novelraw Chapter 99: The Missing Piece
Chapter 99: The Missing Piece
Darion woke, and the problems from the previous day returned immediately.
The six days deadline, the inventory empty apart from the wild wolf and valdenmoor now aware that something deliberate was happening.
He lay still for about thirty seconds,acknowledged all of it, and got up.
The morning was moving already when he came downstairs. He could hear the usual sounds of the castle doing it’s thing, maret in the kitchen, Wulfric somewhere outside and the distant noise of the barracks.
He ate quickly, standing at the kitchen doorway, and told Maret not to prepare anything elaborate for the rest of the day.
Through the window he could see Seren heading toward the farmland with her two knight escorts, the leather pack across her shoulder.
She had settled into a routine which was soil work in the morning, then back to the castle, then archery in the afternoon with the ten recruits. The recruits had improved enough that she had started doing moving target work, which had required Garren to improvise a suspended object that could swing, which he had done without complaint.
Darion watched her go and then went to the graveyard.
He started by digging himself.
He dug two graves, side by side, working through the older section where the ground was packed but familiar to him now.
He had been through enough of this graveyard that he knew which sections held better-preserved remains and which ones were likely to produce Rotten Tier or worse.
Some graves had stone markers and most didn’t.
He picked two graves with good stone markers, names still partially legible, the depth suggesting proper burial rather than the rushed mass graves of the worst years.
He revived both, checked the stats which was pretty good. Strength was alright, same with loyalty. He put them to work.
The difference was immediate. Two undead digging simultaneously, tireless, working at the pace of things that didn’t need to manage their energy, they moved through the earth faster than he could have managed alone.
He moved to the graves they had unearthed while they worked, placed his hand, said the word, and added to the working group. Then the next. Then the next.
By the time he had six revived and digging he was barely doing anything, just moving between the corpses they uncovered and repeating the process, the operation compounding on itself.
The stats were decent across the board. Nothing exceptional, a spread of Rust and Bone Tier with a few Decaying, the loyalty numbers sitting in the acceptable range.
He didn’t examine each one too closely. He needed the slots filled and the bindings stable, and he was getting both.
He worked through the graveyard for over an hour and came out with thirty-five knights in inventory.
Full.
He stood at the gate and looked back at the covered graves and felt the satisfaction of a problem solved, and then immediately felt the next problem arrive in its place.
The venomous undead were gone.
He had lost all four of them at Valdenmoor, in the chaos of the escape, he had sent everything into the fight, kept nothing back.
The priority then had been survival rather than preservation of specific assets. He had made the right call in the moment. But standing here now with a full inventory of standard undead knights and no venomous ones, he felt the gap.
He hadn’t filled his animal inventory but the venemous ones was the immediate problem.
The venomous undead had been his infiltration tool. The bats especially, nine venomous bats moving silently through a building at night was a capability that nothing else in his inventory could replicate.
The knights were fighters. The wolves were fighters. But the bats had been something categorically different: invisible, fast, capable of delivering a lethal payload without triggering any of the alarms that physical presence triggered.
Infiltration was practically its own ability. He hadn’t thought of it that way before, but that was exactly what it was, a separate mode of operation, distinct from direct combat, that had been made possible specifically by the venom.
Without it, he was a Necromancer with an army of undead fighters. With it, he was something that could reach inside an enemy’s walls and do damage before they knew he was there.
It was a like laying the path for him and his undead knights.
He wanted it back.
The original venomous knights had been an accident. The Pachian snakes in the trees at Gonnb had bitten his men, his men had died, and the system had flagged the venom-saturated corpses as exceptional revival candidates. He hadn’t planned it. It had just happened and he had gone with it.
To recreate it intentionally, he needed Pachian venom in the body of something he could revive.
His first thought was to take his undead knights into the forest and have them bitten. But that immediately fell apart.
The knights were bone. Rotten Tier, Decaying Tier, Rust Tier, even the best of them was predominantly skeletal structure. A Pachian snake couldn’t inject venom into bone. There was nothing to receive it and nothing to carry it.
He needed living flesh. Which meant he couldn’t use his undead.
Which meant he couldn’t use his undead knights at all for this purpose.
He could use the living ones though, but that would just intentionally killing them. So no.
He thought about the bats instead.
The bats were already his preferred venomous delivery system. They were fast, small and invisible in the dark.
Nine venomous bats had done more damage per infiltration than anything else in his inventory. If he was going to rebuild the venomous capability, rebuilding it through bats made the most sense.
But to create venomous bats he needed the Pachian venom in a bat that he could then revive.
Which meant he needed to catch a bat.
Take it to wherever Pachian snakes lived in the forest. Let it get bitten, wait for it to die then revive it.
He almost smiled at how straightforward that was.
He would leave the venomous capability to the animals for now. The logic was simple: normal corpses were bone, Pachian venom needed living tissue to work, and the only practical living hosts were the animals he could catch and expose. Bats specifically, for all the reasons that had made them effective before.