Necromancer

A Royal Road Fan Fiction

By: Halosty

Chapter 72

Outside of Royal Road, Mortimer’s life hadn’t changed much. His training with Master Valarao had leveled off. Not that it had decreased any, but Mortimer seemed to be getting closer to Master Valarao’s standards, whatever those were. This left Mortimer less exhausted, which allowed him to do better on his schoolwork. He actually had a reason and motivation to do it, now, so he actually did it well, even those classes he didn’t like.

At school, he actually talked to Solara. Occasionally. If greetings counted. Otherwise, it was more correct to categorize it as rarely, which was still a step up from almost never. Of course, conversations would inevitably be about Royal Road, or classes, but it was still conversation. That said, some of the conversations were rather vague in front of Angela, who was the only one who didn’t know Mortimer was a necromancer yet.

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When he logged back into Royal Road, Quietus found himself still in Aullet’s Tomb. Though, it was still relevant to point out that it was a tomb that he owned rather than a tomb that he was buried in. In front of him was a destroyer skeleton. He knew immediately that it was his destroyer skelton. He thought it was pretty awesome, and it looked quite powerful. However, it was still missing something. Like, armor and a giant sword. Or axe, really. Anything big. However, before he could sort out its equipment, he’d rather finish this quest.

The image of Aullet recognized his return to life. “Excellent job, necromancer! It is not easy for most to comprehend the essence of necromancy so easily. As a reward for your perseverence and understanding, I grant you this tome of my best spells!” A transparent, ghostly book appeared in front of Quietus. “That said, the physical book has long since decayed, so it can only appear in this form. I wish I could preserve all my notes thusly, but alas, they will have decayed. Further understanding will require you to research it yourself!” With that, Aullet’s image faded.

You have completed a quest!

Level up! x 10

The Power to Accept Death has advanced to advanced level 9!

Obtaining 10 levels… wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t great. In fact, about half of those levels he had lost. Thanks to The Power to Accept Death’s increase experience gain, he had actually received it all back. That skill would never give him more experience than he had lost to death, but it still allowed him to re-earn the experience, given enough time. Alternatively, completing a big quest like this was also a method. It had actually managed to bring Quietus to the very rare state of him not having any experience to regain from death. Though, he’d still lost the time he’d spent dead, it hadn’t particularly affected him lately, unless he died early in his play sessions.

Quietus checked his skill list, and he had indeed obtained the ability to create destroyer skeletons. Destroyer anything undead, actually. It was just the only examples he had seen had been large, powerful skeletons. Basically, by sacrificing his life, he could make any undead that hadn’t already been the target of Soul Transfer last an unlimited amount of time, and be approximately twice as powerful. This of course meant that it was necessary to find good base creatures if he wanted it to be worth the loss of play time. Of course, he could just use it on regular undead if he was going to be logging out anyway.

The only downside was that if any of his minions died, they wouldn’t come back. He couldn’t just use them carelessly as cannon fodder. The good ones, that is. He’d still use most of them as cannon fodder, since he could mass produce them. Any that he made into destroyers would have to be taken care of well. He’d also need to equip them. Well, he could start actually paying attention to equipment that wasn’t rogue or caster type, now. He also had some drops from the dullahans on the surface. Although they were much smaller than this destroyer skeleton… it didn’t matter. This was a game. He had it equip some of the armor and a greatsword. Now it looked really cool, in Quietus’ personal opinion. The armor was already dark and spiky, being from undead. Well, he was still missing gauntlets and greaves, so the skeleton looked somewhat lacking there.

Quietus hadn’t really saved up a lot of money, though. That meant it would be somewhat troublesome to buy a lot of good gear. For a while, he was worried about where he would get it. He supposed he could do dungeon raids, some of them even by himself, but he didn’t really know any good places, and whether he would get the items he wanted. He knew what he wanted though. It was the kinds of things that other players had.

However, he wasn’t going to kill people just because they had items he wanted. Unless the item was for a quest. He’d also kill players if they attacked him first, or were going to attack him first, or if he had a quest. There was still the problem, even if he killed them, of dropping what he wanted. They might not even drop anything. Then he remember that player killers dropped more items upon their death. It wasn’t even a problem to go around killing them as he pleased, since his guild supported that. Of course, he could check if they really deserved the status first, or were provoked into it, but that didn’t matter to him. He would just go with red name = fair target.

Therefore, he contacted Angelo to get some information on places where similarly high level player killers lived. While he waited on the information, he looked at his new spell book.

Of course, he couldn’t touch it, since it was just spiritual. It wasn’t anything that soul bind didn’t fix, though. Obviously, whenever a prompt popped up asking him to learn a spell, he would learn it. A few of the spells really stood out.

Dark Fog. It worked just like dark hand and dark cloak, except it spread out to fill an area, and wasn’t centered on him. It also had a certain duration, instead of costing mana over time. With this, he could cause damage, as well as creating darkness and inflicting pain, in a large area. That would be useful for fights against large groups of enemies. Although it wouldn’t kill them, it would hinder them somewhat, and it would aid the mana regeneration from his sadism stat. It did cost 2000 mana though, and that was after all the reductions he already had to the cost of dark magic. It seemed like a pretty fair price, though.

Soul link. It allowed him to use personal spells on one destroyer undead at the same time as on himself. This meant he could use dark hand, dark cloak, or, the most relevant, pain mirror, on an undead, for an additional mana cost per duration. This meant he could make one minion much more dangerous, since with pain mirror they could reflect damage, and many of them were a lot tougher than Quietus himself. It was important to note that pain mirror didn’t actually require the user to feel pain. It was actually just damage reflection. Otherwise, it would have been useless for undead.

Demon Spear. This was just the upgraded version of dark spear. Higher level, more damage, more mana cost.

Mass Life Drain. Another area effect ability. It consumed a large amount of mana relative to the damage dealt, but it returned some of the damage done to those in the area to the user as health. This worked even, or especially, if the user was undead. Quietus experimented, and learned he could also use it to heal the target of Soul Link. This was his fastest healing method, since otherwise he had to do repairs, and that took time and wasn’t practical except out of battle. It didn’t damage undead, but was indiscriminate among living targets except the user. Not that he planned to use it except when the only living things around were enemies.

The last one he saw immediate use for was Enervating Field. His new spells would be very draining on his mana, but this would allow him to recover it. It would allow him to recover mana when enemies were slain. It also had a large mana cost to keep active, though, so it was only useful when there were many enemies, preferably with large mana pools, dying. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth the cost. Well, he would still use it even when it wasn’t worth it so that it became somewhat more efficient. At the very least, it would level dark magic mastery, even if the base cost didn’t go down.

In the end, it was a very, very worthwhile quest. Soon, Quietus’ undead army would rule the lands! Well, the parts he cared about. Until he got bored.

End Chapter 72