Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 26: The Bait

Revise the plan?

The knights looked at the wolf. Then at Darion. Then at the wolf again.

They knew what revising the plan meant. It meant the wolf was going to be part of it somehow. Nobody said anything but the glances going around the group said plenty.

"We keep the bait plan," Darion said. "Same setup, everyone in the trees around the clearing, bait in the middle. Nothing changes there."

"And the wolf?" Garren asked.

"It stays with me. In my tree."

There were more glances. The skepticism was visible on every face, though nobody voiced it directly. A wolf was not a dog. It wasn’t trained, it wasn’t domesticated, it had wandered out of the forest ten minutes ago and their Baron had crouched down and pet it like it was his from birth.

Darion was a little surprised at himself too, if he was being honest.

He wasn’t a beast tamer. That wasn’t his class or ability, it wasn’t anything he had been told to expect when the system had shown him what he was.

He was a Necromancer. He raised the dead. He had no business taming wolves.

And yet he had looked at the loyalty stat sitting at 70 in his system screen, the same kind of stat he saw on his undead, and the wolf had let him put his hand on its neck and leaned into it.

The system had registered the animal the same way it registered his skeletons. Which meant something was happening that he didn’t fully understand yet, and this wasn’t the time to stand in a forest trying to work it out.

He would find out later. For now the wolf was here, it was loyal to him for whatever reason, and a loyal wolf the size of a small horse was a useful thing to have in a clearing when Bogoarts were involved.

"It’ll help us fight," he said simply, and moved on before anyone could ask follow-up questions he didn’t have answers to.

They organised themselves and moved toward the clearing.

A lanky knight had been chosen as bait. Darion watched him take up his position in the middle of the open ground, standing there in the pale, exposed space with nothing around him for thirty feet in any direction, and felt a brief, quiet pang of something. It was a real risk.

If the Bogoart moved faster than expected, if the archers missed and if the plan fell apart in any of the dozen ways plans fell apart, the man in the middle of the clearing would be the first to find out.

He had considered the horses for a moment. Put them in the clearing instead, let them be the smell that drew the creatures in.

But then, when left alone, the horses could run away, and they couldn’t climb trees, which meant they’d be on the ground regardless, which meant they were already acting as secondary bait whether anyone planned it that way or not.

Two horses at the edge of the clearing, one knight in the middle. Three signals for the Bogoart’s nose to follow, with the knight being the clearest and closest.

The lanky knight looked up at the trees once before facing forward. His face was doing its best to look calm.

Darion turned to the wolf. "Up," he said, and pointed at the tree he had chosen, a broad trunk, low first branch, good height and sightline over the clearing.

The wolf looked at the tree. Then it jumped, caught the first branch with its front paws and hauled itself up with a ease that suggested this was not its first time climbing a tree.

It settled on a wide branch about fifteen feet up and looked down at Darion.

He climbed up after it. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

All around the clearing, knights were doing the same, moving to their assigned trees and pulling themselves up, slower and less gracefully than the wolf but getting there.

Weapons were tucked or slung where they could be freed quickly. The archers found their positions with clear angles down into the open ground below.

Within a few minutes the clearing was empty except for the lanky knight standing in the middle of it and the two horses standing at the far edge, and every other living person was fifteen to twenty feet off the ground and completely still.

Darion settled onto his branch, the wolf beside him taking up considerably more space than he had anticipated. He checked the spear in his hand, checked the angle to the clearing below, and waited.

He expected it wouldn’t take long. They had spent a lot of time on the ground since entering the forest: the planning, the walk in and the business with the wolf. All of that time their smell had been sitting in the air, spreading outward through the trees. By now any Bogoart within a reasonable distance would have registered the presence of a large group of humans in its territory.

The question was how many.

He made himself breathe slowly and keep his eyes on the treeline at the far side of the clearing where the northeastern approach came in.

The forest was quiet.

Then the ground started to shake. A faint, thud! thud! vibration in the branch under him, the kind that came from something heavy moving fast.

He looked at the knight below him in the tree, who had heard it too. He spread the message along with a hand signal — stay still, wait.

The lanky knight in the clearing heard the footsteps and his whole body went rigid.

Four Bogoarts broke through the treeline on the far side of the clearing at a full run, moving in low, hurtling momentum. Like they had already committed to the kill before they arrived.

They were enormous in motion, the serpentine tails cutting the air behind them, the horns dropped low, every step leaving a visible impression in the dry ground. They spread slightly as they entered the open space, fanning out by instinct, and locked onto the knight in the middle.

"AIM!"

Every archer in the trees pulled back.

"SHOOT!"

Darion stood on the branch and hurled the spear down.