novelraw Chapter 93: Replenishment
Chapter 93: Replenishment
He woke up early and didn’t eat, didn’t bathe and didn’t do any of the morning routine.
He pulled on clothes, took the saddlebag, and went straight to the graveyard.
Five empty slots in the knight inventory. He had been carrying them unfilled for days, too tired and too focused on other things to do anything about it. Today he was filling them before he rode out to Valdenmoor.
He didn’t want to dig this time. Normally that would have discouraged him coming here, the thought of doing all those hard work definitely would.
But then, he had undead knights to do it for him.
And so, he summoned four undead instead, to work.
The strongest knight in his inventory was the one he had found in the back room of the farmhouse building, sitting in the chair in the rusted armor, dead for decades.
Strength fifty, endurance fifty, the measurements of a large and well-built man, and those numbers had translated into a revived undead that was visibly different from the others.
It was bigger, the bones carrying the density of someone who had been substantial in life. He set that one to work on two graves simultaneously, moving between them, and gave the other three one grave each.
He stood back and watched them dig.
It was faster than doing it himself. Considerably faster. The undead didn’t tire, didn’t slow and didn’t stop to stretch their back or catch their breath. They dug like they could go on continuously for decades, centuries maybe and not tire out.
Five graves cleared in the time it would have taken him to clear two.
He moved through them in sequence, crouching beside each corpse, placing his hand, saying the word.
"Revive!"
The first came up as Rust Tier. He checked the stats.
[Undead Knight – Rust Tier]
Former Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 32
Endurance: 39
Loyalty: 70
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
Solid. The loyalty especially, seventy was a clean connection, commands arriving without drag.
"Revive!"
[Undead Knight – Rust Tier]
Former Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 35
Endurance: 44
Loyalty: 68
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
Good numbers. The strength was higher than most of what he had pulled from the graveyard outside the farmhouse knight.
"Revive!"
[Undead Knight – Decaying Tier]
Former Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 24
Endurance: 67
Loyalty: 69
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
He looked at the endurance for a moment. Sixty-seven.
That was perhaps the highest endurance he had seen on a Decaying Tier undead knight.
The strength was modest but the endurance was exceptional, this one would last in prolonged engagements in a way that the strength number didn’t suggest at first glance.
"Revive!"
[Undead Knight – Rotten Tier]
Former Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 4
Endurance: 89
Loyalty: 65
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
Strength four.
He had seen strength one before, on one of his first graveyard knights, that one had 1 strength.
Strength four was the kind of number that said this skeleton, in a direct fight, would fall to the first solid hit it received. It would contribute almost nothing offensively.
But endurance eighty-nine.
He thought about the Rotten Tier knight from his first graveyard session, the one with strength one and endurance fifteen, the one he had written off as useless at the time.
He had learned since then that endurance meant persistence, staying upright, absorbing damage and continuing to function.
Eighty-nine endurance on a skeleton meant it would keep standing through hits that destroyed other undead.
It would keep moving through damage that should have stopped it. It wouldn’t win any fight, but it would be the last thing standing after everything else had fallen.
He almost smiled. It was absurd in a way that he found amusing.
"You’ll last longer than you have any right to," he said to it, and unsummoned it.
Onto the last now.
"Revive!"
[Undead Knight – Rust Tier]
Former Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 30
Endurance: 40
Loyalty: 71
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
He commanded the undead knights who had unearthed the five graves, to cover them. They did and now Darion walked back to the gate, and checked his status.
[STATUS]
Name: Darion
Title: Baron of Percvale
Class: Necromancer
Rank: Acolyte
Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)
Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving-aligned — Improving)
[ATTRIBUTES]
Strength: 54 [+2]
Agility: 41 [+2]
Endurance: 48 [+3]
Vitality: 42 [+5]
Perception: 41 [+2]
Intelligence: 61 [+4]
Willpower: 46 [+2]
[Knight Undead Inventory: 35/35]
[Animal Undead Inventory: 15/15]
[Skills:
Death Perception
Distant Command]
Full. Both inventories at capacity now.
He looked at the vitality jump, five points, the largest individual gainfor today.
He wasn’t sure what had driven it. The rest, probably. Three days of actual sleep and regular food doing something that combat and riding and staying awake all night hadn’t been able to do.
He untied the horse and rode.
He arrived at Valdenmoor after dark, same as always. Tied the horse at the further spot he had been using since the bearded knight incident, the one that added walking distance but removed the risk of the tie-off point becoming familiar to anyone patrolling the treeline.
He walked forward through the trees carefully, checking around him as he moved.
At the treeline edge he stopped and looked at the wall.
Something was different.
The barracks was lit. Not the way it was usually lit... the low glow of a few candles through gaps in the shutters.
No, now it was properly lit, the kind of brightness that suggested every lamp inside was burning and had been burning for some time.
And the sound coming from it was different from the previous infiltrations. Not the quiet of a building full of sleeping men, but activity, voices and movement.
’Huh? this much activity in the middle of the night? Aren’t they supposed to be sleeping,’ Darion wondered.
He frowned and climbed the tree he usually climbed to see what was happening, if sending his bats in to do their stuff was possible today.
The perspective glass came out.
He focused it on the exterior of the building and swept it slowly across the walls, the ground, the guard positions.
Then he heard...
Six or seven knights, outside, pointing. Not at the building, at the treeline. At his treeline. Pointing and shouting, voices carrying clearly across the open ground.
"Someone’s spying on us, someone’s spying on us!"
"There, in the trees! I see it!"
"That’s the attacker, that’s him!"
The knights were active as hell! All the nights of watching and not seeing anything, they were slowly starting to lose hope. But they kept watching closely, not missing any tiny details.
And now! They’ve been rewarded!
Swords came out. They were moving before the last word had finished, crossing the open ground, toward the treeline at a run, spreading as they came, cutting off angles.