Excuse me?

John wasn't the only one thrown from his position. The Beacon's next attack was so powerful that John saw his horse also flying through the air as his body was sent skidding across the ash and dirt. It hit John so hard that he bounced once off the ground from the impact and then landed on his shoulder with a loud, hard grunt before shoving himself back up to his feet as quickly as possible. He didn't even bother waiting long enough to try and catch his breath again. The knowledge of the fact that he was only a couple hundred feet away from about fifty undead soldiers and a large necromancy crystal sent his heart racing and pushed him to try and run away.

He only barely managed to stand up before he saw what happened when the beacon leveled up. At first, it was hard to comprehend what it was that he was looking at. One of the surrounding crystals around the Beacon's original placement lifted up from the ground. The dirt and ash it grew out of fell away from the construct like the bottom of the second pillar hadn't even been buried three feet into the earth. It moved sharply through the air as John stared at it, pivoting around the Beacon's main pillar body before one end of the new piece abruptly slammed against the ground. It steadied the main structure and **** the charge of levitating magic back against it while another pillar also ripped free from the dirt... and then another, and another...

The growing spikes of amethyst and elemental essence that had been poking out of the ground all shot up towards the first Beacon, and with a giant flash of purple lightning, the Beacon stood. The broken pieces and wounds that John had torn from the center left it jagged and thin while the rest of the gems formed around it like the original Beacon had become a torso. It was so lanky and weak after all the damage it had taken that it looked something that had been starved and left to rot as it pushed up onto two sharp, leg-like pillars. Its narrow body slouched under all the weight of the other gems as it finished forming its shoulders and arms, and then it turned right towards John and seemed to almost stare at him... even if it had no head.

It never needed one; the beacon saw with its light and its summons.

It stepped towards him, and John watched as its foot fell on his upturned horse. The zombies finally jerked back to life with the Beacon's new evolution, and every last soldier began to stomp and drag over to the Gamer. He swallowed hard and barely noticed his pack members yelling at him under the sound of all the deafening wailing and screeching coming from the ghastly faces on the crystal's surface. They had to move away, and so did he; with the beacon and its light moving now, they were in even more danger. They-

Undead Elemental
Level 10 Enchanted Essence
<Ruin>
15/120 HP
RP: -200
Effects: BOSS!, Mobile, Mana Well, Truesight, Pack Leader, Growing.

John blinked as he stared hard at the Elemental's health bar. It hasn't healed back up. His eyes narrowed and slowly moved back up to look at the Elemental, and then he straightened up again. The dead began to lurch towards him, and the evolved Beacon went with them. Each step it took was so heavy that it sent a small tremor through the surrounding area. John's pack members screamed at him, and naturally, he ignored them.

It only took a couple of steps for the elemental to reach John. The wailing of hundreds of different voices within it drowned out all other sound as it got close, and he could see it starting to pulse with a stronger light as the seconds went by, but he wasn't worried, not yet at least. In a way, the lack of living people in the villages was starting to make sense to John. If that was how the Beacon's grew, and if they walked between villages to spread and create more beacons, then it was easy for him to understand how all of the cities he had come to had been eradicated.

Undead Elemental used Blind! (30s remaining)
Undead Elemental used summoning!
Undead Elemental Drains you for -15 HP!
Undead Elemental Drains you for -15 HP!

By the time that the Beacon had regained its casting ability and raised its arms up to strike at John, he didn't even need his vision for it anymore. It came right to him, close enough for him to finish it off with the last few dregs of mana he had left. His fists flashed brightly as he smacked it a few times with his Infused Strike ability, and then all sound died off. Even the Hallowed stopped making any noise. The elemental exploded once and fell into a pile of shards and glimmering pieces of loot, and John stood there... a little nervous as the rest of his pack didn't even call out to him. He waited for either his vision to come back or for a zombie to bite him, but after thirty seconds passed and he found that he hadn't been attacked, he started to breathe a little easier.

Until he saw the horde of Hallowed men twitching in front of him while they adjusted to the sudden lack of magic that was being used to control them. At the first sign of movement from John and the Orcs, the crowd of dead began to move towards them again, hefting up rusted blades as they found their first meal all on their own. Almost thirty of them charged immediately towards John, and he barely got away when Mub rode in now that the Elemental was dead and gave him a ride back to safety. He and the rest of his pack regrouped at one of the far hills as the dead slowly chased after them... and then the men asked their Alpha what the next step was.

"Ride them down," he muttered and began to nurse the shoulder that he had landed on back to health.

It took a couple more hours after that to finally finish killing everything off. After he had finally stopped to take a moment to rest and breathe, he regenerated, mostly with the help of his Meditation ability, and then charged back into the fray. He had to stop at one point, mostly because of the fact that he couldn't use his Cavalier ability without a weapon, but once he found Putt's still walking body, he managed to swipe the undead Orc's old club. The weapon was quite simply just a large, brown, heavy block of wood and was covered in a thick, dark substance that smelled quite like copper, but it didn’t matter. The only important thing of note for John was that when he picked it up he could actually swing something so heavy, even though it felt like it had been crafted around a giant metal rod to help make each strike hit just a little harder.

After all of the zombies were finally destroyed, John stopped to go over what loot he had earned. He was surprised to find right off the bat that he still earned experience whenever the members of his pack had killed anything, but it was only half of what he would have earned if he had killed them himself. In the end, with nearly a hundred undead finally killed off, John walked away from the fight with almost enough experience to get him another level. However, the amount that he got from killing the elemental helped to finally push him up to level eleven.

LEVEL UP!
+5 Stat Points!

+6 Undead Essences
+21 Undead Essence Shards
+2 Shadow Essences
+48 Bones
+168 Zombie Teeth
+40 Arcane Rocks
+38 Units of Grey Tattered Cloth
+$23,440

Once again, not all of the zombies dropped money for John upon ****, and when his pack killed them, they dropped half of what they would have normally given him. The Elemental itself simply seemed to give him a thousand bucks for every level it had. At level ten, it gave him a separate surprise of nearly ten grand, and much to his own enjoyment... the members of his pack didn't care for any strange pieces of paper. They did like the idea of collecting all the skulls, rusted weapons, and pieces of armor that the Hallowed used, however, and in exchange for fighting for John, he let them take all of it.

"Just make sure to use some of it to make me some more armor," he told Mub with a little chuckle while both men tried to strap more swords and breastplates to their horses than they knew what to do with. In the end, they had to bury some of the loot. They couldn't carry such an incredible amount, so they had to hide it from thieves and scavengers. John would have offered to put it in his inventory for them, but he was running out of room and needed to clear some of it out. If he could have spared the Mana for his Craft ability, he might have tried to turn some of it into simple iron crafting materials and units, but there was so much of it that he didn't even bother trying.

He just skipped straight to trying to help his men dig.

This time, when John leveled up, only two of his stat points went into his Strength score. He tried to keep the focus of his 'character building' on his Strength, but with the possibility of unlocking the use of his new Evade ability, the majority and rest of his points went into his Agility, bringing it up to a total of twenty. The increase of his stat was distinguished first around his waist. As his Agility stat went up, the width around his midsection went down. It was only a small, subtle change, one that John didn't even notice was happening at first. It came to his attention when he put a hand on his side and felt how it had shrunk beneath his fingers.

His pack didn't even look twice at John; as far as they were concerned, nothing had happened. They all finished up business in Eldham, removed the blinders on their respective mounts, much to the relief of the horses, and then finally rode back home for Bleakfield and the tribe.