Lumil snorted. “Yeah, great idea. Let’s turn our backs on those. What the hell are they?”
The closest building on their right shifted and collapsed the rest of the way, then a snarling, rabid skaxen leaped from behind the next building over and charged at Byrd.
Byrd unleashed two balls of green fire at the skaxen, hitting it in the chest and stomach. The other magical staggered backward and looked down at its chest. Loose rags hung from the skaxen’s skin, and beneath them, the same black sludge oozed from its pores, giving it an eerie sheen as if the magical had slathered itself in black oil. The skaxen thumped its chest, sending a spray of sludge in all directions, then attacked again.
“Seriously, what the hell?” Byrd sent out more green fire, stopping his attacker long enough to step away from the snarling, flailing creature.
“What happened to him?” Cheyenne asked.
“Anyone wanna help first and ask questions later?” Byrd shouted as the skaxen just kept coming.
Lumil conjured the spinning disks of blazing-red runes around her fists. “I gotcha.”
A mottled black-orange skaxen leaped from the ruined village and landed on Lumil’s back. The goblin woman roared and flung her attacker away, then stalked after that one instead. “Come back here!”
A dozen more skaxen wearing rags and covered in oozing black sludge swarmed from the wreckage toward the traveling party. Black sludge dripped from their fangs and ran beneath their orange skin in thick lines like veins. Cheyenne took a step back. “Jesus, look at their eyes.”
“They might look the same, Cheyenne, but those are not the eyes of Oracles.” L’zar hissed at the oncoming swarm of rotting skaxen while Byrd and Lumil finally managed to put down the first two.
“They’re gone.” Corian’s blade-like claws extended in a glint of silver. “We’re fighting animals now.”
If I couldn’t smell them dying, I’d say he was wrong. Cheyenne summoned two sparking black orbs and nodded. “This sucks.”
When Lumil’s fist came up into her attacker’s face and sent the skaxen-thing flying back into a rotting building, the rest of the crazed pack turned to look at the damage. Then they charged.
Cheyenne sent blast after blast into the oncoming horde, knocking them back into each other. Orange-black bodies flew, spraying black sludge in every direction, but they kept coming.
Maleshi and Corian darted around the attackers in flashes of silver light, going as close as they dared to the sludge-soaked grass and the rotting village. Their claws glinted in the light as they came down on any mottled body part in their way. The skaxen screamed and clutched bleeding stumps. One kept crawling toward Maleshi’s foot with one hand as it clutched its eviscerated stomach with the other. She put it down with another swipe of her claws and kept moving.
Foltr raised his staff and swung it at the creatures, making contact every time with thick smacks and blasting them back with red light from his gnarled, outstretched hand.
Ember froze behind the line of fighting, staring at the bleeding, burned, or disemboweled skaxen clawing across the ground to get at the magicals standing against them. “Holy shit. We’re fighting magical zombies.”
Cheyenne flung black tendrils from her fingertips, which coiled around the neck of a skaxen leaping right toward Ember and jerked the creature backward. It let out a strangled choking sound and Cheyenne stepped aside, releasing her tendrils to send two black energy spheres into the thing’s throat. “Can’t really say we if you’re just standing there, Em.”
“Right.” The fae girl blinked and stepped forward, shoving outward with both hands. A wall of brilliant violet light shot away from her and spread across the scrambling, snarling lines of rotting skaxen. The force of her attack threw them back like bowling pins, and the lost creatures convulsed on the ground before lying still.
“Whoa.” Cheyenne spun around toward her friend. “That one new?”
Ember shrugged. “I think so.”
L’zar dodged a skaxen’s swiping claws, stepping around the thing with his hands clasped behind his back and watching it move.
Cheyenne turned with the others to watch the drow not fight the creature. “What is he doing?”
As if to answer her, L’zar flicked his hand toward the creature. A concentrated burst of white light hit the skaxen in mid-air as it leaped toward him and blew the blighted magical to smithereens. Thick, sludge-covered chunks of skaxen rained down around the drow, who’d raised a shield around himself and held it until the revolting deluge subsided.
Byrd and Lumil guffawed in surprise, pointing at the mess and shaking their heads.
Ember doubled over and turned away, dry-heaving at the side of the path.
Grunting, Foltr watched the path beneath him as he trudged onward, thumping his staff into the dirt. “A waste. Pure waste is what it is.”
Corian headed toward L’zar, frowning at the bodies littering the ground between them and the not-so-abandoned village. “That was a little excessive.”
“In the end, perhaps.” L’zar’s fingers moved quickly to lower his shield, then he stepped toward the closest intact body and bent over it for a closer look. “I wanted to see how this worked.”
“What, you mean, how an entire village of skaxen mutated with the blight over four hundred years?” Cheyenne stopped beside Ember and set a hand briefly on her friend’s back. “You okay?”
“Yep.” Ember straightened and swiped her violet-streaked hair away from her face. “I can’t believe I didn’t puke. I’m good.”
“This wasn’t a generational mutation.” L’zar straightened again and stepped back to study the black-oozing bodies. “No skaxen village would have a new population in only four hundred years, if it’s even been that long since these were tainted.”
Corian said, “So, they were infected.”
“That’s one way to look at it. Touched, perhaps.” L’zar strode up the path and scanned the foothills ahead. “The wildlife Persh’al mentioned were mutations. I would’ve said these skaxen contracted this from the water or a tainted food supply, but I can’t, can I?”
Maleshi shook a glistening black chunk off the toe of her
