"Cerberus has guarded this gate for generations since the lich was sealed," Siegfried gave each of us a hard look. "Many noble padins and even a grand knight tried to get past him but they all failed. None has entered the catacombs to challenge the lich in centuries."

  They reached the bottom step. Jinxara faced the door and hunkered down, pcing her cwed hands in front of her and moving into a sprinter's stance. Her tail shook from side to side, pointing its arrow tip erratically. Lirael chugged a mana potion with the other summoners and Siegfried put a hand on the door ready to push it open.

  He held up three fingers and counted down. At one he shoved the door open and Jinxara shot through the opening dodging a cw that would have skewered anyone at eye level. Sparks flew off Siegfried's armor where the side of the cw screeched across his armor. At the same time, Jinxara became a red blur shooting through the darkness.

  Green chains wrapped around the monster's arm and yanked it down before the beast could withdraw it. Blue lights within the eye sockets of wolves stared at us through the darkness as Jinxara sshed its throat. It opened its maw and another set of chains shed out around the beast's neck before spinning like a saw bde. Sparks flew as its rotten hide's enchantments fought demonic steel bdes with anti-undead properties.

  Jinxara jumped back away from a cw swipe. Her cwed toes cut sparking trails through the stone floor, stopping her retreat. Another cw showed forward, and the beast leaned into the chain to get a clean strike.

  Siegfried shot forward and parried a paw the size of a van with his obsidian war mace. The cw shot off target nding hard on the stone floor. The fort shook as a wave of demonic power bsted forth. The Jabberwock emerged from the meteor.

  The cw I bound dug its cws into the stone and rose slowly with undead enchanted muscles battling my will and the demonic power I had left at my disposal.

  The chain to Jinxara helped me move the demonic power between us, stopping it from deteriorating. That didn't mean I could have fought the Cerberus myself. It was the undead equivalent of a fiend-rank demon.

  I altered the chains on the paw sprouting bdes and cut through the limb at the joint. The monster struck out with its other cw, ignoring the others as it howled, unleashing a cloud of miasma in a closed-in space.

  A creeping fog of death spread around the monster and I looked up at the shaking stairway.

  Lirael shouted something, and a wave of purifying wind met the poison cloud, matching it and keeping the room from becoming a gas chamber. Cws the size of long swords raked against the chains trapping its paw as it howled and shook its head as the chains sawing into its neck cut through yers of muscle.

  I smirked at that. Being a part of a team was fun. Jinxara pushed me back just before a cw would have done me in.

  I rubbed her dark hair, careful not to mess with her horns. If I recalled correctly, imps were touchy about them. Only lovers could touch them.

  "I can't let you die or the others would kill me for being a traitor," Jinxara said.

  The head tumbled off as bck ichor poured out of its stump. Two more heads stretched out of the darkness, one crackling with electricity, while the other froze the ground with frost. Long reptilian necks connected them to a massive body with six limbs.

  The paw sawed free of the limb and the beast yanked its paw back. It growled before both jaws creaked open to spill out their elemental wrath.

  I raised my hand, focusing my full attention on the creature.

  Chains with padin steel spear tips bsted from the shadows around the crackling lightning impaling the beast several times a second. It roared, smming the shadows from where the attacks spawned, but ignored my party completely.

  The monsters VI was outdated.

  "Keep hitting it. Undead are like golems, they have a finite amount of energy before they power down. That ichor carries the negative energy through its body. If you drain all of its ichor, it won't be able to fight." Lirael said.

  The accented voice of princess Charlotte joined in. "What if it has a mortician rod or reserve ichor bdders in the body?"

  "Are you talking about recent undead innovations?" I asked.

  "Yes, the mortician rod was invented by the great empire's shamans to repair undead servants without needing an experienced mortician. It was invented not 40 years ago."

  The Cerberus colpsed as the ground atop a spreading pool of bck ichor. "I don't think this thing could have been upgraded."

  A red thread shot out from the monster's stumps. One grabbed its head, while the other grabbed its paw. I watched in horrible fascination as I was thoroughly proven wrong.

  The only expnation I could come up with was that the lich wasn't contained or that the fort's soldiers practiced necromancy and upgraded the Cerberus as necromantic technology improved.

  "We can't do this, it will just keep going until we can't fight it anymore," Charlotte said.

  I turned my head to the side in complete incredulity. Arguing was a sign of weakness, whether won or lost, so I didn't pn to bother with it.

  A little-known fact is that I could sense the area around my chains. It wasn't well or even visible, but I could feel around with my chains.

  My chains shot out from the shadows and impaled the Cerberus's stump following the threads from the mortician rod. Bdes sprouted from the chains along with backward-facing barbs to prevent the creature from pulling them out. I raised a second hand and added some grace to it as I pushed. Through rotten veins, my chains arrived at arteries.

  I found the mortician rod and pulled back ripping muscle, scraping bone, and ripping away necrotic tissue.

  "Jinxara, when my chains are out, crawl in and destroy the rod," I said.

  Jinxara appeared beside me with a gre promising murder.

  A slurry of flesh spewed out of the monster in necrotic heaps as Jinxara looked between the rotten slurry and back to me.

  Brown hair raised her hand. "I have a better idea."

  She looked nervous so I gave her my best encouraging smile and she paled. "Please y it on me," I said.

  "I can use liquid fme, a powerful elemental spell, to burn the Cerberus from the inside out. Its hide is covered with enchantments to resist fme, but if you make a hole big enough for Jinxara to fit into, my fmes could do the job."

  That was the start of a good tactic. Maybe I should learn her name.

  I pointed at her. "That is a great idea. You should voice your ideas more often. Oh, and get ready; the chain is almost free."

  The chain pulled out, and the brown-haired girl shot forward while screaming. "Make sure she reaches the stump. If you fail to protect her, then go in and retrieve the rod," I said.

  Jinxara fell into her sprint position showing off her ass. "The rotten bastard won't touch a hair on her head."

  "Language there is a princess present." Jinxara turned and looked at me. "I'm joking, say whatever you feel like."

  "Fuck you." Jinxara said.

  She shot forward and sliced through the joint of one of the Cerberus's paws before it could smush the brown haired girl. Threads shot out of the hole I made just when the chain broke free. The head was nearly reattached. Siegfried was busy battling the ice head while the lightning head took spear chain after spear chain, turning into Swiss cheese.

  If I had tried this alone it might have killed me. It was no wonder trying this was considered a death sentence.

  The fort shook as the Jabberwock unleashed its wrath. If each meteor was a lesser demon, then the world was in worse shape than I thought.

  Jinxara completed her escort mission and the brown haired summoner unleashed her spell. A jet of a bright orange liquid shot into the manhole sized hole leading into the monster. But I knew the liquid would slosh out without doing enough damage if I let it be. So I formed a chain with small curved disk-shaped bdes angled like a plunger. The chain unched before the liquid fme could emerge from the hole.

  The chain pushed the liquid fme inside the beast through veins and arteries until it reached the creature's depths.

  I wiped the sweat from my brow and fell back against a wall.

  "If the fight was this bad, then think about how bad fighting the lich would be," I said.

  "We aren't fighting him," Charlotte said.

  "I don't pn to no," I said.

  How often did pns survive first contact?

  The Cerberus caught fire but didn't die even when the mortician rod melted in the fmes, the remaining heads caught fire, and its ichor ignited. The beast continued fighting until it crumbled in on itself, and Lirael colpsed from exhaustion from refreshing the air, so we didn't die from smoke inhation.

  Jinxara lvl48

  Jobs

  Saboteur T2 10/10

  Ritualist T2 lvl9/10

  Imp T1 9/10

  "Boss, I need to increase my tier and have many choices.

  T3

  Gravebde Infiltrator: Masters of stealth who slip into undead hordes to assassinate necromancer commanders, causing the army to colpse into chaos.

  Pgueveil Executioner: Uses cursed toxins to rot entire undead ranks, turning the horde's numbers against itself via infectious decay.

  Cryptshade Reaper: Wields twin scythes imbued with soulfire, cleaving through swaths of lesser undead while evading detection.

  Whightmire Sabatour: Sabotages necromantic totems and burial grounds, severing the dark magic that binds the undead army.

  Soulsear Nullifier: Burns souls directly with bckfme daggers, preventing resurrection or regeneration by erasing the victim's essence.

  Entropy Edge Harvester: Wields bdes that accelerate entropy in wounds, causing regenerating flesh to age and crumble rapidly.

  Fleshrot Marauder: Uses serrated, poison-coated weapons designed to shred tissue and inject necrotic venom that halts cellur repair.

  Necrosis Whisper: Delivers slow-acting curses that rot regenerative cells, turning the target's healing factor against itself.

  I had to think of the short term and the much more important long term. Bck fme was just hellfire, something every tier 3 fiend could access. Enhancing daggers with them wasn't a great feat. Soulfire, though that was the primary weapon of the archons, it wasn't an anti-undead weapon so much as an anti-everything weapon.

  There were a few reasons why it was being offered. Normally, the archon in charge of the system would never give access to it, but his world was in danger. I was probably his best bet at stopping the demon invasion, and soul fire was very energy-intensive. She would need lots of demonic power to fuel any soul fire techniques. If I made her other job all about fueling her soul fire, then that changed things.

  I didn't just like min-maxing, no, that was a hideous lie, I loved min-maxing. A magic job like ritualist could easily be changed into something like a demon summoner. This was to create a pyramid scheme much like the hierarchy of hell. She would summon demons, helping me stabilize my bck halo and further empowering her. Jinxara would be in charge of the demons she summoned so I wouldn't have to deal with them. It was fool proof.

  "Cryptshade Reaper, don't worry about the power costs; we'll have plenty on your next tier."

  "Boss, I don't have a scythe."

  "We're going into an undead spawning pit, we'll find you a scythe," I said.

  "Awesome, you're the best boss."

  "I can't believe we got through it without casualties," Lirael said.

  The stairs chose that moment to colpse, killing three summoners.

  I turned to Lirael. "It's ok that was going to happen no matter what you said."

  "It's a sign the gods are angry with us and demand sacrifice," Charlotte said.

  Siegfried calmly looked at me. "She's being hysterical, could you reset her for me?"

  I spped the princess across the face, and her eyes widened in shock. Then, she burst into a tirade in a nguage I didn't understand.

  "Why did you sp the princess? What if her father finds out? She could demand your hand." Siegfried said.

  I blinked. Why did they think she was making it out when we had undead riddled catacombs to slog through?

  Her accented voice broke me from my ponderings. "No, you did the right thing. I lost control of my emotions. We can't afford that here."

  The next four chapters are on my patreon. Go ahead and check the collection out. Link