Officer Corpse - Serpen Tine

He had to do a good job.

Serpen Tine had been raised from the dead, not once, not twice, but three times. First, he was a fisherman off the eastern coast. His past there was ancient and shrouded and lost to the shifting sands of time.

Then he was a cobra. A simple snake, sneaking across the sands until his inevitable demise.

He remembered his time as a snake most of all. He wasn't reincarnated. No, his body was that of a ghoul, an experiment by now-Captain Seventeen. The necromancer had two servants, a simple cobra who was too small to be of any use and a long-dead fisherman whose head had been chewed on by some large predatory fish.

So he did what necromancers do and combined the two.

Two existences becoming one in death.

Serpen Tine sometimes felt like an abomination. His cobra head was far too small for his human body, and he constantly had to fight the urge to curl up on any warm rocks he passed by. But that ability to fight those urges is what brought him to where he was.

There were plenty of abominations in the undead army. Few of them became anything. He didn't want to be a nothing. He wanted to excel, to do right by the army that had raised him (from the dead).

It brought him genuine joy when he saw the Bone Father for the first time. Not just seeing the man who was an exemplar of undeath, but to see that the man's highest ranked servant was a Death Butler made from the corpses of two creatures just like Serpen Tine was. Of course, Alex the Maid was made by the Father, and was therefore perfect in a way he would never be but... well, it was something.

He came back to the moment as a ghost materialized from shadow nearby. He was currently hidden in the shade of a large stone that hung off the side of a cliff-face some two day's walk from Yu Xiang. This was very much near the centre of the Flamming Steppes. If he were to climb that cliff-face and squint into the distance, he would be able to see the heat-haze rising off of the main road that cut through the province.

"Sir," the ghost said.

"Yesss?" he replied. Serpen knew that he was far from wise or even smart, but sometimes he felt like his subordinates weren't even trying. "Report."

The ghost bobbed on the spot. It was one of the newer recruits from the city, a formless ghost who had forgotten their gender and appearance and who seemed more like a blob with some silken sheets wrapped over it than a proper geist or apparition. That same weakness of form made the ghost almost entirely invisible to the sight of mortals.

"The army rides east."

Serpen stared. "I know thisss," he hissed. Everyone knew this. Sometimes he wondered if Captain Seventeen also felt this kind of uncanny despair when dealing with his own subordinates. "Let me go sssee for mysself," he said.

The army moving towards Yu Xiang was impressive, at least in number. They moved in a column wide enough to cover the entirety of the road, a road that could hold two carriages abreast.

The size of the army was impressive, yes, but his reports painted a different picture.

Serpen snuck out from beneath his rock and slowly trudged over to a rope ladder leading up the steep cliffside, parts of it hidden in the underbrush. At the top of the ladder was a dug-out. This was recently the home of a prairie fox of the flamming steppes, but now it was one of the many hidey-holes of the Serpens Scouts.

The den had been dug out a little, to make just enough room for a dexterous undead to climb in and crawl across it. A zombie, one of the few in his scout group, hid at the far end of the den next to a thin slit of an opening in the dirt.

There was some tough prairie grass shoved into the hole to mask it better, and some loose stonework around it to keep it in place. From the outside it was all but invisible.

Serpen moved up next to the zombie and was handed a long spyglass which he carefully extended.

There were some hundred or so hidey holes like this along the main road, and more along the side roads and in places where they had a clear view of the landscape. Further out, near the edge of the province, was a well-maintained picket of little stations just like this one.

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He was still growing the Serpens Scouts into a proper division, and trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. So far they'd settled on a system where every such lookout had one undead like a zombie or ghoul and a pair of ghosts or wraiths.

The apparitions could communicate and carry messages. The ghouls and zombies could keep an eye out day and night. Their stench actually warded away small animals as well, which kept them hidden from even those.

The Empress, soon may she die to join their immortal army, was likely not yet aware that her territory was watched over so carefully.

Serpen finally focused on what was in the spyglass.

The army was laid out like a long train. When they'd entered the Steppes they had been walking in perfect, orderly lines with a pep in their step. Now the lines were raggedy and somewhat crooked, some of the men were trudging along lazily, and it was clear that order only held as long as an officer was nearby to hold it.

Serpen turned his attention to the middle of the line, where the cultivators were moving along. Most of them were within horse-drawn carriages of massive proportions, some were riding in palanquins, and still others, rare though they may be, were walking on foot.

Behind them were the elite troops. Men in matching armour whose firm steps hadn't wavered yet. They were a column of perfectly level glaives poking out into the sky with a panoply of tassels catching the wind.

And then the support troops and engineers, some carrying entire siege engines with them. And finally, the juiciest target of them all. The supply wagons.

There were a few of these between each division in the army. They weren't so foolish as to have all of their supplies in one space. But a lot of them were all gathered by the rear. There was even a train of civilians and merchants following the army.

"Hmm, good," he said. The troop disposition hadn't changed from his last report. Turning, he gestured to the ghost. "Plan Alpha," he said.

The ghost bobbed a bow, then faded away.

Serpen retrieved the spyglass and continued to watch. From up here, the army seemed like ants. Very predictable ants.

At the rate they were advancing, they'd reach their new empire's capital in two days. That was, simply put, unacceptable.

And so it was the task of his scouts to slow the army down.

Plan Alpha took a few minutes to begin, but when it did, Serpen could see its consequences rushing across the army. The front stalled, the unruly mob of conscripts slowing down to a full stop while officers on horseback rode around and tried to discover what had happened.

What had happened was simple. They'd discovered a corpse. A brave volunteer (that he had picked out and who was too brain-dead to refuse) was laying on the road.

The living were rather squeamish, after all. They wouldn't just trample a body, especially not one dressed exactly like one of their men, with the same emblems and gear.

The equipment had been stolen days prior, to examine and study.

A small group moved ahead to inspect the body, then more were called up. The news reached the cultivators, who delegated it to inner disciples, who delegated it down to the outer, and finally some poor fool was sent running up the entire length of the army to inspect a corpse.

The soldiers backed away as the cultivator arrived.

Serpen squinted through the spyglass.

The cultivator knelt over the body...

The body leapt up, claws ripping into the young fool with surprising speed and ferocity.

The soldiers panicked, some running back, others fumbling their weapons. A few were smart enough to run towards the undead, but Serpen's scout was smart. As soon as the cultivator was dead, the undead took off running. After a hundred paces, he started to zig-zag, just in time for the first arrows to miss him.

And then the undead was around a bend in the road where it dipped hard enough that it couldn't be seen any longer. Soon it would be in another tunnel like the one Serpen was in.

A ghost materialised in the room. "Plan Alpha worked," it said.

"Start Alpha Two," Serpen replied.

Plan Alpha stage two through four hundred and twelve were going to make the lives of those soldiers very interesting for the next day or so.

***