Chapter 12: The Suffocating Dark.
One of the fleeing goblins, sensing the sudden drop in temperature and the ghostly chill behind it, risked a terrified glance over its shoulder.
Its green face instantly turned pale as it spotted the dark, wispy shapes of the resentful ghosts closing the distance with unnatural speed.
The creature let out a high-pitched, scream of pure terror and tried to push its short legs to move even faster, but the gap was closing far too quickly for it to evade.
Right now, the stairs seemed to be stretching away from it, The end of the hallway simply out of reach.
The resentful ghosts were far quicker than their living counterparts, gliding through the air like streaks of ink dropped into water, and in a matter of seconds, they were upon their prey.
Their eyes burned with a concentrated, cold resentment as the eight spectral figures swarmed the four goblins, two spirits diving for each target
With ghostly, elongated fingers that looked like wisps of smoke, they reached out and clamped their hands firmly around the goblins' necks, their touch felt cold to the bone to these goblins.
The four goblins tried desperately to resist, their clawed hands flailing wildly in the air and scratching at the translucent forms of their unknown attackers, but their efforts were entirely in vain.
Their fingers merely phased through the misty torsos of the ghosts, encountering no resistance and finding nothing to grip or tear in their pitiful attempt to break free from the ethereal stranglehold.
The panic in their small, black hearts grew exponentially as the very oxygen in the hallway seemed to vanish, and the precious breath in their lungs was rapidly used up in their silent, frantic struggle.
As the seconds ticked by, the physical toll of the spectral assault became visible; the goblins' faces shifted from a sickly green to a bruised blue, and then finally to a deep, dark purple as suffocation took hold.
The veins on their foreheads and necks began to bulge painfully against their skin, and their eyes rolled back into their heads, reflecting the dim fluorescent lights of the ceiling one last time before turning dim.
In the end, the eight resentful spirits maintained their icy grip, choking the life out of the monsters until they dropped dead and hit the carpet with a series of heavy, muffled thuds.
Only after the last spark of life had flickered out from the last goblin, did the ghosts finally uncurl their misty fingers and let the corpses go, drifting a few paces back to await their master.
Jacob soon reached the side of the goblin corpses.
"Come forth," Jacob commanded once more, stepping out from the stairwell and extending his hand toward the fresh pile of bodies.
He watched as his skill took hold.
The four goblin corpses began to twitch and convulse as the flesh upon their frames aged centuries in the span of a few seconds, turning grey and brittle before falling away in dry, dusty flakes.
As the organic matter dissolved, it revealed the sturdy, ivory-white structures of their skeletons, which soon rattled and clicked as they stood upright to join the ranks of their brethren.
Jacob took a moment to mentally tally his growing force, feeling a strange sense of dark pride at the small army he had raised from the literal blood of his enemies.
"With these new guys, that brings the total number of minions under my command to seventeen," he calculated, his voice filled with visible satisfaction. "That's eight skeleton soldiers, eight resentful spirits, and one lesser ghoul."
It was a significant upgrade from the lone, terrified survivor he had been just hours ago, and the feeling of power was starting to settle into his bones, replacing the cold dread with a determination to completely clear the remaining floors.
With his forces fully accounted for, he began his timely descent toward the sixth floor, but this time, he decided to employ a more sophisticated tactical approach.
He willed his resentful spirits and skeleton soldiers to split into two balanced, coordinated units, each consisting of four spirits and four skeletons.
He then sent one team down the left-hand staircase and the other down the right-hand staircase at the opposite ends of the hallway, intending to entrap the goblins on the sixth floor in a pincer movement that would leave them with no possible avenue for retreat.
"Kee?!" The goblins patrolling the sixth floor were instantly alarmed by the sudden, dual emergence of the undead from both ends of the hall, but they were far too slow to formulate a defense.
Before they could even raise their crude clubs, the skeletons and ghosts lunged at them from the shadows.
Jacob had informed the resentful spirits beforehand to prioritize hindering and distracting the goblins, while the skeletons were tasked with doing the actual physical damage with their scavenged kitchen knives.
The coordination was seamless; as a goblin lunged at a skeleton in a desperate attempt to break through the line, a resentful spirit would phase through the floor or the nearby wall to grab at its ankles.
" Kee?!"
One such goblin found its feet snagged by ghostly hands, forcing it to stumble and fall face-first onto the floor with a startled grunt.
It wasn't given a single chance to scramble back to its feet, for the nearest skeleton soldier took the opportunity to drive its blade straight through the creature's skull, ending its life in a single, clean thrust.
Just like this, working hand in hand with murderous precision, the skeletons and resentful spirits moved through the hallway like a scythe through wheat, clearing the sixth floor of all visible threats.
Once the initial fighting had subsided into silence, Jacob didn't head down to the floor directly. Instead, he remained in the safety of the upper landing and willed his minions to conduct a thorough sweep of the individual apartments, searching for any lingering survivors or hidden threats that might be lurking behind closed doors.
True to what he had suspected, there were several goblins who had been hiding in fear within the rooms, perhaps sensing the slaughter of their kin in the hallway and hoping to avoid the same fate, they sided to hide in fear.
The skeletons and resentful spirits made quick, brutal work of these stragglers, dragging the fresh corpses out into the center of the sixth-floor hallway until they had formed a grim, tangled pile of green limbs and matted fur.
However, the peace of the cleared floor was short-lived. Just as the last body was tossed onto the heap, the sound of successive, heavy footsteps began to echo up from the stairwell below.
It seemed that a group of reinforcements from the fifth floor had heard the commotion and were rushing up to investigate the source of the noise.
With Jacob's foresight and quick thinking, he issued a mental command for all his minions to vanish.
The skeletons, ghosts, and the ghoul woman scrambled into the open doorways of the various apartments along the hall, pulling the doors nearly shut and melting into the darkness of the rooms.
When the group of fifth-floors goblins finally arrived on the landing, they were greeted by nothing but an eerie silence and a small mountain of their own dead brethren piled in the middle of the floor.
The new arrivals began to circle the mountain of corpses, their noses wrinkling at the scent of fresh blood and their eyes darting around in a frantic search for who had caused all this.
Their expressions turned heavy and fearful as they realized the sheer scale of the massacre, and they began to huddle closer together for protection.
"Kee?!" one of the goblins shrieked, jumping back as its companions also began to yelp in alarm.
The group of goblins were all confused by the sight of misty, spectral hands suddenly emerging from the shadows beneath them to grab firmly at their feet, anchoring them to the spot.