Koyuki, the Necromancing Foxkin

CHAPTER 312: Home

While the adventurers looked after their injured comrade I approached the fallen orthos. As I got closer I could see parts of a cart and a cage. The monster must have destroyed them when it broke free.

"They should have invested in a stronger cage." I mused.

"I believe they relied on a sleeping potion." Hatsumi said. "The blood had a strange taste to it, there was something in it."

"Are you alright?" I asked.

"Yes, I suspect the potion would not work on an undead anyway." Hatsumi replied.

I nodded, then looked back at the corpse. "This beast will be a great mount."

"It's really fluffy!" Helena said, while running her hand through the fur.

"How do you animate something with two heads? Will there be two personalities?" Cassie wondered.

I shrugged. "I have no idea. Maybe? How would that work? Would each head control a part of their body? If I have to raise two tier threes simultaneously it could be tricky."

"We have sealed the holes with ice magic so the corpse does not lose more blood." Skadi reported.

"Do you think we should raise it as a vampire? I am not sure if two heads are not complicated enough already. Maybe a draugr fits better, it even had a water affinity." I said.

"Two heads, two affinities!" Cassie suggested.

"How would that work? With two cores? They would still share a body and the wrong mana would hurt that." I pointed out.

"It would be pretty cool though." Cassie replied. "Imagine one head breathing fire, the other breathing frost."

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I pictured that in my head, it would look really cool. However, it did not change the fact that I had no idea if something like that was possible. And adding fire itself would be problematic. We managed it with Kasai but this would be a more complicated corpse to work with.

"First we need to get the corpse home. Kaito mentioned an ice sled but how are we going to connect that to the carriage? And we need a mage to keep that sled frozen, we also need to keep the corpse frozen to keep it fresh." I said.

"Hopefully we can scavenge some rope from the destroyed carriage." Hatsumi replied.

I looked around. "So, what was drawing their carriage? I don't see any horses."

"They might have been eaten by the beast." Helena suggested.

"Or they ran off, not every horse is as calm as Coffee." Skadi said.

I looked at my trusty horse. Coffee was busy eating some grass and not caring about anything. Nobody had secured him when the battle had started, Frank had jumped off his back as I had called my undead to me.

"Why aren't we putting the corpse on the roof of our carriage?" Skadi asked.

I looked at the carriage, then at the corpse. "I guess we could make it work if it is not too heavy. How much can we load onto the roof? And we would need to put Chariot somewhere else. Oh, and the two goblin corpses. We still have those in boxes on the roof."

"The corpse is heavy but the carriage could take it, I think." Skadi said.

"Let's see if we can make the sled work first and keep the roof as a backup." I suggested.

We got lucky and found some rope to attach our makeshift ice sled to the carriage. Nyx, Yoru and Ivy were sitting on the top of the corpse to keep the sled from melting, or getting too damaged from the road. Nyx was sitting on the left head while Ivy was purring and kneading on the back, Yoru had already curled up.

"Where is Kasai?" I wondered.

"She is in the carriage. She does not like the rain that much." Cassie replied.

It was still raining and we were all soaked by now. Magic would help us dry a bit once we were back inside the carriage but I was looking forward to a cosy dry room. We were not too far away from the place where we had stayed on the way to Neth.

We continued our journey and arrived at the roadside inn two hours later. The innkeeper still remembered us, he also remembered the orthos.

"Bloody adventurers. I charged them extra for the beast they brought. That cage had rust on it! They said they were keeping it sedated but they had to feed it at some point. It's a good thing that you took care of it. I keep telling people, it's the soldiers who keep us safe, not bloody adventurers. All they care about is coin."

He kept ranting a bit more, then offered us the same rooms we had last time. We even got a small discount, which was cancelled out by the parking fee for our orthos corpse.

The next day he offered to sell us an old cart for the corpse. Our makeshift sled was not ideal so we accepted, after Skadi haggled the price down. Then we were on our way again. There were no further ambushes, or other surprises, and eventually we reached Lupos. We were home.

The guards at the gate asked a few questions and we had to file a report about the orthos incident. They confirmed that the corpse was legally ours under the circumstances and the adventurers would be fined for any damage they caused to the road.

It was late when we entered the academy grounds. Kaito and Hatsumi took the corpse and carried it to our storage room with the other undead, while we headed to our rooms. I was looking forward to some more necromancy. As I drifted off to sleep in Helena's arms I dreamed about a new fluffy undead friend.