Chapter 39 - Smoke And Fire

I woke with the dawn again. That hadn’t been my habit, before all of this. I’d been more of a night owl. But these days it felt like there was always more that needed to be done than there were hours in the day, so as soon as sunlight hit my eyelids I’d snap awake and be unable to drift back off. I yawned, stretched, and packed my things back into my bag again, then headed back downstairs.

The man’s body was still on the chair where I’d found him. That had to be first on my list. I’d taken his watch, stayed in his house… The least I could do was bury the man. A quick glance out the back door in the kitchen told me that he had a large enough back yard to make that happen, but I wondered if it might be better to bury him in the actual cemetery. After all, the fence there had kept the undead inside it. If he ‘woke up’ at some later date, it would probably be better for everyone if he was contained like that.

After a quick breakfast, I headed for the garage again, my team of undead in tow. I’d spotted a shovel in there when I was working with the crystals the night before. I snagged that, and we headed back out to the road. I figured I’d have the zombies dig a grave and then we’d haul the man over after the hole was ready.

Hope let out a series of barks. She sounded alarmed and dashed down the road toward the south before howling at her top volume. That was her magical howl, the one that stunned opponents.

I turned, already preparing a spell, then stopped. It was another set of undead! Skeletons, just like the ones I’d fought in the graveyard. There were five of the things ambling down the street toward me. Was there another burial ground nearby? How many cemeteries did this city have, anyway?

There were four of the things. I had a Drain Life ready to cast, but changed my mind. I had a tier five Control Undead spell now, which meant I could control sixteen tiers worth of dead things. I only had four—two tier one zombies, and Hope. I reached out with my Control spell, and a ray of black fire shot from my hand and enveloped one of the oncoming skeletons. It came under my command in an instant, and the others turned to attack it. Before they could destroy it I ordered my new minion to move away from them, back toward us, as fast as it could.

Then I cast the spell again, grabbing another of the skeletons and repeating the process. I did it twice more, until I had four of them under my command, all moving toward me. Then, because I wanted to see what my new Drain Life spell was like, I cast it on the final undead. It collapsed instantly, falling into the road as a pile of bones.

I walked up to the bones and tapped one of them, a new crystal popping into my palm. I glances at it—and I could tell what it did! The stone was an Animate Dead crystal. That was new. I’d never been able to tell what the crystals did until I’d socketed them. After that, I could tell which was which just by holding them, but I’d always had to place them into a Point first. Now it seemed I could identify them just by touching them?

Maybe it was another benefit of hitting rank five.

That was the sixteenth Animate crystal, the last one I needed to rank it up to tier five. I pulled the other Animate Dead stones from my bag of crystals and held them in my hand with the new one. All of them sank quickly into my palm.

I felt them merging with the tier three stone on the outer ring. They merged, and in a flash it was tier four. But things weren’t done at that point. The tier four vanished, moving to merge with the other tier four Animate Dead spell. Together, the two become a tier five stone, still in my second Point.

With the old outer ring Point clear, and Animate now up to tier five with its own outer Point, I now had two slots open. Which spells should I put in them? What would work best?

“Whichever I slot, they’ve got to be black spells,” I mused aloud, talking to my new collection of undead.

I figured I’d think about it while I worked. With my escort increased, I had plenty of security now. I handed the shovel off to one of the new skeletons and had another pick up a shovel that had been dropped during the battle the day before. The two of them went to work, digging a new grave for the man whose watch I wore.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Meanwhile, I went around Animating a bunch of bones. I had no Animated undead, and I had sixteen points worth of them to play with. What to do? Would I be better off with sixteen skeletons? There was no shortage of bones to use. Or should I opt for quality over quantity? I could get eight skeleton warriors instead.

That felt like the better plan to me, so I began having my undead move piles of bones closer to one another. Once they had that done, I cast Animate Dead, focusing on bringing up a tier two monster. The spell only used the bones from one body, but it pulled something, mana perhaps, out of the other set of bones, leaving them empty. I could feel that those drained bones were useless to me now.

I managed to cast it four times before I needed a break. The grave was dug by then, and the morning sun was well above the horizon. It was time to bury the stranger whose house had given me refuge, so I ordered Rosie and Guildie to go wrap the man in a blanket and bring him to me.

As I was waiting, I took in the sky, now bright blue—except in one area. Off to the west, a plume of dark grey smoke poured into the air. Some sort of fire, and it was a big one. I got the feeling the worst of it had already passed, that the bulk of the flames had burned themselves out while I was still asleep. I hadn’t seen the remaining smoke earlier against the dark sky, but it was plenty obvious now.

I had a pretty good idea what it was, too. That smoke was rising from right about where the campus police station stood. I had a bad feeling they’d been hit last night. Maybe by the goblins from their fortress, maybe by something else. But that much smoke wasn’t a good sign.

I turned to Hope. “You think we should go check on them?”

She growled. That wasn’t a sign of approval.

“Maybe you’re right. Bradley did try to kill us,” I replied. “But Kat is still there. Alfred, too. And a lot of innocent people, besides them. The ones who tried to hurt us are already dead, and at this point I don’t really think any of the rest of them are a danger to me. Not now.”

Hope gave a chuffing sound.

“I have no idea if you understand me at all, girl, but you’re good to bounce ideas off,” I told her. “We need to go check. If all’s well, then we’ll just walk away, no harm, no foul. If they’re in trouble, though, we might be the only ones who can save them.”

While I waited for my zombies to return with the man, I went back to raising some of the bones, casting Animate Dead four more times. By the time my mana was run down again, I had eight skeleton warriors under my control, and my Animate spell was maxed out.

The skeleton warriors were a lot stronger than the basic skeletons. I could feel the power in each of their steps. They were stronger, faster, smarter, and understood weapons and tools better than the basic skeletons had. Somehow the spell granted me a basic understanding of their capabilities. They could use weapons much better than their basic brethren, and they would work together better as well. The eight of them were much stronger than sixteen basic skeletons would’ve been. Especially after I got them some weapons.

I’d made the right call.

I kept the burial ‘service’ short. It wasn’t like I was a priest, and I had no idea what religion this guy was anyway. I said a few words of thanks for his home, and what I’d taken from him, as my zombies laid him into the grave. Then the skeletons filled his grave back in, and that job was complete.

“Now we need to arm the rest of you properly,” I told my assembled troops. “If we’re headed into a tussle with the goblins, I want to make sure we’re as prepared for it as we can be.”

We worked our way back out to the road, then headed south. We stopped at each house, knocking first to see if anyone was there, but they were all the same. Each home was locked, but empty, and all of them had signs people packed up some essentials before departing. Part of me badly wanted to go to the Air Guard base and see if I was right, if that had become a rally point for survivors. But not yet, not until I was sure my classmate and roommate were still okay.

Instead, we worked our way through one house after another, collecting everything that could serve as a weapon or shield. We raided every trash can for the lids; they weren’t perfect, and I’d need to build better shields at some point here. But for the time being, they’d work. We found a fair number of baseball bats, too. Popular sport. More houses had one than didn’t. There were also a slew of large kitchen knives, hammers, and other tools which could double as weapons in a pinch.

The real crowning glory was finding a pair of bows. One was a kid’s bow, maybe for teens, and the other for an adult. There were two quivers of arrows there, as well. I couldn’t shoot a bow to save my life, but the skeleton warriors could. I armed two of them with the bows, giving each a heavy kitchen knife as a backup weapon. Having some ranged firepower besides my Drain would be a massive boon.

I crossed a small river as we moved south, then quickly found where the additional undead came from. As I’d thought, there was a whole other cemetery just off the main road a bit. Unlike the one I’d fought in the day before, this one had chain link fences instead of the heavy wrought iron. There were no inscriptions on these; they were cheap fences from a hardware store, not craftsman forged work. The skeletons had torn the fences apart, and they were all over the place.

As I approached, the first ones saw us and headed our way. I grinned. There were only about two dozen of the things. I’d faced so much worse, that barely even tickled my concern meter now.

“Shield wall!” I called out, and my undead formed themselves quickly into a line, preparing for battle.