Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 23: The Loudest Smell

The knights looked at him. Garren too.

Bait?

"Yes," Darion said. "Bait."

He let that sit for exactly one second before continuing, because he could already see some of them starting to form an objection.

"Think about what we just mapped out. We know the areas where the Bogoarts move. We know the routes they’re likely to take between the water and the hunting ground. We know where they wait."

He tapped the map. "So instead of walking into those areas and hoping we spot them before they spot us, which, based on your track record and mine from yesterday, is not a reliable strategy, we use that information differently."

He looked around the circle.

"We pick a clearing. One of these two." He pointed to the marked clearings on the sketch. "Open ground, which means anything coming in has to cross open space to reach the center. We put one knight in the middle of that clearing. Just one, standing in the open, visible, or rather, smellable, from a distance." He paused.

"Every other knight goes up into the trees surrounding the clearing before we send the bait in. Spears, bows, whatever we have with range. You wait in the trees, you stay still, and when the Bogoart comes for the bait, you open up from above."

He folded the map slightly, keeping the clearing section visible.

"The ones on the ground, the bait and anyone positioned at the tree line, finish it with blades once the arrows have done their work. We make it brutally clean and most importantly, nobody is walking blind through dense forest hoping not to get ambushed."

The knights were quiet for a moment, and then the murmuring started. They weren’t against it, this wasn’t opposing murmurs, instead it was them going over the idea, considering if it was actually a good one.

"That’s actually—" someone started.

"Brilliant," Hojj said, plainly, from the middle of the group.

Several others nodded. A few were already looking at the map with the specific focus of people who had moved from listening to planning.

On to the next stage!

But Darion had stopped talking.

He was still standing in the middle of the circle, but his expression had shifted, that slight inward look of someone running a calculation they hadn’t finished yet. The knights noticed. The conversation quieted back down.

He was thinking about the smell.

It was the one thing that could unravel the entire plan, and he’d caught it just before speaking rather than just after, which was fortunate. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

The Bogoarts were blind. That was the foundation the whole plan rested on, the idea that they wouldn’t be able to see the knights positioned in the trees above the clearing, that they would only perceive the bait standing in the middle.

But seeing wasn’t how Bogoarts hunted. They smelled. And if they could smell the bait from a significant distance, they could also smell every knight sitting twenty feet up in the surrounding trees.

Which meant the bait wasn’t the only thing they’d be responding to. They’d be walking into a clearing where the smell of humans was coming from multiple directions simultaneously — above, around the edges, and center. That wasn’t a trap. That was just a larger group of prey in a clearing.

Darion started pacing in the small space available to him, one hand raised toward the knights in a brief gesture that meant hold on.

They held on.

He worked through it. The creature would arrive smelling all of them, yes. But it wouldn’t smell all of them equally. The bait was on the ground, in the open, directly between the Bogoart and wherever it was approaching from. Ground level, no barrier, nothing diluting or diffusing the scent.

The knights in the trees were elevated, partially obscured by bark and leaves and the general layered smell of the forest itself, their scent mixing into the canopy rather than sitting directly at the Bogoart’s nose level.

The bait’s smell would hit harder. It would hit more stronger, direct and immediate.

So the Bogoart would register multiple humans in the area, yes, but the one it would lock onto first, the one its instincts would drive it toward, would be the clearest and closest signal. The one in the open. The bait!

And by the time it had committed to that charge and was halfway across the clearing, the arrows would already be falling.

It wasn’t perfect. The creature might hesitate at the edge of the clearing, confused by the multiple signals. It might circle, trying to resolve the conflicting information. But it would come. Bogoarts were hunters and hunters responded to prey, and the bait would be the loudest thing in that clearing by a considerable margin.

He raised his head.

"There’s one problem with it," he said, and the circle went quiet again. "The Bogoarts will smell everyone, the bait and the people in the trees. They can’t see the difference between a trap and a meal, but they can smell that there’s more than one person in that clearing."

He looked at the group.

"But here’s the thing. The bait’s smell is going to be the strongest. Ground level y’know, no cover, directly in the creature’s path. The knights in the trees, their scent gets mixed into everything else up there, the bark, the leaves, whatever birds have been sitting in those branches. It’s not invisible, but it’s weaker and less direct."

He paused.

"So the Bogoart walks into a clearing where it smells humans in several places, but one of those smells is considerably louder than the others. It’s going to go for the loudest one first. That’s just how hunters work, you take the clearest target before worrying about the rest."

He looked around the circle.

"And it won’t get the chance to worry about the rest."

The silence that followed was the kind that indicated agreement rather than doubt.

"That’s brilliant," Garren said. He hadn’t said it to respect Darion because he was the Baron, he instead had said it the way a man said something when he actually meant it and had no reason to be generous.

It got more approving nods from the knights. The affirmative murmuring started again.

"Right," Darion said. "So we move. But before we do, does anyone have bows and arrows?"

"Five, m’lord," one of the senior knights said. "Five bows, enough arrows to make them worth using."

"Bring all of them." He looked at the rest of the group. "Everyone else brings what they have, spears, swords, axes, whatever you’re carrying. If it has an edge, bring it."

He rolled the map back up and handed it to its owner, who tucked it away with considerably more care than its battered condition probably warranted.

"I’ll be on the horse," Darion said, scanning the group one last time, noting the weapons, the faces and the energy that was nothing like the barracks he had walked into yesterday.

’I’m doing a pretty good job’ he thought.

"Everyone else on foot. We move in formation, stay quiet when I say stay quiet, and nobody does anything until the Bogoart is in the clearing." He met a few eyes specifically. "Nobody."

A sound of agreement moved through the group.

Darion turned toward the gate.

"Let’s do this."