Chapter

Two

The cellar was cold. Colder than outside, much colder than it should be. He’d spent enough time in the modern world to recognize the feeling; this cellar was refrigerated. He knew he was right, there was no mistaking the feeling, but there was no machinery around that could explain it. The floor and walls were made of dirt. He hadn’t gone into any of the other cellars, maybe they were all like that? There could be some kind of magical cooling going on. On the shelves there were wheels of cheese, bread wrapped in thin cloth, and a few jars of preserves. Nothing that would really need to be refrigerated.

He would probably have to dart out to try to find something to cover himself with, even if that meant pulling clothes off the dead. If he could even bring himself to do it. He wouldn’t be able to stay here overnight, and who knew when the “danger” would arrive. Honestly, he didn’t even know if he could trust that warning.

Just as he started to push the cellar doors open, he saw something through the thin crack of the door and pulled his hand away like he’d been burned.

Something was moving through the town. Something bright, a flickering, unsteady light. Torches. Was it an army? If so then he was dead.

Thanks, Solia. After all the panic and despair her Skill had given him, he was still going to die. Thanks a lot.

And why was it so cold? It wasn’t fair that he’d die cold in both lives.

With creeping dread, he watched through the gap in the door as the light grew brighter and brighter.

Then he saw them. Monsters or an army? How about both? He saw fire first, then noticed the things inside the fire. Black corpses, eyeless, with a thin layer of blackened flesh wrapped tightly over their bones. They marched as red and unholy flames wrapped their bodies, always burning but never diminishing. Their steps were artless and unnatural. An army of undead, wrapped in flame. A burning legion.

He stayed still, so terrified he couldn’t even think of moving. He barely knew if he was even breathing. But none of the monsters even glanced in his direction.

They marched forward, angry and callous. Incurious. Rank after rank, with strange mismatched weapons. Axes and hammers so large they never should have been able to carry them with those thin arms. Swords and shields, spears and pikes, even some with wooden longbows. Why didn’t the weapons burn? Magic?

He saw one break off the ranks to turn to one of the structures whose ruins were taller than the rest. One of the ghouls raised a hand, and a stream of flame shot from his hand and blasted into the still-standing wall. The force of it knocked the remaining structure to dust, lighting the ruins aflame again.

They were ghastly. And wrong. As wrong as an army of flaming undead, but also wrong, like there was something about this picture that was… not true. A deception.

Why was it still so cold? Was there cold magic in the cellar to protect anyone hiding inside from the giant flaming army outside? That would make sense. The dead villagers must’ve had some kind of magic, though it hadn’t saved them.

He snapped his focus back to the burning army. Wrong. The fire… it wasn’t real. His skill, [Know What’s Real], was telling him something. The undead were real. The fire was fake. The entire undead army was real, but the flames were an illusion.

Then how had they burned the town down? He picked one undead soldier and watched him. Really watched him. The illusion didn’t go away, but he saw little glimmers, here and there. Tiny signs that what he was watching wasn’t quite right. When one ghoul’s flames touched another, they just sort of went through each other instead of combining. And his hand… It wasn’t at his waist. It was in the air. It was… holding a torch.

He saw a ghoul reach the well, the one structure that was still standing. In the illusion, the ghoul shot fire out of his hands. But through that, though… he could faintly see the shadows of reality. One ghoul hacked at the well with an ax, while the other lit it on fire with a torch. They were faking the flame attacks.

Why, though? This army was clearly capable of destroying a town, so why bother with the subterfuge? It was here that his gaming knowledge came in handy, specifically his RPG knowledge.

He’d never been a huge MMO fan, though he’d played a few. They weren’t any fun solo, and he’d refused to invest the amount of time into them that it takes to make a good group of friends. In fact, he’d made fun of the guys who played so many video games that they completely failed to get a career. Ironic, because now his career was less than worthless, and the only thing that mattered was his video game knowledge. Not that this was a video game, he knew it wasn’t, but it was a good starting point for organizing his thoughts.

In lots of video games, the undead were weak against fire, while water or ice spells were weaker against them. These undead were disguising themselves with fire. Anyone who saw them would naturally try to fight against them with water or ice, which would do nothing.

That tactic wouldn’t work forever. It wouldn’t work at all if a group turned and fought. But that probably didn’t happen. Everyone probably panicked the second they saw the monsters arrive. And when they started lighting houses on fire, it would be hot enough to be convincing.

Could he use this information? Well, no, probably not. He was still just one little boy. If the worst happened and the undead spotted him, he’d try to grab one of their torches, but the odds that he’d be able to fight them off were less than zero. The ghouls weren’t that afraid of fire, not if they were carrying the torches in the first place.

With that in mind, he backed away from the door. His best chance was to stay in here and hide. Thinking about it again, the fact that he hadn’t found any bodies in the cellars was a really good sign. It was doubtful that the ghouls would’ve bothered to pull people out before slaughtering them. It made more sense to assume that the people hiding in the cellars had survived the night of the attack, then fled the area during the daytime. Using video game logic, ghouls hunted using heat vision. That could’ve been the reason the villagers magicked their cellars to be freezing cold. It was possible the army simply wouldn’t be able to see him down here.

He crawled underneath the shelves and lay in the cold dirt behind some bags of flour. He found a few empty bags and used them as a blanket, but it was still freezing cold.

Cold was better than dead. Wasn’t it?

He was already practically dead. The life he knew was over. The master’s degree he’d spent years working and sacrificing for was useless. Who wanted someone who could program machines that didn’t exist? It’s not like he could make a computer. He had only a basic idea of how they worked; if he’d wanted to be an engineer, he would have studied engineering.

His career was over. He’d worked hard for four years after graduating, saving everything, planning on taking a whole year off someday soon and traveling the world. He’d stay in the best hotels, eat the best food, meet new and interesting people. Now all of it was in vain. That money he’d saved would go to his parents.

In the cold, in the dark, it felt like every decision he’d ever made was a mistake. Why didn’t he live his life when he was alive? He could’ve seen the Grand Canyon; it was only six hours away. He could’ve eaten at all the best restaurants in Denver, only one hour away. His ex probably would have stuck around if he’d refused to work fourteen-hour days during crunch for that game company. They’d ended up laying him off anyway, though he’d failed forwards with a new job and a fifty percent pay raise. At the time he’d felt vindicated, but it was all stupid. All a mistake. And now he lived in a crappy medieval world where a hot night on the town probably meant an extra portion of gruel and splitting an apple between fourteen people.

Despite his dark mood, he never actually thought about standing up and walking to the army to let them kill him. He was too scared. He lay, shivering, flinching at the sound of ghouls who wandered close, until somehow he fell asleep.

When he woke up the next morning, the army was gone.

He left his cellar and examined the surroundings. The town was even more burnt down than yesterday, with few structures standing above his height. Burning stuff by pressing a torch to it wasn’t that easy. They’d probably caught the thatch roofs on fire the first day they’d invaded. Everything very flammable had burned then; after that, they hadn’t made much progress.

He found the well, slashed and burned. Disappointing, but there was still a hole in the ground. The bucket was missing, but if he could find another one and some rope, then he would still have a source of water. He’d learned a little bit of survival skills with the Boy Scouts. Shelter, water, food, in that order. You could freeze to death in one afternoon, die of thirst in a day or two, but it took weeks to starve to death.

Before that, he had a decision to make.

“Same decision as before. Flee or hide?” Talking to himself felt weird, but he wanted to voice his opinions out loud, so he walked over to a group of crows and talked to them instead. “It’s not much of a decision, really. I have no idea where the survivors fled to, or if there even were any. I’m more likely to run into the undead camp than I am to find survivors. Here in town, I have shelter, water, and food. I’ll stay here. If that’s alright with you fellas.”

He must’ve walked too close, because the crows flew away, a short distance to a different corpse. Mark followed them.

“The undead will leave, now that they’re out of victims. Or someone will come with an army. They don’t just let undead armies run wild around here, do they? You crows probably love undead armies. Round-the-clock buffet. But we humans, see, we don’t like things like this.”

The crows ignored him. Whatever. He had better things to do.

He found a bucket in one of the cellars, and then with more searching found a replacement rope, and finally got himself a drink of water, though those two tasks took up the entire morning. After that, he searched for blankets, finding several more bags he could use while holed up in the freezing cellars.

He also found a really sharp knife and a shortsword that fit his small frame. He doubted he’d be able to kill even a single one of the black ghouls, but he still felt better carrying it around.

Food wasn’t a problem. The cellars were mostly cleared out, leaving only a loaf of bread here or a jar of something there, but he was only one person, so it was more than enough to survive on for months.

The bread was hard as a rock, and he had to carve pieces of it away with his knife and soften it with water, but when he did it was incredibly delicious. Thick and dark, it made his mouth explode with the beautiful, rich flavor. It was probably just the hunger talking; he’d probably spit it out if he had a hamburger on hand. Even so, he thought it might be the best thing he’d ever tasted. At least, until he found the cheese. Simply unbelievable. He hadn’t known cheese could be so good. Is that why people bought that super-expensive cheese in the grocery stores? He desperately wished he could go back and try some, but regret didn’t fill stomachs. Fantasy-world cheese did, though, and it did it wonderfully.

That night, the undead army arrived again, with all their fake flame and unholy glory. Again, they didn’t find him, and he slept in a cellar, shivering and terrified.

Days passed, and he fell into a routine. Scavenging things during the day. Hiding at night. He found an ax and started hacking down any wooden beams that had survived the constant pillaging. He hid them in empty cellars. Maybe if the ghouls had nothing left to burn, they’d leave him alone, and then he could sleep above ground where it wasn’t so cold.

His daily searches also revealed a disturbing pattern. The bodies were slowly but surely starting to disappear. The burned ones from inside the homes went first, but then the bloated, quickly rotting ones from the town streets started to go. The undead army was adding to its ranks. He knew he should do something, burn the bodies or bury them, but there were already hundreds of undead. A few more wouldn’t make any difference.

That was the excuse he gave himself. Also, moving them would be near impossible with his little arms. He didn’t want to go near them, they stank. He could get diseases. And of course, if their bodies started disappearing, the undead might catch on that he was still here. They might start looking for him.

All good reasons to leave the dead where they lay, but it weighed on him. Here he was, watching them disintegrate more and more, and he didn’t do anything. He looked away from their rotted, accusing eyes. He tried to ignore them.

It felt sacrilegious to live in a town where everyone was dead. He talked to the crows just to hear the sound of a human voice, but it felt wrong to disturb the awful peace with the sounds of life.

Maybe without [Know What’s Real], it would be better. He wished he could pretend that this was the Matrix. That he was still wounded in a hospital bed and they’d strapped him into some kind of advanced VR. Or that he was in a coma or something, but he couldn’t. He knew this was all real. Whatever that Skill was doing to him, it left no room for doubt. Those weren’t set pieces and they weren’t digital loot boxes. Those had been real people, with their own little joys and sorrows, and now they were dead, and he wasn’t, and they were being turned and he wasn’t doing anything to stop it.

He had good reasons, but it weighed on him.

It wasn’t all bad, though. He found a good number of metal coins, mostly brass, but a few that could be silver. Those would be valuable if he ever found another place with people. Absolute pay dirt, however, came from one cellar he found that was five times larger than the rest, packed full of preserved meat. Sausages, ham, chicken, mutton, beef, and many cuts of meat from animals he couldn’t identify. Giant snake, maybe? Could that one be a giant spider? He left the weird stuff alone, but even without it, there was enough to last him months, maybe years. When he found the bacon, he nearly cried.

He found flint and some cookware in the ashes of a home and made a reasonable campsite kitchen. The bacon was fantastic, and he could use the grease to cook other things.

The army came, night after night. They gave up trying to burn what remained and simply spent the night ambling around. One thing was clear: they weren’t leaving.

Two weeks passed, until one night, there was a change. He noticed the change even before he saw any undead. As dusk turned to night, he heard a soft, rhythmic sound. A repeated beat. Thump, thump, thump.

It was an ordinary beat, but to Mark, it was almost hypnotic. It was the first sound of anything close to music that he’d heard since coming to this world, and he was tempted to open his cellar door just a smidge to peep and get a better look. The flickering light cast by the illusory flames told him it was the ghouls making the sound, so he stayed hidden.

The first ghouls crossed the path that he could see from the tiny crack in his cellar doors. They were marching. They walked in orderly lines, stepping to the same beat. Thump, thump, thump.

From the sound of it, they crossed the entire town, then split up. When he next saw the ghouls, they were split up into groups of three. They moved completely differently than he’d ever seen them before. Instead of the lazy, uncaring trudging, they moved with energy and purpose. They rotated their heads from side to side, scanning the ground. They poked bushes with their weapons and pushed over piles of debris, searching for something. Searching for him.

A ghoul reached the cellar doors, in the ground directly across from him. Mark expected it to turn away like they always did. Cellars are cold. Cold is uninteresting. The ghoul opened the doors and walked inside.

If they were searching cellars, it wouldn’t be long until they entered his.

His heart beat like a drum, so loud he was surprised the ghouls couldn’t hear it. Maybe they could. They’d come down any second and then…

No. He wouldn’t just sit and wait. He needed to do something.

He got a big flour sack, a full one, and dumped half of it on the floor. Then he pushed it behind all the other flour sacks, blocking the way with loaves of bread, jars and jugs, everything he could find. Then he climbed inside the half-empty flour sack and tried to bury himself inside.

Before long, he stopped himself. Panic made him want to keep moving, but giving in to panic here would mean death. If the undead came down here, any tiny movement would give him away.

The flour was cold, like burying himself in snow, but he blessed the coldness if it was what was protecting him from the ghouls’ rotten eyes. He didn’t know. Even after all this time he didn’t know for sure, but it was the best he had. Hiding in the cellars had worked. Until tonight.

He lay absolutely still. Flour got up his nose but he didn’t dare cough, even though his throat started to burn. He could barely breathe. The flour sacks weren’t airtight, but close enough.

He heard something. Quiet steps, coming down the stairs.

He heard things being pulled off the shelves. A ceramic pot landed with a thunk. He felt vibrations through the wood as the things in front of him were being thrown to the ground.

The flour sack was still cold. He didn’t dare move at all, but where the sack touched his skin he still felt the draining cold. Would it be good enough?

The sounds stopped. He waited for them to pull him off the shelf, but it didn’t happen. He felt a snag instead, the walls of the flour sack pulling in tight, then away. Then, there was light. A little hole in the flour sack.

They must’ve stabbed it. They must’ve stabbed straight through, right between where his knee and elbow were.

Somehow, through sheer force of character, he managed to avoid screaming. He forced his voice to stay silent. He forced his sobs of panic and relief to stay silent though he couldn’t stop the streaming tears.

He heard the ghouls’ footsteps retreat out of the cellar, and he didn’t make a sound.

Something appeared in his vision.

Through your efforts you have increased the following attribute.

Will +1

For some reason, that didn’t help at all. He shivered in the dark until he fell asleep.