“That has to be a joke...”

  Those were the first words out of Marie’s mouth when she came round again.

  But given what she’d been through, it seemed a little silly to draw the line at levelling up.

  She stood up and quickly checked from her vantage point that, yes, she was in a ruined city with a featureless sky of dull grey overhead and, yes, there were the animated bodies of the undead at almost every corner and, yes, she was fairly sure she was in another world.

  She studiously avoided looking deeper into the city and the… thing… that had been there. Instead, she focused back on what she thought was the way she’d come from.

  If this were a city on Earth, in France, she’d have guessed she was on the edge of the suburbs. Closing her eyes she could picture elements of her flight hours before. The buildings may have been destroyed in some cataclysmic event but the general shape of the place was still there. Many of the roads were traversable, even if rubble and skeletal bodies littered them like flies on a corpse.

  She tried to piece together a mental image of the area but it was too jumbled. One thing did begin to become clearer though.

  Opening her eyes, she felt the dull ache in her forearm where the first skeleton she’d met had scratched her. It was hot now - around the wound.

  “That cannot be good.”

  She tried to get a better look, wiped her glasses on her t-shirt and cursed as she remembered she’d cracked one of the lenses.

  “That is not going to make things any easier.”

  Her mouth was dry, and a faint growling from her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since she’d come to this place. A faint breeze blew and the hairs on her arms rose in response, and a more unpleasant feeling between her thighs reminded her of her other troubles.

  She sighed.

  “On fait avec.”

  On one hand, Marie’s resigned acceptance of her situation might have been surprising, but anyone that had known her as a little girl growing up, or in her more recent and wilder student days (which for Marie meant actually going to some of the parties she was invited to rather than staying home to read), would have identified the young French woman as a pragmatist, and one who refused to do anything badly.

  So she made a list.

  “Okay. Step 1: Find water, shelter and food. In that order. If I find clean water, rinse out the wound. Leave it to air dry? Lack of life here suggests no bacteria?” The only alternative to cleaning the wound was to find the first aid kit in her tent…and to do that… “Step 2: Find my way back. I did not cross the river… I do not think… so heading back will take me away from the centre of the city.” And whatever lay there. She suppressed a shudder. “Step 3: Salvage what I can, if anything is left.” She looked at the ruined house she sat in and down at the coins and engraved stone in the ash and rubble. She began to pick them up and put them back in the miraculously-intact leather pouch, and as she did so she felt something flicker in her brain, and after a few moments she resumed her monologue. “Amendment: search for salvage along the way; the coins are valuable, and if they have value, there must be people who will pay for them… will pay… their weight in… enough for…” She could feel something trying to provide her information. The Skill she had received? [Baseline Appraisal]? But she had nothing to compare the coins to. She shrugged to herself. “You will need food. Supplies. Historical artefacts of value will secure that.”

  She stood up and brushed herself off, pocketing the pouch and reaching for the spade she’d left just inside the ruined doorframe. She took a deep breath.

  “Water. Shelter. Food. Treat Injury. Supplies. Salvage.” She ticked off the items on her list then added the final one. “Find out where the fuck I am and get the hell back to civilisation.”

  It took her a full minute to make it out into the street. She checked all round before she left the shadow of the doorway; mercifully, each time she thought she saw movement in the corner of her eye it turned out to be nothing.

  Once she left the ruin of the building she stuck to the derelict house fronts as she crept down the terrace, or as close to the houses as she could. Broken bricks of stone and detritus from whatever calamity had befallen this place formed treacherous obstacles that she preferred to avoid unless there was a need to scramble over them. The risk of twisting an ankle or making noise was too great.

  A shambling further down the road made her press herself up against a crumbling wall, trying to disappear into the grey ruin. She clutched her spade to her chest, covering the shovel head with her arms to avoid the glinting of any light on metal.

  It was another minute before the distant figures shuffled out of view and Marie breathed again.

  A scuffle to her left made her leap out into the street and spin, spade thrumming through the air faster than she would have thought possible.

  She pulled the blow just in time, though she might have missed anyway.

  Two small skeletal bodies stood barely moving in the wreckage of the house she’d been leaning against.

  Children.

  Children’s bones.

  For some reason that gave her pause.

  It was one thing to decapitate the animated remains of a person that had been bigger than you were, especially when they were clawing for your skin, but the idea of crushing the skulls of two waist-high bodies seemed… wrong. Brutal.

  They weren’t moving for her either. Just standing, swaying slightly from side to side, facing roughly her direction.

  Was there a form of awareness there? Or was it a complete lack of awareness?

  Marie knelt warily, keeping one eye on the street through the cracked lens of her glasses and one hand on the spade. Just in case.

  With her other she reached out to the skeletal bodies of the children and spoke in as soft and friendly a voice as she could manage with a parched tongue and throat.

  “Hey there. I did not mean to startle you. Can you understand me? Who are you? What happened here?”

  She wasn’t expecting a reply but the figures twisted a bit in her direction. Her hand tightened round the haft of the spade but they didn’t move against her, so she didn’t swing.

  She took a moment to examine them as closely as she could with partially-obscured vision

  Their bones were old. Yellowing. Fragmented. They reminded her of some of the pictures of Roman remains she’d studied in her courses, or maybe even older - ancient Egyptian? She didn’t know what this place was but at a guess it had been this way for thousands of years.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  There were other clues too, as to what had happened.

  A gaping hole in one of their skulls - the slightly larger one; a boy perhaps, or simply an older sibling, if they were related at all - suggested the manner of its death. Puncture wound, from a weapon most likely, unless it had happened when the house collapsed. That would fit the injuries on the smaller of the two; both the femurs were shattered, and other bones were in more than one piece as she looked closer. Some of the larger one’s bones were likewise fractured, both held in humanoid form by some sort of…what? Magic? Unless Benny had slipped some acid into her wine or someone was playing the world’s most elaborate trick on her, there was no other explanation she could think of as to how the bones would defy gravity. Have motion.

  That wasn’t the only oddity either she realised as she thought of the two children, trapped or killed when the house they were in collapsed around them. She was in the ruins of a city, but despite the huge mounds of rubble and tumbled stone and detritus, there simply wasn’t enough material to account for the size of the place and the state it was in.

  Either this place had the most unusual architecture, or someone has been removing the remains. She thought for a moment longer. Or whatever destroyed it was truly cataclysmic, not just an invading army.

  She focused back on the faces of the undead children.

  “What happened here?”

  There was no response, and Marie reluctantly got back to her feet and backed away from the bodies, returning to the street and her search for water that was growing more pressing as the wound in her arm began to pulse and her mouth did its best impression of the Tunisian desert in summer.

  The spade was heavy in her hands, but as she stumbled on and grasped it tight in case a threat lurched out from an alley or doorway, she felt it settle into a comfortable grip. She found she was angling the head out and forwards slightly - better to allow for a quick jab at an enemy or to swing for a skull. What was that? Where had the knowledge come from? It felt like common sense. It felt natural, but she’d never been in a fight. Never used a weapon.

  But then again, a spade wasn’t really a weapon, and with that thought the understanding came.

  “[Basic Proficiency: Improvised Weapons].”

  As the memory of the skill came, she realised it hadn’t been the first time she’d heard the voice. It had been there, just before she woke up in her tent; it had spoken to her. But what had it said?

  It was too hazy. And she was still shaken from the whole experience, but she did remember what she had gained when she’d passed out. She spoke it aloud despite the rasp to her voice, if only to keep herself company in the quiet, dead city.

  “Fighter. Level 2. The weapon proficiency and [Swift Blow] - that is what was happening when I went for the children. And a level 1 Scholar. [Baseline Appraisal].” She felt the form of the words as she spoke them. They were Skills, not skills. “Hmm. Seems like cheating.”

  To gain something without putting in the work to learn it was an alien concept, but one she wouldn’t turn down. She’d take anything right now.

  Reaching the end of the row of terraced houses, she peered round the corner to check that it was free of the undead.

  It wasn’t.

  Internally now, she cursed.

  There were two skeletons nearby - perhaps two dozen paces away; it was awkward to judge with cracked glasses - and what looked like another further off.

  Continuing down the street she’d been on was little better. It was clear for a while but as it began to turn there was a solid mass of bones standing motionless. Waiting. At least, that was what she could make out from here.

  She stood, motionless, for long minutes, hoping some other solution would present itself. But of course, it didn’t.

  “Okay,” she muttered under her breath, “two. I can do two. I managed one when I was surprised, and now I have Skills…”

  Saying it aloud wasn’t as convincing as she’d hoped it would be, but as her choices were climbing over crumbling buildings of questionable structural integrity, facing a horde of skeletal foes, or heading the opposite way - deeper into the city - she decided she’d take the risk of…two of the undead, even if they did look like they were wearing the pitted and rusted remains of armour.

  Steeling her resolve, she crept forwards, ignoring the hunger in her belly and the pain in her arm.

  Twenty yards. Fifteen. Ten. The skeletons didn’t turn round. Five. One…

  She paused for a second as she raised the spade. She’d never hit someone that was unaware of her. But these things were already dead. Surely they didn’t feel? Didn't think? Everything she knew from pop culture said the undead were mindless monsters who sought to destroy the living. But w-

  One of them began to turn.

  Clang! Crunch!

  Marie stood, chest heaving, over two piles of scattered bones.

  That had been easy. Almost too easy.

  She’d felt the [Swift Blow] activate as soon as she’d thought about it, the spade suddenly weighing no more than a feather and swinging with three times the speed she could have managed normally. She’d recovered from the attack instantly. The second had been harder - the spade was heavier; the Skill hadn’t activated again. Was there a trick she was missing, or did she have to wait before she could use it again? Not knowing the rules was frustrating, but it seemed her proficiency with the improvised weapon worked all the time because she’d swung the iron head of the spade up and shattered the second skeleton’s spine right between its ancient helmet and its shoulder blades with a single blow.

  Unfortunately, the noise had drawn attention, and there proved to be more bodies around than the other one in the street.

  They crawled from the shells of what had once been their homes or places of work, bodies of yellow-white, glinting where the calcified remains caught what little light filtered down to the ground level of this cursed place. At first it was just one or two, then half a dozen, then a dozen.

  But Marie didn’t wait for them to surround her. Taking her spade in her hands like she knew how to use it, which she did, she rushed the closest and brought the improvised weapon down in a two-handed blow that crushed its skull down into its chest, the brittle bones exploding into shards and dust.

  She was moving before the remains hit the floor, legs pumping as she rushed to the ruin on the other side of the street where two more were stumbling over the uneven detritus of collapsed walls and broken road.

  She took them out before they could find their footing.

  The next had a length of metal in one hand that might have once been a sword, but she was faster than it, running high on adrenaline, and she shifted her grip down the handle to swing for its knees, stamping on its head when it fell to the ground with all the might her 110lb, 5’ 2” frame could muster.

  Say what you wanted about Earth’s knowledge, but it seemed that destroying the head worked to take out these things.

  A figure appeared on one of the few first-storey floors still intact, crawling out of the window to drop on her from above, but there was a loose cobblestone close at hand and she instinctively launched it up at the skeleton before it could defenestrate itself, shattering ribs and spine with greater accuracy than she could have hoped for a day ago.

  “Quelle conne. Right - improvise!”

  It was eerily silent as she destroyed a score of skeletons that tried to surround her. The only sounds beyond their shuffling and the rasp of bone-on-bone was the clang of the metal spade head carving through vertebrae or the dull crunch of a thrown stone crushing a skull or scattering a rib cage, and, once or twice, the reverberating echo of metal on metal as some met her blows.

  That and the ragged breaths that came from her as she darted around the street, keeping in motion.

  But that same silence let her notice a new set of sounds as the last of her assailants fell. From behind her the rattle of armour echoed out from streets unseen, and above that, a steady clip-clop of hooves on stone.

  It was difficult to tell how far off it was - there was a weird quality to the air that seemed to carry some sounds and deaden others, like on a winter morning where the air was frozen and the land was covered in snow. She didn’t wait to find out though.

  Only a couple of the skeletons had given her any trouble, and they’d both been wearing the tattered remains of armour - a rusting breastplate on one and vambraces and greaves on the other - and wielding bladed weapons. They’d blocked a few of her swings and forced her to dodge back and resort to stones to shatter the bones that were more exposed.

  Her speed and reach had given her an advantage, but as the initial surge of fear and tinge of excitement wore off she felt the leaden pull of exhaustion dragging at her limbs, and for the first time in her life wished she’d done more cardio.

  If a couple of skeletons in battered armour had given her pause, she didn’t want to know how she’d fare against enough to make the volume of noise she was now hearing, and she definitely didn’t fancy her chances against something on a horse - undead or not.

  Despite the wave of exhaustion that was as much emotional as physical, she needed to keep moving.

  By her best estimates she’d only covered a mile as the bird flew through the ruined streets before she’d ended up collapsing in the house that morning; that broken tower in the distance looked vaguely familiar - didn’t it?

  So she pushed her glasses up from where they were threatening to fall off her nose, and headed in the opposite direction of whatever was approaching behind her as quickly as she dared.

  …and she still hadn’t gotten her [Swift Blow] Skill back.

  https://www.patreon.com/collection/817753 and I greatly appreciate anyone who chooses to support me there.