"If it lives, we can slay it. And then burn it, just to make sure it doesn't come back from the dead," she said.
"...does that happen often?" he asked.
"Slaying? Yeah, duh? It's what we're here to do in the first place, dummy."
"I meant the coming...
Despite the pain, Sadea cheered inwardly as she successfully pulled Raksha into her lightning aspect. Their corporeal bodies de-atomized into wisps of psychic energy, the physical manifestation of which would be a cloud of crackling cobalt-blue electric light.
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She directed this cloud through the steel doors of the mortuary plant, riding their electron stream and emerging on the other side, right in the midst of a horde of frenzied, clawing corpses. The unsanctioned dead fell apart into ashen piles beneath the touch of her lightning aspect.
Sadea dropped back into corporeality, materializing several inches above the permacrete floor of the plant's entrance lobby and stumbling the rest of the way down. Raksha landed deftly behind her, much to her annoyance, because she'd been hoping that he'd eat a mouthful of floor-dust.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded. "What did you do to me?"
"Turned you into lightning, then pulled you through the door," Sadea said, chuckling as she wiped a trickle of blood from her nose. "You know, you're the first person I've been able to do that to and still keep alive. Wasn't entirely sure it'd work, but here we are."
"I thought my aegis..." Raksha muttered.
Sadea savored the tinge of uncertainty in his voice, but she couldn't resist explaining. "I already touched on this. Your aegis and my lightning both strengthen the veil between the material and immaterial realms, the latter being the Ethereal Tides. This means that they are metaphysical parallels, benign and impervious to each other. That's how you're still alive. Your aegis kept your soul from being torn to shreds by my lightning."
Something occurred to Sadea, then, as she pulled her scarf free from Raksha's neck. "This also means that if you had resisted at all, I wouldn't have been able to turn your flesh into electricity."
A grin spread across her face. "I know you find me irresistibly beautiful, but you really shouldn't just trust me, or anyone else, so quickly. That's cute, though, very cute."
"How would I resist something that I didn't know was happening in the first place?" Raksha growled, casting his gaze around and getting his bearings.
Sadea took the opportunity to do the same. The entrance lobby of the mortuary plant was a vast chamber with unpainted permacrete walls and floors. Their dull-gray surfaces sported dozens of wooden signs denoting, in neatly stenciled letters, different locations.
We're in, she pulsed telepathically to Viktoria.
Head for the lower levels and find the source of these unsanctioned energies. The processing chambers would be your best bet, the necromancer replied.
No, really? I'd have thought it'd be somewhere all these corpses aren't boiling from, like the archives numbered "one" through "forty-four" or the privies. Maybe even your in-house eatery. Wow, you necromancers are living large, aren't you? And just how much garbage paperwork do you lot have to need forty-four archives?
