"Revive."
The green light ca and went faster than it had in the graveyard, four tis in quick succession, one hand to one chest then the next, the black-green lines spreading and fading, the skulls lighting up, the bodies shifting.
It took less than two minutes for all four of them to be standing.
Before Garren had fully turned around, before most of the knights had registered what the light had been, all four were upright and facing Darion with their heads bowed.
They looked different from his skeleton knights. The flesh was still there, grey now, the colour drained out of it, the veins visible dark beneath the skin like ink soaking through paper.
Flesh looking like their was not a single drop of blood in it. They looked like corpses without blood.
The eyes were green, sa as the others, but the faces were recognisable, looking all dried but still recognizable.
That was the part that made it strange. With the skeleton knights you were looking at bone, which was abstract enough to process.
These still had faces. Aldric still looked like Aldric, just emptied out and relit from the inside with sothing cold.
The green markings from the venom were still on their skin. Still spreading slightly and still dark.
Hojj saw them first.
"What the—" He stopped. Then louder: "What in the gods’ nas!"
Several knights echoed him, not in words exactly but in volu.
The group that had been hauling Bogoart carcasses dropped what they were holding. The ones closest to the four newly standing figures took steps back, so of them significant steps.
Darion stood up from the last body and looked at his system.
[Congratulations — Venomous Undead Knights Created!]
[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]
Forr Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragnted)
Strength: 41
Endurance: 39
Loyalty: 22
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]
Forr Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragnted)
Strength: 44
Endurance: 40
Loyalty: 20
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]
Forr Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragnted)
Strength: 43
Endurance: 38
Loyalty: 21
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]
Forr Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragnted)
Strength: 40
Endurance: 41
Loyalty: 24
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
Hmm, Strong!
All four of them considerably stronger than anything he had pulled from the graveyard, the strength stats sitting in the forties, endurance close behind, the combat instinct intact.
The venom was a separate category of useful that he didn’t need to think hard about to appreciate.
Then his eyes went to the loyalty numbers.
He stared at those for longer than he had stared at anything else on the screen.
Low loyalty wasn’t just a minor inconvenience. He hadlearnt from his system that loyalty was the binding, the hold he had over the undeads, the thing that made the difference between an undead that followed a command cleanly and one that lagged, glitched, or in the worst case stopped responding entirely.
High loyalty ant he said go left and it went left imdiately.
Low loyalty ant he said go left and sothing in the connection resisted, dragged and created a delay between instruction and action that in a fight could an the difference between the undead doing what he needed and the undead doing sothing adjacent to what he needed half a second too late.
Strength 41 ant nothing if he couldn’t reliably direct it.
He thought about why the loyalty was so low.
The skeleton knights from the graveyard had co back with loyalty in the fifties and sixties, not too high, but at least enough to be controlled without too many issues.
These four had died violently, quickly and in pain, not in battle under his command but from venom while clinging to tree branches. The binding was weaker because the circumstances of death had been chaotic, maybe?
No that couldn’t be it.
Or because fresh corpses with intact flesh were harder to bind fully than clean bone?
He didn’t know. He didn’t know why the loyalty was this little.
He dismissed the stat screens and summoned the undead knights into his inventory.
Then he looked at his status.
[STATUS]
Na: Darion
Title: Baron of Percvale
Class: Necromancer
Rank: Novice
Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)
Territorial Resonance: Low (Death-aligned)
[ATTRIBUTES]
Strength: 31 [ 6]
Agility: 20 [ 3]
Endurance: 21 [ 4]
Vitality: 20 [ 5]
Perception: 20 [ 3]
Intelligence: 25 [ 4]
Willpower: 25 [ 7]
[Knight Undead Inventory: 4/10] — [Five Extra Slots Unlocked!]
[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/5]
Animal Undead inventory?
Two separate inventories now. Knight undead and animal undead, tracked independently, with the animal inventory sitting at one (the wolf) in its own category of five slots.
Which raised an imdiate question.
He asked the system whether the animal inventory worked the sa way as the knight inventory, whether the sa domain restriction applied and whether he could only revive animals that had died within his territory or under his authority.
The system answered.
[Correct. The sa restrictions apply.
You may only revive animals that are yours, that died within your domain or under your direct authority.]
Darion read that and then sat with it for a second.
That are yours...
He looked at the undead wolf standing at the edge of the clearing, the half-flesh half-bone face turned toward the tree line, the green eye moving slowly across the forest.
The wolf had walked out of those trees on its own. It hadn’t belonged to Percvale prior to that mont.
It hadn’t died within his domain or under his authority, instead it had died in the forest fighting Bogoarts, which was a different thing entirely. By the system’s own rules he shouldn’t have been able to revive it.
And yet there it stood.
He asked the system directly.
’The wolf wasn’t mine when it died. How did I revive it?’
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