My pack rat nature was really catching up to me, since they couldn't be stacked, there was no way I would be able to fit everything in my Inventory. Not to mention that they were made up of parts possessed in vast quantities. Alongside less than stellar capabilities, they didn't warrant replacing the bric-a-brac saved for Macgyvering. I didn’t want them to go to waste though, even if they were easily replaced, if I kept them, then I would basically have both them and their replacements. Why would I want two dozen inefficient minions when I could have four dozen?

Deciding to hide them away, for the moment I would leave them in the battlefield to hide amongst the bodies. With clean bones, they stood out a little, but a rolling around in the bodies and hiding among some chunks of flesh made them slightly less noticeable. They were still complete skeletons, but no passing observer, especially one of goblin intelligence would take notice of them. Giving them orders to run north if attacked individually, and if more than three were found all of them would flee. They would then stop when no longer pursued, and flee again if attacked again. I could always recall them at any distance, and it should dissuade attackers enough. I wanted them to stop after a while, because if they ran constantly night and day, it would take that amount of time to return.

I left the 23 fodder skeletons there, the freshmen elites coming along in Inventory since some effort had actually gone into refining them. The sun wasn’t quite at the horizon, but it would certainly be getting close to dark by the time I actually got to the village. Saying goodbye to the spoiling spoils of war, I returned home. Naturally practicing on the way, this time practicing my {Negative Energy} enhancements on Hans. Since placing him into Inventory cycled some mana back to me, it could be done in much longer stints.

Setting the slightly glowing Hans into my Inventory, I felt at my spiritual connections again. This was the farthest I’d gotten from my minnies, and I was curious how the connection held up. Periodically checking through the journey, the rate of reduction in contact between souls also diminished with distance. Checking on their status was more difficult than it already was, but other than that there didn’t seem to be any lag time in getting information. It was superluminal communication, except one end didn’t receive or transmit. Also, the distance used was a bit small for testing if there was a delay smaller than the speed of light.

Having made good time, there was still an hour before night started, so I wandered around a bit. Not much went on, but I spotted Rion and the children mucking about in the stream. While the rest of them were playing about, Rion seemed to be earnestly trying to catch some fish. Tagalong Girl stood by him, but on one of the rocks, not in the river itself. Not bothering them; I went around helping people with various chores for the rest of the evening.

The next morning also proceeded as usual, and to my amusement as Ria tried feeding herself, she fell unconscious into the bowl of porridge. I didn’t laugh; at least not to her face. cleaned things right up, and I made time to feed her during the elusive ‘lunch’. With only 21 hours, lunch wasn’t a very big thing in Derriad; though sometimes a small food break was taken in the middle of the day, it wasn’t its own meal.

In the remaining hours, I proceeded to stealthily grind my skills among the villagers. I figured openly turning trash to ashes would be acceptable, but walking around with bones all the time probably wasn’t. Keeping to knucklebones and occasionally getting in a jawbone or rib when no one was around, if my original robes hadn’t been torn to shreds, the loose sleeves would have been great spots to stealthily imbue the bones. After dinner, I tried catching up on the other parts that were missed. Having slept the night before, I decided to pull an all-nighter imbuing and creating more high quality minions. Eking out two more, with plenty of imbued digits to spare, only a few of the larger bones like the cranium and pelvis remained to be processed before the next. Larger bones required more Negative Energy and thus mana to enhance to the same degree, so I just had to wait a little longer; I could finish it up on the road.

Feeding Ria, I set out to collect the chikans again. As my mana replenished, I finished up another skeletal goblin elite, but quickly packed it away. Psh! Psh! Went the ; practicing as I traveled, I realized that I was starting to form a bit of a trail. In sniping random bits of tree, when paying a bit of attention one could see the stretches where I unleashed wanton destruction on the flora. Meh, the forest was bigger than several countries, it could take a few infused with the energies of death and decay.

The chikans provided to me Tuesday were slightly lesser in amount than Sunday. Ychk admitted that he and Khtraal planned to overwhelm me with the first delivery so they could shirk the rest of the payment. Upon seeing how I could ‘eat’ chikans in such magnitude, they gave up on that plot and just handed over what would be a ‘normal’ amount. Ychk alleged the reason they didn’t want to go through with their end of the deal was a minor one; mobilizing hundreds of thousands of goblins to return with chikans and put them in one spot was logistically challenging. As I found it amusing, I brushed it off and let them deliver more halfheartedly. A whole goblin nest mobilizing to get me rations was slightly overboard.

Again after receiving chikans, I headed north once more, feeling the spiritual connections with the skeletal laborers grow clear again. Only one day passed, and they were unharmed as expected. That one day did show that another threat was growing.

Black and brown clouds were beginning to form, numbers increasing to the point that something was always in the air moving. The insects’ spheres of dominion only reached two or three meters, but they were becoming more prevalent. On some of their oldest work, it could be seen that even bones suffered under their voracious mandibles. I assumed they had mandibles, I hadn’t actually gone and caught one for a proper inspection.

Those gluttonous buggers, eating my stuff! Rallying the troops, I summoned up more pitiful laborers to work faster. A race against the buggers, I commanded my fleet using superluminal communication(maybe)! For the sake of humanity!

Without much space for extra thought, with a sudden influx of spiritual connections, I started feeling lightheaded. The reason I didn’t worry is because that’s an analogy, maybe vertigo is a better word? However it’s worded, as more minions were created it became more overwhelming to command them all. Especially considering that my horde numbered over 60, including the non-laborers. It may have had to do with the level of micromanagement; as to maximize efficiencies I was constantly in the process of tweaking their routines. At the same time I had to devote enough attention to my body to shovel in bones at its maximum rate.

Creating 29 more skeletal laborers that day, my head felt like it was splitting by the end of it. At the beginning of the day I had expected to create more, but the mental burden of commanding so many at once hindered mana regeneration. Still, the area swept clean of bodies was at least 100 meters in radius, which was the range most burned into my mind from commanding them. We did have to shift around a bit, as my control was at its peak if I could see the minny, and I needed all the help I could get maximizing all their potentials.

Massaging my temples, my brain cooled down from its overload. The skeletal laborers were milling about. In their hasty production, it seemed they lacked the personality of the hand spiders or Clavi, but they still acted a bit more sentient than most people ascribed undead to be. Not doing anything major, they just rocked back and forth on their heels, tapped their claws, sat on the ground drawing random lines in the dirt; all of them felt like they were undertaking very generic idling activities.

In this state the mental burden had been reduced all the way back to zero. Drawing seemed like it would be taxing, but happened without a thought from me. The ones drawing just made lame stick figure cartoons, so it wasn’t all that impressive. Before leaving, I tried making them do a few more things to see how much concentration it ate up on my end. Apparently ‘programming’ the undead, like I had with Zog and the hand spiders wouldn’t drain me at all. It was only my constant ‘change how you’re tearing the corpse apart’, ‘hand that off to that guy’, ‘go over that way instead’ and so on that wore me down. Of course it’s not like I would give up micromanagement, the simple skeletons couldn’t reach their maximum potential only using basic instructions. I could deal with a temporary headache anyhow, after stopping my commands it vanished like the pain of a mildly stubbed toe.

Now with 52 skeletal laborers, and a battlefield with a grand reduction in corpses, I shifted the horde along the casualty line, and found a new spot to hide them. It was a bit laborious to communicate with them all at the same time, so I did so in groups of four. Since I already knew what I wanted them to do, I could communicate the orders nigh-instantaneously. That nigh, multiplied 13 times plus a tiny bit of brain-lag time built up. Not even a minute, but if I were to command armies of the dead, then the batch size needed to be increased. Another thing to practice.

A lot of joint cracking was done before setting off, the grinding session of dismantling bodies lasted 8 hours on its own. Sure if I pushed myself I could have gone longer, but there was also the village to think about.

Running in and out of the forest, all the training of {Negative Energy}, dealing with goblins, it ate up a lot of time and not a whole lot else was going on. However there were fewer and fewer days left until the paladins started to sweep across the countryside. My actions may have been repetitive, but they packed the day full, and were as optimal as the situation allowed. There were only intimations of a plan formed, I still didn’t know enough about the paladins.

The paladins, though I have not oft mentioned them in my recounting, were a looming threat to the me of that time. I may have placed a higher threat value on them than warranted, but I did not have the full picture, nor could they be taken lightly even if I did. Let alone individual strength, were the theocratic state to get wind of resistance...well I had no delusions as to how that would end.

So the following thought process would be to hide out and weather the storm. The church’s minions would only come by for three or four days; even including the paladins that were merely passing by only raised the duration to two or three weeks. That was fairly doable, especially for me. But the wheel of time continues to turn and come yet again.

Plopping out of the sky, I waltzed right into another world. Even if it had been Pan’s judgement, based on a shadow of a hope, a stranger knowing not a word of Derrish had become part of Salt Village. Migration may be infrequent, but Ria was still rather young, in the coming decades the village could easily gain a few inhabitants from the city that may not be sympathetic to her plight.

Without a real solution to the problem, every year she would need to be hidden away. At the rate she was improving it would take a year before she could act for an hour, and that time couldn’t be spent seeing anyone new. I could spend an exorbitant amount of time in reclusive training while getting to the point she could reasonably act on her own, but that didn’t seem like a [Good End] to me. Several decades and still a recluse at the end wasn’t much of a fix.

So with the danger of the Church in Derriad, I found it best to just throw the dice. At the very least I had accumulated enough power to run us away. But for the unreasonable dangers I continued to work. The world was bigger than I realized, and the odds of stumbling onto a solution were essentially zero.

To hell with mathematicians! I don’t give a damn how many zeroes there are, it’s not nothing I tell you!

A/N:AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

It's the start of a new month! Let's celebrate with another chapter!