Too late to stop the Shadow Warriors (part 2)

Part 2 of my second playthrough of Legend of the Shadow Warriors

Previously, I escaped the city and consulted a hermit who then got eaten by the undead zombie of his son. And I’m back on the road to Karnstein. To make up some lost time, I decide to cut south through Hustings and Cumberside then cross the mountains.

As I approach Hustings in the evening, I see a pillar of mud magically raised from the ground and supporting a tower that really doesn’t seem like part of the town. I also see humanoid shapes rising from the bog surrounding me, and am given the choice to wander off the road to go check one out. No thank you! I book it into town… to find the way blocked by a pumpkin-head dude. These are the pumpkin-head character on the cover, but a crapload of them. I kill this one, then make it into town to find that they’re barricading and arming up for a siege against “the witch” and her pumpkin-heads.

I figure I can do them a good turn, and instead of fighting the minions, I head back to that tower.

Bad move. I’m captured as soon as I open the door, and taken to see the witch. Well, that was partly my goal…

She’s rather proud of herself, for having once been a vampire but then becoming a vampyr which I gather is a super vampire. She even keeps the stake that killed her vampire form as a souvenir. I laugh at her, and dare her to prove it by… get this… letting me decapitate her.

But then… she says “yeah, okay” and lets me do it! Holy shit! She has her minions hold her down as I cut off her head and throw the body out the window.

And I start to sing heartily the famous song “Ding dong, the witch is…”

… standing right behind me… with her head still attached…

oh shit.

But she’s not even mad, just amused. So I’m even more unnerved. I run for it, leaping out the window and miraculously taking only 2 stamina damage.

I head back to town, and find it being thoroughly destroyed by the pumpkin-heads, so I just keep walking.

On my walk, I try not to consider that I have got to be the worst mercenary / adventurer ever.

• The two guys who hired me, died in a cut-scene on the same page where I met up with them.
• I didn’t save the hermit from his zombie son.
• I backed down from a super-vampire witch and a town was destroyed.

And a day later, I arrive at the town of Cumberside.

Cumbleside is completely deserted. Looks like the whole town just packed up and let because of the orcs and ogres from the mountains, the undead and pumpkin-heads from the north, and just generally being a crummy place to live. The only thing left is a “doctor of diseases of the mind” and I figure maybe that’s a place I could find a sage or a book about numbers.

Inside is a lady who is very insistent that I eat, and who won’t talk to me except to tell me to eat. I’m super suspicious, of course, but also curious so I follow her into…

…into her laboratory, where she has assembled a monster, in the style of Victor Frankenstein. She just needed a brain to finish her creature, and she’s not at all happy that I wouldn’t offer mine up. So she asks her creation to remove mine. I beat it down without a lot of trouble, and flee for my life as the tower catches fire as scientists’ lairs always do on the old movies. She tampered in God’s domain.

And with that, I head into the Witchtooth Line mountains.