Chapter 5: The Toll of the New World.
Jacob stood in the heavy silence of the corridor, the revolting smell of blood hanging thick in the stagnant air as he stared at his trembling hands.
"Honestly, does it even matter how I did it?" he whispered to the empty hallway in an attempt to calm himself.
"At least I stopped them before they could bring any more of those things up here." He took a deep, shuddering breath to steady his racing heart, trying to push down the rising bile in his throat, and turned around to make his way back toward the familiar stretch of the hallway where his studio apartment was located.
However, as he rounded the corner and his eyes fell upon the spot where the two goblins had first been bickering, his posture stiffened and a deep, dark frown pulled at his features.
His expression darkened instantly, a cold pressure settling in the pit of his stomach as he finally saw the prize the two monsters had been fighting over with such mindless ferocity.
"So this is what those two bastards were arguing about back then," he muttered, his voice dropping to a somber, hollow tone.
Lying on the stained carpet was the mangled corpse of a young woman, her clothes torn so severely that most of her pale, bruised skin was visible to the dim fluorescent lights overhead.
In his frantic, adrenaline-fueled pursuit of the fleeing goblin, Jacob had been so focused on preventing an alarm from being raised that he hadn't even noticed it from the fleshy canvas all around him.
Now that the immediate danger had passed, the grisly sight hit him with the force of a physical blow, making the reality of the apocalypse feel far more intimate and cruel than it had only moments ago.
The victim was a young brunette, her once-stylish hair now dyed with a great concentration of dark, dried blood that pooled around her slender neck. As Jacob forced himself to step closer, his eyes traced the jagged, deep wound that had ended her life, and he realized with a pang of horror that the angle was all wrong for a monster's claw.
Judging by the way her hand still rested near the injury, he came to the grim conclusion that she must have slit her own throat to escape a far worse fate at the hands of the green-skinned devils.
The thought left him feeling a profound, heavy sense of sorrow for her, though he couldn't bring himself to be truly surprised by her choice given the circumstances.
He could only imagine the sheer, soul-crushing terror she must have faced, realizing that her only options were a quick death by her own hand or being kept awake while her body was systematically tortured and consumed by those fiendish things.
'Wait... doesn't she look familiar?' a sudden, jarring thought flashed through Jacob's mind, causing him to squint at her pale features through the gloom. He racked his brain, searching through his recent memories until a specific image clicked into place like a puzzle piece.
'That's right, I remember bumping into her once... it was that day on my way home from buying the limited edition game.' Jacob was genuinely stunned to realize that this girl was one of the three fashionable students he had briefly encountered on the sidewalk just a week ago.
She was the one who had lingered for a split second, looking at him with an apologetic, almost pitying gaze while her friends had scoffed and walked away.
"I honestly didn't think we were actually neighbors," he whispered, letting out a short, awkward laugh that held no humor and gradually dissolved into a quiet, genuine sorrow.
"But then again, it's not like I ever paid enough attention to anyone in this building to know who lived next door." He stood over her for a long moment, the silence of the hallway feeling more oppressive than ever as he contemplated the fragility of the life he had once taken for granted.
"I hope you can rest in peace now, knowing that I've dealt with those two demons who were bothering you," he said in a calm, respectful tone, offering the only small comfort he could before turning away to focus on his own survival.
He began walking back toward his true destination, the first goblin he had killed, his mind already coming up with what to do with it.
'It would be far too dangerous to keep scouring the rest of this building on my own without any real combat experience,' Jacob reasoned with himself, his gamer instincts starting to override his lingering shock.
'But if I had someone else to do the scouting and the fighting for me, it would make things a whole lot easier and give me a real chance at lasting more than another week.' He felt a surge of nervous energy and eagerness as he prepared to test the limits of the dark gift he had been granted by the system.
Arriving at the first corpse, he stood over the twisted, green body and took a deep breath, focusing his will on what he wanted.
"Come forth." he uttered, the command word feeling heavy and cold as it left his lips.
The effect was almost instantaneous and far more visceral than he had expected, as the dead goblin's body began to twitch and convulse with a sickening, wet sound.
Jacob watched with wide, fascinated eyes as signs of rapid decay swept over the flesh, the skin blackening and sloughing off in a matter of seconds until only a gleaming, ivory skeleton remained.
Just as he thought the transformation had reached its conclusion, two pinpricks of spectral red flame ignited within the empty eye sockets of the skull, staring up at him with a terrifying glow.
[Congratulations! The transformation was a success.]
[Successfully created three undead.]
"Hahaha! It actually worked! I actually managed to create a..." Jacob began to cheer, his voice filled with a manic sort of excitement, but he froze mid-sentence as the text of the system notification fully registered in his mind.
'W-Wait, did that just say I created three undead?' He blinked rapidly, his jaw dropping as his facial expression went completely blank with confusion.
He looked down at the single goblin skeleton standing before him, then back at the notification, his brain struggling to make sense of the math.
If he had only used his skill on this one corpse, where could the other two possibly have come from?
As if on cue, the heavy silence of the hallway was broken by the dry, rattling sound of movement coming from directly behind him.
The noise prompted him to whip his head around in a panic, his heart leaping into his throat.
His brain practically short-circuited when he saw a second goblin skeleton pulling itself up from the floor where the other monster had fallen, its red eyes flickering to life.
But his gaze didn't stop there; it drifted some distance Infront of him, closer than the goblin near the stairs.
To his absolute horror and bewilderment, the brunette girl was slowly, stiffly rising to her feet, her pale limbs moving with a jerky, unnatural rhythm that defied every law of nature he knew.