Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

The venomous undead moved toward the wall slowly.

Darion watched from a few feet back, keeping still.

The bats in the gaps between the stones were dense enough that the colony had its own sound. It was a low, collective rustling, the occasional adjustment of wings and the small sounds of animals in the specific state of rest that wasn’t quite sleep.

They hadn’t sensed the undead yet.

The undead produced no warmth, no breath, no scent. To the bats’ senses, nothing was approaching.

The first undead reached the wall and stopped, looking at the clusters in the nearest gap.

Then it reached in.

The reaction was immediate and chaotic. The section of the colony nearest the hand erupted outward, a sudden explosion of wings and high-pitched sound, bats pouring out of the gap in every direction, the air above the wall suddenly thick with movement.

The undead closed its hand on two of them, held them, bit each one after the other very quickly, and released them.

They fell to the ground, twitched, and went still within thirty seconds.

’The venom worked faster for the bats...’ Darion observed.

The other three venomous undead had moved to different sections of the wall at the same moment, and the colony was in full scatter now, bats streaming out of every gap, filling the air above the graveyard in a churning mass before dispersing in different directions into the evening sky.

But the undead had been positioned at four points along the wall, and each of them had gotten their hands on several before the scatter completed.

When the movement settled, Darion counted.

Eleven bats on the ground. He needed nine.

He walked along the wall, checking each one. Some were already completely still. A couple were still moving faintly, the venom working at whatever rate it worked in a creature this small, which turned out to be considerably faster than it worked in a human.

Within two minutes all eleven were motionless.

He crouched beside the first one and placed a finger on its small chest.

”Revive.”

The green light came, smaller than he had seen it before, scaled to the animal, a thin thread of it tracing the outline of the bat’s body rather than the spreading lines he was used to with larger undead.

The eyes opened, dim green points in the grey fur of the face. The wings shifted. It turned its head toward him and was still.

He checked the stats.

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Former Type: Wild Bat

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 6

Endurance: 8

Speed: 60

Loyalty: 68

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 5

Endurance: 7

Speed: 62

Loyalty: 70

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 6

Endurance: 8

Speed: 61

Loyalty: 66

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 5

Endurance: 9

Speed: 63

Loyalty: 67

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 6

Endurance: 7

Speed: 64

Loyalty: 69

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 5

Endurance: 8

Speed: 65

Loyalty: 65

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 6

Endurance: 8

Speed: 62

Loyalty: 70

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 5

Endurance: 7

Speed: 61

Loyalty: 66

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

[Undead Bat – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Strength: 6

Endurance: 9

Speed: 63

Loyalty: 68

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull)

Darion looked through them all, taking his time in doing so.

Strength and endurance were what they were — small animals, small numbers, and he had known going in that he wasn’t raising these for their combat capacity.

What caught his attention was the speed stat, which he hadn’t seen on any of his other undead. The bats had it because bats were speed, essentially, their entire existence was built around fast movement in three dimensions in the dark.

Speed ranging from sixty to sixty-five across the nine of them, which he had no direct comparison for but which felt significant given that nothing else in his inventory had a speed stat at all.

The loyalty numbers were good too. Mid-to-high sixties across the board, higher than he had expected from freshly revived animals.

Probably the nature of the bite, the venom had been delivered directly, the death was fast, and whatever produced loyalty in the binding seemed to respond well to that combination.

They were significantly better compared to his venomous undead knights. When he had created them, their loyalty stats were poor compared to what he had been expecting. It had taken serious work for him to make it higher. And that included sleepless nights, repeated commands and just the drive to not give up.

He looked at the nine bats sitting on the ground in front of him, green eyes dim, waiting.

”Fly,” he said.

All nine lifted at once, wings spreading, and went up into the darkening air above the graveyard. They moved the way bats moved, fast, directional changes that seemed to happen without transition, no wasted motion.

But they stayed within the graveyard boundary, which meant the command had included the implicit parameter of proximity even without him specifying it, the Distant Command ability interpreting the instruction with more precision than he had expected.

”Land.”

They came down, settling on the wall, on the tops of nearby markers, two of them on the ground near his feet.

He noticed immediately that the speed variation was visible. Some of them had responded fractionally faster than others on both commands, the ones with the higher speed stats, he assumed, the difference small but consistent.

It was a bit surprising how little numbers made a difference. An Undead bat at 66 speed points moved faster (that it was obvious) than one with speed points at 63, 64 and even 65.

He sort of filed the thought away. Not important for the operation, but interesting in terms of how the stats translated to actual behavior.

”Return to me.”

The two on the ground walked toward him, bats weren’t built for ground movement and it showed, an awkward forward crawl on their wing joints.

The ones on the wall and the markers dropped and flew the short distance, landing around his feet or on his outstretched arm when he extended it.

He stood there for a moment with an undead bat on his arm, looking at it.

It looked back at him with the small green point of its eye.

The Distant Command had worked cleanly on airborne undead, which he hadn’t been certain of before testing it.

Ground units moved predictably in two dimensions, the binding could track their position relative to his instructions without much difficulty.

Airborne units moved in three dimensions at speed, which he had thought might degrade the command quality. It hadn’t, at least not at graveyard distances. Whether it would hold at the distances required during the Gonnb operation — directing bats moving fast through a settlement from a vantage point outside it, was something he wouldn’t know until he tried.

But the graveyard test was encouraging.

He unsummoned all nine and checked his full status.

[STATUS]

Name: Darion

Title: Baron of Percvale

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Acolyte

Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving-aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 44

Agility: 31

Endurance: 40

Vitality: 30

Perception: 30

Intelligence: 45 [+8]

Willpower: 37

[Knight Undead Inventory: 30/30]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 10/10]

[Skills:

Death Perception

Distant Command]

The intelligence jump caught his eye.

Eight points, perhaps the largest single gain he had seen in that stat, which made sense, the bat experiment had been a problem-solving exercise from beginning to end.

Identifying the resource, working out the delivery mechanism, testing the theory, adapting when the colony scattered faster than expected and verifying the Distant Command function on a new type of undead.

His brain had been working the whole time and the system had apparently decided it counted.

He unsummoned the venomous undead knights, walked back to the gate, and untied the horse.

Full inventory. Thirty knight slots, ten animal slots, all of them occupied. Nine venomous bats, one undead wolf, four venomous knights among the thirty, the rest a spread of Bone and Rust and Decaying that formed the bulk of what he was bringing to Gonnb tomorrow night.

He mounted up and rode back toward Percvale in the last of the evening light.

The experiment had worked.