I had taken some time to raid the crypt’s loot. The alcoves in the throne room turned out to be

spots where the last Deathwalker put high-quality equipment. There were a couple boxes of

high-quality healing potions and mana potions. There was a ton more stuff, but I didn’t have the

time to look at each piece to determine if it was something I wanted to swap out.

The big exception to that was a single weapon that I grabbed. I took with me a dagger

called Soul Ripper. It was just what the doctor ordered for the living who were working with the

lich.

Soul Ripper

Soul Anchor

Slots 27/50

Charges 9/9

This Dagger, when plunged into a victim up to the hilt, will cast soul anchor and rip the soul of

the living into the hilt. These souls can be used as wraiths or burned to cause spiritual damage.

I had lost my tools for socketing, so I couldn’t core anything, not that I had the time to do much.

So I filled my shield with single-use potions and gave the rest to a zombie guard. I gave that

guard directions to walk directly behind me.

Then I took my army down the hall where the shade had disappeared. When I got to the

end, there were the large double doors. I had one of the guards reach out and open the door. As

his hand made contact, I saw his health start to fall.

I quickly had the damaged skeleton back away from the door and had my chairmen lower

my throne down. I stared at the door for a moment, trying to think through the implications. The

problem was that the pain was consuming a lot of my brainpower. Something was going on with

the door, something that I should be understanding.

I muttered. “A necromancer’s crypt with a door that keeps everything in. It just doesn’t

make any sense. Unless the army was trapped in here, and that’s why he didn’t care that I took

it.”

I entered the Crypt’s interface. I had gotten better at understanding it as it converted

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from a stack of papers into spreadsheets in my brain. It was the oddest thing watching the sheets

of aged papers convert one by one to a digital readout as I mentally picked them up.

It took me a while to find what I was looking for. The Crypt wasn’t a cored building or

room or something. It was all done by inscriptions, meaning hundreds or perhaps thousands of

spells were working together. The whole place took a massive amount of mana to run.

I shook my head. “The siphon is part of the crypt, I bet. Powering the containment for

all of the high-level undead. It’s to keep people from stealing from him or them wandering off.”

I smiled as I found the switch in the interface. I might not have been right about the use

of the siphon, but I was right that it was part of the crypt. I couldn’t turn it off, but I could

change its direction. It seemed that it was designed to have a hole that could be moved around.

It had marked three different spots. Two I knew were doors. The third I hadn’t seen but figured

must have been another door.

I swiveled the siphon around and had another skeleton test the door. It pulled on the

door, but nothing happened. I slammed my fist onto the bone skull of my throne. Then plunged

back into the interface. It took me a while to find that the door was keyed and would open to the

one with the key.

I was about to order the skeletons to attack the door when I noticed the interface showed

me where the key was. I sent a zombie back to the dais to grab the footrest. I went to laugh at

how over the top the last Deathwalker was and then grimaced as pain shot through my body.

I placed my one nub on the footrest and willed the door open. Then with a skeleton in

front of me carrying the footrest, my army of undead moved out. Leading the way were my hell

dogs. Their task was to scout for me.

The view through the door showed a natural cave with a worked floor. The floor was

smooth and clear of anything that would slow a moving army. As we exited, we moved west and

slightly up. The underground road I was on was a gentle ramp moving up beside what appeared

to be a dried-out channel.

The channel and road kept going further underground and toward the east. Likely toward

the hills that we came from. It might lead all the way to the coast for all I knew. However, it

wasn’t as important as getting up.

When my army cleared the doors, I willed them shut again. As the doors closed, I heard

my hell dogs already fighting. The screeching of dying rats was music to my ears. I wouldn’t

have lost my friends if they hadn't been here. I blamed the rats as much as I did the lich at this

point. They would all die.

As we moved up the tunnel, I saw the work of the undead. Dozens of rats were laid out

everywhere as we went. If I wasn’t already close to maxed out on my control, I would have

started to raise them. Having more bodies was always good. That said, I figured if I lost any of

my current undead, I would steal the ones that the lich had.

A wave of emotion hit me just a few moments after clearing the door. It was relief and

anger all at once. Blink was alive and slamming me with her feelings. She was also sharing her

vision with me and thoughts all at once.

It was so much that I had to drop using the skeleton’s senses as I couldn’t overlay

everything. Between my pain and her, something had to give. As soon as I dropped the

skeleton’s vision, I could see hers and fight through her emotions to understand her.

She was showing me a group of men laughing at Kasidy. I couldn’t make out what they

were saying because Blink was screaming at me. “DADDY, YOU’RE ALIVE! I THOUGHT

YOU WERE DEAD!”

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I thought back. “Yeah, I thought I was too. Then I thought you were. What’s going

on?”

“Oh, Daddy, it’s those dumb men that made you mad in the town. They are here talking

about selling Kasidy! The spells they used to make the flesh golems came from the lich!”

“Which dumb men? I thought I killed them all.”

“No, Daddy, their herd.”

I nodded, winced, then shook my head because I knew Blink couldn’t see me and thought

back. “What do you mean herd?”

Blink got louder in my head, which just led to more pain. “The Merchant Guild!”

I thought that I had been mad before. I thought that taking Kasidy from me and locking

up Blink was bad. I thought that I was going to kill a lich over and over again. Even hurt the

men that were working with him. But I was wrong. That anger had just been a little fire, one that

set me moving. I was good and truly angry as I thought that I had taken care of this problem

already.

“I’m coming as fast as I can. Do you know what happened to Renfry? No one is in the

party anymore.”

“They have him chained up on the wall. The lich wants to figure out what he is.”

My army paused, but I wasn’t sure why. I had them moving up the ramp, and they

should have kept going to the end. I sighed heavily.

I pushed my pain aside and thought to Blink. “I need to focus on what I am doing. Let

me know if they leave the room but do send me what you are seeing right now.”

I felt Blink clamp down on what she was sending me, and soon it was just her seething

anger and hunger. “Okay, Daddy, I need out because I need to kill some of these men. They

made Kasidy cry.”

I smiled and nodded. “I’ll break that cage when I get there. Then you can have some

fun.”

I pushed my vision back into the lead skeleton to see why we had stopped. We had

gotten to a fork in the road. The broad tunnel kept going, but off to the left was a narrow tunnel

that led toward Blink. I winced as pain shot through my missing eye as I thought about where to

go.

With a grunt, I sent a group of the hell dogs through the narrow tunnel and a group up the

ramp. I told both to go as far as they could without trying to open doors. While they might have

been dogs with being level 53, they would be able to knock down many doors. In fact, if I had

met any of them when I was fighting the loose undead, I likely would have died.

I waited impatiently for the hell dogs to get to the end of their runs. I kept switching back

and forth between the view of the two different packs of dogs. I needed to see what was going

on to know which direction to take my army.

Just a few minutes had passed, and the pack I sent down the tunnel reached the dead end.

There in front of them, after climbing dozens of stairs, was a stone wall. Down the other

direction, the pack kept running. They were going far faster than the tunnel pack covering more

and more ground and getting closer and closer to the surface.

I had one of the dogs in the narrow tunnel start looking around. It took me a few

moments before I found what looked like a latch. While I couldn't be sure, I was pretty

confident that the tunnel ended on the back side of a secret passage.

The only problem was going to be getting through the tunnel. It was just narrow enough

that my throne would have to be turned sideways. Unfortunately, there were also a couple of

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areas that appeared to be too tight of a turn for the throne to go through flat. This meant I would

have to be taken out of the throne and carried by a couple of the zombies since the skeletons

were too light to carry me.

I told the hell dogs heading up the ramped passage to keep going as fast as possible. No

matter what, I needed to know where that passage let out to ensure I wasn’t attacked from

behind. That said, I was confident that the narrow passage was the direction to go.

I sent my minions forward and then entered the tunnel myself. My throne was turned

sideways, so we moved forward, and I was facing the wall. If it had been people carrying me, it

would have been far harder; however, with the undead, it was easy for them to shuffle to the side

as my weight hadn't changed, and their magical ability to lift hadn't either.

What took the hell dogs mere moments to run through took my army much longer. The

slow movement of my armored skeletons as they passed through the passages just wide enough

for two at a time. Worse yet was the speed that the ones carrying me had to go. We could have

run, except every time we picked up the pace, the throne would scrape on the walls and get

stuck. We had to keep backing up and forcing it around.

Each time we hit the wall was another shot of pain down my nub or through my missing

leg. Each time we scraped, the walk sent vibrations into my eye. The whole passage was painful

and painfully slow. Soon we got to a spot that was too narrow for the throne to pass through as

the passage turned back on itself.

I crawled out of the throne and had the undead turn up on end like a sofa trying to get

through a door. We kept moving forward, with me now being carried by two zombies like an

unruly four-year-old. My army was stacked up at the dead end a few minutes later.

I had one of the skeletal guards move forward and throw the latch. Slowly the stone wall

swung open. I couldn’t hear if it made any noise as I was too far down the tunnel. Then I sent

the skeleton that I was sharing senses with through the door first. The door opened into a stone

hallway.

* * *