Undead — the most basic monster type in existence — were practically every rookie adventurer's first opponent.
They were absurdly easy to create. No matter how remote or forgotten a location, they could appear there, and once they did, they always arrived in numbers. Harder to fully wipe out than goblins, if anything.
They were also easy to modify, which made them a favorite among necromancers. Want an ice zombie? A fire zombie? Just keep layering in magical attributes. If the modifications didn't take, the zombie simply died on its own — self-correcting, in a sense.
In short: think of them as this world's version of zombies, minus most of the contagion. The odds of catching Undeath from one were probably lower than the odds of accidentally poisoning yourself while throwing a Dung Pot.
People generally agreed the Undead inside Sein Dungeon felt slightly different from the ones outside. A little more coordinated. A little more aware.
Unfortunately, they were exactly as weak as their outside counterparts.
These were the kind of monster that could ambush someone from around a corner and still fail to draw blood. The victim would probably burst out laughing before muttering something like:
"Thank you for your mercy, Sein."
The moment the bearded man finished speaking, he swung his greatsword through an Undead's leg, and the instant it collapsed, casually stomped its skull into paste.
The whole motion flowed as naturally as water. Anyone unfamiliar with him might have assumed he'd trained specifically for this — some kind of formal certification in efficient zombie disposal.
"Good. These things aren't strong. Stay steady and we'll wipe ourselves out—"
He paused.
"Er — wipe them all out, I mean."
Tusk had caught the slip a beat too late and felt, immediately, that the phrasing had landed badly.
The pale Undead noticed the commotion and started shambling toward Bone Fang. Skinny, withered, barely holding together — every few steps they stumbled hard enough that a child could probably knock one over.
Their real weapon wasn't strength.
It was atmosphere. They blended seamlessly into the cemetery's oppressive quiet and let that silence do most of the intimidation work on their behalf.
The graveyard itself was a maze — countless gravestones arranged in chaotic, unpredictable rows, each one absurdly durable, effectively indestructible. Together they carved the space into narrow, winding pathways. The Undead shuffled slowly through these gaps, while adventurers had to constantly watch their swing radius to avoid clipping stone.
A blade bouncing off rock was an inconvenience. Damaging an expensive weapon in the process was the kind of thing that actually stung.
Following Fingri's earlier advice, Bone Fang adjusted their formation — though the bearded man, eager to impress, immediately pushed the plan aside and charged ahead solo, cutting a flashy path through the Undead with his greatsword.
There were a lot of them.
Every single one was weak.
The ranger's arrows skewered two at a time. Everyone wore the satisfied grin of people enjoying an easy grind.
One assassin actually chipped his dagger's edge from overuse.
...His blade chipped? That implied a genuinely alarming volume of kills.
Someone finally noticed the actual problem.
"Boss!"
An adventurer turned, shouting.
"Something's wrong — these things won't stop coming!"
No matter how many fell, more crawled out from beneath the surrounding gravestones. An endless supply.
The Undead themselves posed almost no threat — not one had cracked the party's defense — but the sheer volume was a different kind of problem entirely.
"Magic. Wide-area scatter spell — now!" Tusk called out.
"Got it!"
The mage started chanting, reduced to a slow walk as he focused. The rest of the party deliberately herded the surrounding zombies into a tight cluster.
A brilliant sphere of blue mana climbed into the sky.
It burst.
Countless droplets of light rained down over the crowded horde below.
Carian royal sorcery — Magic Downpour.
"I've barely used this spell since I learned it," the mage admitted, scratching his head. "Huge area, but the damage per hit is pretty underwhelming."
"Didn't expect it to actually be useful here."
It wasn't a particularly powerful spell on paper. Against Undead this fragile, though, it was more than enough. The clustered zombies went down in a single wave.
Without pausing to let the next crop crawl up, Bone Fang pushed deeper into the cemetery, formation intact.
"Not bad."
Watching from just outside, Fingri smiled and turned to his companions.
"Reminds you of the old days, doesn't it?"
"Let's move."
Every step Matilda took produced a heavy metallic clank from her joints. Her armor gleamed like it had come out of the forge that morning — she clearly maintained it with real care. Looking down at the freshly spawned Undead, she casually seized one by the neck and swung it like a club.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Dozens went down in seconds.
"Why does Sein Dungeon even bother including trash mobs like this?"
Genuine disappointment colored her tone. She grabbed another zombie's head, held it up level with her visor, and inspected it.
"What's the point of designing something this weak?"
Over the past several days inside Sein, she'd faced monster after monster clearly engineered to catch adventurers off guard in unpleasant ways. She'd expected the Cathedral of the Deep to keep that streak alive.
But these Undead, besides spawning quickly, seemed to offer nothing else.
"…Wait."
Just as she prepared to crush the skull, something caught her attention.
The zombie's jaw hung broken open, exposing a pitch-black throat.
Something inside it was moving.
Moving?
Years of hard-earned instinct screamed at her simultaneously.
She threw the thing away instantly.
Too late.
One of Sein Dungeon's more reliable unwritten rules: if you notice something wrong, don't bother dodging. Noticing it at all already meant contact had occurred.
"Gghk—!"
The Undead lurched into a violent retch, and a cloud of foul yellow gas exploded outward, mixed with globs of pus.
The smell defied easy description.
Deadly toxin worked its way through every gap in Matilda's armor plating.
Fortunately, that part wasn't a real threat — her armor carried built-in wind magic and filtering barriers designed to scrub contaminated air before it reached her.
The problem was what came next.
Several plump white maggots landed directly on her visor. They writhed with alarming vigor, like something that had just been ejected from wherever it had been living moments earlier. Sticky slime coated their bodies, and within seconds thick trails of mucus streaked across the glass.
Not just the helmet. A generous portion of her armor had received the same treatment.
"…"
Silence.
Behind the visor, the knight went absolutely still.
Her eyes met the eyes of one particularly enthusiastic maggot.
The creature gathered whatever passed for its strength.
And spat a mouthful of slime directly onto her eye.
"AAAAAAHHHHH!!"
Describing exactly how angry Matilda became at that moment would be redundant.
Look at the gravestones instead.
Those gravestones — durable enough to belong on some kind of "explosive-proof tombstone" showcase, unscratchable by ordinary means —
Under Matilda's genuinely unhinged rampage, every single one within reach shattered into rubble.
The last person to produce destruction on this scale had been Gapar himself.
"Whoa, easy! You'll scare the rookies!"
Fingri said this while making absolutely no move to physically intervene.
If anything, his mouth was curving into a distinct grin. He glanced at Aleya and found her already giving him a discreet thumbs-up.
The meaning was unmistakable.
Sein was still exactly what Sein had always been.
Still finding new ways to disgust its adventurers, consistent as ever.
A handful of Undead had survived the destruction. Fingri drew his twin blades, stepped forward —
And the survivors doubled over as one, in visible pain.
The mouthful of maggots spat at Matilda had apparently just been the opening act.
Every Undead in front of him threw its head back in unison. The next instant, a storm of yellow mist and squirming maggots erupted from every mouth simultaneously.
"Tch. I'd rather these not touch me."
His swords blurred into two continuous streaks of silver, and he retreated smoothly while batting the incoming maggots aside.
His technique was flawless.
The smell, unfortunately, didn't require physical contact to land.
It reached his nose regardless, and reached undersold what it actually did to him. Compared to this, Farron Keep smelled like a garden. His brain felt, briefly and vividly, as though several large men had sat on it at once. His vision genuinely threatened to roll back.
His movements slowed by a fraction of a second.
That fraction was more than enough.
The maggots landed on him.
At his level, an adventurer's body ran well past normal human limits — his resistance to poison and status ailments was extraordinary. The earlier toxic gas had barely registered against that resistance.
But nobody, at any level, trains resistance to genuinely bad smells.
"Cough — cough! Aleya! Fresh air, now!"
He gagged. Compared to the insects crawling on his skin, the smell had become the immediate priority.
Laughter drifted out from inside the scarecrow. Several strange plants sprouted along Aleya's left arm, swelled rapidly, and burst — instantly scrubbing the surrounding air clean. At the same time, hundreds of straw tendrils shot from her right arm, sweeping every maggot off him in one coordinated pass.
"Haa…"
"Back among the living."
Fingri pulled in deep breaths of clean air, color slowly returning to his face — relief that felt, honestly, close to something divine.
Then he started laughing.
"This is what a dungeon's supposed to feel like."
"It's been a long time since surface adventuring left me looking this pathetic."
"For a second there — genuinely felt like being a brand-new adventurer again."
"You came all the way here to relive your childhood?"
Aleya retracted her arms, then made a small, curious sound.
"Hm?"
She pointed.
"You're bleeding."
"Scars are a man's glory."
"Please stop talking. Just look down."
Fingri lowered his gaze.
The smile faded off his face immediately.
"…GAHHH!!"
He squeezed both eyes shut.
"Help me. I don't want to look at this."
He was injured, and not lightly. Every stretch of exposed skin the maggots had crossed — arms, chest, anywhere at all — was now covered in tiny puncture holes. Each one individually miniscule, almost like a single small bite mark.
None of them were closing.
Wounds this small should have gone unnoticed under ordinary circumstances. Unless, of course, there were thousands of them.
Densely packed.
Endlessly, relentlessly dense.
His entire body was a field of tiny, bleeding punctures. Anyone with trypophobia would have hit the floor on sight.
Fingri didn't have trypophobia specifically, and he still couldn't force his eyes open a second time.
"Well then…" Aleya drew the words out deliberately. "Should I heal these with magic?"
Fingri flinched and stepped backward immediately.
"W-wait! I just remembered — I've got a healing potion. I'll handle it myself. No need to trouble you."
"Hmph."
She made a disappointed sound.
The sheer number of tiny wounds felt genuinely horrifying just to think about. After this many years adventuring, it had been a while since anything had disgusted Fingri this thoroughly.
Part of him wanted to be sick.
The other part, disturbingly, felt something closer to excitement.
"…Wait."
Applying potion to the wounds, his expression shifted abruptly.
"Oh no."
He sprinted around the still-rampaging Matilda and cut deeper into the cemetery.
These maggots weren't ordinary insects. They drank blood. They consumed flesh. And whatever they left behind simply refused to stop bleeding.
Those Undead had been nowhere near as harmless as first impressions suggested.
Which meant —
Bone Fang was in real danger.
After scrambling over several rows of gravestones and reaching the cemetery's upper tier, Fingri stopped dead.
Not from fear.
From something closer to disbelief that the scene in front of him was allowed to exist.
Bone Fang was fighting three Grave Wardens at that moment — fast, merciless, dual-blade-wielding opponents, dangerous by any measure.
Fingri wasn't looking at them.
His eyes had locked onto Tusk.
The bearded warrior wasn't exactly fighting an Undead. He also wasn't exactly standing still.
The most accurate description available was: they were embracing.
The zombie's stomach had ruptured open, and hundreds — no, thousands — of writhing white maggots had poured out in a continuous stream. Driven by some coordinating force, the mass had twisted together into the rough shape of a humanoid torso, rising directly out of the corpse's abdomen.
It defied clean description.
That grotesque insect-form now had both arms wrapped fully around Tusk. Maggots crawled across every inch of him. He couldn't move. He couldn't resist.
All he could manage was trembling.
From Fingri's vantage point, the pair looked, in silhouette, exactly like two lovers locked in an embrace, entirely indifferent to the judgment of the watching world.
In that moment, something clicked into place for Fingri.
He finally understood exactly why Sein Dungeon had chosen to populate this particular cemetery with these particular Undead.
"…So this whole section exists purely to disgust people."
His mana doubled on the spot.