few minutes and closed my eyes as I scanned the woods surrounding the ruins for any presence of death.
It wasn’t too difficult to pick up; death, whether that of a human or an animal, created an imprint between the planes of this world and the world of the Great Tree and the Sea of Souls. When I concentrated, I was able to pick up these trails, which glowed like thin threads of light in the darkness. I could see them—sense them—through solid objects like trees and stone.
Within minutes of casting my senses out into the woods, I picked up three carcasses: a half-eaten deer, obviously taken by wolves; a dead wolf with a broken antler in its side, which had no doubt been killed by the deer; and a dead boar, which was bloated and rotten and seemed to have drowned in a deceptively deep creek.
All of them were within two miles of the ruins, and with the power my corpse explosions were able to generate and that fact that it was quiet out here, these sniper assholes would hear and probably see the explosions quite clearly.
There was no sense in wasting any time. I held out my fingertips, feeling them buzzing with power, and connected my invisible conductor threads to the corpse of the wolf, which was farthest away from the ruins. I zapped a jolt of power along the thread, and in a sliver of a second, a tremendous blast ripped through the woods, shooting a fireball up into the night sky, the thunderous sound echoing through the mountains.
“What the fuck was that?” one of the snipers yelled.
“That was trouble. Big fucking trouble!” the other shouted.
I waited a few moments, then detonated the corpse of the boar. I heard shouts coming from the other side of the ruins, and someone roared, “We’re under attack!”
My plan worked perfectly. The snipers near my zombie raced off to the south side to get into position to fight off the attack they thought was on its way, and as soon as they did, I hurled my mind back into my zombie’s body. I only had a few seconds, and one last animal corpse to blow up to hold their attention, so I had to do this fast.
In the body of my zombie, I raced across the open space to the north wing, where the intact rooms were. And there, in the first room I crept into, was the actor, cowering in a corner with his hands over his head.
“Oh, by the gods, I don’t wanna die, I don’t wanna die,” he was whimpering. Man, was this guy a pussy.
Just to keep the snipers occupied, I detonated the final corpse, and it exploded in the trees just outside the farthest section of the ruins, followed by a bout of frantic shouts from the snipers, who were now completely convinced that a large-scale attack was underway.
I wasted no time in taking my real quarry though; controlling my zombie, I walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Get me out of here, you stupid fucking—” he began, turning and looking at me with naked rage in his teary eyes, a look that morphed into terror when he saw that he was not looking at one of his uncle’s snipers.
I didn’t give him time to scream. I knocked him out cold with a single punch, slung his body over my zombie’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes, ran across the stretch of open ground, and carried him into the crypt, where I bound and gagged him before he came to. After that, I ordered two zombies to carry him between them—I knew neither of them would get tired, but we could move faster like that—and then hightailed it out of the tunnel back into the woods before the snipers realized that the whole thing was a ruse.
The actor started waking up about a mile from the ruins. For a few moments, he looked around in sheer confusion, groggy and disoriented, and without any idea where he was or how he had gotten there. Thankfully, I was there to clear up these details for him.
“Wakey wakey, asshole,” I said as I slapped him over the face.
He turned his head to look at me and freaked out even more when he realized that he was looking at “himself.” Then, a look of understanding came across his face, followed by what had to be an attempt at a smile, which was difficult with a rag stuffed in his mouth.
“I don’t know what you’re smiling about, asshole,” I said, “but when I start pulling your teeth out one by one, that smug grin will disappear pretty quickly.”
“Mm, mf, gnn!” he mumbled, desperately trying to say something despite the presence of the gag in his mouth.
“Shut the fuck up. You’ll get to speak when we get back to my camp. Until then, save your breath.”
The actor obeyed, albeit reluctantly, and kept his mouth shut for the rest of the hike. When we entered the camp, I took him over to a quiet corner away from the others so that I could interrogate him in peace. My zombies dumped him on the ground, and I ripped the gag out of his mouth.
“You turned the people of Brakith against me,” I said. “You made my people think I was a vampire, abducting and killing young women.”
“W-wait, wait,” he gasped, trying to catch his breath and groaning with pain. “L-let me explain, p-please.”
“Explain what, you hemorrhoid?”
“I, I didn’t kill anyone, and nobody died! It was just rumors about the dead girls, just rumors!”
“Wow, you’re a good liar,” I said, my fists clenched tight. “Unless you really are that fucking stupid
