Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

The system replied.

[The wolf had no prior owner. As a wild animal unclaimed by any person or territory, ownership was established at the moment of willing contact and acceptance.

When you extended your hand and the wolf chose to remain, it became yours.

This is why its loyalty stat was visible to you.

This is why revival was possible upon its death.]

Darion stared at that for a moment.

So it was that simple. The wolf had belonged to nobody, which meant it could belong to anybody, and the moment it had pressed its nose into his palm and stayed, the system had registered that as a transfer of ownership.

Not a formal one actually, it wasn’t one that required paperwork or a purchase or a ceremony, this was just a wild animal making a choice and the system taking note of it.

Which meant the restriction wasn’t as narrow as he had assumed. It wasn’t just dead knights from Percvale’s graves and animals that had lived inside his territory. It was anything that had chosen him, or that he had claimed, before it died.

The domain rule still applied to things that had never been his, he couldn’t walk up to a dead enemy soldier on a battlefield and revive them, not yet anyway. But anything that had crossed into his ownership, however that happened, was eligible.

Darion stood up now.

”Let’s move,” he said, loud enough to carry across the clearing. ”Everyone grab what you can carry.”

Now he walked toward his horse like a man with a list of tasks and a preference for completing them.

The murmuring followed him anyway.

He caught fragments of it.

”Dark magic!.”

”Did you see the ones with the green skin!”

”How long has he been able to do that.”

Just stuff like that.

He let it pass without responding. He would deal with it properly when they were back inside Percvale’s walls, not standing in a forest where anything could be listening, and where they could be attacked by another group of Bogarts.

He had considered reviving the two knights who had died in the fight with the Bogoarts —Aldric and Piers, the ones killed by horns rather than venom.

Fresh corpses and full flesh, they would have come back at Flesh Tier same as the others.

But he looked at the group of knights currently looking at him with expressions that ranged from uncertain to deeply unsettled, and decided that two more bodies standing up in the same clearing in the same afternoon was probably one revival too many for the current state of trust between them.

He let the knights carry them instead. It was the right call for now.

———

Darion unsummoned the wolf before they reached the tree line.

The journey back was quieter than the journey in had been, which made sense.

They had gone in as one hundred and twenty-one and were coming back as one hundred and fifteen, and the ones who were walking were carrying the ones who weren’t, along with nine Bogoart carcasses distributed among the group in sections and haunches and whatever form made them portable.

They had found a deer near the eastern edge of the forest, a large one, standing in a shaft of light between two trees.

It registered the group and froze for a moment, then several spears left hands simultaneously and that was the end of that particular deer.

It was large enough to matter and the knights who killed it were visibly pleased with themselves.

Ten kills. Nine Bogoarts and a deer.

When they came through the gate, the townspeople were already out.

Word traveled fast in a place this small, or maybe they had just been watching the gate since the hunting party left that morning and waiting to see what came back through it.

What came back through it was Darion on foot one hundred and fifteen knights on behind, and enough meat distributed among the group to feed every person in the barony for several days.

Darion had unsummoned the wolf well before the gate. The last thing he needed was to ride into Percvale on the back of a half-skeleton half-flesh wolf and have to explain that before he had explained anything else.

The crowd reacted the way a hungry crowd reacted to a large quantity of food appearing in front of them, with a noise that started as surprise and built quickly into something louder and less restrained.

People were pointing at the Bogoart sections, at the deer, at the sizes of it. Someone started the chanting again.

Darion nodded and kept moving.

They set everything down in the courtyard, all of it, the Bogoarts, the deer, the whole day’s work laid out on the cracked stone, and the cook appeared from somewhere inside the castle looking at the pile with an expression that suggested she had not expected to be facing this particular logistical challenge today.

Darion dismounted and turned to face his knights.

All of them. One hundred and fifteen standing men plus Garren, in a rough group in the courtyard.

The knights were looking at him with the collective expression of people who had been holding a question back for two hours and were now somewhere they could reasonably ask it.

He had been thinking about this on the ride back. He could stay cryptic. He could be the mysterious Baron with unusual abilities and let the stories build up around him without ever confirming or denying anything specific.

There was a version of that which worked — leaders had operated on mystique before and would again.

But these were his knights. They had followed him into those trees this morning on the strength of one dead Bogoart and a bowl of soup. Six of them had died in that clearing. He owed them more than mystique.

And in the long run, if he wanted them to really cooperate and do their duties excellently, he needed to tell them now.

Darion exhaled slowly.

”Before anyone goes anywhere,” he said, ”I want to ask you all something.”

The courtyard went quiet.

”What do you think of Necromancers?”