"The spirit of life is indomitable"
You may have never heard of this quote before, it isn’t from me, nor is it from anyone you could guess.
I have searched through much of my family’s lost archives, all in an effort to excavate the past back into the light, so that it may not be forgotten, so that we may learn from it, so that we may avoid the mistakes of yore.
In my research, I have dug up the retelling of a most noble, and mighty hero, sadly forgotten in spite of his legacy still staring us all in the face.
All of us have heard, or seen, death hunters, valiant men and women who fight against the undead scourge without fear.
Yet, none of us, none of them remember The Death Hunter, the very first who took a stand against death, the world we live in today would have been much different if not for his actions.
He was the one to speak those words:
"The spirit of life is indomitable"
I lack context of why or when he professed this sentence, but I can still see their value.
The plague of the living dead, foul and hypocritical creatures preaching the joys of death, unable to realise that all they do is merely live in death.
They dare look down on the living, us, who breathe and whose hearts beat.
The practitioners of necrolatry in the underground tower would only agree with such an idea, but The Death Hunter could see past the obvious, he could see that there was beauty and power in life.
He believed that the living could overcome their fear of death and be triumphant over the animated corpses.
His name was Thanatok Ynigós, and I ask that we remember him.
Stolgob didn’t have time to make any decision however, Loimos dropped right on his head, the goblin’s head was submerged in decay and rotten blood, sticking to his face and eating away at him without any respite.
The green monster threw himself blindly, trashing and rolling around in an attempt to remove the undead from him but it was all useless, the rot decomposed his eyes, lips and tongue in only a few moments as the dark blood invaded his insides.
The instant it reached his brain, he stopped all movements and laid still.
Loimos looked at Irgob’s shuffling feet as she tried to wiggle her way into the tunnel, he simply left the rot to eat away at Stolgob’s body as he began to make his way toward her, crawling as he opened his jaw.
He repeatedly bit right through her feet and legs, to the point that he tore everything that was within his reach, his sharp fangs coated in his oil-like blood, the wounds already looked infected after only a few seconds.
Blood loss eventually claimed her life.
Stolgob had failed everything he had attempted, but thankfully for the late goblin, Loimos wasn’t going to disparage him or his efforts, it was something the living did, not the dead.
Loimos’s lower half walked up to him on its own, it might look like nothing, but retaining pristine control over body parts separated from the head completely wasn’t something any undead could achieve with such precision, some not at all.
Using his rot to try and stitch himself back up, Loimos hadn’t actually been slashed in two, he had just disconnected part of his spine, which was why the goblin had felt no resistance whatsoever, he wouldn’t have had much more problems had Loimos not done this.
Though it wouldn’t have been nearly as easy to reconnect, he had been the one to split himself, so putting it back together only took a few hours with the miasma produced from the generator eating away at Stolgob’s body and Loimos’s own rot.
By a few hours, it really meant that a whole day and half had passed before he was stuck together enough again to move without falling apart.
Making his way back to the shore, the deathly fog had already washed over the place the goblin’s had been slaughtered, their bodies accelerating the spread by a notch.
The bodies had been consumed whole already, not even leaving behind their bones, the only bones left behind were those belonging to the undeads that had been destroyed.
All of the ancient undeads had fallen, all of the tribesmen may have been killed but Gobstoz had replied in kind, taking them all down, including the bone giant, before breathing his last.