Elias led his skeletal phalanx through the Blackwood. They moved with an eerie silence, their bone-shod feet making no sound on the mossy ground. To any observer, they were a hunting party from the deepest circle of hell. For Elias, they were a mobile toolkit, a projection of his will.
His raven-spies provided a clear path to the source of the Blight, allowing him to bypass threats and navigate the unfamiliar territory with speed and confidence. As they drew closer to the cave, the ambient Sense Life/Death map grew disturbingly sparse. The usual fluttering sparks of small animals and insects were gone. This patch of forest was unnaturally, deathly still. A quarantine zone enforced by the poison that bled from the earth.
The cave mouth was a jagged maw in a rock face stained with orange-red streaks of oxidized metal. The water that trickled from it was thick and oily. Even from a distance, Elias could smell the metallic tang, the scent of decay. The dormant Death signature he had sensed earlier was stronger now, a cold, heavy pressure emanating from the darkness within.
He would not risk his own body. This was a textbook application for his new skill.
"Guard the entrance," he commanded his three skeletal prowlers. "Permit nothing to enter or leave." The three beasts fanned out, their eyeless bone-skulls scanning the dead woods, perfect sentinels.
Elias sat cross-legged on the ground, placing his iron-tipped spear across his lap. He entered a state of concentration, then selected his strongest creation, Skeletal Unit 1, and activated Corpse Marionette.
His consciousness plunged into darkness, a dizzying sense of dislocation, and then snapped into a new vessel. He was no longer Elias Thorne, a man of flesh and blood. He was the skeletal prowler. He saw the world through its empty eye sockets, a monochrome vision overlaid with the green-tinged energy of his necrotic senses. He felt the immense strength of its bone-and-shadow form, the power humming in its limbs. There was no pain, no fear, no fatigue. Just cold, functional purpose.
He maneuvered the prowler's body into the cave. The air was thick with the stench of rot and rust. The ground was slick with the poisonous ooze. Inside, the cave opened into a surprisingly large, domed chamber. In the center lay the source of the contamination.
It was the massive carcass of a creature Elias had never seen before. It resembled a colossal badger or bear, but its flesh was riddled with pulsing, rust-colored nodules, and its hide was a patchwork of metal plates that seemed to have grown naturally from its skin. The creature, which he mentally dubbed a "Rust-Beast," was long dead, its body slowly decomposing and leaching its metallic biology into the groundwater.
But the carcass was not the dormant Death signature. Sitting atop the Rust-Beast's corpse, like a king on a rotting throne, was another creature.
It was humanoid in shape but skeletal, draped in decaying black robes. It was a Lich. An ancient, powerful undead, the kind he'd only read about in the flavour text of his strategy games. Unlike his mindless creations, this one's life-signature pulsed with cold, malevolent intelligence. It held a gnarled staff topped with a glowing, rust-colored crystal—the epicenter of the cold pressure he'd been sensing. The Lich was dormant, in a state of hibernation or meditation, slowly absorbing the toxic energies from the dead Rust-Beast beneath it. It was this absorption that was hyper-concentrating the poison and fouling the water.
Elias, in his prowler vessel, remained perfectly still in the shadows of the entrance. This was a foe of a different order. This was not a mindless beast. It was a sorcerer. A fellow necromancer, perhaps, but ancient and clearly powerful. A direct confrontation was likely foolish.
He scanned the chamber, his strategic mind analyzing the terrain. The cave was unstable, marked by fractures and fissures in the ceiling from its partial collapse. Directly above the slumbering Lich was a particularly large, precarious-looking formation of rock, a hanging shelf weighing many tons.
A plan formed. It was unsubtle, but it was efficient. Why fight a powerful sorcerer when you could just drop a mountain on him?
Carefully, silently, he maneuvered his prowler-body along the wall of the cave, its claws finding silent purchase. He began to climb, making his way towards the ceiling, staying in the deepest shadows. The Lich remained motionless, lost in its toxic trance.
He reached the rock shelf. He could feel its immense weight through the prowler's paws. Pushing it would be impossible. He needed to weaken its anchor point. Using the prowler's razor-sharp bone claws, he began to scratch and tear at the fissure where the rock shelf met the cave wall. It was like scribing on granite. He made slow, painstaking progress, particles of rock dusting the slumbering Lich below, who remained oblivious.
It wasn't enough. It wasn't fast enough. The structural integrity was too great.
He needed more force. He needed a battering ram.
He pulled his consciousness back, snapping into his own body with a gasp. The world of color and sensation was a shock after the monochrome stillness of the undead. He looked at his two remaining prowlers.
You, he sent to Unit 2, enter the cave. Climb the far wall.
You, to Unit 3, enter. Stand ready.
He plunged back into his Corpse Marionette state, possessing Unit 1 once more. Through its eyes, he saw his other two creations enter the cavern and take their positions. Now he had a team.
He maneuvered all three prowlers onto the precarious rock shelf. The combined weight caused a groaning sound and a small shower of dust. The Lich below stirred. The green glow in its eye sockets flickered, its head tilting upwards. Time was up.
NOW, he commanded, to himself and to his other minions. SLAM.
The three skeletal beasts, acting as one, threw their immense weight against the back of the shelf, ramming their shoulders into the weakened fissure. The rock groaned, splintered, and then, with a deafening crack, gave way.
Elias pulled his consciousness back a split second before the shelf tore free. The Lich looked up, raising its staff, a screech of rage and surprise echoing psychically in the chamber. It was too late.
Tons of rock crashed down, burying the Lich and the Rust-Beast carcass in a crushing, final avalanche. The chamber floor buckled. The cavern roared, dust and debris filling the air.
Silence.
[Foe Vanquished: Dormant Blight-Lich]
[Quest 'The Whispers of Rust' Completed (Self-Generated)]
[Reward: 10 Skill Points, Trait 'Geomancer's Intuition' Unlocked, Artifact 'Heart of Rust' acquired.]
The rewards were staggering. But Elias felt only a grim satisfaction. He stood up, walking to the mouth of the now-collapsed cave. The trickle of water was gone, cut off by the collapse. He had stopped the poison at its source. Over time, the stream would flush itself clean. Sunstone would be saved.
But what would they see? A shaman from a nearby tribe, perhaps drawn by the tremor, crept to the edge of the clearing to witness the aftermath. He saw the terrifying Grave Warden standing before a collapsed cave, flanked by a pack of bone-horrors, coated in the dust of the destruction he had wrought. It was an image of pure, apocalyptic power. The spirit of the tomb wasn't just a local bogeyman; he was a force that could level mountains. The man fled, his mind filled with a new, even more terrible chapter to add to the legend.
Elias ignored him. He was looking at the system prompt. Artifact 'Heart of Rust' acquired. In the center of the rubble at his feet, an object was glowing with a faint, angry red light. It was the crystal that had topped the Lich's staff, pulsing with contained, toxic energy.
He reached down and picked it up. It was warm to the touch, and it hummed with a sickly power that resonated with his own necrotic abilities.
He had performed an act of selfless, anonymous heroism. He had faced down a powerful evil and saved an entire village from a slow, agonizing death. The sanctity of the act was absolute. And the physical proof of that act was a vile artifact of blight and a reputation now so thoroughly steeped in terror that no one would ever dare thank him. He was no longer just a monster; he was their unwilling, and utterly horrifying, savior.