The forest was the obvious answer for animals. It was where the wolf had co from, where the boar-like creatures had wandered into his camp in sequence throughout the night and where whatever else lived in the surrounding territory made its ho.
Going in that afternoon and hunting for animals to raise was a reasonable plan on its face.
But the forest was unpredictable. You went in looking for sothing specific and found whatever the forest decided to show you, which wasn’t always the sa thing.
He had slots for nine more animals and no guarantee the forest would produce nine things worth raising in a single afternoon, and even if it did, hunting and killing nine animals took ti he would rather spend preparing.
He was thinking about this when sothing clicked.
The graveyard.
Not for corpses, he had that handled, thirty slots full, the graveyard’s knight population well-represented in his inventory. Instead sothing else.
Sothing he had seen on every visit to the graveyard and saw without thinking about because it hadn’t been relevant until now.
Bats.
They were always there, in the older sections especially, hanging from the underside of the larger stone markers, clustered in the gaps where the mortar had crumbled between the stones of the boundary wall, moving in fast low sweeps overhead when the light started going.
He had walked past them dozens of tis without paying them particular attention because a bat was a bat and he had been focused on what was in the ground rather than what was flying above it.
He thought about what a bat could do.
Not fight. A bat’s bite was nothing compared to the wolf, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
One of the boar-like creatures from the forest would do more damage in three seconds than a bat could manage in an entire engagent.
If he wanted sothing to tear through Gonnb’s warriors the way the wolf tore through Bogoarts, a bat wasn’t the answer.
But that wasn’t what he wanted the bats for.
He wanted them for the sa reason he was using the venomous undead in the first place.
Delivery.
The bats didn’t need to fight, they needed to bite instead, make contact, transfer venom, and be gone before anyone registered what had happened.
A bat moving fast and low through a settlent at night was sothing a person swatted at and forgot about. A bat landing on skin for half a second in the dark was sothing a person didn’t notice at all.
Since there would be no pain, no mark visible in low light and no reason to raise an alarm.
And he had nine animal slots empty.
So... nine undead bats, each carrying the sa venom his four venomous knights carried, moving through Gonnb’s settlent at speed while the undead knights handled the warriors on the ground: the coverage was completely different from what he had been planning.
The undead knights moved through a scattered settlent slowly by necessity, navigating between buildings, exposed in the open ground between structures.
The bats covered the sa ground in seconds, from above, reaching targets the undead knights would never get near.
The smile ca before he had finished the thought.
He turned to Garren.
"Change of plan. I’m not going to the forest."
Garren raised an eyebrow.
"I’m going into the graveyard instead."
Garren was confused. "Uh...graveyard instead?"
"Yes," Darion replied. "There are bats there, I’ve seen them every ti I’ve gone to raise the knights. Dozens of them." He watched Garren’s expression work through the initial confusion toward sothing else.
"I’m not using them to fight. I’m using them the sa way I’m using the venomous undead, for delivery. Bats moving through the settlent at night, making contact and depositing venom. Nobody notices a bat. Nobody raises an alarm over a bat. By the ti the venom starts working, the bats are already gone and there’s nothing to connect what’s happening to anything external."
Garren sat back in his chair.
"How do you make them venomous."
"Sa way I made the knights venomous. Though now i have the venomous undead bite them, the bats die from the venom, I revive them and they carry it. The system should classify them as venomous on revival the sa way it classified the knights." He paused. "Or sothing close to it."
Garren was quiet for a mont, assembling the full picture.
"So the updated plan," he said slowly, "Is bats moving through the settlent first, fast, wide coverage, hitting targets the undead knights can’t easily reach.
Undead knights on the ground targeting the warriors directly. Both phases of the infiltration running simultaneously, the venom spreading faster and wider than the original plan allowed for."
He looked at Darion.
"Then so minutes later, when it’s working, we move in with the living knights and the undead wolf and whatever else you’ve raised, into a settlent that’s already—"
"Already falling apart," Darion finished. "Yes."
Garren nodded slowly. The skepticism that had been present at various points in the conversation was largely gone now, replaced by the focused practicality of a man who had decided the plan was sound and was shifting his thinking toward execution.
"Then you’d better go get your bats."
——
Darion rode to the graveyard alone.
Garren had offered to co and Darion had declined, this wasn’t the kind of operation that benefited from an audience, and besides, Garren had things to do.
The living knights needed to be briefed on the tiline, equipnt checked and the departure at noon tomorrow organized. Darion would handle the graveyard.
He tied the horse at the gate and went in.
The afternoon light was going flat, the grey quality of it thickening toward evening.
He moved through the familiar sections, past the newer graves, past the section he had worked through systematically over the last week, into the older part of the graveyard where the stones were darker and lower and the boundary wall had been crumbling for long enough that the gaps in it had beco features rather than damage.
He found them in the oldest section of the boundary wall, on the northern side where the stones had separated most significantly from decades of frost and settling.
The gaps between the fallen sections had created a series of dark recesses at ground level and just above it, sheltered from wind and light, exactly the kind of environnt bats sought out for roosting.
They were hanging in clusters in the deeper gaps, dozens of them, small and still, packed together with comfortable density. They were animals that had been using this particular wall for long enough that it was simply ho.
He stood and looked at them for a mont.
They were small. Each one individually was nothing: a handful of mbrane and bone, the kind of thing that was essentially invisible in the dark when it was moving. That was exactly the point.
He reached into his inventory and summoned the four venomous undead knights.
They appeared behind him in the grey light of the graveyard, green eyes dim, waiting.
He looked at the wall, then at them, and kept his voice low.
"The bats in that wall," he said, pointing. "Move carefully. Don’t scatter them all at once, approach slowly, get close then bite as many as you can reach before they fly. Hold one if you can manage it, bite it directly, then move to the next."
He watched them begin to move toward the wall, slow and deliberate, the preserved instinct of trained soldiers translating reasonably well into the specific requirent of approaching a roosting colony of bats without disturbing the whole group at once.
He folded his arms and watched.
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