Necromancer

A Royal Road Fan Fiction

By: Halosty

Chapter 73

Quietus hadn’t actually considered what he would do with an undead army, once he made it. In addition, nobody talked about how difficult it was to move an undead army from place to place. Even though they didn’t need rest or almost any supplies, it was still somewhat a pain to bring them places. Therefore, since his first destroyer skeleton seemed to be able to learn things, he decided to teach it about maps. Then Quietus realized he didn’t really know much about maps, and that he also needed to name it. He was planning to make more destroyer skeletons, or other types, so just calling them “#1” or such would work. However, he at least wanted the first one to have a name… or all the very best ones.

Eventually, Quietus went to the nearest large city, and purchased maps. Since #1 could understand complex orders, he was able to teach it what he wanted. He would send it to certain places while he was offline, and it would direct the rest of his minions on what to do along the way. Quietus wanted his undead to stay out of fights with players. Mostly Partly because some of his army would die, but also because he wanted to avoid gaining too much more infamy.

The destination was near a guild that The Children of Light were having a war with. Quietus didn’t plan to use them, at least not where anyone could see, but having them nearby would make him feel better. Quietus hadn’t gotten involved in any of the guild affairs in a while. Angelo was still under the promise not to bug Quietus into doing anything, and in this case hadn’t even asked him to join. However, since Quietus was in a killing helpful mood, he actually asked to join himself. Naturally, he was told what he asked, though Angelo didn’t know if he would be too much help, with just one more person. Of course, this was only because Quietus still pretended to be a rogue.

Quietus pondered. A single rogue really wouldn’t contribute all that much to a battle. Even if he himself could find and remove a large number of traps, The Children of Light and the other guild, Gods of War, had many hundreds of members each. There were already quite a members who could disarm or set traps on either side. Other than that, Quietus couldn’t publicly contribute much to the fight. Which isn’t to say he couldn’t actually help.

Even in the previous incident of a guild war, Quietus hadn’t participated in a way anyone could see directly. He planned for it to be much the same this time. Perhaps even more so, since he didn’t want to expose the use of his undead unless he had to. However, he could think of several ways that would still work. He could even teach some of them to find and disable traps… though only the weaker ones, since they would have very low skill levels. However, even if they failed, the traps could still be set off. As long as he used disposable undead for this, it would be fine. Alternatively, he could use better ones that would likely survive, and could thus gain more levels of skills.

Quietus noted that the skills of any “destroyer” type undead learned skills faster. Not faster than players, but faster than regular undead minions. It wasn’t too far off from players, though, as far as he could tell. Every day, before he logged off, Quietus would pick one of his best undead, and turn them into a destroyer. This, of course, killed him, but that wasn’t particularly an issue. All it did was make him weaker, very temporarily. With Power to Accept Death at advanced level 9, he was gaining back an additional 145% experience that he lost. This meant if he died, he regained the experience about two and a half times as fast. Single levels didn’t particularly affect his strength, and making the destroyers even made his overall potential better, so it was definitely worth it. Most importantly, the experience wasn’t really “lost” with the skill, he just temporarily didn’t have it. It was so useful, Quietus wanted to cackle maniacally. He figured that was appropriate for a necromancer, so he did. Not when anyone was watching of course. He didn’t want to look silly.

Aside from the guild war, Quietus wondered if he should get back into working as an assassin. He hadn’t done much of that recently. He felt like he shouldn’t neglect his stealth and single combat skills, just because he had new skills for fighting multiple enemies, and an army of undead. Maybe he would work on that afterwards, if he had the time.

In the meantime, Quietus practiced his new large area skills while journeying. He determined they were mostly only useful if there were more than ten enemies. It didn’t cost any more mana if there were more around, so it was just more efficient that way. If there weren’t many, it was better and faster to defeat them with his dagger or Demon Spear. However, if there were a large number of enemies near each other, Quietus could take them out quickly, at the cost of a large amount of mana. This was, however, offset significantly by enervation field.

Though he could defeat a large amount of enemies quickly with his new abilities, it only worked on enemies significantly weaker than himself. Otherwise, he would run out of mana before killing them, and then he would be in trouble. If he ignored his undead minions, anyway. Even with them, he was more suited to fight larger amounts of weaker enemies, since stronger enemies would be more likely to kill some of his undead. That was a waste.

Quietus could still fight stronger enemies by himself, but his new spells weren’t much use for that, with the exception of dark fog. Because it continuously dealt damage in a large area, as well as reducing vision, it was worthwhile. He could quickly strike an enemy and then retreat, making battles difficult for those who relied entirely on vision. Even then, with his stealth skills, most monsters could not detect him if he was being careful. There was the slight issue of it being painful to Quietus himself if he wasn’t undead, but since he had high dark magic resistance, even that wasn’t usually an issue. It didn’t cause any actual damage, so he could endure.

As Quietus surveyed his undead army, he did notice a few missing elements. Specifically, magic other than his own, and ghosts. He knew there were various kinds of undead that could use magic, and they would definitely help support the entirely melee army he had now. Ghosts… were ghosts. They were hard to attack, and sneaky. They would just generally be useful. Of course, if he could get other kinds of incorporeal undead, they would serve the same purpose. Unfortunately, techniques for making caster undead and ghosts weren’t in Aullet’s legacy. He could, however, turn them into “destroyers” if he had them. Thus, he would first need to learn to make them, somehow.

Well, he could certainly do that later, after testing out what he currently had.

End Chapter 73