"I h-hate you."

"You say that a lot," Alarion noted.

"Yes. That's b-because I hate you," Bergman said with a heaving sigh.

Alarion couldn't fault his reasoning, nor the emotion behind it. None of them had slept more than a few minutes throughout the night, and sleep deprivation had taken its toll on everyone. Everyone except for Alarion, that is. He had a spring in his step, the vital energy of [Valentina's Energetic Embrace] flowing through him.

Jealousy was a perfectly rational response.

"Any updates?" Alarion asked, looking back over his shoulder.

Dimov trudged along behind him, each step uncertain. A child of privilege who had probably never lost a night of sleep in his life, the night's excitement had hit him even worse than the others.

"Nothing," Dimov grunted. "The dead remain active. And close."

"They have to run out at some point, don't they?" asked Bergman.

It was a question Alarion had asked himself through most of the night, one he was no closer to answering.

The assault had begun just after dark, but it was not what any of them had expected. The infested dead were at once the least and most dangerous threat posed by a boil. Individually, they were weak, as they were nothing more than the reanimated corpses of the unawakened dead. They were stronger, faster, and more durable than a baseline human, but only because they lacked any self-preservation instinct. The dead would tear their own muscles to shreds if it meant landing a killing blow against the living, and they would eagerly pull themselves along a spear to get their hands on its wielder. They were also stupid, barely capable of using weapons, and incapable of using any tactics not foisted on them by their revenant masters. Even unawakened militia could typically best an equal number of the dead in direct combat.

The problem, and their core strength, was that the numbers were rarely equal.

Every man, woman, and child who was reclaimed by the boil became a member of their army. Any defeat of the living added hundreds or thousands to their numbers, and if a boil reached critical mass, it could drown civilization under an ocean of corpses. They were no match for the truly powerful Awakened, of course, but against the lower ranks, quantity could still compete alongside quality.

Especially if the former could exhaust the latter.

They'd come in waves, ten, twenty, thirty at a time. Never enough to pose an existential threat or to force a retreat, but sufficient to keep them fighting. Enough to keep them on edge and awake. Enough to slowly whittle away at their stamina and their nerves. Just as with its initial ambush, the infection was trading its bodies for their strength, wearing them down under a relentless barrage of expendable corpses.

But as the assault passed from night to dawn to mid-afternoon, the question of their numbers became ever more outrageous.

"How many have we killed?" Dimov asked. "I lost track hours ago."

"Four hundred and thirty-two," Alarion answered absently. A few seconds later, he noticed Bergman giving him an odd look and responded with a slight shrug. "I started keeping count of the kill notifications."

"As one does," Kali said dryly. He was at the head of their short column, his eyes fixed firmly on the ground ahead. "That makes what, sixteen hundred in total?"

"Seventeen," Bergman said, earning him an irritated grunt from the Sergeant for the correction. "What was the population of the infested area?"

"They are still checking," Dimov answered. "Records for the area are sparse."

"At least seventeen hundred, I imagine," joked Kali.

"T-there are more u-up ahead."

Sure enough, a cluster of shapes crested the ridgeline a little over a mile ahead. They moved at a quick pace, loping across the field with the unusual stride Alarion associated with the dead. There were only nine of them, the smallest group that had been sent at the Awakened thus far.

"Mine," Alarion said matter-of-factly.

No one argued. Even exhausted, any one of them could handle a group this small, but none of them wanted to. And not just because of the exhaustion.

Fighting the dead took a toll that went beyond MP or Stamina. Not that long ago, they had been people. Men, women, and children who had lived and loved, who had hopes and fears. Destroying their risen corpses was a mercy, but it remained a difficult task even with the revulsion the dead inspired.

Three generations met Alarion as he rushed across the field. The grandfather was in the lead. Tall, thin, and missing most of an arm, he made it easy for Alarion as he met him ahead of the pack. One swing of his mace splattered the contents of the man's skull across the putrid ground. Then they were on him, and Alarion was retreating.

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Not out of fear, but out of necessity. Individually, the dead were no threat at all, especially when they were armed with little more than farming implements. But in a group, they could swarm him and attack from so many angles that it became impossible to dodge. So he retreated, allowing the natural differences between the dead to separate the pack once more.

A woman came at him next. Her face was a mess, her cheek torn open from ear to chin by the thing that had ended her life. Her rictus grin reminded him of ZEKE, but did not stay his hand. Her husband came next, a man of charcoal skin who looked nothing like the rest of her kin; he was large but cumbersome, especially with his belly split and his insides half outside.

On and on it went. Most died in a single blow, and not one came close to striking him. Unlike Kali or Dimov, Alarion had a strong reach advantage, and he leveraged it to its full potential over the course of minutes. The fight was so one-sided it felt wrong to even call it that. They were no more a threat to him than he had been to Ruin.

There was one problem with his strategy, however. Separating the group based on stride meant that two groups were always left for last. Those with injured legs.

And the children.

There were two in this group, neither of whom was much older than ten, if he had to guess. A younger boy and an older girl.

He raged at the sight of them. At the injustice, not only of the sickness in the land, but the world that allowed any of this. He had never been a religious child, for his mother had little time for the gods despite Imurian custom, but experience had made him bitter at the very concept of divinity.

"Are you watching, Lal Viren?" he asked the empty sky as he waited for the children to reach him. "Why do you allow this?"

No answer was forthcoming. His favor with She Who Bore Challenges allowed the goddess to know his location and to look in on him if she so chose, but to his knowledge, she had never done so. If she heard his complaints or his blasphemies, she cared no more for them than she did for these forsaken children.

Their salvation came not from the divine, but from the swing of his mace.

When it was over, Alarion stood over the bodies. The girl wasn't dead. She'd twisted at the last moment, and he'd shattered her back instead of crushing her head. The head and the heart, those were the only organs the dead needed to function. They'd never heal from a crippling injury, but they could live forever with only those two.

The girl looked nothing like his sister, but Atra was all Alarion saw as he looked down upon her. It was a strange quirk of memory; Atra had been on the cusp of her teenage years when he'd left them, but try as he might, he only ever remembered what she looked like in their younger days. Pale blue eyes, like their mothers. The thin white scar under her lip from where she'd nearly bitten through it after a fall. Even those details were fading.

Two and a half years his senior, she'd be a woman grown by now. She could have a daughter of her own. Would he recognize her if he saw her again?

Would she recognize what he'd become?

The girl squirmed on the ground, still trying to get to him despite her ruined body. He drew a knife from his wrist, bent down, and plunged it into her heart. She stiffened, shivered, and then lay silent, staring up at him with vacant eyes.

Alarion returned the stare for a few moments, then lifted a hand to her face and shut her eyes.

You have slain [Infested Human – UCL 0]. You have 23:59:59 remaining to loot this opponent.

Looting the dead was pointless. He'd attempted it on the first wave they'd fought and received next to nothing. Scraps of cloth, bits of metal, whatever the System could conjure up to tell him it was not worth his time. ZEKE had warned him as much when they'd been debating the skill; a high disparity in UCL drastically decreased the rewards provided by a looting power, rewards that were already minimal given that they were coming from an unawakened opponent.

But that didn't mean it was a complete waste.

You have foregone loot from this opponent. 0.01% added to Unrealized Opportunity.

One-hundredth of a percent did not account for much on its own, but after facing hundreds of the dead, Alarion had collected a respectable 3.42% toward his [Unrealized Opportunity] resource pool. Soon to be 3.5%. It might have been higher still, but he'd not been the only one fighting the dead. As far as he'd been able to determine, looting privileges were part and parcel of gaining XP from a defeated opponent. If he didn't receive a kill or assist notification, he could not loot the body.

He wandered the field of the defeated, touching each body to trigger the looting prompt. He didn't bother to search the bodies. Dead farmers weren't likely to have anything of value to an Awakened, and even if they'd had something in life, revenants usually took such items for themselves. When he finished with the last body, Alarion did a quick count to make certain, then started back toward his allies.

Kali was in a mood as Alarion jogged into camp. "Try it again."

"I h-have tried it t-three times-"

"Then a fourth won't kill you." Kali scowled. He was towering over Bergman while the latter was kneeling down in the muck, his sample kit open on a tarp before him. The map was next to it, its grid surface covered in pencil marks, documenting the most recent test in each sector. "Or let Dimov try. Maybe you're doing something wrong."

"I'm n-not!" Bergman pointed at three deep blue testing strips laid out next to his supplies. "The results are all w-within the margin of error! The same as last time. We are going the wrong way!"

"Then the margin of error is wrong!" Kali shouted. "It can't be getting weaker for half of us and stronger for the others. Not with the way the search grid is set up. Even if we somehow marched past it, we'd expect Higgin's team to be getting weaker, and they're still getting stronger."

"Perhaps the others are the issue?" Dimov suggested, ill at ease with the argument between his fellow soldiers. "They could be getting the wrong results instead."

"Is that better?" Alarion asked, ever the master of the obvious. "That would mean we missed it."

"W-we could double back-"

"Our orders are to proceed to the next grid," Dimov said sharply. "If the next round of testing shows us moving away, then we will be ordered to turn around."

"And if it shows the same d-discrepancy?" Bergman stood his ground. "T-then what?"

"Then we follow-"

"We're stumbling in the dark." Kali ran a hand over his bare scalp as he paced. "But we don't have any other choice."

"I... t-there might be one?" Bergman said, his voice filled with anything but conviction. "If we... no, t-that would be stupid."

Alarion's heart tightened in his chest just as his fingers wrapped tighter around the haft of his mace. He'd told Bergman about ZEKE and his abilities, but he'd done so in confidence. Had the other boy been about to break that confidence so flippantly?

"Bergman." The word alone from Kali's lips was enough. The topic was not going to go away until he explained himself.

"Maybe we could-" Alarion started before a sharp glance from the Sergeant stopped him in his tracks.

"Well?"

Bergman looked at the map, his finger tracing out their location before it tracked to a nearby village. "I need books. A lot of books."

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