Emil was still on the ground, his body lying against the ice wall. He had not moved since the barrage of attacks had hit him. However, there had been no follow-up from the monster. Could the ice elemental not tell if he was dead or alive? Since he was undead, perhaps it couldn’t know the difference as long as he didn’t move or channel Mana. That was the best explanation he had for why it hadn’t attempted to finish him off yet.

Emil took advantage of this moment to breathe to review his predicament. His Mana Level was now at 120/300. The first memory orb he absorbed had finished its conversion, but it would still be a couple of minutes until the next two were complete. So he would wait until they were fully converted. But even once they did, it would only bring it back up to 155/300, so just over half.

He strained his eyes to glance over in the ice elemental’s direction without moving his head. The good news for him was that it too was limited in its resources. The elemental was powered by Mana, so if it used its own Mana to attack, it would risk its own destruction. As such, it had to pull from the ambient Mana around them.

Since its affinity was ice, it was able to do so easily while in a winter environment. But between the repair of the damage he had dealt, and all the icicles and ice walls it had conjured, most of the Mana surrounding it had already been used up.

It would take a while for the Mana in the environment to rebalance and fill back in, so the only way the elemental could get more was if it moved far enough from here. Which meant that in the war of attrition for Mana usage, Emil was actually winning. Even if he couldn’t directly do enough damage to destroy it, he could force it to dip into its personal Mana and begin the countdown to its end.

-10 Mana

-10 Mana

Emil sprung into action the second the two Mana conversions finished. Thanks to the now shorter distance between them, he could afford to spend only the base amount of Mana on Negative Void. The ice elemental immediately responded with a cone of frost and ice shards. He didn’t let them break his concentration as he fired two of them off in rapid succession.

A large shard shot directly into his left eye. Like his flesh, his eye was frozen solid by the frost and shattered from the impact of the blow. The sensation of its pulverization rattled through his skull. And immediately realized that though that eye was now destroyed, it had not impacted Emil’s vision in the slightest. He could still see perfectly fine, as though it was still there.

At the same time as that attack, the ice elemental had conjured a set of walls to block his Negative Voids. The first spell tunneled through the walls, before it dissipated by the time it reached the last obstacle. But it had done its job, and cleared the way for the second one. It broke through the final wall with ease, and slammed into the arcane monster. A flume of mist erupted from where it got hit, but this time, Emil didn’t wait for the cloud to clear up.

-10 Mana

-10 Mana

-10 Mana

He shot one more Negative Void through the hole in the walls. Emil then immediately got away from the ice wall he was still against, and went around to cast two more. The elemental remained on the defensive, and could only continue to conjure more walls to defend itself. Once again, the first spell tore through most of them to open the way for the second to strike.

The Necromancer had already realized that it could not attack and defend at the same time. So as long as he didn’t give it the chance, it wouldn’t be able to retaliate. His Mana Level had now been already been reduced to 105/300. But as long as the elemental was forced to use even more Mana, he was still ahead in this battle.

Emil prepared to cast more rounds of Negative Void. But as he started to channel the Mana needed, the temperature around him suddenly dropped by dozens of degrees. It was still the middle of the day, but within moments a shadow covered him. Emil could see that the darkness extended far past himself, to at least a hundred feet in every direction. He looked up toward the sky.

Above him, thousands of icicles hung in the air. From them, he could sense a large of Mana spread across them all. There was no space between each one, so he almost thought they were one massive unit. But as they slowly moved around, small gaps opened and closed to let through tiny rays of sunlight. He had been wrong about his assumption about the ice elemental’s ability to counterattack.

Emil gulped as the hailstorm of ice came down upon him. He took a step back, and hesitated. But the hesitation lasted no more than a moment, as he gritted his teeth and readied himself to meet them head-on.

-20 Mana

-10 Mana

-10 Mana

He had just enough time to fire a Negative Arc at the icicles directly above him. Dozens of them were destroyed by the attack, but it barely made a dent in their total number. Emil cast Negative Touch on both of his hands to defend himself as best he could. With no other options, he threw himself onto his back to have at least one side of his body be protected. He placed his hands above the front of where his soul was located.

Several of the attacks landed on his negatively charged hands, and disintegrated upon impact. However, the rest of his body did not prove so fortunate. One icicle split apart his skull like a nail hammered into dry wood. Another went through his right ankle and fully severed the foot from his leg. A third impaled itself into his left shoulder, while two more hit different parts of his stomach.

An icicle went into his right knee, and impaled straight through the kneecap. Several more went into both of his legs simultaneously, and effectively chopped them into more than dozen pieces. Everything below the hip was turned into chilled mush within a mere half of a second. However, he had yet to feel any pain at all even from that.

But as flesh and bone were eviscerated, the tendrils of darkness located below those limbs managed to survive a little longer. Even when they were all that remained, he still had the full feeling of his legs and feet. But as the onslaught of ice continued, even the concentrated cords of death could not resist. Piece by piece, they too were torn to shreds.

Soul Durability: -5%

Soul Durability: -5%

Blazing anguish now irradiated up from where Emil’s lower body had just been maimed. He screamed out a yowl of pain that echoed through the forest. His vision turned white from the agony, and it was all he could to do to maintain Negative Touch. As the searing heat only became exacerbated with each passing second, he felt that needed concentration was about to break. And as soon as it did, nothing would be able to protect his soul.

Off to his side, Emil heard the thunks of several large objects dropping into the snow. At the same moment, the remaining hundreds upon hundreds of icicles still in the air paused in their descent. They then all began to dissipate away, as the magic that maintained them was broken. In a confused daze, he released the two casts of Negative touch. The icicles that would have kept him pinned down had also now faded away. Emil slowly sat up, and turned to look.

There on the ground was a husk that had once been the ice elemental. Its limbs were scattered across the snow, and its central body had collapsed into a few big pieces. The sphere that had spun rapidly with white light was now still and dead. For that mighty final shower of icicles, it had drained its own Mana down to zero.

But Emil was all too aware that had it lasted just a couple of seconds longer, it would have successfully taken him down with it. He looked back down at his legs. The fiery spike of pain had already gone down to a dull ache. But his legs were still completely and utterly destroyed. With a groan, he let himself fall back into the snow. Through his shared connection with Ray, he called for the undead elk to sprint over to him.

It only took his mount a mere couple of minutes to arrive at his location. It fully lowered itself onto the snow, where Emil was then able to grasp its shoulder. He pulled himself onto its back, and then allowed it to stand up. The now legless Necromancer looked around the area.

The ground around them was covered in holes from the icicles. The walls of ice had not faded away though. But they would probably not last too long with the gaping holes inside them, while under the unobstructed light of the sun. Emil took in the sight of the recent battle. If he had encountered a wild elemental as both a living Mage or Necromancer, he wouldn’t have tried his luck against it.

He had only done so because he was now undead. And as such, he had allowed himself to be reckless. At the same time, he did admit that he had just survived what would have certainly killed him while he was alive. There was no way any normal human would stay alive after having their skull split apart, stabbed multiple times, and their lower body destroyed. That in of itself did prove that while he was not invincible, his undead body was quite resilient.

But Emil probably could have approached the elemental in a smarter way, and formed a more tactically sound plan. One that would have allowed him to defeat it without sustaining so much damage in the process. However, what worried him the most were the notifications that had popped up during the last attack.

The System had informed him that his Soul Durability had decreased. Two increments of 5%, which would have brought it down to 90%. The pop-ups had occurred even despite him keeping his soul completely safe and untouched. They came right after the tendrils of death were destroyed. And with them, was the first time this newly undead body of his had experienced pain.

Is Soul Durability a measure of my overall condition, instead of strictly just being my soul’s? If so, however, you’d think that both of my legs would represent more than just 5% each. But from what it looks not, it’s not actually those limbs themselves that got measured. Instead, it seems to have been from the concentrated death energy that was underneath the flesh.

Emil reached a hand up to his split-apart skull. The opening was large enough for him to fit a finger inside of it. A viscous trail of liquid had already begun to leak out, with small bits of gray matter mixed in. He reached another hand up, and felt inside the socket where his left eye had been. One eye had been completely destroyed, and his brain punctured. Yet neither injury impeded the undead human’s sight, movement, or ability to think clearly.

But inside his skull, he could sense one extension of the dark tendril. The icicle that had stabbed into his head had not gone deep enough to touch it. However, if it had, would that have been enough to incapacitate his body’s functions? And for his lower body, if he absorbed death energy to reform the tendrils, would their restoration give back his ability to feel his legs?

He urged Ray to move over to the ice elemental, and to lower itself again. Emil reached for the dead sphere, and placed a hand on it. Of course, he sensed no death energy from it. He expected as much from his other ability’s being unable to affect it. But Emil had wanted to check, just to be sure.

Inside the sphere was a white powder that sparkled under the light of the sun. It was not snow, but elemental essence, an uncommon arcane reagent. Emil grabbed his bag and opened it up to place the sphere inside.

Perhaps he would be able to find some use for it. He could utilize it as an ingredient in more golem experimentation. He could also see if he’d be able to add it to an undead to potentially give them access to cryomancy. Or he could always just find someone to sell it to. Emil wasn’t sure if any of those ideas would be worth the damage his body and Soul Durability had taken. But that would largely depend on how difficult it would prove to be to repair himself.

Once the sphere was in the bag, he closed it and had his mount rise back up. Today was perhaps not the best start to his new existence as an undead. But so long as the damage hopefully turned out to be reversible, then it still had the makings to be a net positive for him. Emil was low on Mana, but that could now be a benefit.

Emil closed his figurative and stared up at the sky. He recalled the time when he had first experimented with his Necromancer powers, and how he had burned through nearly all his Mana. His current Mana Level wasn’t as low as it had been then, yet he still believed this would work. But he specifically focused on the scent of death that had aroused a sense of hunger within him. That had led him to a corpse to let him absorb the power of its death.

As Emil concentrated, he became aware of several scents. One was like the first time, the smell of barbequed steak. Another was an aroma that reminded him of a bakery with fresh loaves of bread. There was a third that could only be described as sweet, almost overwhelmingly so. He took them all in. As he maintained his focus on them, he willed Ray to begin to walk in the direction of the nearest one.