Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Chapter 96: Really Fast Wild Wolf Ride

The notification faded and Darion exhaled.

That settled it.

This meant there would be no remains, evidence or anything for Valdenmoor’s men to find and examine in the morning light.

The undead dissolved when the binding ended, which meant whatever was on the ground outside those barracks right now would be green dust before sunrise.

No skeleton knights to study or wolf bodies to measure and describe to a scholar. Nothing that pointed to anything except a fight that had happened and left no physical trace of what had caused it.

The horse!

But then, when Darion thought about it, would it really be a problem? It was just a horse and even though it was examined and checked, they wouldn’t find anything that would lead to him.

The horse didn’t have a special mark or symbol that told it was from Percvale. It just looked like a normal horse.

The wolf was still running at full speed and Darion was having a genuinely difficult time staying on it. It was not built like a horse. A horse had a back shaped for carrying, withers to brace against, a rhythm you could learn and match.

The wolf moved differently. It moved lower and faster, the whole body engaged in a way that made every direction change feel like a sudden decision rather than a gradual one.

He had both hands locked in the fur at its neck and was essentially holding on rather than steering, trusting the wolf to carry the instruction to go forward and keep going forward.

"Straight," he said, and felt the wolf adjust. "More to the left. Left. Now ahead again, straight."

It responded immediately, cleanly, the direction changes happening without the half-second lag he sometimes felt with the undead knights when the loyalty was lower.

The wolf’s loyalty was high and the binding was strong and it did what he told it with the completeness of something that had no competing instincts pulling at it.

He thought about that for a moment, gripping tighter as the wolf took a slight rise in the road at speed.

He had been talking to the wolf like it was listening. And it was listening, not in the way a dog listened, not processing language and finding meaning in words, but responding.

The commands landed and the body acted on them. He had been doing it instinctively since the wolf first came under his control, the same way he did with the bats, the same way he gave distant commands to the venemous undead knights.

But the mechanics of it were different. Distant Command was a skill, a system-granted ability that let him push instructions through the binding at range without speaking aloud.

The wolf was right beneath him. He wasn’t projecting anything through space. He was just talking.

He asked the system.

’How am I giving commands to the wolf and the other animals directly? Is that Distant Command too?’

The system answered.

[Bound undead animals are conditioned by the necromantic binding to respond to the voice and intent of their binder in ways a living animal would not.

The binding removes the instinctual resistance that would cause a living animal to ignore, misinterpret, or disobey commands.

What remains is direct responsiveness, your voice and intent reach them through the binding regardless of proximity.

Distant Command extends this principle to undead at range and allows non-verbal instruction. For bound animals in contact range, verbal command functions similarly.]

So the binding itself was the mechanism. The wolf wasn’t understanding language, it was receiving intent, the command arriving through the connection between them rather than through the animal’s comprehension of words.

Distant Command formalized that at range. Up close, the binding did the same thing naturally.

He now focused on the road.

He didn’t know if anyone was following him. He couldn’t hear pursuit over the sound of the wolf’s movement and the wind in his ears, and he couldn’t look back without risking his grip.

But he kept the speed up regardless. Not because he was certain they were behind him, but because he needed to get to Percvale and think.

He had made a mistake tonight. A real one, not a near-miss that worked out, an actual operational error that had almost ended in capture.

He had assumed Valdenmoor’s response to the infiltrations would be inward-looking. Healers, investigations inside the barracks, questions about water and food and air.

He had not properly accounted for the possibility that someone in Valdenmoor’s command structure would think outward. That someone would watch the trees. That they would have men looking for a source rather than looking at the symptoms.

They had reasoned well. And they had found him.

That changed everything about how the remaining days of the deadline window had to work.

He couldn’t go back to the same tree. He probably couldn’t go back to the same general position, if Valdenmoor put men in the treeline tonight, they would be in the treeline every night until they found something.

The bats didn’t need him in a tree with a perspective glass. They needed to get into the barracks, which they could do from further back if he could find a position with enough elevation to track them through the binding.

But then, was his Distant at the level that allowed him to give commands from way far?

He needed a new plan before he could execute another infiltration.

The walls of Percvale appeared ahead, lit faintly by the torches at the gate of the castle.

The wolf didn’t slow, Darion had told it to run and it was running, and it was covering the distance to the gate at a speed that made the gate approach faster than he expected.

He thought about saying stop and then thought about the gate and instead said: "Over."

The wolf left the ground.

It cleared the gate in a single motion, the arc of it long and low, and landed on the courtyard stones with an impact that echoed off the castle walls. Darion’s grip held through the landing, barely. He unsummoned the wolf as it touched down, the binding collapsing instantly, and he landed on his feet on the courtyard stone with considerably less grace than he would have preferred.

He stood up, straightened, and looked at the castle door.

He knocked.

Nothing for a moment. Then a shutter above opened and a face looked down. Darion looked up.

It was Garren.

"Come open the door," Darion said.