+ Whoever else is in The Hive at the moment.
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Ursan stood on top of a building. It was one of many run down, shoddy little shacks, mere skeletons of their former selves. Sure, The Hive had once been home to nothing more than criminals, low lifes, and the poor, but compared to then, these buildings were complete trash. The Undead had little care for living conditions. That wasn't even mentioning the odd man or woman breaking in, stealing valuable metal pipes or support beams when they could, and selling it to the highest bidder. He would look down to the dirt covering his boots with a semblance of distaste; it was almost as if his meatless face could portray that snobbish emotion with clarity equal to that of a living man.
The blackened skull, the single golden eye, the burning mote of living fire replacing the other one, these features all culminated in identifying markers. There was likely no other Lich with the appearance, splayed out in dull greys and the overshadowing black leather trenchcoat, that could match Ursan's own. From the jeweled rings across every one of his gloved, dead hands, to the way his eye twirled restlessly in his skull, he was one of a kind. Anyone who had heard of the man knew him from first glance.
Ursan the Golden was there, there to take back The Hive in potentially the largest single exchange of power Sigil had ever seen.
He was alone on top of the building, at least for that moment. He was a solitary black dots against a dull orange-yellow backwash, the permanent dusk of Sigil. From here, with his Golden Eye magnified in strength thanks of a golden ornament hanging from his neck, he saw what each ordered man and woman did in The Hive. They ran.
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Sigil's Defenders ran through the City. Hershom, a prominent member of the United Workers Party, lead a small group of five like minded individuals through their section of the Hive. The pace was rough, but they had been chosen specifically for this job. The Hive was a dangerous place, and that basic knowledge made itself clear in each sweat-streaked, tight knit brow among them.
"Left here." Hershom said, and they turned. A man in the middle of the group navigated what appeared to be a pushcart of some build. Each step he took dropped a small amount of glittering dust onto the uneven terrain.
And through some weird magic, it stayed put. Hard winds, being trodden over, and the shuffling gait of the undead didn't seem to erase this spelled stuff.
They turned in tandem, their trained bodies unrelenting in their duty. They were the chosen today, the men and women who would aid in the so called Hive Reclamation Project, possibly the only one which stood a chance at working through all of this. Their heavy jog, the ache running through their calves, their sides, their shoulders, it was all a painful affirmation that they were finally standing up to the city's chaotic rule, and carving themselves a home.
Katarina, a relatively new operative, sighted down the scope of her combat rifle. She was new, a rookie by all standards, yet had proven her mettle in the last incursion with the undead actually inside of Sigil Proper. She had caught a bit of movement to their right just as they turned down another street, and it worried her.
Contact, 5'o'clock. Halt movement." She breathed out, stopping in her tracks, and leveling her rifle towards whatever she had seen. All five of them heard it, the
ploop, ploop, plooood, ploop, the step of the undead approaching, and damn fast at that. It'd take a minute to see just how many there were.
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Ursan saw them before Katarina gave notion, and was raising his wrist towards his skull when she called out. A small bracelet hung from his too-thin wrist, connected magically to similar pieces of jewelry each squad head wore around his neck. She saw them, however, and the group stopped almost immediately. Weapons were raised in quick succession, hardly a heartbeat after she gave the assent to action. A rifle here, with silver coated bullets, there a pistol and a sword flaming with arcane energies. Hershom ignored the rifle laying across his armored back, even went so far as to leave the pistol in it's hip-strung holster. Rather, he drew two hand axes, each one blazing with runic marks, denoting it's power of a permanent death.
Ursan was pleased, yet worried slightly over them. There was a sizeable group approaching, maybe twenty, thirty low-class undead. They were dumb, dimwitted at best, but had the distinct advantage of numbers clustered very close together. It'd be interesting to see if the People's Finest could come out on top.
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He couldn't remember his name. He was sure he was a he, at least. Faint memories of himself stuck, among them, thoughts about his gender. He was a he, alright, he was sure of it.
Nothing really guided him. Or the others, he thought for a half second, looking around with dead-eyes at the zombies around him. He knew he was one of them, and they knew they were like him. But they didn't care.
Maybe there was one thing guiding them, something really deeply ingrained in what remained of their brains. The desire to feast upon something alive was there. They wanted to dig deep into something with a heartbeart, find that pumpy-pumpy organ, and they wanted to feel it squirm under rotted out teeth, and gums so decayed they snapped and oozed brackish ichor with every mouthful.
He was a priest. He was once a priest. The cassock covering his desiccated, broken body told people that. The ruined holy text in his hands, permanently clutched there by fingers that refused to open, told people that.
He was a holy man, by god, he was a holy man.
And his stumbling, unsteady gait, tantamount to the crunching sounds of his shoe covered feet breaking open, the sound of dead bones snapping if he moved too fast, was suddenly interrupted. A single bullet blew through his head, blasting a crater the Moon would be jealous over, out from the back of his squishy, dead skull.
Brainmatter went everywhere, black bits of rotten skeleton and necrotic flesh oozing over the dirty zombies behind him. He fell, cracking his skull open on the hard concrete sidewalk. It only really served to spread more of the stomach turning ichor across the ground, and the other's hardly noticed, besides being forced to stumble halfheartedly over or around their completely dead compatriot.
"Goodbye, Father Percy, Sleep well, will you?"
