Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

The wolf released it, stepped back, and turned to look at Darion with the green eye.

Darion looked at the dead animal on the ground, then at the wolf, then back at the animal.

Without the wolf he would have been asleep against that tree when it came through.

Whatever it was, it was heavy enough and built well enough that it would have done real damage to a sleeping man who hadn’t known it was coming.

”Good,” he said to the wolf, and meant it more than the word conveyed.

He crouched beside the carcass and looked at it properly.

The build was strange, he noted again, pig-like in body but the musculature was wrong for a domestic animal, and the bristles were coarser and longer than any pig he had seen. He pressed a hand against the flank. It was dense and heavy, the kind of meat that would last.

”Good meat,” Darion said, looking at the carcass.

He almost reached out and patted the wolf on the head.

The impulse was there, the same instinct that made people scratch a dog behind the ears after it did something useful. He caught himself before his hand moved.

The wolf stared back at him with the green eye, patient and empty, waiting for the next instruction, not even reacting to the head patting.

Right. Not a dog. Not even close to a dog. A dead wolf with its skeleton partially exposed, bound to him by necromantic loyalty and incapable of caring whether he was pleased with it or not.

The fact that it had just saved his life was not something it was aware of or would remember in any meaningful way.

He really had almost forgotten that.

”Good meat,” he said again, this time meaning the carcass, and went back to sleep.

He was still tired. His body had no interest in being awake yet.

He woke up twice more before morning.

The first time was to the sound of something crashing through undergrowth nearby, followed immediately by the impact of the wolf engaging it.

He opened one eye, registered that the wolf was handling whatever it was, and closed the eye again.

The second time was to a similar sound, slightly further away, similarly resolved.

He didn’t get up for either of them.

There was a version of him, the version that had sat in a prison cart two weeks ago wondering what he was supposed to do with a dying barony, that version would have been on his feet with the sword out at the first sound.

That version hadn’t had an undead wolf with strength 55 and no pain response standing guard in the dark.

Current Darion had exactly that, and current Darion had also been awake for the better part of two days and had just successfully infiltrated a military barracks without being caught.

Current Darion was proving his Father, step mother, step siblings and every godforsaken nobles in the hall wrong.

’Oh, he’s good as dead.’

’It’s death sentence what did you expect?’

’Oh he wouldn’t last a day.’

’He wouldn’t last a week.’

Blah blah.

He was TWO WEEKS! lasting!

He wasn’t dead, he wasn’t good as dead either. Infact, he is breathing just fine.

That made him think, why hadn’t the Emperor checked on him? Since he was sent here and told he wouldn’t last a day or a week he had expected the Empress particularly to be curious.

He had expected her to check on the Bastard and see how he was doing. Or did they think he was dead that was why they didn’t bother to see?

Was that how quick they had forgotten about his existence?

Well, one day, he might take Vengeance.

He slept through both fights without worry.

When he actually woke up, the light through the treeline was the pale flat grey of early morning and there were three dead animals on the ground around him.

He sat up and looked at them.

Three.

He had heard two fights in the night. Which meant either there had been a third he had slept entirely through, or one of the fights had involved two animals and he had only half-registered the full scale of it.

They were the same build as the first one. All three of them noticeably fat, the kind of fat that came from animals that ate well and moved slowly and had never developed a serious fear of predators.

Probably because nothing in this particular stretch of forest had been capable of killing them efficiently until last night.

Darion looked at the three carcasses, then at the wolf standing among them with the serene indifference of something that had no concept of how absurd this scene was.

”Are they just — ” he started, then stopped.

They were. They were absolutely just wandering up one at a time to investigate whatever had killed their companions before them, getting killed themselves, and then being replaced by the next one.

No alarm response or territorial avoidance instinct that would normally keep animals away from a location where one of their own had just died.

Instead a continuous rotation of large fat creatures making the same poor decision in sequence throughout the night.

Dumb creatures.

Though if they were going to be dumb in this specific and convenient way, he wasn’t going to complain about it.

Four total — the first one plus three more.

That was substantial. More than he had any right to expect from a roadside sleep stop.

He unsummoned the wolf, stretched the stiffness out of his back, and started thinking about the problem of getting four heavy carcasses from a forest in the borderlands to Percvale.

He spent twenty minutes moving through the treeline looking for anything usable as binding, things like long vines, flexible young branches, anything that would hold weight over a sustained journey.

He found enough after some searching, improvised cordage that wasn’t elegant but would hold if he distributed the weight carefully.

He could have used the wolf to carry some of it. The wolf was strong enough, certainly, and tireless, and would have followed instructions without complaint.

But he also couldn’t ride into Percvale with an undead wolf walking beside him trailing dead animals, and summoning it on the road when other travelers might appear was the kind of decision he had been specifically avoiding since he acquired it.

So he did it himself.

The horse bore most of the weight, the four carcasses tied across its back and flanks in a configuration that took three attempts to balance properly and left the animal expressing its opinion through its ears.

Darion walked beside it, leading it by the reins, the road surface at least reasonable enough that the footing wasn’t a problem.

It was slower than riding. Considerably slower. The extra weight changed how the horse moved and he wasn’t going to push it. He walked.

The journey that had taken half a day on horseback took most of the morning on foot leading a heavily loaded animal.

His legs found the rhythm of it eventually and he stopped noticing the pace, he only noticed the road and the slow progress.

Percvale’s walls appeared on the horizon.

He kept walking.