Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Darion asked the system with a thought.

The reply came:

[Cause of death detected: Rare Venom — Pachian Serpent.

Reviving these knights will produce Venomous Undead of the Flesh Tier.]

Flesh Tier...?

He hadn’t seen that one before.

He asked the system to clarify and it pulled up the full rank ladder, the complete version this time, not the truncated list that had cut off at Rust when he first asked in the graveyard.

Then it was like the system was giving him a teaser, just giving him tips of the icebergs and then expecting him to anticipate the remaining.

Rotten

Decaying

Rust

Bone

Fleshbone

Flesh

Darion read it from bottom to top.

He had started at Rotten, Decaying and Rust — the lowest three, pulled from mass graves where the bodies had been in the ground for decades with no coffins and no preservation, only dirt.

He had seen the state of those bones himself when he dug them up. The flesh had long since gone, the marrow dried out, the structure still intact but stripped down to its minimum.

But then, there seemed to a sleekness about them, though they were decaying and rusty, they had this odd smoothness to them.

The system had ranked them accordingly.

Then the wolf had come back as Fleshbone, still carrying most of its flesh when it died, the body fresh, which had produced something considerably stronger than anything he had pulled out of the graveyard.

And now this. Six knights who had died within the last fifteen minutes, bodies completely intact, flesh and muscle and bone all still in the condition they had been in when those snakes hit them.

Fresh corpses produced better undead, he understood that now. The rank wasn’t arbitrary. It was the system reading the condition of what it had to work with and giving him a result accordingly.

Flesh Tier. Above Fleshbone. The wolf was already the strongest thing in his inventory by a significant margin and these would rank above it.

He asked what Venomous meant in practical terms.

The system answered.

[Venomous Undead retain the venom present in the body at time of death.

Capable of delivering lethal doses through bite.

Venom potency: preserved at peak concentration indefinitely.

Enemies killed by venom become eligible for binding under standard domain rules.]

Darion read that last line twice.

Wow!

They didn’t need swords. They didn’t need spears or shields or any of the equipment he had been thinking about scrounging from the barracks.

They could walk up to an enemy and bite them and the enemy would die the same way his knights had died: pale skin, green spreading from the wound, gone in minutes.

He thought through the scenarios quickly.

In a siege, you sent them in first.

Let the enemy engage them in close quarters the way enemies always did when they thought they were fighting something they could kill with a blade.

The moment one of those knights got its teeth into someone, that someone was finished and probably taking the men standing next to him down too when he collapsed.

In open field battle, the psychological effect alone would be worth something. Soldiers who were already dealing with the unnerving reality of fighting undead that didn’t fall when hit would now also have to contend with the knowledge that being grabbed meant dying slowly from the inside.

Imagine how powerful one would be with knights like this in a battle. All you had to do was send them in. And while you fought with sword and shield, they bit, killing silently.

Six of these. Six Venomous Flesh Tier undead knights with full combat instinct preserved, added to the wolf and whatever he rebuilt from the graveyard.

Yes. He was reviving them.

He became aware that Garren had stood up from where he had been crouching and was now moving through the group, organising the business of hauling the Bogoart carcasses back to Percvale.

The knights were doing the mental arithmetic of nine dead Bogoarts between a hundred and fifteen men, they had come in as a hundred and twenty-one and were now minus six, which left one hundred and fifteen, plus Garren, plus Darion, and working out carries and rotations.

They were deciding how they would share the Weight of the Bogarts among them all. The creatures were really heavy and would need at least five or six knights to carry one without being exhausted. So this would mean that not all of them would be carrying the Bogart.

Nobody was paying him specific attention at this exact moment.

He looked at the four bodies laid out at the edge of the clearing.

The green markings had stopped spreading, whatever the venom had been doing while the men were alive had finished its work now that there was nothing left to work on.

The skin was still pale, the faces slack. They looked like his knights, which they had been forty minutes ago.

He felt something that wasn’t quite hesitation and wasn’t quite guilt but lived somewhere near both of them.

These were men who had come into the forest with him this morning. Men who had sharpened their weapons before sunrise because a Bogoart had changed what they thought was possible.

Men who had a lanky knight place a bet on their Baron’s survival two days ago and climbed trees and waited and fought and died doing it.

Reviving them wasn’t disrespecting that. They would still be serving Percvale. They would still be his, loyal, present and fighting under his banner. They just wouldn’t be doing it the way they had done it this morning.

He glanced at the group. Garren’s back was turned. The nearest knights were thirty feet away wrestling with a Bogoart carcass and engaged in an argument about the best way to carry something that weighed more than two of them combined.

Darion moved to the first body, crouched down, and placed his hand flat on the chest.

He said the word.