At that moment, at long last I had managed to reach Level 10. My blood was magma, my heart a supernova, my mind a universe. An overbearing feeling of power that surpassed any of the other levels, I had broken through the first threshold. Now all the primary class abilities were open to me, and could feel the souls of the deceased being drawn towards me.
Awash with new sensations and a domineering attitude, as soon as the new challenger approached, I threw my axe and charged towards him. My senses weren’t overwhelmed, and I was still thinking; but it was also as if I wasn’t thinking at the same time. Ceasing to care about rhyme or reason, I had thoughts about how things should go and acted on those. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t optimal, so long as I willed it, it would be done.
Remembering my opponent as anything more than an ant required conscious effort in the future. At first it seemed like he was only slightly above average size for a goblin, then looked much taller. Batting away the axe as he charged forwards, it was his exceptionally long neck that gave him such an appearance. Like a piranha plant with a bulbous head on a thin stalk, his mouth opened revealing a toothy maw similar to Vamp’s.
Claws honed into points, they appeared short, probably filed down into such a shape. I wasn’t minding such a detail and charged straight forward.
Though doing the same thing, the goblin immediately became wary of me, as I appeared unarmed, and could also draw weapons from nowhere. Half grabbing, half impaling a nearby goblin to be thrown towards me,
Taking advantage of the obstruction and my raised hands, the goblin lunged forward. What utter naivete, had I not just slain a chief moments ago? Even if he was of the same class, he would fare no better than the last!
“*You think this is enough? You INSULT me, you feeble milksop! You frail weakling!*” I snapped my foot upwards, solidly landing a hit on the jaw. His head whipped back, but due to his long neck it didn’t affect his body and slashed at my legs.
“*My pants! NOOO!!!!*” The bastard tore up my pant leg! And not just a little bit, he hit it from both sides, it was more mutilated than half the goblins I pulped! “*YOU WILL PAY for this basTAAAARRRD!!”
It may have been the combination of durable limbs and melodramatic use of ‘bastard’, but I imbued a hand with decay energy and grabbed at the goblin’s skull. He made an effort to deflect me, but as I didn’t have a shirt on, I didn’t have to worry about my arms and grabbed on to his head.
“*Now you perish.*”
The flow of the Negative Energy hadn't spontaneously improved with levels, but I did have a lot more mana at my disposal all of a sudden. Having been fighting with good ol’ fisticuffs, my reservoirs were also nearly full as well; so without heed to cost, I pumped decay energy into him.
It wasn't enough to match the Ark of the Covenant, but the head quickly withered, the location of my hand in particular sinking down into the now mushy skull. It was fairly anticlimactic it had been so simple; but I just couldn't go easy on someone who messed up my pants.
Again I felt another surge of indomitable power, even stronger than from Kugu. That meant he had probably been stronger, so maybe I had gone a little overboard.
Not that I paid attention to that in the moment. Broadnose fell a short while before, and the newcomer had been quickly dispatched. The goblins who witnessed them dying instantly began to flee, and those within radius of my Fear Aura grew even more terrified. Scattering like rats, their numbers still seemed infinite, but the momentum of the battle suddenly shifted.
It’s not like their boundless numbers could have actually done anything, saying if only they’d kept at it they would have had a chance was foolish. After all, the undead did not tire, and at the slow rate of casualties among the dead, the goblins would have their own numbers depleted long before they could break the ranks. After all, I had put them in a defensive position and not all of the undead were exposed at once. Rotating through the surplus, I could head back on occasion to heal them up. We were eternal.
But once the goblins started fleeing, there was absolutely no need to remain on the defensive. Attacks en masse did little, so the pitiful retaliation of one or two goblins at a time would mean nothing. Moving until my legion was in range, I gave the command.
“*Break ranks and slaughter them all, let none escape!*” Shouting, the normally rather droll nameless dead reacted and rattled their bones and weapons. With a deathly chatter, the encirclement broke apart to hunt.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Somehow without the chief, the ranks of goblins were breaking more easily, even if it didn’t seem like they were fully communicating the idea. As fast as they turned to run, the shoulder to shoulder density of goblins was too much. The desire to flee spread outwards, but it was slower than the pressing panic of those already running away. Without space to escape to, the undead, Vamp, and I had no trouble catching up to the back of the wall.
Earlier we slowly ground away at their forces like a cheese grater; they would uselessly press against us, and as it continued their shredded bodies provided an obstruction until we moved to somewhere else. The only damage we took was on a scale too miniscule to mention, and no matter what happened, for cheese to destroy us was an impossible outcome.
We would shred them like cheddar! They would be the toppings of our pizza of death! Spread the sauce of blood across the crust of earth!
I was a bit too into the fight to be thinking up good metaphors, though not much thought was dedicated to it. It was just a mindless cutting and slashing once getting into the swing of things. Well, if it wasn't difficult, grinding was all well and good.
An unfortunate result of all the fighting was my experience returns diminished noticeably. Underworld of Armok never brought XP gained to zero, but once surpassing the enemy’s level by an order of magnitude, the experience dropped by that much as well, minimum of one. So while hordes were being felled, the gains dropped rapidly, although it seemed as though there were a few level 2s and 3s in the mix, so they were quite tasty, helping to fuel my murder spree.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and time flies when you're having fun. A short mayhem filled hour passed and the goblin tide was reduced to mist, and just 30 minutes after that they settled down into a pool of blood.
It was only during that last half hour that I saw the tKlor’t’t warg riders. Having taken care of the relatively powerful elites, they then turned their attentions to traipsing about among the helpless Kugu. Even those that were armed could do little in retaliation, wargs were not near the top of the food chain for no reason. Their thick coats and hides were invulnerable to the meager efforts of the goblins, especially once they were thrown into disarray. Of course it wasn’t impossible for a goblin on the ground to get a shot in on the warg riders; in particular, I spotted many wounds on the legs, one totally torn off, with the rider still fighting on. tKlor’t’t had good subordinates.
The entire battle from first contact to the final goblin struck down lasted a joyous two and a half hours. Letting out a big sigh and doing some unnecessary cooldown stretches, I surveyed the area.
Naturally after starting to run away, the battlefield began to disperse, but towards the center the carnage was concentrated. It reminded me of the Hills of Tuloth, except with trees, and flat ground. Well, without hills the rivers of blood were really more like standing puddles. The main point of the comparison stood, bodies overlapped two to three deep, with everything trampled underfoot.
Now, as the Khthju and the wargs began to rendezvous, I would began sucking up as many bodies as I could. There were many class abilities unlocked, but those would stay with me, the field of corpses was as ephemeral as spring frost, destined to be eaten away by the forces of nature. And Vamp.
The force I was with was only supposed to rest up a short while before heading to aid the main group; tKlor’t’t had faith that somehow our group of elites would somehow finish up our battle first.
Things turned out as he predicted, and it actually hadn’t felt all that challenging, just tedious. Against such large numbers, the results were truly unintuitive, but I suppose that’s what happens when fighting an opponent even more mindless than the undead.
I would ask him when I got back. For the moment, before Khthju was ready to depart again, I wanted as many corpses to be collected as could be managed. Fresh, I was able to omit the flesh-stripping jobs, and the undead needed minimal oversight as to which bodies to grab.
The two hundred lined up like a conveyer belt; Clavi and the Freshmen being the strongest stood at the end adjacent to me. Corpses would be lifted to about waist height, where I could quickly just grab an ankle or wrist to throw it into the Inventory in under a second. In fact, with the multiple stations and using both hands, I could average around three or four per second.
The stacks of bodies were quickly vanishing, my horde acting as a swarm of ants carrying spilled sugar down to their nest. From afar, I’m sure we looked like a cartoonish swarm of piranhas, leaving nothing in our wake. At least, if one ever watched cartoons that’s what they would think of, the tKlor’t’t warg riders that were nearby mostly skittered away in nervousness.
Leaving a small island of corpses for Vamp to eat, there were plenty of others to grab. My minnies could operate in a very large indeed, but personal limitations were beginning to crop up. The Creature Control Radius I was capable of stretched out to around 350 meters, far beyond my visual field. On top of that, the more distance they gained, the more difficult it became to communicate with them.
The fact difficulty increased with distance did the exact opposite of making me feel cheated. Because if control over my minions wasn’t a mere boolean value, that meant while controlling them near myself was easy, and up to the distance was difficult, then perhaps I could go even beyond my theoretical limit, it would just be even harder. As manipulating those within my pre-battle radius of 175 meters was easily done, and simpler still within my usual radius of 50 meters, the matter only depended on practice.
Lacking perception was the more difficult of the two issues. For the most part, the devs did encourage using a few high-level undead as ‘party members’, with maybe several dozen weaker, but still sufficiently strong underlings. They also didn’t design the game world with over a hundred thousand weaklings in one location, making it improbable to gather such a swarm at beginner levels. Horde tactics really came into play over Level 100, where enough perks would have been built up to spend on being able to see through your minions, while at the same time maintaining your own visual field.
A tree involving {Ancient Memories}, and {Soul Field}, it required four perks for minimum operations. [Spiritual Strength] and [Spiritual Detachment] from the {Soul Field} tree, which honestly, most Necromancers would take, but they didn’t give much at low levels, so they were usually relegated for later; and [Comprehending Death] from the {Ancient Memories} tree, which really only served as a stepping stone to other abilities unless you were playing as the information based Gravetongue. Then there was a final perk point needed for the actual ability.
Four perk points, or Level 40, as the barest minimum for seeing what your minion did. In Underworld, this wasn’t a very high number at all, though the lack of combat related perks might make further levels more difficult in comparisons to benefits gained. And this world made leveling up a much harder. While the enemies so far had been far, far, weaker, I at least ran into the odd happenstance of running into a literal army of goblins. But even if I stayed and could continue to wantonly slay them, not only did I suspect their populations could not recuperate faster(no matter how prolific they seemed to be), but they were quickly dropping off in effectiveness. After Level 30, only the elite goblins would probably be able to feed me anything more than a single point of experience, and there certainly wouldn't be enough of those.
Goblins were training dummies, good for a few levels, but then they quickly grew absolutely useless.
So controlling my minnies from afar seemed like a distant dream. Still, I managed to operate my swarm as a well oiled machine within my visual field. For another quarter hour as Khthju rallied his underlings, took count of those lost, and made sure the injuries were tended to, I collected. He and his men settled in for a quick bite to eat to reinvigorate their strength before we headed south to Yhrack.