Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 37: Among the Dead Again

"As expected," Darion muttered.

He crouched down, placed his right hand flat on the rusted chest plate, and said the word.

"Revive."

The green light moved through the armor the same way it always did, threading through the gaps in the metal, spreading across the visible bone, the skull lighting up beneath the tilted helmet.

The jaw shifted.

The hands on the chair arms twitched once. Then the figure stood, slowly, and lowered itself to one knee.

The helmet tilted forward as the head bowed, and the green eyes glowed in the shadow beneath the visor.

The room felt smaller with it upright.

Darion checked the stats.

[Undead Knight – Rust Tier]

Former Rank: Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 50

Endurance: 50

Loyalty: 60

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

He looked at those numbers for a moment.

Fifty strength. Fifty endurance. Both exactly the same value, which felt almost intentional—like whoever this guy was in life had been built with a certain kind of balance.

And sixty loyalty, which was higher than most of what he’d pulled from the graveyard.

For a Rust Tier, this was genuinely impressive.

He thought about that. The tier rankings had felt like a quality ladder when he first encountered them, Rotten at the bottom, something better above it, better still above that.

And that was true in terms of the condition of the corpse.

But condition and capability weren’t the same thing. The tier described what the corpse had been through, how much had been lost to time and decay and circumstance. It didn’t cap what the underlying person had been.

A Rust Tier corpse that had belonged to a physically exceptional person would come back more capable than a Flesh Tier corpse that had belonged to someone unremarkable.

The tier was the starting condition. The individual was the ceiling.

Which meant he needed to go through Percvale’s graveyard more carefully: paying attention to size, looking at whatever info the headstones had about who was buried there.

That was worth a lot more time than he’d given it so far. He’d been picking graves more or less randomly. That was going to change.

He unsummoned the large knight into his inventory and stepped back out through the hidden door, through the main room of the farmhouse, and out into the cold air where Garren was standing a short distance behind the horses, looking at the middle distance with the patience of a man who had been waiting in worse conditions for longer stretches.

"Done?" Garren asked.

"For here," Darion said, mounting up. "I need to go to the graveyard."

Garren nodded, already turning his horse. They rode back through the farmland edge and onto the road that led toward the barony proper, and at a junction where the routes split, one back toward the castle, one continuing east toward the burial ground,

Garren raised a hand briefly and turned right.

Darion turned left without stopping.

The graveyard gate was the same as he had left it. He tied the horse to the post, the same post as before, and walked through.

This time he went deeper.

The front sections he had already been through — the recent graves, the ones from the last few decades, the mass burials from the wars Garren had described.

He moved past those now, following the path as it narrowed toward the older part of the ground where the stones were darker and lower and the ground had had more time to settle flat over what lay beneath it.

The markers back here were different. Some were simple slabs, same as the newer sections.

But others had more on them: fuller inscriptions, titles, this sort of detail that went on a stone when the person being buried had been someone specific rather than one of many.

He moved slowly, reading what he could. Most of the lettering had weathered past legibility.

Some stones had sunk at angles that made them impossible to read without crouching at odd positions.

He worked through them methodically, pausing at each one long enough to make out whatever remained of the text.

Then he stopped.

The stone was larger than most around it, not extravagantly so, but noticeably, the kind of size that indicated someone had spent more on it than the average.

The lettering was deeper cut than usual, which was probably why enough of it remained to read after what looked like several decades of weather.

Battle Commander Edric Vorne.

Darion looked at it for a moment.

Battle Commander. Not infantry, not a standard knight, not one of the ranks that filled the bulk of the graveyard.

A commander!

Someone who had led forces, made tactical decisions and held authority over others. Whatever combat instinct was preserved in those bones had been shaped by a very different kind of military experience than the infantry knights he had been raising so far.

"Let’s start with this one," he said to nobody.

He found a shovel (there were still several of the rusted ones scattered around from his first visit) and started digging.

The grave was deep. Whoever had buried Edric Vorne had done it properly, which meant more work for Darion but also suggested the body had been better preserved than the shallower ones.

He worked steadily, taking his time, until the shovel hit something solid.

He cleared the remaining dirt and lifted the corpse free.

It was an old corpse, having a grey tone, something that had been in the ground for a long time, but the structure was intact.

The skull was present, spine continuous, the major bones all where they should be. Combat instinct needed something to hold onto, and this had enough.

He knelt, placed his hand on the chest, and said the word.

Nothing happened.

He felt it right away, or rather, he didn’t feel it. The connection that normally formed the instant his hand touched a corpse, that thread of something pulling from his chest toward the bones, wasn’t there. The body lay still. The eyes stayed dark.

He said it again.

"Revive."

Still nothing.

He sat back a little, looking at the skeleton with an expression that was trying to figure out what went wrong.

His success rate had been a hundred percent up to now. Every corpse he’d put his hand on had responded.

The system had explained that was because of the domain restriction: he could only raise people who had died within his authority, and everyone in this graveyard qualified.

So why wasn’t this working.

Then words appeared in his vision.

[Your current Necromancer Rank is insufficient to bind this individual.

Rank required: Acolyte or above.]

Darion stared at that for a long moment, then muttered in frustration:

"Fuck!"