Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 31: Venomous...

"Revive."

The green light came and went faster than it had in the graveyard, four times in quick succession, one hand to one chest then the next, the black-green lines spreading and fading, the skulls lighting up, the bodies shifting.

It took less than two minutes for all four of them to be standing.

Before Garren had fully turned around, before most of the knights had registered what the light had been, all four were upright and facing Darion with their heads bowed.

They looked different from his skeleton knights. The flesh was still there, grey now, the colour drained out of it, the veins visible dark beneath the skin like ink soaking through paper.

Flesh looking like their was not a single drop of blood in it. They looked like corpses without blood.

The eyes were green, same as the others, but the faces were recognisable, looking all dried but still recognizable.

That was the part that made it strange. With the skeleton knights you were looking at bone, which was abstract enough to process.

These still had faces. Aldric still looked like Aldric, just emptied out and relit from the inside with something cold.

The green markings from the venom were still on their skin. Still spreading slightly and still dark.

Hojj saw them first.

"What the—" He stopped. Then louder: "What in the gods’ names!"

Several knights echoed him, not in words exactly but in volume.

The group that had been hauling Bogoart carcasses dropped what they were holding. The ones closest to the four newly standing figures took steps back, some of them significant steps.

Darion stood up from the last body and looked at his system.

[Congratulations — Venomous Undead Knights Created!]

[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Former Rank: Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 41

Endurance: 39

Loyalty: 22

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Former Rank: Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 44

Endurance: 40

Loyalty: 20

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Former Rank: Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 43

Endurance: 38

Loyalty: 21

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Former Rank: Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 40

Endurance: 41

Loyalty: 24

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

Hmm, Strong!

All four of them considerably stronger than anything he had pulled from the graveyard, the strength stats sitting in the forties, endurance close behind, the combat instinct intact.

The venom was a separate category of useful that he didn’t need to think hard about to appreciate.

Then his eyes went to the loyalty numbers.

He stared at those for longer than he had stared at anything else on the screen.

Low loyalty wasn’t just a minor inconvenience. He hadlearnt from his system that loyalty was the binding, the hold he had over the undeads, the thing that made the difference between an undead that followed a command cleanly and one that lagged, glitched, or in the worst case stopped responding entirely.

High loyalty meant he said go left and it went left immediately.

Low loyalty meant he said go left and something in the connection resisted, dragged and created a delay between instruction and action that in a fight could mean the difference between the undead doing what he needed and the undead doing something adjacent to what he needed half a second too late.

Strength 41 meant nothing if he couldn’t reliably direct it.

He thought about why the loyalty was so low.

The skeleton knights from the graveyard had come back with loyalty in the fifties and sixties, not too high, but at least enough to be controlled without too many issues.

These four had died violently, quickly and in pain, not in battle under his command but from venom while clinging to tree branches. The binding was weaker because the circumstances of death had been chaotic, maybe?

No that couldn’t be it.

Or because fresh corpses with intact flesh were harder to bind fully than clean bone?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know why the loyalty was this little.

He dismissed the stat screens and summoned the undead knights into his inventory.

Then he looked at his status.

[STATUS]

Name: Darion

Title: Baron of Percvale

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Novice

Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance: Low (Death-aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 31 [+6]

Agility: 20 [+3]

Endurance: 21 [+4]

Vitality: 20 [+5]

Perception: 20 [+3]

Intelligence: 25 [+4]

Willpower: 25 [+7]

[Knight Undead Inventory: 4/10] — [Five Extra Slots Unlocked!]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/5]

Animal Undead inventory?

Two separate inventories now. Knight undead and animal undead, tracked independently, with the animal inventory sitting at one (the wolf) in its own category of five slots.

Which raised an immediate question.

He asked the system whether the animal inventory worked the same way as the knight inventory, whether the same domain restriction applied and whether he could only revive animals that had died within his territory or under his authority.

The system answered. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

[Correct. The same restrictions apply.

You may only revive animals that are yours, that died within your domain or under your direct authority.]

Darion read that and then sat with it for a second.

That are yours...

He looked at the undead wolf standing at the edge of the clearing, the half-flesh half-bone face turned toward the tree line, the green eye moving slowly across the forest.

The wolf had walked out of those trees on its own. It hadn’t belonged to Percvale prior to that moment.

It hadn’t died within his domain or under his authority, instead it had died in the forest fighting Bogoarts, which was a different thing entirely. By the system’s own rules he shouldn’t have been able to revive it.

And yet there it stood.

He asked the system directly.

’The wolf wasn’t mine when it died. How did I revive it?’