He had been made Knight 2345. He chose the name, Dave. Knight 2345 was so impersonal, so dehumanizing. Sure, he wasn't human, but that didn't mean he had to act like it, right? So he chose Dave. It was nice. Mundane, dependable, and average. A normal person's name. That was the kind of name he could get behind.

Not that anyone cared. Or even knew, for that matter. The necromancer that had made him failed to form functioning vocal cords and lungs for him. The undead didn't need to breathe, and that dickbag probably never thought any of them would possibly want to speak.

But Dave wanted to. So, so bad. First, it was to thank the necromancer that made him for the gift of his new unlife. The gift of existing at all. It was a precious thing, and he was nothing if not appreciative.

After that, he wanted to speak so he could tell the idiot what a massive fucking tool he was. Seriously, Dave cursed whatever fate got him stuck with the dumbest living necromancer to ever walk the dead earth of the Necroverse. It didn't take a genius to notice when you commanded half a battalion of lower undead off a cliff! The poor zombies weren't even smart enough to realize they had died a second time.

Fortunately, that stint of service only lasted four thousand years. His idiot creator managed to get himself killed before even reaching lichdom. An experiment gone wrong, a few chemicals mixed with a misplaced vial of succubus essence, and he was free. As a Death Knight, his unlife wasn't solely maintained by his necromancer.

He was weaker for a time. Without fresh Mana being fed to him, Dave had to live frugally. Which for an undead meant not moving for a couple of hundred years as the ambient Mana seeped into his decrepit bones. Dave took some 'me' time and relaxed. That little vacation over, he had to get a move on. Sure, he could have laid in the ruins of his dead creator's tower until entropy consumed him, but he wouldn't be a layabout.

No self-respecting undead of any intellect would coast through unlife in such an irresponsible manner. He had goals, damn it! So the first step, employment. Unlife was difficult for a freelance Death Knight. Lots of competition in the market. Most necromancers preferred undead they raised themselves compared to hiring a third party. The job search stretched his reserves to the point where he had to take on a rather predatory Mana loan from an unscrupulous necromancer.

With that debt hanging over his helmeted head, Dave was hard-pressed to find a solid, respectable undead army to join. He ended up taking the first permanent position that was offered with a small-time force. It was a big hit to his personal autonomy and something he had promised himself he wouldn't do after the fiasco with his creator. But he had bills to pay, and sympathy was not something loan shark necromancers were known for.

That position ended up working out for him better than expected. Malcore the Dread Scion (Real name Tim) was an odd duck but a dependable boss. Paid on time, didn't ask more than he thought his people could handle, a great guy. Dave joined the man early in his career and found he had joined a rising star. The next few millennia were full of victories and fat end-of-conquest bonuses. Dave's loan problems disappeared like a bad memory.

So, Tim carved out a chunk of the Necroverse and settled down to rule his kingdom with an iron fist. Battles of valor and mass combat transformed into bureaucracy and drudgery. Dave found he wasn't very good at being part of a peaceful kingdom. Bringing his growing discontent to the boss turned despotic king got him well wishes and a massive severance package.

After that, Dave bounced around from army to army. Working for Malcore, the Dread King as he was now called, brought a certain amount of clout, and finding work was easy. Unfortunately, all of his contracts for the next few thousand years ended quickly. Either the necromancer failed in his objectives, or Dave left due to irreconcilable differences, like his new boss being an ass.

Successes happened just as often as failures, but none of the necromancers he signed on with lasted long. They would build their own little fiefdom only to be gobbled up by a neighbor the second they let their guard down. And that was the ones that made it. Just as many died in some scrum of combat with yet another necromancer in a battle for their own tower.

Eventually, he got tired of the grind. Conquest just didn't have the draw it used to. He fought a million battles, and nothing ever seemed to change. The final straw came when he heard that Malcore's kingdom had fallen. His greatest achievement had been crushed, just like so many kingdoms that Dave had helped end. It all felt pointless.

So he decided to switch industries. Summoning was an up-and-coming field with a lot of potential at the time. Dave felt it was a good investment to get in on the ground floor. He had been saving up Mana for just such an opportunity and bought a controlling stake in a newly formed summoning tower. It wiped him out, but what was Mana for if not to be spent?

That decision was the real turning point. Dave had finally found something he loved. More than that, it was profitable! Worldwalkers from other realities were hired to disseminate summoning rituals across the expanse of existence, and the requests started pouring in. Undead armies were a hot item in high demand. Dave started with a small force of only ten thousand at the beginning. His forces were booked for the next hundred years in less than a week.

Recruitment was easy. The Necroverse was overflowing with undead looking for work, and necromancers constantly raised more. Soon Dave and his fellow investors were overseeing a force millions strong that catered to thousands of universes, pocket dimensions, Worldwalkers, and anyone anywhere else that needed an army on the quick at a reasonable price.

But Dave wasn't in it for the money. Unlike the other investors, he was listed in the summoning registry. Dave's passion became travel. Visiting distant corners of existence, fighting battles against exotic and wildly variable enemies. It turned out Dave had the soul of a traveler as well as an undead killing machine.

Fifteen thousand years saw Dave across the width of existence, seeing all kinds of places and fighting different fights. He experienced new types of power and people the whole while. Some universes had no undead outside the ones summoned with him, only one person in that entire reality being capable of contacting the Necroverse.

In that time, he learned the truly unknowable majesty of the infinite and how to make a cake. The second one happened when he was summoned by an eccentric chef that wanted kitchen hands that would follow her every command without complaint. That was a weird contract.

Which led up to now. Dave had thought he was going on just another summoning. In some ways, it was. Solo summons were rare, but not that rare. He had gone through several worlds with just himself and his summoner. No, that was not strange.

Instead, he found himself in a world unlike any he had been to before. With thousands of worlds under his metaphorical belt, that was a surprising discovery. Indeed, this world pulsed with an energy type unfamiliar to him. It seemed nearly antithetical to Mana, hostile to his very existence. Which was surprising. Despite every attempt, Dave's company had found that Mana was necessary for the summoning rituals they used. A world like this would be hostile to Mana on a fundamental level, so he wasn't sure how someone managed to get a ritual up and running.

That question found a suitable answer when he looked at his summoner. Undead did not have normal vision. With eyes of burning flame, they could hardly see through the so-called 'visible spectrum' of light. Instead, they saw a small portion of the fundamental underpinnings of reality. It wasn't nearly as amazing as it sounded. Merely, it meant that he saw more than most but with less detail. A broader spectrum of existence was available with half the definition.

Dave had developed a particular knack for peeking into the soul plane. As an extra-dimensional plane, it existed in every reality and was a good method to get a preview of someone's capabilities. So when Dave looked at his new summoner, he saw a glimpse of her soul.

Dave had never seen a more elegant and powerful creature in his life. An incomparable beauty of flaming emerald tresses, a veil demurely hiding her visage. Dave waxed poetic in his own mind for long moments gazing at the vision of a goddess he had glimpsed. A goddess of undeath. He was smitten.

The summoner holding that soul was interesting on her own. She seemed to draw in that strange new energy Dave had noticed, but she was definitely producing necromantic Mana. It was an interesting process. Dave would guess that most powers in this universe were based on the unfamiliar energy. Mana likely didn't exist here or formed in low quantities.

Dave expected the foreign energy to make his time in this reality uncomfortable, but the opposite turned out to be true. The new energy seemed to blend into him in a way he found soothing. It lacked the malicious, controlling edge that Mana had. Regardless, it would make this contract more difficult than one that took place in a Mana-rich universe because Dave couldn't draw from his surroundings to use his magic.

But this interesting new summoner just might be worth it. After all, he had never, ever seen a soul like that. Necromancers typically had ugly, deformed souls to go with their twisted desires. Those that dealt in undeath weren't normal, healthy people. It just came with the territory. Dave could count, on one hand, the number of necromancers he had met that weren't sociopaths or psychopaths.

This young lady seemed to fall on that exclusive list. Her soul might mimic the form of undeath, but it had none of the deformities or malicious aura that many necromancers did. In fact, her soul closely mimicked an actual undead's.

While necromancers might be evil people, more often than not, undead were different. Dave was a fine example. He didn't choose to be an undead. He just became one, regardless. Necromancers learned their field; they decided that they would spend years studying how to manipulate the bodies of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Real people that had passed on. It was an inherently grotesque act, and the people who used such magic reflected that.

But no corpse chooses to rise. Except liches, but those guys were basically universally massive assholes, so Dave wouldn't count them. Anyway, corpses didn't choose to rise. They just happened to be picked out by a necromancer.

This fledgling necromancer before Dave had a soul that reflected a similar situation. Someone who had stumbled on necromancy outside their own will. How in the unhallowed hells someone accidentally learned how to summon undead from the Necroverse, Dave couldn't even guess, but that was the story her soul told. That was like accidentally learning to be a black belt in jiu-jitsu or just happening to learn how to make a cake as an undead knight.

…Well, maybe it wasn't that unbelievable.

"Ok, the little test worked." His summoner muttered to herself. "Time to go big or go home." Dave watched in surprise as she proceeded to form a much, much more complex summoning ritual. It wasn't the act itself that was surprising. Well, it wasn't just the act itself that was surprising.

No, everything about what was happening was weird. Dave watched her spellwork, deeply confused. The framing of the spell started out all wrong, looking more like a spell to create an undead from nothing, a spell that Dave was almost certain didn't exist. He didn't know why someone would try. It would require an astronomical amount of power to forge a new being into existence.

Before the spell was even a quarter formed, another force stepped in and began adjusting the spell work. Looking carefully, Dave followed the new hand in the game back to its source, which was even more surprising. His summoner's soul was working in concert with her own efforts, adjusting the Mana to correct her deficiencies and inaccuracies. That should be impossible. Souls were not conscious. But that was what was happening nonetheless.

What took shape was rough, a summoning circle worse than even a novice necromancer would make. At the same time, Dave felt it contained a better grasp of the fundamental underpinnings of Mana than anything he had ever seen. Like someone who knew the entire breadth and width of the theory on a topic but had never put it into practice. Dave imagined a carver who had studied the art of sculpture their entire life, knew every possible type of stone, how best to carve it, what tools to use, how to identify the best place to strike, and the artistic insight to remove the correct sections of stone, but had never once picked up a chisel until just now.

More than that, the summoning her spell created was one of the largest single summonings Dave had ever seen. Most necromancers called up vast armies, but they did so a piece and a time. Individual soldiers were called one after the other. That was because larger summons decreased in efficiency the more undead that were summoned at once. Again, this implied that his summoner had no knowledge of what she was doing but the raw power to make it work anyway. A terrifying idea.

The battle that followed was admittedly beneath him. The monstrous dragons that came fell all too easily in the face of Deathsteel and Necroflame. With the number of troops his summoner called and the nigh-endless supply of Mana that flowed from her, it was an easy task. Dave felt that the two other Death Knights summoned with the army were unimpressed.

Neither voiced any complaints to him, seeing as he was their boss, but he could feel it through the Death Link. If Dave hadn't seen the spell that summoned the duo himself, he might have been equally unimpressed with such lackluster combat. After all, any self-respecting Necroverse necromancer would have melted such a weak force of monsters with a wave of their hand and some Necroflame.

But he had seen the spell. Dave couldn't help but be interested in this young, inexperienced summoner and this new world. Both were different from anything he had seen before. Times like this were the whole reason he had fallen in love with summoning in the first place.

Maybe he should get the young miss to sign a familiar contract with him? He knew he'd at least leave his specific summon with her before he left. She was far too interesting not to.