novelraw Chapter 103: Purity of Venom
Chapter 103: Purity of Venom
Garren was not around, if he was, he might have seen what happened with the men from Valdenmoor in a carriage.
He had gone on a hunt with some knights. The new knights coming along so they can be part of something.
Darion decided to go to the graveyard. He needed not to think too much about what had happened and instead try to be productive with anything.
He needed to fill the remaining slots of his undead inventory.
Arriving, Darion summoned four undead immediately and set them to work.
He filled them steadily, moving through the older sections, choosing graves with good markers where he could and working by feel where he couldn’t.
The stats were decent, Rust and Bone Tier mostly, the loyalty numbers sitting comfortably.
After he was done, he stood at the graveyard gate and looked at his inventory and felt the satisfaction of it, and then immediately felt what was missing.
Venom.
He had one venomous bat from the Pachian encounter. Just One. His entire infiltration capability from the weeks of operations against Valdenmoor had been nine venomous bats and four venomous knights, and he had lost all of it in the escape.
One bat was not an infiltration capability. It was a starting point.
He thought about the faster option.
He had done it before, in a way, the original venomous bats had been created by having venomous undead knights bite living bats.
If he used his one venomous bat to bite new bats, those bats would die from the venom and he could revive them as venomous undead. Faster than finding Pachian snakes. Safer than going back into the forest repeatedly.
But he paused on it.
The original venom had come from Pachian snakes directly. Real venom, full potency, delivered into living tissue. What he had done with the knight venoms, having the venomous undead bite the bats, had worked, but the venom was already one step removed from the source.
If he now had venomous undead bats biting new bats, that was two steps removed. And if he kept going, venomous bats creating more venomous bats creating more, at what point did the venom degrade? At what point did he end up with undead that carried something weaker than what the Pachian had originally delivered?
He didn’t know. The system hadn’t told him and he hadn’t asked.
He wasn’t going to risk it.
If he was rebuilding the venomous capability, he was doing it from the source. Nine bats, nine Pachian bites and nine properly venomous undead. It would take longer and be more tiring. But he wasn’t going to run an operation against Valdenmoor, or anyone else, with venom he wasn’t certain about.
He went to find a cage, he found one in the storage room in the castle.
His aim for finding the cage was to capture the bats from the graveyard and take them to the forest so they would be bitten by a Pachian snake.
But then, back in his world on Earth, Darion knew that it was biologically impossible.
A snake’s venom wasn’t some bottomless stuff. The glands behind its eyes stored a finite amount, usually only a few milliliters, enough for two or three solid strikes at most.
Each bite dumped 10 to 50 percent of that reserve through hollow fangs, like squeezing a syringe. After the second or third bite, the snake was just gnawing on empty. Dry fangs, no venom and no kill.
It also took time to reload. Venom synthesis wasn’t instant; it could take days to replenish what one fight drained. And striking itself was exhausting. Muscle, speed, precision, a snake could lash out fast, but not nine times in a row without slowing down or giving up when there could be an option to escape.
Using a snake to inject venom into nine bats was impossible unless things worked wayy differently in this world.
So Darion decided he would try to use multiple Pachian snakes. With his Undead wild wolf and his undead knights, it should be relatively easy to find the snakes and get them to do what they are needed for without harming himself.
The cage he found was a tight one, tight in the sense that it was closely spaced like a basket, something that a snake wouldn’t slip out the hole and get off.
He used his undead knights to catch nine bats, put them in the cage then rode into the forest.
After a while, his wild undead wolf stopped two Pachian snakes on a tree.
It climbed and fell them down, Darion summoned four of his Undead knights to help in holding them so they don’t run away or attack him.
He released four bats for his Undead knights to hold and they did.
Each Pachian serpent was able to bite two bats each, bringing the total to four bats bitten.
The Undead wolf killed the snakes after they were done and after some minutes, Darion crouched to revive the Bats, turning them into Undead bats. He summoned them to his inventory and they searched for more Pachian snakes.
Inasmuch as they tried to not encounter a Bogart, they met one which his undead wild wolf killed. The corpse would be stressful taking back to Percvale so he just left it there. Abandoning some large meat!
Garren and the knights must have been back from hunting, Darion concluded as he roamed the forest because he saw no signs of them.
Eventually he was able to find more Pachian snakes to bite the bats with him so he could make them into Undead bats.
After he was done reviving the last one and sending it into his inventory, his status screen appeared:
[STATUS]
Name: Darion
Title: Baron of Percvale
Class: Necromancer
Rank: Acolyte
Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)
Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving-aligned — Improving)
[ATTRIBUTES]
Strength: 57
Agility: 45
Endurance: 55 [+2]
Vitality: 48
Perception: 46 [+2]
Intelligence: 71 [+3]
Willpower: 53 [+3]
[Knight Undead Inventory: 50/50] [FULL]
[Animal Undead Inventory: 12/25]
[Skills:
Death Perception
Distant Command]
He noted that not all his attributes had been increased.
He concluded that he got increases for what he merited and... the knight inventory was full!
Fifty Undead knights was a lot actually.
He rode back to Percvale.
Garren and the knights he went out with had arrived now.
Darion drove his horse into the gate, unmounted and called for Wulfric, who was trimming the front grasses to take the horse to the stable.
Garren who had been talking to one of the senior knights approached him.
"Welcome my lord, i see you went for a hunt of your own."
"Yes, I did," Darion said, then after a short pause added. "Walk with me."
They walked, kind of aimlessly, just aiming around the castle.
"The messengers came," Darion said. " They brought paper works and told me to sign off the lands to them but I refused to sign."
Garren looked at him but didn’t say anything immediately. He was surprised in a way that... showed he wasn’t surprised. This was to be expected anyways.
"They left without arguing," Darion continued. "Just took the papers back, got in the chariot, and left. No threats beyond what they’d already delivered."
"That’s the part that concerns me," Garren said after some time.
Darion nodded. "Me too."
They walked for a moment without talking.
"Will they attack immediately?" Darion asked.
Garren thought about it. "Not immediately. Probably." He paused. "They’ve lost a significant number of knights in the last few weeks. Whatever they think caused it, they’re still dealing with the internal disruption of that. A major military campaign on top of it would strain them." He paused again. "But a small force, something punitive rather than full scale, that I’d expect sooner."
"How soon?"
"Days. A week at most. They won’t want to let defiance sit. It sends the wrong message to everyone watching."
Darion nodded. He had arrived at the same conclusion independently.
"We prepare," he said. "Whatever we have, we make it ready, I have to find a way around this."
———
In Valdenmoor, Aldric sat in the throne room and listened to the report.
The lead messenger delivered it standing, formally actually, the way reports were delivered when the news wasn’t good.
Percvale’s Baron had refused to sign. Had offered an extension request instead. Had stood in his own gate and watched them leave without visible distress.
’What choice do I have.’
Aldric listened to the whole thing without interrupting.
When the messenger finished, the room was quiet.
"So he chooses defiance," Aldric said.
The messenger didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question.
Aldric looked at Bravar, who was standing to the left of the council table. "Thoughts."
Bravar had clearly been forming them since before the messenger finished speaking. "Full assault is not advisable. Not immediately. The losses in the barracks have disrupted operational readiness, not critically, but meaningfully. A major campaign requires logistics we haven’t assembled."
"And waiting?" one of the advisors said. "If we let this sit then we look weak. Perhaps every barony within two days’ ride hears that Valdenmoor issued a deadline and the debtor simply said no and nothing happened."
"I’m not suggesting we do nothing," Bravar said. "I’m suggesting we’re precise about what we do."
Aldric looked at him.
"A corrective force," Bravar said. "We send two hundred knights. Not a war, a demonstration instead. Percvale is not a military threat. They have a hundred knights from what I’ve heard before who were starving three months ago. They don’t require an army. They require a reminder that defiance has a cost." He paused. "We ride in, we take the farmland by presence rather than siege, we leave. The message is sent and the resource is secured. We don’t overextend."
The council sat with it.
"Two hundred knights," Aldric said.
"Sufficient for Percvale," Bravar said. "Not a statement of full strength. Just enough."
Aldric was quiet for a moment. He looked at the map on the wall, the southeastern corner where Percvale sat.
"This Baron," he said. "The young one. He refused to sign while knowing what we would do."
"Yes, m’lord."
"Either he’s foolish or he has something he thinks changes the calculation."
Nobody answered that.
"It doesn’t matter which," Aldric said. He stood. "If he wishes to pretend he has a choice, let us show him otherwise." He looked at Bravar. "Two hundred. Sent in three days."