Ascendant

Nym tried to force his brain past the initial surge of revulsion he felt from seeing his first ghoul, but it was a hard thing to take in at a glance. It was human-shaped, but with mottled grey and green skin. Patchy strands of lank hair hung from its scalp, and it had unnaturally long arms and fingers. A prehensile tongue hung out of its mouth, which was filled with sharp teeth many sizes too big.

It was disgusting to look at it, and up close it had a rancid stink that was unlike anything Nym had ever smelled before. It had landed on Nomick feet first, pushing the earth mage down, and its sharp fingers were eagerly reaching down to tear into the man’s flesh. Nym stood, rooted with shock, and even though he knew he needed to do something, he just stood there.

An aura of arcana sprang up nearby and pillars of earth shot up on either side of Nomick. They slammed into the ghoul, lifting it slightly into the air and allowing Nomick to scramble free. He pivoted in place once he was back on his feet and cast his own spell, causing the ground to tear itself open. The ghoul fell into it, and it slammed shut over top of it.

“Come on! That’s not going to hold it for long,” Nomick said, grabbing Nym’s arm and tugging him along.

“I… I can’t believe I just stood there. I’m so sorry,” Nym said. “What is wrong with me?”

“Not the time for introspection, Nym!” Nomick tugged on his arm again. “We’ve got to keep running!”

Nym snapped out of it and pulled arcana into his soul well, then lifted himself into the air and took Nomick with him. Together, the two skimmed over the ground, easily twice as fast as the rest. Once they had a decent lead, he set Nomick down and said, “Keep going. I’m going to go look for stragglers.”

“No, Nym. Wait-”

But Nym was already gone, determined to make up for his earlier error. He cast night vision as he flew, even though it was still daylight. Colors got harder to differentiate in the light, but at the same time, the dark patches in the boughs became easier to see into. The last thing he needed was some ghoul jumping on his back.

Nym saw a ghoul ahead, down on its hands and knees with its head near the ground. A man laid underneath it, his eyes glazed over in death, while the ghoul ripped chunks out of his abdomen. A part of Nym considered smiting it with a lightning bolt or setting it on fire, but the man was already dead and there were still earth mages and soldiers fighting for their lives.

Nym’s best spell was still flight, but elemental air manipulation was a close second. He was passing decent with water, and a novice with earth. Fire was… well, he was pretty sure he still wasn’t doing it correctly. He felt like he’d found a work-around, but that someday he’d have to learn to do it properly. For now though, he stuck with air spells.

When he found ghouls pouncing on people, he used blasts of air to push them off course. When they already had someone pinned down, he lifted them up with his flight spell. The ghouls struggled, of course, and even his magic could only make air so solid. It was easy for them to escape, and not worth the effort to form more cushions or thicker ones. They only had to distract the ghouls for a second or two. The victims staggered to their feet and ran under their own power, or Nym whisked them away and dropped them off near groups of soldiers who were engaged in fighting retreats.

He saw quite a few ghouls roaming the wood, looking for meat. Those he ignored if they were far enough away, or tried to trap in the ground if they were too close. As Nomick had said, the ghouls were easily able to dig themselves out, but it still gave the workers fleeing from them an extra fifteen or twenty seconds. Sometimes that was the difference between life and death.

While his tactics worked fine on the encounters that involved just one ghoul, that wasn’t always what he found. Several time, there were two or even three ghouls working together to bring down someone. Usually it was a soldier who was fighting back, but occasionally he’d find pockets where earth mages had thrown up stone walls around themselves and the ghouls were trying to physically break through to get to the meaty victim inside.

In those cases, Nym resorted to fire. It didn’t work the best. Ghouls were slimy and didn’t burn easily, but setting one on fire was enough to distract it from its victim. That was usually enough to get the earth mage free and moving again, but several times they’d completely frozen up and Nym had to break through their walls himself, then pull the earth mage free and fly them to safety.

His efforts were saving lives though, and he didn’t feel like he was in any danger of giving himself arcana poisoning any time soon, so he kept scouring the woods for more survivors. As five minutes turned into ten, and ten into half an hour, he found more and more corpses being consumed by ghouls, and less and less survivors still trying to get away.

Nym was feeling pretty good about himself and his contributions to the sudden undead attack right up until something slammed into his back and rode him to the ground. He managed to keep the air cushion that he’d been cruising on from breaking apart, but it was nowhere near strong to support him and the added weight.

He didn’t need to look to know what had happened. All the tree-bound ghouls he’d spotted had been between ten and twenty feet off the ground. They were primed to jump down on an unwitting target who’d passed below them. He’d flown too close to one who’d climbed a bit higher, one he hadn’t noticed because he wasn’t looking up.

This wasn’t like the first ghoul he’d seen. He knew what to expect now, and though the stink was even worse when it was his turn and the ghoul had locked its legs in a painfully tight squeeze around Nym’s hips, he had a pretty good idea of how to dislodge it.

New air cushions formed between the two of them, prying the ghoul’s grip loose. It tried to squeeze down anyway and clamp back down, and it would have succeeded in barely a second, but Nym timed it so that he skimmed just under a particularly large and thick branch an instant after he loosened the ghoul’s hold on him. The creature struck the branch at speed and was lifted clear. Nym let out a little sigh of relief as he flew off.

“Maybe I should have gotten one of those mage weapons after all,” he said regretfully.

It was thanks to Nym’s work that a lot of people were able to flee the ghouls instead of becoming meals, but he hadn’t actually killed a single one. However, now that he wasn’t finding people anymore, he thought it was time to change that. Fire wasn’t really working, and air just didn’t have enough of a punch, but he hadn’t spent weeks working with Ophelia for nothing.

The next ghoul Nym found, he spent the time to create an earth golem, then he knocked it out of the tree with an air blast. The ghoul tumbled to the ground and the golem advanced on it, knocking it around with repeated heavy blows. The undead seemed confused at the attack, but matched the golem’s blows with ferocious swipes. Chunks of earth where ripped free, but the golem shuffled dirt around in its body to fill in the gaps while pulling up more material from the ground under its feet.

Ghouls apparently didn’t understand advanced tactics like retreating, and kept up its attack, unrelenting and implacable, until the blows from the golem weakened it enough that pieces of its body started falling off. Slowly, the ghoul fell apart until it was nothing but a scattered collection of wiggling limbs. Even that wasn’t enough to actually kill it, but Nym poured on enough fire to reduce it to ash.

It was exhausting work, if only because the ghoul didn’t want to burn and he had to feed a constant stream of arcana to the fire to keep it going. He also discovered that while ghouls smelled bad enough on their own, cremating them was a hundred times worse. Nym couldn’t stop himself from throwing up while the ghoul burned.

The next ghoul he encountered, he didn’t even bother with having his golem beat it into submission. It just tackled the ghoul and held it down while Nym slowly burnt it to death. If the ghoul was in any sort of pain, it didn’t show it. The golem, being a creation of dirt, was unaffected by the flames other than its outer layer blackening and cracking. It simply shed the burnt earth and pulled up new dirt to fill its form back out.

“There has to be a better way to do this,” he said out loud. It was way too much work and took way too long to burn each one until there was nothing left but ash. He tried other spells on ghouls, but daze did nothing, kinetic cutting worked even worse than it did on people, entombing them in the ground only held them up for a minute at most, and dismembering them stopped them, but didn’t kill them.

If there was a better way, he couldn’t find it. Apparently, neither could the soldiers, as he’d found several groups throwing the ghouls they’d dismembered onto bonfires they’d built. The smell of a dozen ghouls being incinerated at once was even worse than being up close one while he worked on it. Somehow, every time he turned around, this day kept topping itself in the category of worst-smelling thing he’d ever found in his life.

Nym stopped bothering to burn them himself, instead letting his earth golem start dismembering them again and scooping up the pieces to ferry to the nearest bonfire. The soldiers were surprised at first, but once they figured out what was happening, they cheered every time he came in with another load.

Eventually the sun started going down, and one of the soldiers flagged him down. “We’re retreating back behind walls now, sir mage,” he told Nym. “Will you be coming with us?”

“Sir mage?” Nym echoed. That was a new one.

“Sorry, we did not have time for proper introductions. We’ve held out here as long as is reasonable, but the night will favor the ghouls too much and I can’t risk my men’s lives to keep the fires burning for you.”

“You… you’re only here because I’m still here?” Nym asked. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. We can go back now.”

“Good man,” the soldier said. He turned to the little camp and yelled, “Put it out. We’re retreating back to the fort.”

The soldiers snapped hurried salutes and got to work. Nym helped by scooping up huge chunks of earth and dropping them onto the bonfire. The flames started to sputter and die down, but Nym got impatient and opened a fissure directly under the fire. The whole thing collapsed into the pit, and he closed it back over top of it. “Whew,” he said. “That takes it out of me. Okay, ready to go?”

“Indeed,” the soldier said, chewing on his mustache and regarding Nym. “Forgive me for asking, but how old are you?”

Nym shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

The soldiers started shouting in alarm and rushing into formation. “Enemy coming in!”

“We might have put that fire out a bit too soon,” the soldier said grimly.

Nym peered out into the forest, his night vision showing no ghouls. “I don’t see anything except… oh! It’s fine everyone. It’s not an enemy. That’s just my golem catching up with me!”

“Your… what?” the soldier asked.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

Nym cast a light spell over the earth golem, illuminating it fully. “It’s just some dirt I animated to fight the ghouls for me.”

The soldiers didn’t look reassured, but when the golem made no threatening moves, they slowly relaxed. “So,” Nym said, “We’re going back to the main outpost?”