“That cowardly boil on a hag’s ass,” William spat an invective towards the departed member of their crew. He had expected a certain level of treachery from Ioder. The creature’s nature demanded it. But he’d expected the betrayal to come later, when there was more at stake. Ioder has either been overestimated, or else vastly underestimated. Either way, William and Atzar needed a moment of reprieve from the press of rotting fungus creatures to form a new battle plan.

“Push them back, mage,” William barked and switched his grip on his scythe. Instead of slashing at the creatures, which was proving frustratingly ineffective, William slammed the body length haft of the weapon straight into a group of them. Even the zombie’s constitution meant little against the revenant’s strength, and zombies flew back from William one after another. He knew he was only buying a few moments, as the creatures were merely being added back into the ranks of the advancing horde, but it was something.

And then William’s hand plunged straight into a melon sized mushroom growing out of one zombie’s bloated chest cavity. The swollen flesh swallowed his hand past the wrist, encasing him in a semi-liquid rancid coolness. William’s hand plunged further into the creature, carried by the force of William’s attack, and he panicked at the thought that his whole arm would simply plunge straight through the creature’s chest. Then the obsidian haft of the scythe hooked a splintered rib and the creature forcefully spun away from William.

William had been in enough fights to know how to recover from such an error, but the stumble had carried him away from the safety of the boulder that was keeping the zombies off Atzar and William’s backs. All too quickly, William found himself mired in a sea of putrid flesh. He was tough. But he doubted that even his supernatural physique could survive being torn apart by a horde of mindless dead. Not that it would come down to that.

The moment William was buried in undead flesh he’d unleash the force of his wrath in an explosion of liquid fire. Doing so would destroy the creatures, but this close to Atzar it would almost assuredly kill the mage. And even if the man somehow survived he and William would be in no position to continue pushing towards the Sickly Horseman. William would survive, but he’d be a failure.

That was something he couldn’t allow.

“Atzar, aid me,” William snarled, his voice easily carrying over the shuffling but silent press of zombie bodies. Though his magic was ill suited to destroying the creatures outright, Atzar seemed to be able to throw them aside with some manner of ease. William could only hope that the mage could keep it up.

The two of them fought together, combining lashing blunt spell strikes with bludgeoning force to bring William back to the relative safety of their defensive position.

“This isn’t working,” William growled as he joined his companion. “We can’t keep this up forever.” Aztar nodded, his concentration too focused at the moment to reply. “I’ve got an idea, but it’s risky. I think I can clear the area but you’ll need to get as close to me as possible. If it doesn’t work I think it’ll be too late to fight back against all of them.”

“Do it,” Atzar said.

William dropped his scythe and grabbed the mage, crushing him into a tight embrace. With his other hand William reached up and gripped the handle of a massive cleaver of forged dragon bone. The cleaver was enormous, almost as large as William himself. It would have been a ridiculous sight to see on any other warrior, but William hefted the weapon as easily as he had his obsidian scythe.

There was pent up power in the raw bone cleaver, an echo of rage that the ancient dragon mother had itself possessed. William felt that power coursing throughout the bone and, crushing Atzar against the boulder as tightly as he could, released it.

A torrent of phantom blades surged from the weapon, wildly spinning and slashing at everything that was more than a hands breadth from William and extending twenty feet away from him. The effect was devastating to the zombie horde.

Nothing larger than a fist remained of anything within five feet of William, and even the stone of the boulder was slashed and scored in hundreds of places. William himself was covered in a wave of vile spray which had burst from the slaughtered zombies. Even so, the zombies furthest away were already beginning to stir back to life, and there were even more of them approaching from the mist.

“Let’s get out of here before they surround us again,” William said, spitting out a gobbet of stringy puss. He bent and retrieved his scythe out from under a mound of dead slurry.

“We can make a more effective defense at the dragon’s corpse.”