An ear-piercing sound thundered across the night sky, the people didn’t realized what brought it until it was already floating above their heads, an enormous mass of dozens of meters composed of countless flies! Nobody could realize they were not true flies but small phantoms, all composing a single organism, an Undead! And that Undead as Maria herself.
“Just what… what is that?!”
“A-Another monster?!”
“Why is this night so endless?!”
The people trying to fend off the ghouls quickly ran away from the enormous mass of flies, as Maria nodded to herself and flew down, some people ended being caught up in the swarm of flies, thinking they would get devoured alive, but they only realized they were… well clean. The dirt and blood over their bodies was completely cleansed, but they were not devoured.
The ghouls, however, weren’t treated so nicely, as Maria flew around the city, she unleashed her powerful Aura against the ghouls, and also the power of her Gorgon Eyes combined together! The Ghouls were shocked with Fear and then paralyzed through her Eye of Paralysis, they were too weak to even resist her might, but she made sure to inflict fear on them so Paralysis would be more easy to be inflicted on targets.
The ghouls began dropping in the floor one after the other, the people that stood watching at the scene were left in disbelief, they were completely paralyzed and some even fell unconscious! The mass of flies wasn’t hurting anybody, in fact, merely putting them down so they wouldn’t hurt anybody else. And that wasn’t everything at all, as a trio of demi-humans ran into the city and began to reassure the people that everything was alright.
“Don’t worry, that mass of insects is tamed by our leader, the Mercenary Marie! You know her, right? She’s the one that killed the undead at the graveyard!” Said Partner.
“Are you alright? Do you feel unwell?” Emeraldine wondered, as she began bathing everyone with holy light to heal minor wounds and close larger wounds, her aura spread out into a domain of light and life as well, making for an amazing healer.
“Don’t worry, everything is alright!” Lucifer began helping people trapped below rubble, moving out large pieces of rubble, and letting Emeraldine heal them, all while Partner moved them away and gave them to the people refuging at the gates of the city. Maria had even left an army of Undead there, and a clone of herself made of phantom to guide the people and reassure them the undead were there to protect them.
Maria’s clone was using this opportunity to ask the people what exactly had happened. She felt intrigued about this and wanted some answers from those that saw everything firsthand.
“It was too sudden, out of nowhere people began turning into zombies!”
“Yeah, we heard someone before though…”
“Someone?” Asked Maria.
“It was like the weird voice of a woman…”
The people refuging in the gates of the city began to speak, many had a different version of what had happened, but it was all quite similar, a woman had suddenly screamed “Awaken!”, and the people suddenly turned into ghouls or “zombies” as the people called them. These zombies immediately attacked everyone on sight, but not one another… the chaos began from there.
“That woman might had been a vampire then… I have the Appraisal Skill, so I was able to appraise the infected people, they’re the victims of the drugs… these drugs that some people had been consuming, it turned them into monsters when this vampire woman said the special word!” Said Maria, revealing the truth to the people, as she felt no obligation to keep it a secret.
With this, she could feel reassured the people would know what’s happening and simply not try to kill the ghoulish zombies, although there were already some that had been killed, and well, normal people was also slaughtered by them, there were dozens of casualties, and many souls were floating around. Maria asked these souls about their anecdotes as well, gathering a lot of information about what they had experienced.
“S-So are we being attacked by Vampires?!”
“Should we go fight as well?”
“We are adventurers, we can’t simply hide in here!”
A group of a few dozen people, Adventurers, felt motivated to fight, but as there were no Vampires on sight, Maria began to think that they might be somewhere else entirely. Not in the city at plain sight, or perhaps, they had been targeting someone else this entire time? The moment she realized this, she suddenly remembered that she lost her connection with the clones she left with Julia!
A strange barrier was cutting her mental connection with them, so she was incapable of seeing what they were seeing, nor feel what they were feeling, even less know the current situation of her Undead and how they could currently be doing. She had left Darkbound, Kuro, and Raven with her, but perhaps that wasn’t enough for whatever was attacking Julia and her servants.
“No, you have to stay in here for the moment, I know you want to fight but this is too dangerous for you!” Said Maria, as she quickly moved through her other body across the city.
After Maria incapacitated most of the ghouls, she felt a dangerous presence within Julia’s residence, feeling concerned, she decided to leave the rest to her party.
“Guys, there’s something in Julia’s place! There’s no way this just happened out of nowhere, and if it did, Julia would be here dealing with it! I’ll go search for her, you guys stay here and help the people for the moment!” Maria said without even hearing her party’s answers, as she flew off into the skies.
When she finally reached the area where Julia’s manor was, she quickly found a weird barrier that was absorbing Mana from anyone that touched it. Maria quickly realized this was the same barrier protecting this place, but somehow it had been changed and it was now trapping everyone inside!
“You think this is going to stop me…?! Yog-Sothoth!”