Chapter 704 - Violent Undead

The last of the three rings of this circle of hell. 'Violence against others' was the first. 'Violence against yourself' was the second. And the third was 'Violence against God, Art, and Nature'.

Eisen stepped through the gate leading to this third circle, and could quickly feel hot sand underneath his feet before seeing sparks of flames falling down from the sky toward him. As if they were snowflakes during a blizzard.

And from within that storm of sparks stood another figure. The figure of the being that Eisen would have to fight now. It was a tall being. Disproportionate, but still tall. It seemed like it was wearing some sort of grand, large armor. But since Eisen could still only see the silhouette, he couldn't confirm this fact yet.

In the hand of hte creature, it was holding something that Eisen immediately recognized as a staff, so this was a magic-user.

The silhouette slowly lifted its staff up, and then slammed it down onto the sand below its feet. It created something like a shockwave that pushed the sand toward all directions like ripples of water after dropping a rock into it.

This action showed what was underneath the sand. Or maybe they were created through this just now. They were dead bodies. Mostly rotten, mummified, and some just skeletons.

"What the...?" The old man muttered, although he quickly realized what this was supposed to be. For one, none of these 'corpses' were really dead. Rather, they were Undead. Some of them were slowly walking in circles through the area without any goal in mind, and others were squatting on the ground, crying to themselves.

But there should be a third 'sort' here as well, "The ones laying on their back..." Eisen whispered to himself, trying to activate his truth-seeing eyes to figure out what was going on. But before he was able to really get a good look at the area, he could feel a tight grip around his ankle.

Eisen immediately pulled his leg back instinctively, pulling the undead that grabbed his ankle out of the sand. The mummified humanoid pulled open its maw and let out a loud screech that hurt Eisen's ears. And through this, all the other undead also started paying attention to Eisen.

The ones that had been running in circles were all starting to run toward Eisen, while the ones that were huddled up on the ground were slowly crawling toward him, still bawling thier eyes out. And surely, the ones that were laying on the ground, still hidden by the sand, were going to make it harder for Eisen to move around freely.

Eisen knew that he had to beat the leader of this group of undead, who he assumed to be the silhouette he saw before, the Necromancer that was commanding them all. The first thing that Eisen did was cut through the arm of the undead still holding onto his leg, although that didn't seem to stop it all too much.

The hand kept up its tight grasp, but at least Eisen was able to move around now. Sure, the hand was pushing its claws into Eisen's leg and damaging him, but it was rather weak. And since this helped Eisen figure out how much strength he needed to cut through the Undeads' bodies, he was able to swing his sword around and get this done immediately.

The upper bodies of the running Undead were flying through the air as Eisen stabbed the ones that were hiding under the sand. Those let out loud screams, but all alone, those weren't a big deal.

The 'big deal' however was that all this little damage toward Eisen was slowly stacking up. The incredibly hot sparks hitting his body all over, the Undead clawing at him from all directions, and seemingly even some of the poison they had been pushing into him with every single attack.

Eisen turned his head a bit to look at the health-bar that he had placed right next to himself so that he could keep an eye on it. He was losing health rather rapidly, but luckily he had a few health pills with him. He pushed a handful of his health-pills into his mouth, swallowing one whenever he needed to while keeping the rest in his mouth for later.

Like this, Eisen was able to work against the damage that was constantly building up, at least a little bit. He kept cutting apart the Undead, but for some reason, they were getting just more and more and more without an end in sight. 

As if this Necromancer wasn't resurrecting those that had died here, but rather was directly creating Undead. Except if... "I got it..." The old man rattled his brain and tried to figure out how these undead were created without stop and from places that didn't particularly make sense. Like in the exact places where others already appeared.

And to confirm this, Eisen took a closer look at the fine sand whenever a new Undead appeared. At first, he thought that they were simply pushing the sand up after pushing themselves out from the ground, but it was different. 

They were created from the sand itself. It wasn't regular sand at all. Instead, it seemed to be finely-ground bones and dried flesh that the Necromancer was controlling to instantly create undead.

That seemed to be the most logical explanation, at least. And if that was truly the case, then it would probably be impossible to really get rid of the undead themselves. Luckily the Necromancer only seemed capable of creating these three different Undead, and wasn't too keen on manipulating this sand any more than that.

At first, Eisen figured he should just get rid of the undead until there wasn't anything left to resurrect, but since that wasn't an option anymore, Eisen should just rush at the Necromancer itself. Although, the old man was starting to feel like something was off.

Even though he was moving around this much, the Necromancer was still just a silhouette. Eisen didn't manage to get a good look at them yet, although he was trying to slowly work his way toward them.

The old man sliced through the Undead right in front of him prepared to jump forward. Just as he pushed himself off, Eisen increased his size considerably, and the instant his feet stopped touching the sand, he shrunk down as much as he could in this short amount of time.

This combined the strength of his larger form with his lightweight smaller form to let him push himself forward rapidly. Of course, Eisen also transformed and used his wings to approach the Necromancer instantly. But when he did, what he saw was that it was simply another Undead... it was wearing some sort of large cloak with huge shoulder-pads, explaining its disproportioned silhouette.

But that didn't matter much. Eisen knew that Lichs were a thing, so he simply tried to cut through the body of the Necromancer. And he managed to do so with ease. At this point in time, he was able to take a proper look at the Necromancer. The staff that it was holding was low-quality, super dry wood, and the robes it wore started falling apart before Eisen even touched them.

"It's not this one either..?" Eisen asked himself, confused at what was going on as the Necromancer fell apart into the same sand that the floor was made of.

Eisen tried to stare through the crowd of Undead and the Flame-Blizzard to figure out of he could see anything else that the real opponent could be. Eisen kept slicing through the numerous Undead in front and around him, until he finally spotted something.

It was definitely the shortest figure around, probably a child. It was clearly a mummified Undead, but it was the only one that didn't try to attack Eisen, just standing there and watching. With a single slice as his blade grew larger, Eisen cut through the Undead Child. But it just turned to sand and then appeared again somewhere else.

Again and again, Eisen cut through this undead child just for it to disappear the next moment. It was annoying, frustrating even. Especially since Eisen wanted to just move on to the next two circles of hell, the last ones that he had to complete before returning to the mortal realm and finally becoming a true demon.

But Eisen just didn't understand what he was doing wrong at all. He couldn't figure it out for some reason. All the other undead simply stayed in two pieces, and that undead child was practically teleporting a bit away. It was the only one that was extraordinarily different to the others, so there was no way that it wasn't related to all this. It was certain that it was connected to getting through this test somehow. And the only thing that Eisen could think of that he would be able to do here was continue slicing all these undead into pieces. 

But then, Eisen viewed everything in 'Truth Sight', despite the fact that the world around him mostly became rather dark and blurry, and figured out that this child really was different to the others, mostly because it didn't move autonomously and instead was directly controlled by another entity.

Underneath the surface was a monster that was burrowing around in there, the source of most of the mana that was gathering in this ring. He couldn't actually see what it was, since he only saw a faint connecting thread between the child and something else that was moving underneath the sand, or rather within it.

Eisen knew that it would be tough to get to this monster, but he had to try at least. Or else this would never end. And so, Eisen simply started pushing the tip of the blade into the sand places where the monster might be and then increased his size and weight to push the sword through this sand and hopefully the monster.

But no matter what Eisen did, this creature always managed to dodge him. That was until Eisen just made use of a small trick. He knew that Undead were weak to fire, which he was already using to fight them, but he figured this quality might extend to whatever was the actual necromancer.

Eisen would push the blades into the ground before letting out waves of immense heat into the sand to at least try and steer the monster into the direction where Eisen wanted to have it. And that place was the lowest part of this whole arena, where the monster and Eisen would have the least amount of distance between each other.

Soon, this plan was put into action brilliantly as Eisen's blade cut apart the, seemingly worm-like, monster.