Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Darion leaned forward in his chair.

”We don’t fight them head-on,” he finally said. ”At least not immediately. We use both my undeads and Percvale’s knights for this to work.”

Garren waited.

”Let’s say we start with the venomous undead,” Darion said. ”Same approach as Valdenmoor, broadly. We move the knights to a position near Gonnb but keep them hidden, far enough back that they’re not detected, close enough that I can deploy quickly when it’s time. I find a vantage point, a tree or elevated ground, use the perspective glass to watch the settlement. Then I send the venomous undead in.”

”Objective?”

”Bite as many as possible. Pull them out, then wait for the venom to work.”

Garren was quiet for a moment, which was not the same as disagreement but was the shape it took before disagreement arrived.

”The scattered layout is the problem,” he said. ”With Valdenmoor’s barracks you had everyone concentrated. One building, soldiers in rows and a single point to operate from. Gonnb doesn’t give you that. People spread across separate huts, moving at different times. There’s no predictable concentration.” He paused. ”You won’t hit enough of them at once.”

”Then we don’t aim for everyone,” Darion said. ”We don’t need to bite every person in the settlement. We target the warriors specifically. The hunters, the known fighters and whoever carries visible authority in the village. Not random villagers, but instead the people who make Gonnb dangerous.”

Garren nodded slowly. That was better. More precise and achievable.

”It reduces the number you need to reach and gives the operation a clear priority. If the fighters go down, the rest of the population doesn’t matter militarily.”

”Exactly.”

”But,” Garren said.

Darion looked at him.

”The venom delay.” Garren folded his hands on the table. ”It takes time to work according to what you’ve told me. In Valdenmoor that window didn’t matter because you managed to escape without being detected. And it wasn’t a war, your aim wasn’t to fight to to kill silently.

For Gonnb we are going to fight. In a scattered settlement where the undead are moving between multiple locations, hitting multiple targets across the village, that time frame before the venom works is a risk. One person wakes up and sees something moving through the settlement that shouldn’t be there. Alarm goes up and everything collapses before the undead have done enough.”

Darion thought about that. It was the right concern and he had been circling it without landing on it directly.

”So if we strike,” Garren said, ”We need to strike decisively. Fast enough that the time frame doesn’t become a liability. Either the venom works faster, which I don’t know if you can control, or we reduce the time the undead spend inside by hitting the targets quickly and getting out, or—” He stopped.

”Or we close the time frame from the other side,” Darion said.

Garren raised an eyebrow.

”We don’t just wait for the venom. We use the venom delay deliberately.” Darion stood and started moving, the way he moved when the pieces were assembling. ”The undead go in, hit the targets, pull out. Forty minutes, maybe less. We don’t wait for the venom to finish the job on its own, we use those forty minutes to position, and when the venom starts hitting and the settlement is already confused and disorganized, we go in behind it.”

Garren was very still.

”A second phase,” Darion said. ”The infiltration softens them. The venom creates confusion, y’know fighters weakening, people not understanding what’s happening and no clear threat to respond to because nothing visible attacked them. Then we attack. Not into a prepared defensive position with organized warriors. Into a settlement that’s already falling apart from the inside.”

He looked at Garren.

”That fixes the delay problem. The delay stops being a weakness and becomes the gap between phase one and phase two. We exploit it instead of working around it.”

Garren exhaled slowly. ”That’s a different operation from Valdenmoor.”

”It’s a better operation.”

”It requires more.” Garren was thinking through it well, which was what Garren always did. ”The venomous undead handle the infiltration. But phase two needs force. Thirty undead knights, over a hundred knights of Percvale and the wolf, that’s the core of it. What else do you have?”

Darion looked at him. ”That’s the problem.”

Thirty undead knights was a number that would have seemed impossible two weeks ago and now felt like it was short for what he was planning. The wolf was the most capable individual asset he had — strength 55, tireless, venom of its own — but one wolf in the chaos of a village under attack was one wolf.

It was fast, aggressive and unpredictable in the way that made enemies uncertain, but still one.

He needed more animals.

Not because animals were stronger than the undead knights individually, but because of what they brought that knights didn’t.

A skeleton advancing on a person was frightening but it was a shape they could process, a thing with a weapon, a threat with a direction.

An animal was different. Wolves and the boar-like creatures from the forest moved fast and low and from unexpected angles and triggered something older than tactical thinking in the people they attacked.

Chaos!

The kind that broke formations and turned organized defense into every man responding to the nearest immediate threat.

Wolves... The pig-like creatures from the forest that had come to investigate the wolf’s kills and been killed themselves.

Anything fast and heavy and aggressive enough to amplify the confusion that the venom was already going to be creating.

”I need more animals,” Darion said to Garren. ”Before tomorrow night.”

Garren looked at him. ”You’re going hunting.”

”We’re going hunting. This afternoon, if the light holds. I need the forest and I need whatever’s in it that’s worth raising.” He thought about the animal inventory: one out of ten slots. Nine empty spaces. ”We go out, we kill, I raise whatever the system will let me raise. Tonight we prepare. Tomorrow at noon we leave, we arrive at Gonnb after dark, and we hit them in two phases.”

Yes, kill the animals.

Darion finally understood something, unlike knights who were already bound to a kingdom or someone, animals in the forest had no owner.

They were free...

So if Darion was to kill one, it was already his. So the restriction of only reviving corpses that was your own worked in this scenario.

Hunters went into the forest to hunt, if they caught any animal, it becomes there’s. Same would apply for Darion since the animals would have no previous owner.

The time it wouldn’t work was if he killed or revived an animal already belonging to someone.

The plan as all set up now.

This wasn’t the Valdenmoor operation. That had been quiet, deniable and designed to create consequences without fingerprints.

This was different. This was Percvale riding on a village that had killed a messenger and beaten knights and stolen horses.

This was the cost arriving.

This was Vengeance!

”We go tomorrow night,” Darion said. ”Leave at noon so we arrive after dark.”

Garren looked at him and nodded once.

”Then we’d better go find your animals.”