Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 45: More Training

The status screen appeared in front of his eyes.

[Undead Knight – Flesh (Venomous) Tier]

Former Rank: Percvale Infantry

Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)

Strength: 41

Endurance: 39

Loyalty: 43

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: 41

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: 44

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: 42

Pain Response: None

Morale: Irrelevant

Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)

Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)

He stared at the numbers.

Forty-one, forty-three, forty-four, forty-two. Three days of drilling, barely sleeping and running the same commands over and over in the courtyard until his voice was tired of saying them, and this was what he had to show for it?

It wasn’t enough obviously.

He knew it wasn’t enough before he had even finished reading the screens.

Forty was better than twenty, meaningfully better, the difference between a binding that was barely holding and one that had some real weight behind it.

But for what he was planning, a silent operation in enemy territory in the dark, where the margin for a misread command or a half-second delay was essentially zero, forty wasn’t the number he needed.

He needed fifty at minimum to feel reasonably confident. And even fifty, if he was being honest with himself, was close enough to the edge that a single thing going wrong could unravel it.

He sat with that for a moment.

He had twenty-four days left. The plan couldn’t wait indefinitely. But sending four venomous undead into Valdenmoor’s barracks with loyalty in the low forties and hoping they followed every instruction precisely was the kind of gamble that looked reasonable right up until it wasn’t.

He dismissed the screens and stood up.

More training!

He barely slept that night.

A few hours, broken, his mind running through command sequences even when he wasn’t actively running them.

He was up before dawn and had the four summoned in the courtyard before the first knight of the morning shift had come through the gate.

He pushed harder this time.

Not more of the same simple positional commands, those had produced the initial gains and were now hitting diminishing returns.

He needed complexity.

He needed the undead responding to conditional instructions,sequences and commands that required them to hold one instruction in place while receiving a second one.

Move to the wall and hold. While holding, turn to face the gate. While facing the gate, kneel, rise then return.

Layered commands actually, one on top of another, each one requiring the binding to carry more information than a single instruction.

It was harder to execute and harder to sustain, and the loyalty gains from a successfully completed complex command were larger than the gains from a simple one.

He ran them through sequences for hours.

His head started aching by midmorning, it wasn’t a sharp pain but a dull, persistent pressure behind his eyes that he recognized as the cost of maintaining active binding on four undead simultaneously while pushing the connection harder than it was used to being pushed.

Nonetheless he kept going.

Afternoon arrived and he never slacked, persisting through the mental pain (headache), doing more sequences.

The ache behind his eyes had spread to the back of his skull. He drank water, ate something Maret brought out without being asked, and went back to it. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Garren had checked up on him and saw that the Baron was busy so he only:

"Weldone m’lord." Which Darion replied to.

By evening the undead were responding with a precision that was noticeably different from the morning. The holds were cleaner. The transitions between commands were faster and the layered sequences were being carried out in the right order rather than the right approximate order.

He checked the loyalty stats.

[Loyalty: 67]

[Loyalty: 65]

[Loyalty: 69]

[Loyalty: 66]

He exhaled slowly.

There it was.

There...it... fuckin’... Was!

Sixty-five to sixty-nine, all four of them, clustered in a range that meant something really good.

He knew what sixty loyalty felt like from his graveyard knights, especially the first one he created, it was the point where commands arrived without the slight drag of a weak binding, where the undead did what he told them rather than a version of what he told them.

At sixty-five and above, with the layered command training he had just put them through, these four were as ready as he was going to make them without another week of work he didn’t have.

He unsummoned them and sat down on the cold stone of the courtyard, putting his back against the wall.

His head was still aching and his endurance had taken a real hit over the last two days. It was not physical exhaustion exactly but just tiredness.

Tiredness of someone who had been running a mental process at high intensity for an extended stretch without adequate rest.

He had slept maybe six hours across two nights. His eyes felt dry and his thoughts had that slight blurriness around the edges.

It was definitely worth it though.

Sixty-seven loyalty on a venomous undead knight was not something that came easily. The system hadn’t exaggerated when it said consistency mattered: it had taken two days of near-constant drilling to move from forty to sixty-five, and the second day had been harder than the first by a considerable margin.

The binding had resisted at first. But he had changed it.

He checked his full status screen.

[STATUS]

Name: Darion

Title: Baron of Percvale

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Novice

Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving - aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 40 [+1]

Agility: 29 [+2]

Endurance: 39 [+10]

Vitality: 30 [+3]

Perception: 30 [+2]

Intelligence: 37 [+3]

Willpower: 37 [+4]

[Knight Undead Inventory: 10/10]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/5]

[Skills:

Death Perception]

Starving-aligned?

He looked at that for a moment.

It had been Death-aligned when he first saw it, which had fit well enough: a Necromancer in a dying barony full of unburied dead, everything pointing in one direction.

But starving aligned was different. An upgrade actually.

It wasn’t just the presence of death in the territory, it was the active relationship between the territory and what he had been doing in it. The graves he had opened, the dead he had raised, the knights who had served under this banner and were serving again in a different form.

He found he agreed with the change.

Death-aligned had described what Percvale was when he arrived. Starving-aligned described what it was becoming.

It was something for Darion by the way, it meant that people in the Barony were no longer more likely to die but instead starve.

The distinction felt accurate.

The endurance gain was the largest single jump in his attributes, ten points, the direct result of two days of pushing himself past reasonable limits and continuing anyway.

His willpower had moved too, which made sense. Willpower was what had kept him in the courtyard at midnight running command sequences when everything in him wanted to stop.

He dismissed the screen and looked at the empty courtyard.

Twenty-three days left on Aldric’s deadline.

The undead were ready.

Now to perfect the plan.