Leaping between branches, Julia was extra careful to watch her footing now that the rain had started. Up until now, the swamp had been endlessly wet but strangely rainless. She hadn’t really thought about it—until the drizzle started. Not that she knew whether swamps were more prone to rain than other environments, but the constant drizzle fit the dismal, gray mood of the place.

  While miserable, it did aid in cloaking her approach further. Despite being as silent as possible, slight scrapes and heavier-than-intended footfalls were inevitable when one lept large distances repeatedly. The rain was a perfect cover with impeccable timing, as Julia was beginning to make out more of the sounds she was headed toward.

  In addition to metal striking metal, she could hear grunts and hisses—from people or undead, she couldn’t say. She desperately hoped for people, as any undead that vocalized enough to even grunt or hiss would be stronger than the standard skeletons. Those gh?ls did plenty of both, so that was her first guess.

  She perched on a branch just outside of sight of the conflict thanks to the rain, though her Truesight saw everything as though the sun was shining. There were three people with their backs to a tree, surrounded by skeletons and Gh?ls. The people appeared—at first glance—to be holding their own, but Julia spotted a disaster approaching.

  There was a contingent of Revenants approaching from about three jogs away. They were not the orderly and organized soldiers she’d seen just hours ago. These were monsters of malice and hate. They sprinted through the swamp water, their sloshing and splashing making enough noise to wake the dead—which made sense considering their current state of unlife.

  Julia pondered as quickly as her parallel mind structure would allow. How could she help? Did she even need to help? These people looked equipped and trained. They were fending off the gh?ls and skeletons well enough on their own. She knew it wouldn’t last, though. Those undead were nothing more than animals—the revenants were well-armed and far more intelligent than the rank-and-file.

  What could she do? She couldn’t use lightning around the people, lest she end them quicker than the undead. She could potentially strike the revenants before they reached the main group, but she wasn’t sure how well electricity would propagate through the swamp water. Were a couple jogs enough distance from the group of people to insulate them from the strike?

  She couldn’t risk it. There was no time to think further—she had to get close. She used Dispersal to spread herself out in the rain, hopefully masking her approach as she used Wind Magic to propel herself toward the revenants. She had only an outline of a plan at the moment, but she would do what she could. She was certainly not going to watch people die without acting.

  She used a brief stint of Telepathy to ask Trixy to stay out of the fight. Her primary offense at the moment was her lightning, and invisibility had already proven ineffective. Trixy slinked disappointedly off into the trees while Julia was soaring toward the revenants.

  She mustered up her mana (now fully recovered after hours of travel) and hovered just above the waterline in wait. She focused on suffusing her mana into a pool of the water she estimated the revenants would walk into and siphoned the heat away from it. She used Wind Magic to quickly move the fog that was created away from the area.

  She wasn’t sure how intelligent the revenants were. She could see in their eyes and movements that they were above the skeletons, but she didn’t know if that extended all the way to human-like intelligence. The fog giving her away was simply a risk she didn’t need to take at the moment. This recognition also came with the realization that she was also a cloud of fog at the moment, and she quickly submerged.

  The revenants were close enough that she could feel the water she sank into sloshing with the waves of their footfalls. Her nerves were ramping up the closer they got. Waiting in the middle of a battlefield, submerged and silent, was somehow worse than charging into a fight—it gave her too much time to think.

  The first revenant stepped into her controlled the water, followed by another, and then the whole group was within. She couldn’t see due to being dispersed and submerged, but through her controlled water, she could tell that there were seven of them. This was not a good number, but she was already dedicated.

  Before they could pass through completely, she pushed the water over the edge and rapidly siphoned heat out of it. She’d pulled as much heat from the water as she comfortably could, but she didn’t want it to freeze too early, so she left it just on the edge of freezing. Her siphoning speed was much faster now, and the water rapidly cooled—with revenant legs still inside.

  Julia bolted up out of the water, now reformed and with increased weight, and wreathed her sword in lightning. This was not her usual lightning, it was dark red and crackling with an unquenchable appetite. She struck at the face of the first revenant and was fortunate to meet no resistance due to its surprise at the sudden freeze and attack. The blade pierced into its eye socket and lightning discharged with a zap.

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  The revenant fell over onto the ice immediately, unmoving. She wasted no time admiring her work and lunged at the next. This one—although frozen in place—mustered itself enough to hold its ax up in defense, but Julia simply struck its hand. The lightning again discharged into the revenant, and it keeled over to join its compatriot.

  She had a sudden realization: she could specify targets. Well, obviously she could, but what she hadn’t realized immediately was that although the risk of lightning hitting an ally was low-but-possible over long distances, she was so close to her intended targets that the chance was miniscule—especially considering she was also now a good jog-or-so from the other site of conflict.

  She crouched down and put her palm on the ice, casting a new Bolt spell with specific instructions to target the undead mana within the revenants’ skulls, while not leaving the confines of the ice. She released the spell, and a crimson Bolt arced into the ice with a thwump.

  Five revenants around her convulsed suddenly, and two of them fell over into full defeat. She had been conservative with her mana, so she was expecting survivors. This was not an issue, as the combination of the sudden shock disrupting the mana powering them combined with their ever-freezing bodies had slowed the remaining revenants to an almost standstill.

  Julia lightened her weight and stepped on top of the ice block, sliding over to the other three revenants on her knees. She slashed each of them wherever she could find exposed skin, and the mana around her sword flowed into each. Soon, all seven revenants lay defeated atop a thawing block of murky swamp ice.

  She turned back to the other combat zone—still in a stalemate. Now that she had a chance to examine closely, she realized these people had large, pointed ears, the points jutting up higher than the tips of their heads—elves! Other than their pointed ears, there were no differences she could discern from humans.

  At the front of the three was a hulk of a woman in what looked like brown plate armor. The armor was clearly worn-and-torn, with dents, dings, and scratches all across it. The woman didn’t seem to have a helm—or potentially lost it—so Julia could clearly see her light brown hair that flowed down her back in waves, and she thought she could just make out deep brown eyes, despite the distance.

  She carried a mace and shield of what appeared to be bronze, the shield covering from her chin to just below her knees. She was clearly the tank, but she didn’t let that stop her from dealing damage. Her mace was devastatingly effective against the skeletal skulls, though she was having a hard time contending with the wild ferocity of the gh?ls. She couldn’t take a break from defending long enough to strike them.

  Behind the woman was a slender man in leather armor plates, similar to Julia’s first set of armor, though his helmet was made of that same dark leather. He wore a dark mask that covered his face up to his nose. He had a longbow on his back and was currently using a shortbow to deal tremendous damage to the horde, as each of his arrows seemed to suck the life—or unlife—out of them.

  Finally, there was another slender man in a long, flowing robe that probably used to be white. It was as torn and tattered as the others’ armor, with holes rent here or there and dyed a brown that got darker as it neared his feet. She could see a glimmer from light—nearly white—hair under the cowl that covered his head.

  He carried a staff with a gnarled tip gripping a crystal that glowed green periodically. He seemed to be switching between healing his companions and maintaining brambles on either side of them, if Julia was reading his mana correctly.

  The brambles were all twisting, thorny vines that grew up to shoulder-height (for them—head height for Julia). The thorns likely wouldn’t harm the undead, but they were effective at keeping them away from the party’s sides, funneling the horde toward the tank at the front.

  As she watched, Julia thought that they would likely defeat the horde eventually, but they were obviously exhausted. She decided to help, lest that exhaustion lead to a fatal mistake in an otherwise-winnable situation. She’d also had an idea while dispersed in the swamp muck waiting to trap the revenants.

  The swamp floor was incredibly thick mud, which is why she hadn’t considered her usual tactic of burying enemies’ feet. Mud wasn’t earth, right? She felt pretty stupid about that now—what was mud but water mixed with earth, and what magic was she most familiar with but Water and Earth Magic?

  Julia used a gust of wind to propel her toward the conflict while readying her spell. She landed with a splash, drawing both the horde’s and the elves’ attention. She unleashed her mana, and the water around them swelled like a rogue wave had overcome the swamp.

  Thick, gooey strands of mud splashed out of the water and gripped the skeletons and gh?ls, dragging them down like a kraken might a ship, until only their heads were above the water. Julia held the spell and turned toward the group of elves.

  “Would you mind using that big mace to crush their heads? I can only hold them like this for a few minutes,” she said, looking at the large, armored woman.

  The woman nodded and got to work. The archer also continued shooting heads like the stalemate had never broken. The caster dropped the brambles and began healing wounds, huffing and puffing all the while.

  Once the final undead was dispatched and a notification blinked in the corner of her eye, Julia released her spell—the mud sinking back to the swamp floor. She put on the most winning smile she could manage under the circumstances and turned to the party, hoping her slaying of the undead had proven she was there as an ally, not aligned with the dead.

  “Nice to meet some living souls after all this time. Could you perchance tell me where I am, and whose fuckin’ nightmare I’ve inadvertently stumbled into?” she asked over the pitter patter of rain on the swamp water.