Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Darion went to the graveyard wall first.

The bats roosted in the same gaps they always had. In the crumbled mortar between the old stones and the dark recesses where the wall had separated enough to create shelter.

He summoned one undead knight and pointed at the wall.

”Go catch one bat and bring it here,” he said. ”Walk almost silently, grab it and hold it. Don’t crush it.”

The undead moved to the wall slowly, which was the right instinct because fast movement scattered the colony and it had been commanded to walk slowly.

It reached into the nearest gap with one hand, felt around for a moment, and closed its fingers around something that immediately started making noise.

The rest of the colony exploded outward from the wall in a flurry of wings, filling the air above the graveyard for a few seconds before dispersing into the sky.

The undead stood with one bat in its grip.

The bat was furious about this. It bit the finger bones repeatedly, which accomplished nothing, and made a continuous sound of protest that Darion found genuinely funny for a moment.

”Hold it firm,” he said. ”Don’t let go.”

Now he had a problem.

He needed to get a live bat through the streets of Percvale and into the forest. But he had no way to carry it. He couldn’t do so himself as the bat would bite him and probably escape.

The only option here was to use the undead knight currently holding the bat. But how could he do it without making it into a spectacle.

The citizens probably he was a Necromancer, some of them did, in the way that people knew things in small places, through overheard conversations and the particular logic of putting visible evidence together. He hadn’t announced it to them, he had only done so to his knights.

But then, knowing he was a Necromancer and watching him walk through their streets with an undead knight clutching a screaming bat were different experiences. That was being too obvious and ’obviously’ confirming the speculations.

He thought about it for a moment.

He called the undead knight close and looked at the bat in its grip. Small, wings folded under the closed fingers, still biting at the bones. He took his riding cloak from the saddlebag, wrapped it loosely around the undead’s hand and the bat together, not tight enough to suffocate it, just enough to muffle the sound and hide what was being held.

It wasn’t elegant. But an Undead with something wrapped in a cloak was considerably less alarming than an Undead holding a live bat.

He kept the undead knight close as they moved through Percvale’s streets, the bundle held against the knight’s side.

The few people out at this hour glanced at them and went back to their business. One woman looked at the undead for a moment longer than the others, observing that it wasn’t something she wanted to examine further, and looked away.

There were few people really up by this time of the morning so that helped.

They made it to the forest road without incident.

He left the streets behind and entered the tree line with just the undead knight holding the bat and the original wolf, who he had summoned immediately they were in the forest.

He didn’t need more than that for what he was doing.

The wolf moved ahead of him through the trees, which was when he thought to ask what exactly the wolf could do here that he was assuming it could do.

How would the wolf help in looking for Pachian snakes? A normal living wolf could identify creatures with its smell, what could this do.

He asked the system.

The answer came back in the form of a full description.

[Skill: Necromantic Perception]

Type: Passive (Bound Entity Trait)

Applies To: Undead Beasts under Binding

Bound undead beasts perceive the world through necromantic linkage rather than conventional senses.

Through this connection, the entity reads its surroundings as a field of vital and decaying presences.

Perception Modes:

Vital Sense — Living entities register as distinct presences within the entity’s awareness. Weak lifeforms produce faint, unstable signals. Trained combatants register as firm and steady. Powerful beings produce heavy, oppressive signals. Clarity increases with proximity.

Death Affinity — Necromantic energy responds to decay, blood, and dying states. Fresh wounds and exposed blood create strong signals. Creatures near death appearflickering or unstable. This response intensifies in environments rich in death or injury.

Limitations — Overlapping presences can create interference. Non-living structures are not perceived through this sense. Highly concealed targets may dampen their presence.

Note: This perception is not true sight or smell.

Darion read through it and felt surprised.

The wolf wasn’t tracking by smell. It was reading the forest in a similar way to the way he read his undead through the binding, as presences, signals and the weight of living things in space.

A Pachian snake in a tree would register as a living presence the same way anything else would. The wolf wouldn’t know it was a snake. But it would know something was there, and Darion could watch where the wolf’s attention went and investigate from there.

He looked at the wolf moving through the trees ahead of him.

Actually useful. Really useful.

They went deeper into the forest.

The wolf stopped twice in the first twenty minutes, once at a fallen log where something had been recently, the presence apparently still faintly readable, and once at a section of undergrowth where it stood very still and then moved on, whatever it had registered apparently too small to pursue.

Then it stopped at a tree and didn’t move on.

It was not a large tree, but old thick bark, the kind of bark with deep ridges and gaps that things liked to use.

The wolf stood below it and was very still, its attention fixed upward.

Something was up there.

Darion was about to move closer when a medium-sized wolf came out of the undergrowth to his left at a run, apparently having decided that the intruders in its territory required attacking.

The undead wolf turned and hit it before it reached Darion, the collision brief and completely one-sided. The living wolf went down fast.

Darion stared at the corspe of the now dead wolf and decided to revive it, add it to his animal inventory.

Darion crouched beside it immediately.

”Revive.”

Green light, brief, and it was done. He unsummoned it into the animal inventory and stood back up.

The whole thing had taken forty seconds.

He looked back at the tree.

The wolf was still watching it.

Darion moved toward the trunk slowly, looking up into the branches. Then he saw the snake, coiled in a gap in the bark about fifteen feet up, thick-bodied.

The Pachian snake moved first and Darion immediately stepped back, leaving the snake to face his undead wolf.

The snake came off the branch fast, dropping and striking at the undead wolf in one motion, the fangs finding the neck area, and finding nothing useful there.

Just bone. Lifeless bone covered in the remnant flesh of the Fleshbone Tier. The snake’s venom went into material that had no blood to carry it and no living system to affect.

The wolf didn’t react to the bite at all. It didn’t flinch, didn’t pull back either. It just stood there while the snake struck it a second time with the same result.

Darion looked at the undead knight standing beside him with the wrapped cloak in its arms.

”Go forward,” he said. ” And hold out your arm so the bat can be bitten.”

The knight walked toward the snake.