What did protect him, however, were his own lack of morals on the subject, his keen interest in learning new things, and the fact that he himself had already died and returned. More importantly, the horrors of Necromancy weren’t really all that much for someone who had ever watched horror movies, or medical dramas. Perhaps the most horrific thing that happened was simply the feeling of the mana that came with the skill. To most it would be cold, dark, and baleful, sending shivers down their spine. It brought with it the feeling of being at the bottom of a well as it was filled in above you. Or at least that was what people who hadn’t died would feel. To Dix it was the welcoming warmth of a lit fireplace on a cold winter’s night. Or the arms of a loved one after a time of separation. It was the feeling of coming home.

The soul of the rat being ripped free of its corpse, only for the corpse to violently explode, and its component materials drained into the soul to be recreated as a rat once more wasn’t disturbing at all. Thankfully the process went so slowly that you could completely comprehend each portion as it happened. It was still fairly quick, taking only about a minute to finish before an alien presence attached itself to Dix’s mind. It wasn’t antagonistic at all, merely eager to serve.

The Raising of the other four rats was a bit different. Their bodies didn’t explode, they melted upwards to the soul. Each of the resultant Risen rats were smaller than their original forms, and they moved slightly slower. When their minds connected to Dix’s they were antagonistic, but incapable of doing anything about it. The difference was striking, and he was determined to figure out why one rat was so much better as a Risen than the other four, but he had more important things to do.

Dix sent all the rats down the tunnel a short distance to guard the entrance, with the larger rat behind the others. Controlling them was quite easy, needing only his thoughts to get them moving, or guarding. He knew they would attack as soon as he told them to, and would send him an image of what was approaching first. If he wanted, he could tap directly into their senses. The problem with sharing their senses was that they were animals with sensory abilities far different from his own. Their sense of smell and hearing was so far beyond his own that his brain couldn’t actually interpret the data, and their eyesight was terrible. And don’t even mention the whiskers. Happy with what he had for the moment, Dix got to work fixing himself up.

The first step was actually gathering up all of his weapons. The knives and spear that had been in the rats had dropped free when he Raised them. He had actually left the spear in the central rat when he raised it to see if it was possible to use the skill on something that was still stuck on a weapon. It wasn’t until the spear dropped free that he thought of the possibility of it melting with the rest of the body. Happy that he hadn’t lost his spear through ignorance, he had moved on to finish with the other two rats, and grabbed his knives. He also gathered up the knives he had dropped dealing with the rat that had been attached to his arm.

With his weapons gathered and back in their sheaths, or leaning nearby on the wall, Dix removed his harness, the duster, and part of his armor. With one of his knives he cut out part of the duster’s lining, and covered the wounds on his arm. Using strips of leather cut from the duster he tied the padding in place over his gashes. Finally he tied a couple more layers of duster leather to lay under the holes in his armor, and then reattached it. After his harness was back on, he sliced the majority of the duster into smaller sections, mostly for bandages and armor patches. The remains of the once proud jacket were stuffed into his pack, maybe he’d use it to wrap monster parts.

As patched up as he was likely to get for the time being, he dropped his pack on his back and snatched up his spear. A thought to the rats had them spreading out to escort him on his wander through the halls of the dungeon. The four smaller rats he had spread out to the corners of a long, moving box, with himself and the larger rat in the center. The rats might not make the best of guardians, but their senses should help him to find things to hunt, and reduce the chance of others hunting him. With a little bit of backup to help him out he finally had time to go over his combat to-do list.

It was actually less of a to-do list, and more of a research list. His original list actually had an order to it that he had set specifically so that he could understand the changes he had gone through. First had been to study how damaging his normal, non skill using, attacks were, both with and without Empower. If he couldn’t understand the most basic of things he could do, then he wouldn’t have any hope of figuring out the more complex things. Second was to test out his new Enhanced Attacks. While he knew they were all very similar, he needed to make sure there were no functional differences. For instance, what if Strike allowed for all three modifiers, while Throw only allowed two. If he attempted to force more modifiers than it could take during a tough fight, he could spend precious seconds figuring out why it wouldn’t work.

After the basic attacking skills came his Necromancy. He had planned for his first experiment with Necromancy to be Touch of Death. For the moment, it was his only real healing ability. As such, it was massively important that he understood how much it could heal, as well as how quickly it could kill. When he was satisfied with Touch of Death, he had planned to move on to Raise Dead. Originally, he wanted to know if it worked on creatures other than humanoids, and how useful they would be.

His final task had been to try and remember some of his spells. The system had taken away the knowledge granted him by the Galaxy of Mana, but it had taken nothing else. That meant that he could remember using that same knowledge to fight, even some of the things he had done, but he was missing specific pieces. The problem was that it was partially like taking out a portion of a database. If you take out the value that three different sections of a database reference, then they wouldn’t work correctly anymore. He was planning to search through his memories of everything he did from the moment he first got the spells to see if he could track down the runes and put the spells back together.

Now? Well, now he had to revise the whole list. He still hadn’t made any un-Empowered attacks, but he was having a hard time imagining why he would want to. As he planned to have Empower on all the time, it seemed completely pointless. His Enhanced skills still needed to be fully tested, but at least their first use was exceptional. They worked far beyond what he thought they would. Much like Empower, each modifier seemed to flow perfectly with the others, boosting not only the efficiency of an attack, but also the output of each modifier.

Touch of Death was both better and worse than he thought it would be. It healed well, and seemed to do heaps of damage, but the balance between the two was leaning heavily to the side of damage. He suspected that it would take a lot of skill training to bring that up to parity. His questions about Raise Dead had been answered the moment he raised his first rat, but left new ones in their place. His current suspicion for why the fifth rat was so much stronger than the others had nothing to do with the amount of time that had passed since their deaths. The fifth rat had been the only one killed with Touch of Death, his other necromancy skill. He was determined to discover if the two skills worked together to make a better Risen.

And his magic? Well, he hadn’t gotten that far yet. With his rats helping, Dix sent out to hunt down anything else living in this dungeon and test them to death.

------------------------

While Dix was fighting and Raising rats in the dungeon, Thunk was on a mission of his own. Despite his tendencies to be a lazy ass, Error was always surprisingly difficult to find if you attempted to do so yourself. Most likely it had to do with his work. If finding an assassin was easy, everyone would hire them. Thankfully, being friends with the man meant Thunk knew the fastest way to find him. That meant he was going for lunch at The Bloody Knife.

While to some it may seem to be a bit of an odd name for a restaurant, The Bloody Knife was not only an excellent place to eat, its wait staff were actually extremely well trained persons of stealthy demeanor. Not every Rogue, Assassin, and Thief were mentally suited to the darker side of life, some just had those classes because they synergized well with their chosen style of combat. When they sought to end their careers as adventurers and retire, they often faced difficulty in finding non criminal work to keep them busy. Hence The Bloody Knife was born.

Retired rogues would take on the role of trainers to the next generation of crime free, stealthy fighters. Each would mentor one or two trainees in the art of unnoticed combat. The method? Work in the restaurant. Until you were actually stealthy enough to serve as a waiter, you would begin as a busboy. Such work would help you to learn the skills necessary to move quickly and quietly, dodge obstacles, and detect unseen dangers. They would also train combat skills through prep work in the kitchen and attached combination slaughterhouse and butcher’s shop. Proper knife handling, active attack skills, passives to drain blood faster, stealth, backstab, and single hit kills were all taught there against simple beasts and their products. Graduation from the position of busboy to waiter brought all new challenges.

As a waiter, your main purpose was to serve the diners at your tables without them knowing you were ever there. Waiters spent their entire day in stealth. This would not only increase their skill levels, but also their stamina while stealthed. For further incentive, their portion of the pay from each meal would be reduced each time they were detected. Sense training was conducted through studying your target, or guest, and learning how to tell when each person at your table had decided what they wanted to order. Learning to read their body language well enough to also decide what they wanted without any interaction was the goal, but most diners just spoke their orders out loud at some point. As for their advanced combat training, they attacked the busboys with blunted weapons to help them with their own training, while simultaneously attempting to avoid the hidden strikes of their mentors. The fact that there was always an invisible war occurring in the middle of a high class dining establishment was an added draw for those that wanted to raise their own skills, or just found it entertaining.

Despite this being the reality of The Bloody Knife, perhaps the oddest aspect was the chef. A retired Grandmaster Alchemist, and Poisoner of Kings. Training was similar here, but focused more on how to prepare meals to perfection, with an added curriculum of correct poisons to use for each particular type of meal, as well as how to correctly hide their existence. A great many of the seasonings for said meals were actually made through alchemy, some even being poisons and their antidotes. Large numbers of poisons carried phenomenal flavors, while their counterparts usually did not. Truly balanced meals at The Bloody Knife would result in the consumer being poisoned and cured several times over, without them being any the wiser. The top end dishes could also grant long lasting buffs, for an appropriate price.

No matter how great the entertainment, or wonderful the food, the most important thing about The Bloody Knife was that throughout all the time it had been open, not once had someone died. Many people had made the mistake of thinking that assassinating someone in a building full of fighting assassins and poisons would make things easier, but nothing could be further from the truth. Someone who didn’t belong was easily detected by the masters, and every single meal was checked several times throughout preparation, serving, and consumption. These safeguards had kept people coming back time and time again; the entertainment and food were just a nice bonus.

The reason Thunk was looking for the start of the trail to locate Error at The Bloody Knife was that it was his family’s business. His family’s legacy stretched back quite some time, but one of his ancestors had opened the restaurant upon his retirement from adventuring as a combination of joke and dare. Now it was run by his sister, who was an incredibly dangerous existence, even without the rest of the staff. Thunk wasn’t worried about her though, he’d known her for a long time. Other than people who attempted to infiltrate her business, the only person she was truly a danger to was Error. She violently disapproved of her brother’s lackadaisical attitude towards work. The priest was fairly certain that the only reason Error ever took any jobs at all was to get away from his sister.

Upon entering, Thunk headed towards the back corner near the kitchen. There was always a small table there that was seemingly empty. There were very few who knew otherwise. Slipping a hand into his pocket, he let a jeweled medallion on a black chain drop out of his inventory drop onto his palm, and then let it dangle by the chain as he closed his fist on it. For a brief moment as he made his way towards the table there was an incredible sense of danger, as though his life was balanced on a knife’s edge, but it was gone as quick as it came. He blinked, and the chair at the table had not only changed, but also been pulled back for him to sit, so he put his medallion back into his pocket and then his inventory. Smiling warmly, he climbed the laddered chair to sit facing his friend Lorna, Error’s sister. The table was where she spent a fair portion of her time, surveying her domain.

He flashed a couple quick numbers with his fingers, placing his orders. While they most likely already knew, he still liked to keep them guessing a little bit. It was actually easier to serve him, as he had his own lists for drinks and food. Lorna just smirked, knowing he had been purposely faking his expressions and body language just to mess with her staff. She was a stunningly beautiful woman, but, for a number of reasons, Thunk could never tell anything beyond that. Her facial features and figure were always obscured, and yet he knew she was beautiful. Even after all these years, she could still mess with his head, but that was the strength of a rogue specializing in Mind magic. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see her, just that the memories never remained.

“Hello, Ogre. You must have missed me.” Her voice was a throaty purr, but the traditional joke helped him resist drooling.

“Aye, lassie, tha’ I did.” She was the only local he ever bothered to use the accent for, mostly because it always made her smile at how terrible he was at it. Still only one sentence though, no sense in embarrassing himself. “As much as I love your company, this time I actually have an excuse to visit. Not that you’ll like the excuse I have.

He didn’t even need to tell her, as her sigh revealed. Knowing what was coming next, he attempted to steal himself as her eyes sharpened and bore into his own. “Work?” she asked.

Thunk shrugged. This was where it would get difficult. “Of a sort. Training for a new arrival.”

Somehow Lorna’s eyes actually got even more fierce. He felt like they had become the blades the restaurant was named for. “What kind of training can that useless sack of dung provide that I can’t? And there’s a dozen better Rangers begging for work that would do a better job. All he cares about is….” She stopped abruptly, eyes wide. Slowly, her shocked expression melted into a small smile. One hand floated across the table to run a nail down the back of his hand. “You’ve found another one?” Her voice was back to that throaty purr again, but there was a little more curiosity to it this time. It was a dangerous sign to those who knew her.

“You know I can’t tell you anything, but I will ask, OK?” His voice had gotten a little desperate. Lorna almost always got her way. When she didn’t, people had a habit of dying.

Thunk felt as though he was nailed to the chair as Lorna’s eyes bore into him, trying to force out his secrets. He had permission to speak to Error, but no one else. In this case it was a very good thing, as it allowed Balance to help enforce his vows. Eventually she huffed, and turned her eyes to an empty spot on the wall. With a twitch of her finger the wall vanished to reveal a stairway. “He’s in his room, pouting like a child. Your food will be delivered there for you.” Once more her eyes flickered to his. “Do not forget to ask.” With that, she vanished.