My first move was a feint—I wasn’t particularly hoping that I could cut it down from behind, but the enemy didn’t want to receive the hit. I wasn’t in a rush, as I didn’t need to win this thing with my first shot; I just needed to slow it down. Its reaction to the sword behind it left me a minute opening. I took advantage of it and slashed at its left leg with Schism. I felt the feedback of cutting through something hard. Wait, not just one thing! Two, three...four bones?! Was it multiplying its bones to prevent my attack?! What the hell was going on with this zombie’s body?
“Zwei! Drei!”
I managed to cut right through its thigh. Without a leg to stand on, it slumped to the side. As it lost balance, it used its arms to try and get at me—whether to strike or grab, I wasn’t sure. I interposed another summoned sword between me and the enemy. In TRPG terms, Schism earlier took a whole round to fully complete, and so I’d committed to this whole elaborate string of maneuvers on my prior turn to keep my target busy while I teed up the shot. It cost me three swords from my magic box, but it had made the enemy wary and stopped them from going totally ham, which was a win in my book.
This zombie was powerful, but whoever was running things wasn’t that used to combat. It moved efficiently and had a tough body, but I could sense some inefficient overthinking on the part of the person in the driver’s seat. That was why it had overreacted to my sudden fakeout backstab. My enemy was ingeniously engineered, but undisciplined, unproven.
This combination seemed weirdly familiar to me. It reminded me of a magus who wasn’t yet a polemurge. They had incredible tools at their disposal, but the person in question couldn’t use them to their full potential, given their dearth of practical experience. They had enough destructive power to crush most regular foes, but a more seasoned combatant could read them like a book. Everything about my enemy’s tactics just screamed “amateur combat magus” to me.
Well, they were a technocrat, after all. I didn’t want to think that an Imperial magus would do something so despicable. I supposed there were similar folk in any land. Specialists had a tendency to all think along similar lines, so I would just assume for now they weren’t a domestic threat.
Down a leg and shaken by the idea that they might actually lose, the zombie had lost much of the zeal that had driven its attacks before, and its movements had become exponentially more sloppy. It wasn’t just because I’d diminished its abilities. It was distracted. I glanced over to its severed leg and noticed that tendrils were squirming from the wound.
Uh-huh, I see... It was a regenerator, and it wasn’t used to its wounds healing this slowly! Schism, after all, was no mere armor-piercing strike, but a technique that annihilated what it cut down to the conceptual level. The leg that I had chopped off had forgotten it had once been a leg. That concept was gone. It was beyond the zombie’s regenerative formulae’s ability to recover.
Now, you might argue that handing out status ailments that forbid healing seems awfully like the sort of homebrew skill you’d see on a really nasty NPC antagonist, but y’know, up against something that forced me to waste actions dodging acid whenever I landed a clean hit, I could live with looking a little like the bad guy, and it had no right to be sore about it. In short, now that I’d deprived it of the frankly cracked ability to recover from harm as it punished me for harming it, it was stuck abiding by the conventional rules of combat.
It pushed harder to disengage as it sustained the pressure on me, seeming less like it wanted to actually hurt me and more like it was buying time to figure out why it couldn’t heal. I was happy to oblige.
Just then, I heard the signal I’d been waiting for.
“It’s ready!”
“Awesome, Siegfried!”
My opportunity had arrived. Siegfried and the others had finished planting the pegs, and now the preparations were complete. If I were being honest, though, I didn’t want to resort to this. The zombie was bitching and moaning—and even grieving—like a human, but there was no way a person could survive in a body as overtuned as that. Their brain couldn’t survive the mental strain.
Back in Berylin, I’d read something to that effect in a book Lady Agrippina had borrowed from the College’s vaults. According to a Setting Sun school authority in the past, if you were to forcibly change someone’s physical form—aside from natural transitions seen in other races such as vampires or geists—then their soul wouldn’t be able to cope with the intellectual gap that came from the structural difference of the body, even if it looked similar to the person’s previous form. In other words, this thing was either a zombie controlled by an independent geist or was being remotely controlled from afar. My instincts told me it was the latter.
The sorrow that this zombie had displayed didn’t seem like the despair one felt at losing one’s creator; rather, it came across like it’d been mourning the loss of a peer and colleague taken from the world too soon. Unless this was a brief window onto one of those weird and super obtuse backstories that a crafty GM would occasionally cook up in secret—so hidden that you only found out in the diner after the session—where it turned out that the zombie had raised an adoptive human child or something, I was pretty sure there was someone elsewhere pulling the strings.
That was why I didn’t really want to reveal yet another one of my secret tricks to an enemy that could still take that knowledge home, even after I killed them. On the other hand, I didn’t think that my stamina would last long enough to pop off enough Schisms to do the zombie in properly. I was locked in a deadly dance where one hit against me would spell my doom, and I was bound to run out of juice first. That was why I had to reveal my super top secret, max-power attack—one that, in all honesty, I viewed as perhaps the single most tremendous XP boondoggle of my entire career: a lesson in hubris I’d stumbled into while I was drunk on all my experience from Limelit.
“Hm? A spell?!”
The metal pegs were ritual tools engraved with fine incantations that aided in the creation of a magic circle. The circle they made was a bit messy, but it was only when I poured my mana in that the enemy realized I had finished my preparations. Fortunately the enemy had been so busy dancing with me that it hadn’t been able to use its many eyes to notice the preparations that had been underway around it. I was so, so grateful for my allies. Doing a big magic trick like this would be nigh impossible alone.