~~~~~

  “Alright! Just register with this paper, and we’ll get you started on the class you’ll end up with,” the clerk said, handing over a worn parchment. “But a warning, once you're assigned a class, it will stick with you for the rest of your life.”

  “Would that be an issue?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  The clerk shook his head with a calm smile. “No, it wouldn’t,” he replied.

  The Order of the Southern Radikal was a promising guild in the far eastern lands of the Damian Kingdom. Its expanding territories had pushed the guild to recruit adventurers and mercenaries.

  I hadn’t built much of my strength yet, but during my younger years, the town mages told me I possessed unusually strong mana. They encouraged me to pursue magic, and so I did, believing it was the right path.

  Many locals and travellers from across the region gathered here, inside the lively guild tavern, each hoping to carve out a name for themselves. Some dreamed of becoming as successful as the legendary “Great Ten”. Around me, the room buzzed with voices and clinking mugs. I saw various people, archers sharpening their arrows, knights polishing their armour, mages chatting with sparks flickering at their fingertips, and even summoners calmly seated with small spirits hovering beside them.

  Women, young men, and older men all worked together as equals here, some already holding high-tier ranks like the prestigious Diamond Rank and even the rarer Titanium Class. Among them, I spotted the legendary Lady Victoria, a powerful Knight-class adventurer, kneeling slightly to speak kindly with a group of common Silver Rank adventurers. Even reaching Silver was considered a blessing. Escaping the Copper tier was no easy feat.

  Summoners were among the rarer classes to awaken into, and while powerful, legends warned of a cursed path, those who became Undead Summoners. Useless to the world, unable to even summon the undead themselves, they were often marked as failures. I couldn’t imagine ending up as one. To be the weakest of all… it was a terrifying thought.

  As I stood near the front of the line, a quiet moment passed. Then, I felt a light tap on my head from behind.

  “Ovisia, look!” she said excitedly. “The appraiser told me my ability is most promising as an Archer! Perhaps, after this, we should go to the Fletcher’s shop and purchase a bow!”

  She grinned from ear to ear, practically bouncing on her feet.

  “Sure,” I replied with a smile. “Once I get my appraisal done, I’ll spare a few copper coins to help you with that.”

  She was beautiful. Her golden hair flowed with a soft shimmer, catching the tavern’s light as it spilt through the windows. Crimson eyes gleamed with excitement and warmth. She drew the gaze of many men in the room, each no doubt wishing for a girl like her. But her eyes… they always focused on me. I was lucky. Blessed, even, to share a long-standing friendship with her.

  Just then, a voice called out from behind the counter.

  “Ovisia Merisa! Come! We shall begin the appraising,” the appraiser announced with a firm yet inviting tone.

  She turned to me and gently placed her hand on my shoulder. “Good luck,” she said, her voice soft and steady.

  I smiled back, my nerves calming just a little.

  With the papers in hand, I stepped forward to join the guild official. Behind me, the chatter of the tavern quietened slightly. Many of the new adventurers watched, curious and intrigued by what class I would become.

  “Just stand there, and I’ll have the Guild Mage check your class type,” the guild official instructed, gesturing for me to remain still.

  “Remember~!” he added with a grin. “What you call upon is what you shall end up as… Though, in rare cases, there may be outcomes that let you choose your path.”

  “I understand,” I said quietly.

  All eyes turned toward me. Their gazes settled, silent and heavy, waiting.

  And then, as if summoned by fate itself, she appeared.

  The mage.

  An elderly woman, draped in flowing silk, black as shadow. Her eyes, piercing, ageless, held the weight of someone who had witnessed the rise and fall of a thousand battles. She moved with solemn purpose, each step echoing through the hall, commanding the attention of everyone present.

  She stopped in front of me. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then, in a voice that seemed to come from beyond the veil of reality, she spoke:

  “Thou shalt know thy power. You shall remain… for he will stay of the class untold. Do you accept?”

  I answered without thought, without understanding.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  How foolish I was.

  Light burst forth from the palms of her hands, an orb, radiant and wild, sparking with volatile energy. Whirlwinds swirled around her, twisting in unnatural patterns. Shadows closed in, forming a shroud around me, cutting me off from the world.

  She closed her eyes, her expression sharpening as her focus deepened.

  She saw into me.

  To read what I was.

  “You have a strong heart…” she murmured.

  “A warrior…”

  I blinked. Me? A warrior?

  I didn't know how to respond. But she went on.

  “Your past…” the mage whispered, her voice laced with ancient gravity. “You were born for war. A son bred for battle.”

  She paused, her eyes glowing faintly as foreign names fell from her lips like distant echoes.

  “Chechnya…”

  “Ukraine…”

  “The dead follow you… wherever you go.”

  Her words struck me harder than I’d expected. Not as prophecy, but as something deeper. Like a memory I couldn’t place.

  “I’ve never been to those countries, let alone heard of them,” I said softly, my voice unsteady. “I was never a soldier.”

  I looked into her eyes, hoping for some kind of answer.

  She didn’t blink.

  “Yet you are,” she said, her tone unwavering. “A soldier… before you arrived.”

  The silence that followed was heavy.

  Chechnya… Ukraine…

  Strange names. They sounded so distant, so… wrong in this world. I couldn’t place them anymore. Maybe I once knew them. Maybe they once mattered.

  But not now.

  Not here.

  What mattered now was what I would become, what fate this appraisal would hand me.

  The ancient mage continued to mutter under her breath, her hands fluttering as the orb danced between shadow and light. Her eyes remained closed, yet her face contorted, gently at first, then as if she'd glimpsed something she wasn't meant to. Something that unsettled even her.

  I stood there, arms folded, pulse steady.

  The darkness around us gradually dissipated. The gusts died down. The ritual had concluded.

  She opened her eyes, staring straight at me for a long moment before turning to the others gathered behind her.

  "You are… an Undead Summoner," she announced, voice hollow.

  Silence dropped like a guillotine.

  Then came the laughter. The whispering. The murmurs rippling across the guild.

  "Undead Summoner? Damned draw, more a curse than a class..."

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  "Poor bastard..."

  Some of the older adventurers just stared at me, like I was something contagious. Diseased. The mage, though, she didn’t blink. She simply held my gaze, eyes like ice. Cold. Knowing. As if she’d seen something she wasn’t ready to say aloud.

  That silence of hers said more than the murmurs ever could.

  Behind me, I felt a hand press firmly on my back, hers. She stepped up, standing beside me.

  "Don't listen to them," she said softly, her voice trembling. "It's better than nothing."

  "Yeah. Sure," I muttered, not even glancing her way.

  Just as we were about to turn and leave, the mage raised a hand. A parchment floated toward us, sealed with wax and marked with the shimmer of a newly inscribed magic sigil, my class, my fate.

  The receptionist handed it over silently. But the mage leaned close, just enough that I could hear her whisper, her voice grave and ancient:

  "Beware the Undead… Alexander."

  I didn’t respond.

  We stepped out of the guild tavern together, the thick wooden doors groaning shut behind us. But inside, I could still hear it all, the whispers, the muttered curses, the laughter. The judgement.

  Even the high-ranking adventurers, clad in silver, some in gleaming titanium, stared as if I'd been branded with death itself.

  My reputation was already stained.

  But she was still with me. That mattered more than the looks.

  I glanced at her, thinking about how I’d promised to get her a bow… and maybe a dozen arrows too.

  She turned to me, her face alight with a hopeful grin.

  “Hehe, perhaps after this, we should get you a staff,” she said with a soft laugh.

  I smirked, finally meeting her eyes.

  “I think we should.”

  _________

  Trudging forward past the colossal statue, the first thing that hit me was the smell, thick, fetid air clinging like rot to the gate of the fortress. It was worse than I'd imagined. More than a handful of corpses lay strewn about, dozens of adventurers, some barely a day dead, others long since rotted to bone and rusted steel. Their stories ended here, unremarked and unmourned.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder if mine would, too. Just another corpse in front of a gate that never promised survival.

  The fortress guards hadn’t spotted us yet.

  Behind me, Alexander broke the silence, his voice like gravel dragged across old stone.

  "This... reminds me of the days back in Chechnya. Innocents stacked like sandbags."

  He paused, eyes distant.

  "The wars after the fall of the USSR... I wonder if they ever meant anything."

  "They didn’t", I replied curtly.

  "Then we were just bodies in uniforms. Just another face in the long march of the dead. We died fighting for… what? Nothing."

  He didn’t respond.

  He didn’t need to.

  We both understood. Whatever loyalties we had, to the Federation or the USSR, they crumbled just like the men lying in front of us. And now, with death once again leering at us from the fortress gates, we only wanted one thing.

  Something real.

  Something that mattered.

  As we walked, I stopped by one of the corpses, a knight-class adventurer, from what little was left of him. His face was gone, a pit of maggots writhing in the cavity. The stench almost made me retch, but I forced myself to kneel anyway.

  I rifled through what remained.

  A pouch. A few silver coins. A broken sword.

  "Unlucky," I muttered, standing again.

  Alexander watched, irritated, arms folded.

  "Stop with that shit!" he snapped. "We can get something far better if we just get inside the damn castle!"

  "I'm making sure we at least get something. We’ve got nothing but a broken sword."

  "You’re a summoner. Not a knight," he growled. "A summoner that can’t summon shit. At least try to summon something!"

  "But how?" I barked back. "I can’t even summon a damn rock."

  Alexander took a breath. Then his eyes narrowed, like he was about to say something heavy.

  "That’s why we need to go into the fortress."

  He leaned in closer, his voice low and fierce.

  "The fear–it’ll make us stronger."

  I dropped the broken sword from the dead knight's body, feeling the weight of the words I couldn't quite swallow. We both kept to the shadows, our movements cautious as we approached the entrance. But the main gate was shut tight, and there was no way through there.

  Alexander paused for a moment, his hollow gaze scanning the walls as if they held some answer. It was a dead stare, an empty one, but it still carried a weight. He finally spoke, his voice low.

  "There’s a doorway along the left wall. We can slip past there and proceed."

  I didn’t hesitate. Nodding once, I darted toward the opening. The guards were none the wiser, thank the gods. We stayed close to the wall, the cover tight as I struggled up with what little strength I had left. Behind me, Alexander floated through the shadows, effortlessly gliding past the same obstacles I struggled with.

  "Don’t work too hard," he called out, his grin echoing through the darkness. "I don’t want to feel old when I combine with you later."

  "Watch your foul mouth," I muttered under my breath, my arms burning as I hauled myself over the final ledge. "You might not be that lucky."

  We slipped through the side entrance, and what greeted us wasn’t quite what I expected. The dungeon stretched out before us, vast and silent. Too silent. A creeping unease gnawed at the edges of my thoughts, but I pushed it aside. We were in too deep. No turning back now.

  My eyes caught a small staircase leading downward. Without thinking, I started toward it, but the air felt heavy with foreboding. My lungs burned, the dry air sticking to the back of my throat like sandpaper, but I pressed forward. The hunger gnawed at me, relentless. A thirst I couldn’t quench.

  Four sets of stairs. My legs screamed at me to stop, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not now.

  Alexander followed silently, his presence a quiet pressure against my back, urging me onwards. It was like he knew I couldn’t afford to falter, not even for a moment.

  As we reached the top, a pair of massive wooden doors loomed overhead. I pushed against them, and they groaned open, revealing a narrow bridge stretching over an endless chasm. The torches along the walls cast faint light, but the abyss below was untouched by it, a void that seemed to go on forever. I could feel the weight of it, the coldness of the unknown, pressing in.

  I approached with caution, each step resounding in the stillness like the rhythm of war drums, the weight of the silence pressing on me. Dust floated in the air, untouched by time, as though this place hadn't seen life in an eternity. It felt wrong; this place was untouched, uncharted. Unpenetrated.

  I shot a glance over at Alexander. "You weren't telling me this was one of the old ones."

  He looked back, the shadow of something ancient creeping into his voice. "It’s special. This dungeon links the past and the future. The fortress was constructed to allow a class bearer to bond more strongly through darkness, through memory, through death."

  "So, what? You brought me here just to plug me into your past?" I asked, confusion and a bit of frustration rising.

  "Perhaps," he said, his voice softer, tinged with something I couldn’t quite place. "I've never managed to get this far myself. But if it means you're going to get your revenge, and I get to see the surface at last after 16 years of festering in the dark, I'm with you."

  Fair enough. It made sense, in a twisted way. A bargain of sorts.

  We were about halfway across the bridge when Alexander’s tone shifted, low, urgent, and sharp. "Hostile incoming. Twelve o'clock. Undead. Armoured."

  I froze. My fingers curled around the hilt of the splintered sword, the once brittle steel now steady in my grip. My pulse slowed, my body slipping into that familiar fighting rhythm, the one I hated and needed in equal measure. The scraping of metal on stone, the unmistakable sound of something heavy coming closer, was enough to make my muscles tense with readiness.

  "Guess we're not the only ones looking for this dungeon," I muttered, a growl rumbling in my throat.

  Alexander's voice dropped lower, practically a growl in its own right. "Good. Time to put your new class to the test."

  Out of the shadows, a figure emerged, its presence sending a chill through the air. The sound of metal scraping echoed, each step of its weight-laden armour like a death bell tolling for something long forgotten. A skeleton, clad in worn but functional armour, with a shield and sword, no fear, no hesitation. Just empty sockets staring through me, as though it had already seen me, already passed judgement on me.

  We stopped. The standoff hung in the air like a final, suspended breath.

  "Don’t hit straight," Alexander hissed in my ear. "From behind. You strike from behind."

  I gritted my teeth as the skeletal warrior’s movements blurred into a streak of rage, the sword crashing down with deadly precision. It was faster than I expected, but my instincts kicked in, just barely. I dove left, the air whooshing past me as the blade missed by inches, and I slipped behind it, my body reacting before my mind could catch up.

  "RAH!" I yelled as I thrust the shattered sword toward its spine.

  The undead thing spun in a blur, its sword meeting mine with a resounding clang, the blade of mine bouncing back from the parry, nearly slipping from my grasp.

  "FUCK!" I spat, struggling to keep the weapon in hand. My arms burned. This wasn't just some mindless corpse; this thing knew how to fight.

  I circled, watching its every move, hoping to find an opening. It lunged again, same predictable move, sword raised high. I’ve got this. I thought.

  “WATCH THE SIDE!” Alexander shouted, his voice like a sharp crack of thunder.

  Too late. My body registered the threat too slowly, and I stepped just an inch too far. The ground was gone beneath me, the drop too close to even think about.

  I jerked to the right, feeling the wind of the skeleton’s sword whistle past my ear as I twisted out of the way. The creature overcommitted. Its sword slashed through empty air, leaving it wide open.

  "TAKE THIS!" I roared, spinning as the fury surged through me. I drove my sword toward its neck, a last-ditch effort to finish this fight.

  Bone splintered beneath the force of the blow, but the bastard didn’t go down. The creature staggered, head jerking as if it were powered by pure, unyielding rage, the spine visibly flashing with a vengeful pulse. But no matter how much it thrashed, it was still standing.

  I could feel the anger rising in me. Enough.

  I let out a feral growl, my grip tightening on the hilt. "FUCK YOU!" I roared, and with everything I had left, I hurled myself forward, slamming my shoulder into its armoured chest, pushing it with every ounce of strength.

  The undead thing staggered back, trying to thrust its sword, but the blade only glanced off my arm, the shallow wound searing with pain. But I didn’t care.

  The edge was there. I could feel it. The cold abyss waiting to swallow us both.

  I shoved harder.

  The skeleton’s armoured body tipped backward, and I watched as its feet left the ground, its bones rattling in an eerie silence as it plunged into the endless chasm below. Its shield and sword spun out of sight, swallowed by the void as the sound of their fall echoed, slowly fading away.

  I collapsed to one knee, breath ragged, chest heaving. The adrenaline started to wear off, leaving nothing but the ache in my muscles and the dull sting of the shallow wound in my arm.

  "Good thinking." Alexander’s voice rang out. I could feel his eyes on me, assessing, approving.

  The weirdest feeling washed over me. Not pride. Not triumph. Just… relief. Like I had let go of something I didn’t even know I was holding onto.

  I felt it before I saw it, the heat from the injury on my flank. Glancing down, I watched the wound knit itself together, the flesh mending quickly, almost unnaturally.

  Alexander noticed it too. "Looks like the undead summoner class heals upon killing the undead," he said, his tone a mix of amusement and observation. "Least you've got something working in your favour."

  "Not useful enough," I muttered, trying to shake off the dried blood. "I'd prefer something that meant something. Something worth this curse, damn it."

  He snorted behind me, unfazed, before moving to the edge of the ledge. "Go on. Get up. Try to call it."

  I blinked. "It doesn't work. We've done this before."

  "Trust me," he said firmly, more convincing than ever.

  That line again. But this time, there was no hint of uncertainty in his voice. Something about it made me pause.

  I stood, every inch of me protesting, my body craving food, water, anything to ease the ache. But I knelt anyway, one hand pressed against the cold stone. The air was thick here, heavy with dust and silence. No footprints, no sign of life.

  "Both hands." Alexander's voice was calm, unwavering.

  I swallowed, then placed my other hand down, the stone chilling my palms. And as I did, memories flooded in: her eyes, her voice, her last breath. The screams of my comrades-in-arms, lost to fire and death. The killers of our kind, cold, cruel, and unpunished.

  And then, the hum.

  A low thrum reverberated through the air, as if the dungeon itself were awakening. Dust swirled, caught in an invisible wind, and the atmosphere grew charged.

  Then, the circle formed beneath my hands. It glowed, blazing in blue fire, the symbols foreign yet strangely familiar. The whispers came, growing louder, frantic, voices of the lost, the broken, some weeping, others laughing, and some just… lost to madness.

  Alexander stepped back, his face unreadable, as the circle pulsed with power.

  And from it, it rose.

  Piece by piece, bone by bone, the skeleton pulled itself from the stone floor. Armour cracked and torn, but it remained on its frame, proud, carrying the scars of a forgotten battle. As it stood, it stiffened like a soldier on command and saluted.

  Its eyes flickered to life, glowing an ominous red. It spoke in a heavy accent.

  "Майор Даша Феофил из 62-го пехотного батальона готова к бою снова."

  (Major Dasha Feofil, 62nd Infantry Battalion. Ready for combat again.)

  I stood frozen, my heart hammering. This wasn’t just any skeleton; it was a soldier. One of ours.

  Alexander stepped forward and saluted her. I could see something in his face, respect, perhaps recognition. Guilt? Maybe.

  I raised my hand, saluting her too.

  For the first time since waking in this hellhole of a world, I didn’t feel useless.

  I had done it.

  I had brought the dead to life.

  Alexander moved closer, a rare smile pulling at his lips, something genuine. "Well", he said, his voice low, "it appears you're not worthless after all."

  I breathed heavily, the weight of the moment settling in. "What now?" I asked, glancing at him.

  He turned his gaze to the distant fortress ahead.

  "Now?" He smirked, his dead eyes burning with a strange fire. "We start the next phase."

  I narrowed my eyes. "What phase?"

  His smile widened, a flicker of something dangerous in his gaze.

  "Our special operation."