Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 38: Steady progress

Darion read the message a second time, then looked at the Battle Commander’s headstone.

He honestly hadn’t seen that coming. A rank restriction. He’d just assumed his perfect revival record was because of the domain rule, as long as someone died on his land, he could raise them. Apparently that wasn’t the whole picture. Some people were strong enough that you needed to be a strong enough Necromancer to hold them, and he wasn’t there yet.

"Welp," he muttered, and started filling the grave back in.

He wasn’t annoyed for long. Edric Vorne’s corpse had been laying in that grave for decades, he could wait a little longer. The moment Darion hit Acolyte, he was coming straight back here.

He picked up the shovel and moved deeper into the older section.

The next five graves went faster than he expected. He was getting better at reading the ground, knowing from how the soil had settled and how the stones were leaning which graves were worth digging up and which weren’t. He picked out five spots, dug each one out, and said the word over each of them.

Every single one responded.

He checked them one by one as they knelt in front of him.

[Undead Knight – Rust Tier]

Former Rank:Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct:Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength:22

Endurance:20

Loyalty:54

Pain Response:None

Morale:Irrelevant

Special Trait:Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness:Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Rust Tier]

Former Rank:Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct:Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength:24

Endurance:21

Loyalty:58

Pain Response:None

Morale:Irrelevant

Special Trait:Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness:Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Bone Tier]

Former Rank:Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct:Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength:35

Endurance:32

Loyalty:56

Pain Response:None

Morale:Irrelevant

Special Trait:Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness:Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Bone Tier]

Former Rank:Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct:Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength:33

Endurance:36

Loyalty:59

Pain Response:None

Morale:Irrelevant

Special Trait:Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness:Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

[Undead Knight – Decaying Tier]

Former Rank:Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct:Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength:13

Endurance:11

Loyalty:52

Pain Response:None

Morale:Irrelevant

Special Trait:Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness:Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

So that gave him two Rust Tier knights, two Bone Tier knights, and one Decaying. The two Bone Tier ones were the ones worth paying attention to, their strength in the mid-thirties, and one of them had loyalty pushing sixty. Solid numbers.

The Rust pair were workable enough, and the Decaying was... well, it was what it was.

He covered each grave after raising them, filling the dirt back in before moving to the next. When all five were kneeling in a row in the gray afternoon light, he willed them into his inventory one by one. The green faded from each set of eyes in sequence until the graveyard was empty again except for him.

He checked his status.

[STATUS]

Name:Darion

Title:Baron of Percvale

Class:Necromancer

Rank:Novice

Territory:Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance:Low (Death-aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 34 [+1]

Agility: 22

Endurance: 23

Vitality: 22

Perception: 22 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Intelligence: 29

Willpower: 28

[Knight Undead Inventory: 10/10]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/5]

[Skills:

Death Perception]

His knight slots were completely full now (ten out of ten) with the wolf sitting alone in the animal inventory. His attributes did not increase apart from strength, and that was just by 1.

He put the shovel down, walked back to the gate, untied his horse, and rode back to Percvale.

---

The next week moved quickly.

The meat sold out in four days.

Not a slow trickle with leftovers sitting unsold in the evening market, no, it was properly gone, cleared out by steady sales from morning until the supply ran dry each day.

The coin coming back to the castle was modest, but it was real, which was different from what the castle had been seeing for months. Garren counted it each evening with the look of a man who had forgotten what coins felt like in his hand and was quietly getting used to it again.

The coins helped in buying little food items to support to the Bogart meat they had been eating for days now.

They bought rice and potatoes from a market in a kingdom not too far from Percvale.

Darion sent Sir Garren to do so and they tried not to spend too much from their income.

The citizens bought whatever was available by the way. Bogoart meat was unfamiliar, but hunger makes everything taste fine, and after the first day word spread about what it tasted like. The line at the market stall was longer on the second morning.

When the supply ran out, Darion took the knights back into the forest.

The second hunt went better than the first in almost every way. Thier was no ambush from behind and no snake bites pulling knights out of trees at the wrong moment.

The plan held together from start to finish, the wolf was used well and early, and the archers up in the trees did exactly what they were supposed to do.

They came back with kills, and they came back whole.

Every knight who went in came out, which wasn’t something that had happened on any Percvale hunt in longer than most of the knights could remember.

Not a single loss.

For the third hunt, Darion changed the target entirely.

He had been thinking about Bogoarts, specifically, how much they cost compared to what they gave back.

Big kills, sure. Impressive, sure. Enough meat to feed the barony for days, sure. But hunting them was heavy. It required specific terrain, elevated positions, the wolf doing work that put it at risk, and even when everything went right, the margin for disaster was thin. The first hunt had shown that clearly enough.

And he didn’t want to push too hard. Facing Bogoarts was a lot of work, especially the mental exhaustion that came with it.

There was easier meat in that forest...