As the former Heroes once again began to make the hike through the (partially) cleared portion of the Gallows Woods, Kain, the Abominable King and the person whose nation they were going to try and emigrate to, was busy doing some experiments. He was concerned about something. It was something that had been on his mind off and on for the past few years, and it had to do with his ‘Kingdom Management Tool’.

He had managed to view the ‘tech tree’ and had discovered that the undead formations he could summon only went up to tier 3. This was a problem for obvious reasons. While a Tier 2 Undead was indeed quite powerful and had a decent intelligence and while Tier 3 Undead were likely to be even better, Tier 3 Ranged Undead could, at most, carry magical breechloading rifles. If he was ever to deal with a foe that used automatic weaponry, his undead would be cut down in moments, their armor probably doing next to nothing to stop a high-velocity full-metal-jacketed machine gun round.

For a military that was comprised mainly of undead, being that heavily outgunned, even if it was merely a possibility, was definitely no bueno. As a result, Kain had taken to experimenting with necromancy, using the recently deceased foes he managed to get his hands on as test subjects. Of course, Alistaira had to insist on helping which made Alexis insist on assisting as well. The two had a friendly rivalry going on, with both of them knowing full well that the only woman that Kain had eyes for was his wife yet both competing for Kain’s time and attention in a rather playful manner.

Back to the experiments.

The main experiment was to see if mashing bodies together could create a useful undead. It had long since been proven that a mass grave was a place that could spawn some of the most terrible undead. It was also a general rule of thumb that necromancers don’t try and fuse corpses together. When multiple bodies were fused together and reanimated, the residual will from each of the bodies remained and fought for control within the patchwork abomination that had been raised.

This resulted in one of two things happening. Either the patchwork undead would literally rip itself apart due to each will trying to maintain its own independence or the undead would just seize up and fail to respond until only one will remained. When the later happened, the patchwork undead would go berserk soon after the single dominant soul emerged triumphant. There was something about stuffing numerous souls inside the same body that drove them mad and made controlling them all but impossible. Even OG Kain had tried to do this, only to have failed in doing so.

But that was the past, and now Kain had a chance to try things out. He started not with mashing bodies together, but instead putting bones together. He was trying to see what was the tipping point at which the undead would start fighting itself and that point seemed to be related to how much time was spent coaxing the undead into unlife. Alistaira was the first to hit on the reason as to why previous attempts had failed. Most necromancers and even arch necromancers had a limited mana pool. Hell, even vampires had a limit to what they could exert, and the main problem was that it was far too easy to lose control and oversaturate the undead with magic too quickly.

Precise control was the name of the game, and since almost all spells, including channeled ones, relied on pumping out as much mana as quickly as possible no one had figured out how to slowly release their power over longer periods of time. The discovery of this was a game changer. It meant that there was the potential for unknown spells to be made and discovered that did not rely on mass mana dumps and instead relied on fine control taking place over elongated periods of time.

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The sky was the limit, but it still left the task at hand.

Kain and the two women managed to craft some strange skeletal creatures during their experiments. Kain created a skeleton that was partially modeled off of a certain alien cyborg general and Alistaira fused bones together to create a skeleton with bones up to three times as thick and a skeletal horse’s body in place of the structure from the waist down. Alexis, on the other hand, created a Death Hound-sized skeletal Cerberus with mouths filled with long, sharp teeth that vibrated up, down, back and forth. It seemed that while Kain and Alistaira were just playing around, Alexis was taking this very seriously.

…

Kain entered the workshop and looked around at the new stuff Wakanda and the others in the ‘Think Tank’ had been working on. His eyes scanned the warehouse-sized room and locked onto a single piece of equipment. It was a prototype gas-operated machine gun reminiscent of one of the earliest machine guns from Earth. It did not use a tube to feed gas back into the weapon to eject and then chamber a new round, rather the gas forced a spring-loaded lever to move as it escaped, and that lever then ejected the cartridge and loaded a new one in a convoluted Rube-Goldberg-like motion.

Wakanda had placed it in the area where all the ‘failures’ and ‘unneeded objects’ went, so Kain saw nothing wrong with picking it up and carrying it away along with its associated ammunition. He had an idea on how to use this, but based on the fact that when he had tried to register his newly created undead with the ‘KMT’ they had been taken away and registered as Tier 3 Undead (thus making them out of his reach for now) he fully expected that this experiment would result in the possible creation of a Tier 4 Undead.

He left a note for Wakanda thanking him for the weapon and moved over to one of the ‘buildings’ he had made in the time between battles. It was simply called the ‘Charnel Pit’ and was supposed to help produce and increased amount of the ‘Dark Magic Credits’ that let him build ‘buildings’ and do other cool stuff. When entered, it was basically a massive field filled with dead bodies in various states of decay, all of them locked in stasis and constantly exuding dark mana. Kain had tried to get to the bottom of the pile once, only to find that he could dig down for miles and not be any closer to the floor. It was isolated, quiet, and nobody came here; it was the perfect place to gather some fresh bodies and experiment.

Using his magic, Kain began to pull some bodies free from the mass and rearrange bone and meat around the weapon and ammo that he had brought. He had already made a massive metal box to hold the ammo and a belt to ferry it to the gun, now all he needed to do was fuse the metal and meat in just the right way to create a hideous masterpiece. After a few hours of fiddling, he hit paydirt. The abomination moaned and groaned as it finished its transition into unlife and as Kain touched his creation it vanished into thin air.

Kain hurried back to his throne and pulled up the Tech Tree. He barely held himself back from pumping his fists when he saw that there was now a Tier 4 to his list of eventually possible undead and buildings. The creation of a new undead and the breaking of the normal limits was something to celebrate, and as much as Kain wanted to bust out the champagne and caviar he still had to deal with the former Heroes. They should have arrived by now, but he had not heard anything about them.

Then it hit him. Of course he didn’t hear about them, he was fiddling with a bunch of metal and flesh in a ‘building’ that no one ever went to. He opened a tab in the ‘Kingdom Management Tool’ and summoned Jeeves the head butler. A few words later and the message was sent. Kain relaxed in his big, sinister-yet-regal-looking and comfy chair and waited for the former Heroes to take their first steps into his crowning city. Hopefully they would behave themselves and not simply raise a stir. He had enough things to deal with, and having the people he invited cause mayhem was not something he wished to endure.