The form of an armored woman rose from the settling dust, and with her, an upsurge of undead skeletons. Her eyes scanned her surroundings quickly and narrowed. Her bike lay a few hundred feet behind her embedded in a cliff wall, a trail of dust and gouged earth led out from the wreck. The young woman had escaped with minimal surface damage.

A putrid breath seemed to hang in the air as all fell silent. Then, with a sudden rush of wind, sand, bone and plasma, the inevitable carnage began. Swords flailing wildly, the undead charged, only to be turned to mere dust and splinters by the plasmatic explosions. Dozens of ghoulish warriors fell before they had even lifted their weapon, but countless more pressed on.

It wasn’t long before Roery realized there was no hope to stand and fight. That only put her in a worse mood. She had been so miserable for so long now, that the unliving army of punching bags was almost a welcome sight. Being forced to flee was the last thing she wanted to do.

Just as the zombies pressed their way through her defensive barrage of plasma disks, Roery took to the skies, taking out a few unlucky assailants with the blast from her thrusters. From the air the situation looked even more hopeless. The sea of discolored marrow and rusted armor stretched unabated in all directions.

Turning in air—flying swords and spears clattering semi harmlessly off her armor—the girl took off in the direction of her crashed bike. Maybe if she could start it up without being dragged down by the unliving army, she could bulldoze her way through them and escape. Or if nothing else, she could climb the cliff wall and escape to the hilltops.

Her plasma disk launchers continued to lay siege to the undead as she rocketed her way through the air. As luck would have it, her thrusters weren’t able to carry her all the way to her destination. Aiming her guns forward and towards the ground, she began to gouge out a place to land in the midst of the swarming army.

She took a deep breath and landed hard, trying to avoid breathing in the soldiers turned to powder. The young woman grimaced at the thought and kicked forward, sprinting her way straight through bone and jagged blades.

The female soldier gasped as a rusted blade stabbed her side and another gouged her thigh badly. She furrowed her brow and made sure to overkill the two culprits by sending pointblank plasma disks into their ribcages. She leaped forward again, propelled partially by the massive explosions.

If not for the adrenaline rush, her focused mind, and her suit’s general ability to dull pain, her accumulated slashes and wounds might have done her in by now. She was over halfway there; giving up was not an option. All she needed was one more jump.

Then the worst thing possible happened. She could feel something in the air change, some greater danger. Her muscles tensioned, but it was already too late as her body immediately ceased to follow what her mind told it to do. Her eyes widened as every fiber of her being told her body to brace for impact, but instead fell limply to the ground from her full on sprint. The wind was instantly knocked out of her as she crumbled and rolled along the ground, crashing strait through skeletons that had ceased moving and merely stood in their place. The undead soldiers stepped back to form a circle around the woman as she finally came to a stop in an awkwardly heap on the ground.

She winced in pain, her breathing heavy as the pain from her many wounds started to sink in, and the rising sense of fear took hold. She strained her mind to move even a finger, but nothing worked. Even her eyes were locked, staring strait up into the blurry sky. She could only make out a dark, looming form before her. It steadily becoming larger as it came closer, obscuring her vision until all that she could see was darkness. Her panic escalated more, only to be subdued suddenly as her mind went dark as well.

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I)ragon11’s Art