You dash up to the middle of the room, thankful for the precious moments you had to reload your weapons and wishing you had a target that might actually suffer from shooting. As you track your pistol to the entrance where you hope such a target to emerge, you catch a little of the spirit's glow; and Bella's eyes -which know your shape in the dark as her dear friend, with atleast a little illumination - find you.

"Taalia..!" She croaks, her voice suddenly hoarse when it had screamed not long ago as the terror that freezes her limbs starts to thaw at the glimmer of hope your arrival provides. The spirit aborts its grasp to turn to see you; the mournful parody of the man, in his officious coat and uniform, seeming just dimly to recognize you from the earlier encounter.

Your name spoken in such a way chills you for a moment, dividing your tention away from the doorway; and in that moment, the source of the shambling sound reveals itself: another dead man.

This one, dead in a different way. Rusted scale male shuffles and clicks against the bare bones beneath, and the rotted remnants of a gambeson; a lipless, skeletal mouth clicks wide with a wordless cry of battle, and with the scrabble-click of skeletal feet on hardwood floors, the dead man rushes across the floor at a charge, its rusty blade held high.

You track your pistol back on it, trying to line up its skull and hoping that bursting that will be enough to 'kill' such a thing where shooting a rib off seems likely to do little. The last thing you need is TWO undead horrors chasing you and Bella around this awful place! But your night-eyes resolve a fact as you aim - the skeleton's blade is not rusty, but bronze; merely dirty with age and neglect. A leaf shaped bladed; a xiphos, as the classics call them; a weapon of the ancient times before the Tilean states.

To your surprise, the skeleton charges at the spirit, and swings the old blade in a vicious arc. It misses - but it misses because the spirit reels back from the swipe as if it has something legitmate to avoid about the blow, rather than allowing the violence to pass through it meaninglessly, as happened with your pistol balls.

This new challenge plays out infront of Bella's eyes as her sense comes back to her, and her shaking legs begin to activate.

Spoiler: OOC:
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That low initiative worked out for you, since the spirit WHIFFED bigly and you got to witness the weird politics of the cursed villa play out in front of you. Do what you will with this information. Bella acts at the same time as you; she is likely to defer to your best suggestion, and try to get and stay near to you!