Drip.
Cloudy droplets carrying a foul stench fell from the cavern ceiling, splashing into black blooms across the slick mud.
Zombies.
These low-level undead, usually ranked by the Adventurer Guild alongside Goblins and ordinary skeletons, were often the least welcome foes among veteran adventurers.
The reason was simple: they neither had Goblins' habit of hoarding little shiny treasures, nor could they be smashed into a floorful of fragments with a single blow like skeletons.
As corpses forcibly awakened by negative energy, they had sacrificed agility, wisdom, and will in exchange for terrifying physiques comparable to professional warriors, along with thick, painless armor of flesh.
Clang!
The battle axe bit fiercely into the rotten flesh before him.
Yet the monstrous strength that could split a skeleton in two now felt as though it had struck a waterlogged log.
That bizarre, resilient rotten flesh clamped down hard on the axe blade. The zombie felt nothing; instead, it opened a mouth dripping with black water and bit at the dwarf's face.
"Stinking rotten meat!" Ulag could only kick the creature in the belly and use the recoil to wrench his axe free.
Ordinary humanoid zombies were already this troublesome.
But what Ulag faced now was an even more twisted monster.
Accompanied by a heavy, grotesque squelch, a strange monster crashed out of the shadows.
It was clearly a fat pig that, before death, had somehow spent time in a slaughterhouse. Its four thick hooves stamped hard against the mud, and with a nauseating stench of blood, it sent the charging Ulag stumbling back again and again, leaving him hard-pressed to withstand it.
What made the seasoned dwarf warrior's scalp crawl even more was that two thick arms had been crudely inserted backward into the broad back and shoulders of the zombie pig.
At