They spent all morning on the road and were nearing the outskirts of New New York at around lunchtime, Bobby hadn’t wanted to go gravedigging too close to home and the metropolis had the most graveyards of any city they were close to according to the internet.

“Are we nearly there yet?” Bobby asked for what must have been the hundredth time.

No one replied to him this time, none of the others actually knew due to their general lack of non megacorp disabled phones. Between them the only portable device they had was an old Skylink Laptop that accessed the net via the satellite ring round the planet, a megastructure that had been built before the lunar tragedy and had miraculously survived most of the planetary upheaval that ensued, remaining quite independent from megacorporations. Which was good because having a neutral party own the internet generally did favours for the online freedoms of the people.

They also had a satnav, but Gary had expressed a hate towards the thing and argued that he didn’t need its help to get to the city.

Bobby’s question happened to prove a watched kettle did boil eventually, especially if one was persistent and bored enough. The horizon was broken by three needle-like towers, soon followed by three smaller humps of city around their bases. The humps weren’t actually hills, rather they were the countless skyscrapers that had been built pressed so close together that they formed a sort of bedrock, which a new and more modern city had been built atop of.

It was the general case nowadays for most cities, following the human rule of ‘if you run out of sideways room, go up’. And the three needle-like towers were owned by exactly who you would think, almost every city was a war ground for the megacorps to measure their dicks in the most literal way possible.

Bobby took a moment to admire the cyberpunk-esque skyline before realising they still had at least half an hour to go and deciding to check his system.

Roadkill Necromancer - Human[Bobby]

Magic[100] Soul[100]

Magic Capacity

10

Magic Density

10

Regeneration

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

10

Perception

15

Dexterity

12

Warning: If soul drops below 80 death will occur

His numbers hadn’t gone up as much as he’d hoped in the past week, although he hoped to change that when he had corpses to experiment on. However just because he’d been idle in that sense didn’t mean he’d accomplished nothing. In fact he’d spent a lot of time watching souls to try and understand how his new knowledge related to them.

He opened his third eye and looked inwards at his own soul. The familiar cloud met his vision, with flashes of light pulsing through it like miniature bolts of lightning. The tiny flashes as he’d come to learn were like the bits in a computer, and while they were small and insignificant separately, together they formed the complex thought machine that was a person's mind. The more he had come to understand them, the further Bobby knew he was away from constructing a working mind, but that wasn’t the goal of necromancy, rather necromancy was an art form that intended to turn something that was decaying or broken into something new and different.

He pushed his perception deeper into his soul, past the cloudy layers and lazy flashes that made up his subconscious mind to the dense centre that pulsed with activity, and past that was a brief calmness like the eye of a storm. However unlike natural storms the eye wasn’t empty, occupying it was a small symphony of activity, the fragile nucleus that was his ego. Bobby silently watched his ego for a moment, it was such a delicate thing, but its role was seemingly fathomless and complex. It dictated a person's entire personality while at the same time being the source of an individual's intuition, consciousness and imagination.

Self experimentation was not the way to go in learning about this remarkable part of souls though. Bobby had spent a lot of time studying Mcgunkins broken ego, after all one often learned the most from studying something that didn’t work properly, and Bobby had learned a lot. Mcgunkin’s ego had shown a remarkable regeneration ability in comparison with other parts of the soul. In fact Bobby suspected the magic used in making a thrall was only needed to heal the outer layers of the soul, as far as he could tell the Ego was quite capable of returning itself to full functionality. Although that didn’t mean it was the same as before, it was not. It had seemingly fully integrated the piece of Bobby’s soul he had put into it to such a degree that he had been unable to actually locate where the piece was.

He wasn’t exactly sure what allowed him to control the beings he made into thralls, but he had a few theories which would either prove or disprove themselves as he made more thralls. He would also need to study Boris and Gomps souls when they returned to Kelpington to see if his absence had altered how much control he had over them.

Bobby shook his head and refocused on the city which had become a lot closer in his ponderings. He could now make out the countless cars and trains on the roads and monorails that weaved through the layers of the mountainous city like lines of silver ants.

The graveyards would of course be buried at the bottom, in the crumbling bedrock of the old city. He doubted going down there would be a pleasant experience, but at least there was less likely to be a consistent police presence down there. However a lack of police didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be other organisations that they might have to avoid down there.

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