The Wraith Sovereign Returns to Conquer

The day they threw me into the horde was the same day I planned to propose to Sasha Frost. The crystal-core ring I had bought with every last cent I had rolled across the ground. It was stomped into the mud by someone in the garrison uniform. It was my best friend, Rafe Donovan. "Nico, don't blame me." He looked down at me without a shred of guilt in his eyes. "Sasha deserves better. And you, some deadbeat who talks to corpses, were never going to give her a future." I stared past him at the familiar figure behind his shoulder. Sasha, the woman I had loved for three years, was leaning into Axel Kain, the base commander's son. She did not spare me a single glance. Her eyes were locked on the ring on Axel's finger, forged from an S-class crystal core. It was 10,000 times brighter than my pathetic little stone. Chapter 1 My ability was channeling and, in the apocalypse, it was the most useless power a person could have. It did not help me fight. It did not help me defend myself. The only thing it ever did was force me to hear the dying screams and bitter resentment of the dead. Three years of that noise had made me the laughingstock of the entire base. Axel Kain let out a contemptuous laugh and pulled Sasha Frost closer by the waist. "A piece of trash who talks to ghosts thinks he can compete with me for a woman? Throw him out and feed him to the dead. Make it clean." The garrison soldiers hauled me up and dragged me out like a puppet. I thrashed and screamed like a cornered animal, but when I looked back, all I saw was Sasha wrinkling her nose in disgust, as though one more second of looking at me would dirty her. The massive alloy gate slammed shut behind me and sealed off that world of pretty lies. Ahead of me stretched nothing but endless ruins and the shrieking dead already closing in. Cold despair and white-hot hatred collided inside my chest, threatening to tear me apart. I had no weapon, no food, and my ribs were already cracked from the way they had dragged me across the ground. Death was seconds away. The instant a zombie's claws were about to rip through my throat, a cold, hollow, mechanical voice rang out inside my skull. [Host near-death state detected. Resentment intensity has breached critical threshold. Binding conditions met.] [Abyss Wraith Dominion System activating.] [Activation successful. Host: Nico Vane. Current level: LV1. Available Resentment Points: 0.] [Starter quest issued: Bind your first wraith. Reward: 100 Resentment Points, skill "Wraith Armor."] Abyss Wraith Dominion System? My eyes snapped open. My survival instincts drew the last reserves of strength out of me and I threw myself sideways, rolling clear of the zombie's lunge just in time. A pale blue panel only I could see flickered to life in front of my eyes. [Notice: The host may spend Resentment Points to bind the soul of any deceased harboring intense resentment, converting them into wraiths that fight on your behalf. Wraiths are immune to physical damage and unaffected by the zombie virus. They are the perfect soldiers of the apocalypse.] Immune to physical damage? The perfect soldiers? A wild sense of desperate joy surged through me. This ability might as well have been made for someone like me. That was when I heard it. Not the shriek of a zombie, but the faint, broken sobbing of a child. My channeling ability guided my eyes toward the sound. In a collapsed alcove not far away, a blurred, translucent shadow was curled up and shaking beside the body of a girl no older than seven or eight. It was her soul, freshly torn from her body. Her parents had used her as bait to draw the zombies away, and the dead had ripped her apart for it. The resentment pouring off her was so thick it had nearly taken physical form. [High-quality wraith detected: Shade Child. Binding requirement: 10 Resentment Points.] "How do I get Resentment Points?" I demanded inside my head. [Kill any living entity or absorb ambient resentment to earn Resentment Points.] I turned toward the zombie lunging at me again. There was no fear left in my eyes, only cold, killing intent. I snatched up a piece of broken rebar and the instant the creature closed in, I drove it through its eye socket with everything I had. The bar sank straight into its brain and the zombie dropped like a stone. [F-class zombie killed. Resentment Points earned: 1.] It was not enough. Three more came stumbling out of the ruins, drawn by the smell of blood, and I did not back down. I charged them head-on, using the rubble and their stiff, clumsy movements against them, dodging lunge after lunge and driving the rebar through skull after skull. By the time I had scraped together 10 Resentment Points, I was drenched in blood and barely able to stand. "I want... to bind!" [Spend 10 Resentment Points to bind "Shade Child"?] I clenched my jaw and nodded. A streak of pale blue light shot from my palm and engulfed the girl's soul in an instant. She stopped crying and lifted her head, empty eye sockets staring up at me. Then she dissolved into a dark streak and sank into my shadow without a sound. [Binding successful. F-class wraith acquired: Shade Child. Skills: Shadow Lurk, Psychic Strike.] [Starter quest complete. Rewards issued: 100 Resentment Points. Skill "Wraith Armor" activated.] A thin layer of black armor woven from pure resentment spread across my entire body. A cool wave washed over my broken ribs and the pain faded to almost nothing. Furthermore, somewhere deep inside my shadow, a killer now awaited my command. I stared at the sealed gate of the base in the distance and curled my lips into a thin, cold smile. Axel, Rafe and Sasha could enjoy whatever time they had left. I would be back for all of them soon enough. Chapter 2 I did not rush back to the base. Over the next seven days, I took Shade Child into the ruins and hunted zombies like a man possessed, hoarding every Resentment Point I could get. Shade Child's abilities far exceeded anything I had imagined. It could slip into any shadow and hit a zombie with a psychic strike that locked the creature stiff just long enough to give me a clean kill shot. My Resentment Points climbed quickly and blew past the 1,000 mark before the week was out. [Sufficient Resentment Points detected. System can be upgraded to LV2. New functions unlocked upon upgrade: Wraith Fusion, Wraith Armament. Proceed with upgrade?] "Yes. Do it now." [System upgrade successful. Wraith Fusion: Merge wraiths of the same type to raise their rank. Wraith Armament: Convert a wraith into a weapon or piece of equipment.] I immediately fused the nine ordinary wraiths I had bound during the hunt into Shade Child. Pale light flashed through the darkness, and when it faded, the little girl's silhouette inside my shadow had grown far more solid. The aura she exuded was several times stronger than before. [Wraith "Shade Child" promoted to D-class. Skills enhanced: Deep Shadow (brief concealment, even in lit environments), Enhanced Psychic Strike (inflicts one second of paralysis on targets C-class and below).] It was time. I stripped the clothes off a corpse, covered my face, and slipped in among a scavenging party heading back through the gates. Just like that, I walked right back into Base Seven. The base at night was still bathed in light, as though the end of the world had never happened. However, I knew exactly how much filth and rot that brightness was hiding. My first target was Rafe. He had been promoted to garrison squad leader, and tonight he was on patrol duty at the east district warehouse. I sent Shade Child into his shadow and stayed hidden in the dark, watching his every move through her eyes. Rafe was strutting through the warehouse with two subordinates, checking inventory like he owned the place. "Damn, Mr. Kain's generous. He handed me the squad leader position just because he wanted some guy's girl." He was grinning from ear to ear, showing off to the men beside him. "That dumbass Nico's probably been chewed down to the bone by now." "No kidding, Captain Donovan. You're the golden boy in Mr. Kain's circle these days." One of the lackeys laughed, grinning like the suck-up he was. My killing intent was on the verge of exploding. "Shade Child. Go." An invisible wave of psychic force slammed into both subordinates at once. They let out choked grunts and crumpled to the floor. Rafe went white. "What the hell? We're under attack!" He had barely drawn his gun before he realized the warehouse had gone completely silent. Nothing moved except the massive shadows thrown by the stacked crates, swaying gently under the overhead lights. A chill crawled up the back of his neck. "Who's there? Show yourself!" he bellowed, but his voice cracked halfway through. A thin, lilting nursery rhyme drifted up from somewhere far beneath the earth. "One, two, three, playing hide and seek... who will be the next... little lamb..." Every drop of color drained from Rafe's face. He had heard that voice before. It was the same kind of whispering my channeling ability sometimes pulled in, the one everyone at the base treated like a joke. "Ni... Nico? You're alive? Are you... are you even human?" He stumbled backward, swinging the muzzle wildly in every direction. "What do you think?" My voice came from directly behind him. He spun around and saw nothing. "Quit playing tricks! Come out and face me if you've got the guts!" "I'm right behind you." The nursery rhyme started again, and this time it was rising out of his own shadow. Rafe looked down. His shadow was stretching and twisting across the concrete, and from the center of it, the blurred outline of a small girl was slowly rising to her feet. Her hollow eyes locked onto his face and did not blink. "No... there's... something here!" He broke completely. He emptied his magazine into his own shadow, but every round passed straight through Shade Child's form and ricocheted off the floor without leaving a scratch. "Stay... stay back! I was wrong! Nico, I was wrong!" Tears and snot streamed down his face as his knees hit the ground. "It was all Axel! He's the one who wanted Sasha! He's the one who wanted you dead!" "It is a little late for that." I stepped out of the darkness and walked toward him. "Wraith Armament." Shade Child dissolved in an instant and reformed as a pitch-black short sword in my hand. Cold resentment rippled along the blade like liquid. Rafe stared at me as though he were looking at something that had crawled out of a grave. I did not give him the chance to say another word. I swung once and the blade came down. His head hit the floor and rolled to a stop with an expression of pure, frozen terror still stamped across it. [D-class ability user killed. Resentment Points earned: 500. Deceased's resentment absorbed. Resentment Points earned: 200.] I wiped the blood from the blade and looked toward the most extravagant villa at the center of the base. Axel was next. However, before that, there was someone I needed to see first. Chapter 3 Sasha had moved into Axel's villa and become the most envied woman in Base Seven. I did not go looking for her right away. Rafe's death had sent shockwaves through the entire base. Axel was furious and ordered a full lockdown, which suited me fine. I used the time to keep building my strength. I found the base morgue. It was the single most resentment-saturated place in all of Base Seven. Every day, soldiers who had fallen to the hordes and civilians who had been weeded out by the base's brutal survival rules were wheeled in and left there. For someone like me, it was paradise. I bound over a dozen warrior souls, men and women who had died ugly, violent deaths and carried enormous resentment because of it, then fused them all into a brand-new wraith. [Wraith Fusion successful. C-class wraith acquired: Hundred-War Specter. Skills: Coordinated Combat, Weapon Mastery.] This wraith was built from the combined souls of multiple fighters and could split into several units that worked in tandem. Its combat ability dwarfed Shade Child's by a wide margin. Once that was done, I moved on to the second phase of my plan. I created the identity of an anonymous information broker and reached out to Axel's biggest rival, the base's second-in-command, Vice Commander Weston Hale. I told him I had proof that Axel had been colluding with the black market and skimming relief supplies, then set a meeting for midnight at the abandoned clock tower on the western edge of the base. Weston took the bait. At midnight, I stood on the top of the clock tower with the cold wind pulling at my clothes. In the distance, Weston's convoy was creeping toward the building with its lights off. However, he was never my real target. "Master, she's here." Shade Child's voice echoed inside my mind. I turned and saw a striking figure approaching the clock tower alone, slipping along a side path. It was Sasha. She had obviously eavesdropped on Axel's briefing and assumed she could dig up leverage on him here, something to trade for a better position. That was Sasha through and through, always clever, always looking out for herself and nobody else. I jumped down from the top of the clock tower and landed behind her without a sound. "Long time no see, Sasha." Her whole body went rigid. She turned slowly, and the moment she saw my face, shock and a flicker of barely concealed panic spread across her features. "Nico? You're... you're still alive?" "Thanks to you, I'm doing great." I smiled at her, but there was nothing warm about it. She pulled herself together fast, studying me with an unreadable look on her face. "What are you here for? Revenge? Going to kill me, and then go after Axel?" "Kill you? No." I shook my head. "That would be letting you off too easily." I stepped forward and caught her chin, tilting her face up so she had no choice but to look me in the eye. "I'm going to make you watch while everything you cling to gets torn apart, piece by piece. Everything you have right now is going to disappear. And when it's all gone, you'll come crawling to me on your knees, begging me to take you in like a stray with nowhere left to go." Humiliation and fury flashed through her eyes, but underneath both of those was fear. She could see it. I was not the spineless boy she used to push around whenever she felt like it. The aura I exuded was cold and overwhelming, like something that had climbed out of the abyss itself. "You're delusional," she hissed through her teeth. "We'll see about that." I released her chin and turned to leave. That was when a gunshot split the night sky. Every alarm in my head went off at once and I activated Wraith Armor on instinct. A sniper round slammed into the center of my back and the black armor deflected it with a sharp crack. Everything changed in an instant. They were not Weston's men, and they were not Axel's either. Over a dozen dark figures poured in from every direction. Their speed and raw power far surpassed any ordinary ability user, and every single one of them had eyes glowing unnaturally red. My stomach dropped. They were Augments, the base's most closely guarded weapon, soldiers rebuilt with high-grade zombie crystal cores implanted in their bodies. These soldiers were immensely powerful but dangerously unstable, and they answered to one person only, the supreme commander of the base, who happened to be Axel's father. Their target was both me and Sasha. Chapter 4 "What's happening?" Sasha went pale beside me. I understood immediately. It was a trap, layered and calculated from the start. Axel had deliberately leaked the information to Weston and allowed Sasha to overhear it. The entire point was to lure all three parties to this one location so he could call in his father's secret army and wipe us all out in a single sweep. The ruthlessness of it was staggering. He was not just eliminating me and his political rival. He was throwing away the woman who shared his bed without a second thought. There was no time to think. I grabbed Sasha's hand and ran for the darkness. "Hundred-War Specter!" The C-class wraith materialized in an instant, splitting into three spectral warriors with blades in their hands. They threw themselves at the Augments without hesitation or fear. Still, the Augments were too strong. The Specter held out for less than ten seconds before it was torn to shreds. "Damn it!" I dragged Sasha through the maze of ruins at a dead sprint. The Augments stayed right on us, and every strike they threw was precise and lethal. "Let go of me! I can run on my own!" Sasha struggled against my grip. She was a C-class ability user herself. "Shut up and keep moving!" I snarled. We rounded a corner and Sasha's foot hit something wrong. She let out a sharp cry as the ground gave way beneath her, a camouflaged pit trap, and her entire body pitched forward into the pit. I caught her arm on pure instinct and held on. But the instant I grabbed her, something cold and absolute flickered through her eyes. Her free hand shot to her waist, drew a dagger, and drove it straight at my heart. "I'm sorry, Nico!" Her voice trembled, but her hand did not. "You have to die so I have a chance to live!" It was another betrayal. At the edge of life and death, this woman did not hesitate for a single second before choosing to sacrifice me again. Whatever was left in me went cold. The dagger punched into my body, but it did not hit my heart. The instant she moved, I had shifted Shade Child's position inside me, placing the wraith directly over my heart. The blade pierced through the Wraith Armor and through Shade Child's spectral body, but it went no further. [Warning: Wraith "Shade Child" critically damaged. Entering dormancy.] I let out a strangled grunt and blood spilled from the corner of my mouth. Sasha saw the strike had failed and disbelief flashed across her face. I used the force of her own thrust against her and shoved her hard toward the Augments closing in behind us. "Nico! You b*stard!" She screamed in desperation, but within seconds the Augments swallowed her whole. I did not look back. I poured everything I had left into my legs and vanished into the distant darkness. The cold mechanical voice echoed through my skull. [Extreme betrayal detected. Host resentment intensity surging. Initiating forced system upgrade.] [System upgraded to LV3. Ultimate function unlocked: Wraith Dominion (host may establish a territorial domain; within the domain, the host is absolute). New wraith tier unlocked: Calamity-class.] I made it back to my hideout. The Wraith Armor slowly knitted my wound shut, but Shade Child's dormancy was like losing a limb. Sasha's betrayal and Axel's trap burned through what was left of my restraint like venom-laced fire. I wanted revenge, and I wanted it now. The system upgrade had given me power I had never felt before, and I was no longer content to pick them off one at a time. I wanted to give them a spectacle of destruction they would never forget. I made a decision that bordered on insanity. I infiltrated the quarantine zone on the outer edge of the base, the facility that held thousands of zombies kept alive for experimentation.