Kai wandered through the village. The cetery, churches, and even the dungeon were all empty.
Empty of souls.
Not a single glimr of the spark of life remained.
Over the centuries, they faded away or found their next purpose.
"Well, if there are no souls, I'll make use of the bodies. If Orlin could be reanimated l, so can these."
Kai looked over the streets.
He'd seen them already.
They were everywhere.
Stripped skeletons thrown into corners, heaps of ribs and thighbones where scavengers had taken everything except the bones.
The skulls embedded in the earthen soil.
The living were gone. Long gone.
Those that were left had fled to the surface and taken everything that the living were too afraid to leave, needed to survive.
The dead had been thrown into piles and left to feed fungi. None of those dead were recent enough to have lingering souls; only whispers, shards of what once was instead of anything whole.
Still, where there was bone there was possibility.
Kai worked his magic.
He focused his necromancy throughout the village, to stitch those tiny, ragged fragnts so that they might be spun into serviceable shells.
"Mass Raise Undead." He called.
The skeletons answered.
At first it was a handful: a femur twitched, a jaw clicked. Then they fell one onto another like a darker tide. tal clattered, joint popped into place.
It took ti.
An afternoon of patience, but when the last small scrap of bone tidied itself into a standing shape, Kai counted aloud as the new bodies arranged, absorbed, and fell in line.
The reach of his spell had multiplied since ranking up his necromancy. It blanketed the entire village and swarms of them began to mass march towards him.
"Four hundred and twelve." He finished.
[412 Skeletons Raised.]
He felt the old, familiar thrum of command settle in the marrow of his skull.
More soldiers.
Their ranks were ragged and crude.
No mailed knights, no robed mages.
At least, not yet.
But, regardless of their rank and power, each would obey the whisper of his will.
They were not the army he needed for the ordeal to co; they were a skeleton crew in the truest sense, but they bought him room to experint.
Kai's hands shook not from exertion but from the taste of what he'd done. He had no easy illusions about the ethics of harvesting the dead for his purposes; these people had belonged to a small, forgotten village.
Orlin's village.
He told himself what he would have needed to before becoming a necromancer.
The sa things he'd say when killing players who got in the way of farming resources back in the Knights of Elora.
No one asked for this, nobody was left to care, the lives had already been taken.
But, instead of the dull sense of guilt he'd feel back in his old world, it was replaced by emptiness.
Slowly, his humanity was breaking free from his sense of self.
The next experint was more direct.
Riskier.
Unpredictable.
Kai sat on the carved stone bench at the center of the abandoned manor's main hall, lit only by the faint glow of soul crystals hovering above his palm. The air slled of old dust and bone, this had been a place for people once, but now it was only his laboratory.
He ran his thumb across the blackened edge of his dagger, thinking.
'I don't have the control to order thousands.'
Even with Rhea's lingering guidance echoing faintly in the back of his mind, the sheer mass of his army was unmanageable. Soldiers without discipline were just corpses waiting to be slaughtered again.
So he refined.
One by one, his skeletal soldiers clattered into the hall at his summons, rows of hollow-eyed, silent killers lining up before him. A flicker of shadow magic twined around his fingers as he began his work.
He rged skeletons together, bone into bone, soul-thread into soul-thread, until they reshaped under his will.
The first ti he did it, since his only reserve of souls were Primordial souls, he got an interesting piece of information delivered to him.
[There are left over soul fragnts. Would you like to save them for the next fusion?]
"Oh? Yes, please."
As it turned out, each primordial soul allowed Kai to fuse fifty normal skeletons before it's spark was depleted.
Where there had been thousands of fragile, rattling soldiers, there now stood hulking skeleton warriors with jagged armor made of fused bone.
The skeletal mages were next, their twisted wands snapping like dry wood as he reforged them into arch mages, their eye sockets glowing with deeper, more intelligent light.
He refined further. With painstaking care he carved sigils into their bones with his parchnt covered in bone-chalk sigils. Each rune shimred faintly before burning into place.
The arch mages split into specialized casters: frost, fire, necrotic, darkness, and light.
The warriors, by contrast, darkened with shadow magic until their ribcages looked like cages of obsidian, their weapons dripping with condensed dusk, they beca shadow death knights, radiating a silent nace.
Then…
Then the most incredible thing happened.
Sothing he had planned, yes, but had not dared to hope for.
He rged a shadow death knight and a skeletal arch mage together, threads of soul and bone pulled tight between his hands, compressing them with such force that the air itself seed to recoil. The fusion circle on the floor blazed, the symbols flickering from violet to a deep abyssal blue.
When the light died down, sothing new stood before him.
It bore a knight's armored silhouette but with runes crawling across its blade and spine, a shimring haze of magic pulsing from its hands. Its eyes burned like twin dying stars.
[Undead Spellblade created.
Mana – Increased. Strength – Increased. Combat Awareness – Increased.]
A thrill rippled through him. He couldn't help but smile.
'Finally. Sothing stronger.'
Each one took half of a Primordial soul, but it was worth it.
But Kai didn't stop there.
He continued until he had more:
[Skeletons Arch Mage (1,441)]
[Shadow Death Knight (1,444)]
[Undead Spellblade (500)]
He gestured, and the shadows around him writhed as massive shapes pushed through, the bodies of his undead wyverns, wings folding like torn sails. Their hollow roars shook the cavern ceiling.
He inscribed fire sigils onto two of them with careful precision and attempted to rge them. The fusion circle blazed white-hot.
Then a concussive blast knocked him off his feet.
[rging Failed. Materials Destroyed.]
The wyverns collapsed into piles of brittle bone and ash, their essence snuffed out.
"Destroyed? Fuck!" His voice echoed off the stone, harsh and raw.
He exhaled sharply, forcing calm back into his body. He looked at the remaining ten wyverns. Their eyeless skulls stared back.
"All or nothing," he muttered.
Ten primordial souls shimred between his hands, the last of a rare stockpile.
He inscribed a different sigil on each wyvern, wind, fire, frost, shadow, venom, blood, gravity, lightning, void, and chaos before ordering them to stand in a circle.
The chamber darkened as the ritual began.
"Let's see just what I can create!"
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