Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

The messenger left before midday.

Darion had sent one of the senior knights, a steady man named Calder who Garren had recommended specifically because he had the temperament to deliver a formal letter to a hostile location without doing anything that would make the situation worse.

He rode out through the gate with the scroll sealed and tucked in his jacket and didn’t look particularly concerned about it, which was either confidence or professionalism and either way was what the job required.

Many messengers were known to eventually read the scroll on the road to their destination. It was a fun part of the messenger work.

But then, Calder didn’t look like he would do such a thing.

Darion watched him go from the gate, then turned and went to the graveyard.

He spent the rest of the afternoon there.

Thirty slots was a different kind of resource than ten had been. Ten had required constant management: raising five, losing two in a hunt, replacing them, always operating near the ceiling with no room for growth or experimentation. Thirty meant he could fill the inventory properly and still have capacity left over for whatever came next.

He worked through the older sections, reading the markers he could still make out, selecting graves based on size and depth and whatever the stones told him.

He was getting faster at this, the digging, the revival, the reading of the stats, the covering back up and moving to the next one. What had taken him most of a day on his first visit now took a fraction of that per grave.

By the time the light started going he had filled the inventory.

He checked the full breakdown as he walked back to the gate. Two Rotten, four Decaying, five Bone, the rest Rust, a spread that reflected the varied condition of what Percvale’s graveyard held, the older burials sitting lower on the tier ladder and the more recent ones, where the bone structure had been better preserved, coming back higher.

Not a war-winning force by any measure, but thirty undead knights was a number that felt different from ten in a way that was hard to articulate and easy to feel.

If he were, for example, to be walking in a forest with four large dead pig goat like animals, meats that would sell for a lot due to how large they were, and he was approached by some primitive guards, even if they were considerably many, he would be obliterating them due to the Thirty undead knights and his undead wild wolf.

He was certain it wouldn’t even be a close fight, it wouldn’t be related to a ’near death’ experience.

Instead he would be completely out on top.

The Undead Knight he had revived at Farmlands was strong, as strong as an actual human, like three or four of his average Undead knight put together.

That would be a important fighter in the battle.

”Dumbass people,” Darion muttered, cursing the warriors of Gonnb who had almost beaten his men to death.

He checked his status:

[STATUS]

Name: Darion

Title: Baron of Percvale

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Acolyte

Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving-aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 44 [+4]

Agility: 31 [+2]

Endurance: 40 [+1]

Vitality: 30

Perception: 30

Intelligence: 37

Willpower: 37

[Knight Undead Inventory: 30/30]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/10]

[Skills:

Death Perception

Distant Command]

Thirty out of thirty.

He looked at that number for a moment.

Massive improvement compared how he first started to be honest.

Weeks ago he had been digging up his first skeleton with a rusted shovel, alone in the graveyard.

Now he had thirty bound undead sitting in his inventory alongside an undead wolf, two skills, and an Acolyte rank.

He just had to improve his Animal undead inventory.

The wolf had proven its value twice over already. More animals, the right ones, would change what was possible in ways he hadn’t fully expected yet.

He untied the horse and rode back to the castle.

He slept well. Deeply, the kind of sleep that came from physical work done properly, and when he woke the room was still dark, a kind of dark that meant it was early but not yet the grey-before-dawn that signaled morning was actually coming.

Then he heard a knock.

He lay still for a moment, registering it, then sat up.

”M’lord.” Garren’s voice, through the door. Quiet but with something underneath it that wasn’t his usual register. ”I apologize for the hour. I need you to come outside.”

Darion dressed quickly and came out.

Garren was in the corridor, and behind him, visible through the door at the end of the passage that opened onto the courtyard, a knight was standing in the grey pre-dawn holding something. Darion couldn’t make it out from the corridor.

He walked through.

The knight was young, one of the junior ones, still in his riding gear, the horse behind him breathing hard in the cold air. He had clearly come in fast and recently. In his hands, held out in front of him at an angle that suggested he had not wanted to carry it and had been unable to put it down, was a spear.

On the end of the spear was a head.

Darion looked at it.

He recognized the face, or what remained of it recognizable...

It was Calder!

The gentle man Garren had recommended specifically because he had the temperament for difficult situations.

The man who had ridden out yesterday with a sealed scroll in his jacket and hadn’t looked particularly concerned about it.

”I found it on the road, m’lord,” the young knight said. His voice was holding together but only just. ”Planted in the ground at the edge of the road. Like, like they wanted it to be seen. Like they put it there to be found.”

The courtyard was very quiet.

Darion looked at the head on the spear for a long moment. Then at the young knight holding it. Then at Garren, who was standing to his left with an expression that had gone past shock into something quieter and more dangerous.

The letter. The carefully worded, formally addressed, deliberately almost nice letter asking calmly and politely for an account of what had happened.

The letter Garren had written and Darion had approved and Calder had ridden out with yesterday.

This was the response!