Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 39: Deer Hunt

The deer hunt needed a different approach than the Bogoart hunts did.

With Bogoarts, the whole problem had been survival.

Figuring out how to fight something that could kill twenty-seven men in an afternoon and still come out ahead.

Using kinda complex plan: the bait plan, the elevated positions, the undead wolf, all of it had been designed around one question: how do you fight something that dangerous without getting yourself killed?

Deer didn’t require fighting. They required finding.

Which came with its own problem. Garren had mentioned killing a small deer near the barony’s edge a while back, and that was pretty much the extent of what they knew about where the animals actually roamed.

They’d never needed to think about deer territory before because deer hadn’t been the priority. Surviving Bogoart encounters had been the priority, and that problem took up so much attention that everything else got pushed aside.

Darion had wondered why the knights hadn’t been hunting smaller game all along, if smaller game existed in the forest.

After thinking about it, he figured it was this: going into a forest that had been actively killing people for years took a special kind of motivation. The knights who had gone in before had been hungry and desperate and didn’t have a plan, so they went in the way desperate people go into dangerous places — straight ahead, fast and hoping desperation would carry them through.

What they ran into, every time, was Bogoarts. After enough of those encounters, the forest just became a place where people died, full stop. Nobody was going back in no matter what else might be living in there.

The deer had been in there the whole time. They just hadn’t ever been the reason anyone went in.

Darion took thirty-one knights. Not his full force, this wasn’t a fighting expedition and he didn’t need that many. Thirty-one was still a big group for a hunting party, but the forest had earned some respect and he wasn’t going in understaffed. He brought the wolf. He left Garren at the barony to handle the meat sales and the training schedule.

They followed the direction Garren had pointed out and moved carefully, staying out of the northeastern section entirely and sticking to the western approaches where the trees were farther apart and the undergrowth wasn’t as thick.

They found deer sign within the first hour, tracks in a soft patch of ground near a stream, fresh enough that they couldn’t have been there long.

The group slowed down and spread out, moving quietly. The knights handled the shift from marching to hunting with more discipline than Darion had expected.

They found the first deer in a clearing on the western side. It heard them before it saw them, or smelled them; more likely, and bolted.

Three spears went flying after it at the same time. Two missed. One caught it in the hindquarter and dropped it about forty feet from where it had been standing.

The second deer took longer. They tracked it for the better part of an hour through the quieter parts of the forest, the undead wolf moving ahead in slow sweeps, before they cornered it near a dense patch of brush and brought it down clean.

Two deer. Not the haul they’d been hoping for when they set out. The forest was big, but the deer population was sparse. Whatever had been in there before the Bogoarts took over had either been hunted out over the years or had moved to ranges farther out. Two was what the forest gave them that day, so two was what they came back with.

They also came back with a dead Bogoart, which hadn’t been part of the plan.

It found them on the way out, coming in from the east the way Bogoarts always came, fast and without warning, hitting the back of the column before anyone in the front even knew it was there.

Darion’s undead wolf turned it in the first few seconds and the knights closed in around the edges.

It was over in under two minutes, but it cost them. Two of his undead took damage that destroyed their core structure during the fight. Both were Rotten Tier, the weakest in his inventory. They were gone now, the slots sitting empty.

He replaced them the next morning with two more from the graveyard. Not Rotten this time, he was getting better at picking graves, reading the ground and the stones, and he came back with one Bone and one Rust. An improvement on what he had lost.

By the end of the week, things had changed in ways you could see if you knew what to look for.

The knights were eating regularly, which was the most important thing, the thing everything else flowed from. Regular food meant regular energy. Regular energy meant the training Garren had been running each morning was actually producing results instead of just exhausting men who had nothing to replace what they burned.

The hollow-eyed flatness that had been the barracks’ permanent atmosphere when Darion arrived was still there in the background, but it had faded. Men were talking more, arguing more, making the kind of noise that came from people who had enough energy to have opinions again.

The coin from the meat sales wasn’t much, but it was adding up. Not enough to make a dent in the debt (that was a problem on a completely different scale) but enough to start thinking about tools, about seeds, about the farmland and what getting it productive again would actually require.

The undead inventory sat at ten out of ten, the wolf in the animal slot, the full force available and ready.

It had been, all things considered, a good week. The first good week Percvale had seen in longer than Garren wanted to guess.

His system stats was also alright:

[STATUS]

Name:Darion

Title:Baron of Percvale

Class:Necromancer

Rank:Novice

Territory:Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance:Low (Death-aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength:39 [+6]

Agility:27 [+5]

Endurance:29 [+6]

Vitality:27 [+5]

Perception:28 [+6]

Intelligence:34 [+5]

Willpower:33 [+5]

[Knight Undead Inventory: 10/10]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/5]

[Skills:

Death Perception]

Then a messenger arrived.

He came through the gate on a horse that was well-fed and well-kept, which stood out immediately in a barony where the horses were neither. His clothes were clean, his posture emitting sigma, and he carried a sealed letter with the insignia of a neighboring kingdom pressed into the wax.

Garren brought him to Darion without saying anything, which told Darion everything about how Garren had sized up the situation before the letter was even opened.

Darion broke the seal and read it.

The language was formal and courteous in that particular way where formal courtesy starts to feel like a threat, the kind of letter written by someone who wanted it on record that they had been reasonable before they stopped being reasonable.

The kingdom of Valdenmoor presented its greetings to the Baron of Percvale, and wished to remind him that the outstanding debt of fourteen thousand gold coins, borrowed by the previous administration of Percvale and long overdue for settlement, remained unpaid. Given the extended period of non-payment and the absence of any agreed repayment schedule, Valdenmoor considered it appropriate to formally request either full settlement within thirty days or the transfer of the eastern farmland territory as equivalent compensation.

Failure to respond within the stated period would necessitate further measures.

Darion folded the letter and looked at Garren, brows furrowed.

’Valdenmoor?’ he thought. ’The fuck is Valdenmoor.’