[img]http://i.imgur.com/SsySWU5.png[/img] It might be weird to say, but Leila actually sort of liked the place. Leila walked amongst the group, slowly - she probably wasn’t aware of the tension and fear in the rest of the members that caused their drop in pace, but Leila slowed her footsteps because she wanted more time to admire the scenery. Crooked, leafless trees. Howling wind. Clouded skies and moonlight shining through. Absolutely beautiful. Aside from the wind, Leila also believed that she heard speak - voices, some belonging to their group, some otherwise. One of them was laughing and humming a tune. Closing her eyes and immersing herself in the atmosphere of the place, she sang calmly along, repeating the song after the foreign voice: “A tisket a tasket, there’s blood -” [b]“HARPER LEILA GET OUT OF THE WAY”[/b] Before Leila could finish the line, she felt a sudden impulse against her chest. She was knocked right off her feet, and along with Harper they tumbled aside to the nearby ground. Leila had the wind knocked out of her, and the sudden change in atmosphere induced panic. What was going on? In pain she struggled to stand back up, looking around in search of the source of the sudden assault, only to piece together from the various parts of this incoherent scene - a rotten unicorn with its horn stuck in a tree, an apparently temporarily relieved Leon and an irritated Haku - that the gust of wind wasn’t an assault, their lives were just saved, and if she wasn’t mistaken, and if they were to live - [b]”Now only death awaits you...”[/b] - their lives will need to be saved several more times this night. Leila stomped the ground and shook her leg until the skeleton hand, barely covered by a remaining layer of dry, rotten skin, gave way and fell the the side, snapped. Her heart for scenery and laid back admiration receded and was replaced by a sense of imminent crisis - weird, she rarely feels like that. She noticed her amulet was glowing - not at full intensity, but brighter. She wondered - - there was no time to wonder. Without thinking she stepped aside, while reaching back with both hands to draw both her bow and an arrow. She could clearly feel the influence of the amulet this time - just like that time back in the caves, or on the mountain. She could feel her muscles snap into synchronization with her nerves, her thoughts. She could feel that her thoughts also seemed to be that bit less her thoughts, and that she was only co-commanding her body. [i]Save me.[/i] She didn’t have time to think about where that thought came from, or to whom it was directed. The dead rose through the ground from beneath them, muscles decayed somehow managing to drag the skeletal bodies along the paths that all led to one of the members of the group of humans and lost souls. They weren’t fast - that plus the fact that their path-finding methods were consistently to follow the straight line to the target - made them nearly static targets. The short distances meant that the archer had a larger acceptable margin when she gauged her aim, which in turn allowed her to do it faster. In quick succession she fired two arrows, one at the head of an approaching zombie and the other at another one that just broke through the ground - both on target, and efficiently knocking them over and motionless. Go for the brains. Dead, this time hopefully permanently. And so, arrow after arrow. She almost felt like she didn’t need to think. She was mildly amused she didn’t feel sorry for their deaths - or perhaps it was because she already decided that they were already dead anyway. What’s the difference if you could move but all you could do was drag your feet along towards the nearest living thing… ...how did all this work? She told herself that when this was all over she needed to recover one of them and take some samples... The premise was “when this was over”. Only then did it strike Leila that state was what they’d probably end up in if they didn’t get out of this. Either that or the actually dead she was thinking about, depending on how much you believe in zombies. And it didn’t matter because they [i]needed[/i] to get out of this. More arrows embedded in aged, slightly crispy skulls. What concerned her more, however, was that there was no surjection from her arrows to the number of zombies emerging around them. Her amulet was also draining quickly. She plucked an arrow from a skull on the nearby ground, loaded it onto the bow and took aim at one of the closing undead. Yet as she let go of the bowstring she was pulled back by the shoulders, the arrow flung upwards, aimlessly into the sky. Quickly recovering and pulling free from the grip of the decayed fingers - the dead weren’t especially strong physically - in a panic she resorted to bashing the zombie on the head with her bow, which proved efficient as the creature dropped to the ground, with a layer of greyish slush remaining on the wood. Their numbers were great and she wasn’t fast enough. Neither did she have enough ammunition. As she continued firing, she look around frantically for higher ground, for a gap in the swarm, and for her human allies. That slowed her down even more, and she could feel the circle closing in. And then for one moment she glimpsed the movement of a figure some distance away that differed from the army of corpses. A sword. “Harper!” She cried out without thinking, and it must’ve been the loudest thing she ever uttered in a long time. She didn’t know the purpose of that signal, nor how she expected Harper to respond. She wasn’t entirely sure it was Harper. It was another one of those times you feel like it wasn’t you voice that yelled what you just yelled after you yelled it. But she just felt...kind of relieved to see him there. Which was a silly emotion because she already had no space to draw the bow, and was now down to using the bow as a very inefficient blunt weapon a bit clumsily just to keep the clawing hand off of her. She had three arrows left - she reached for one and stabbed it straight through the socket of one of the closer zombies. Two. No time to think anymore, but she didn’t need to think to know that she couldn’t hold this for long, and if something was to happen, it had better happen soon - - and then, a cascade of bright light in all the colours of the rainbow, the the background, behind her.