The remaining 3 guards had finally perished at the hands of the swarm of undead and thus freed up all of the undead to swarm Berk and Jarrl. I called off the undead that had been attacking the slaves even though I had ordered them not to do so. Lesser undead were so dumb that it was plain frustrating at times, which was why I wanted to get higher tiered undead soon. I decided to summon a load of undead goblins to cover me while I pulled off some shenanigans so I used my inventory and tossed around 100 goblin corpses in a massive pile in the dungeon. This instantly made Berk and Jarrl agitated as they tried to stop me by charging through undead and using ranged attacks on me. Jarrl's knife throwing skills were particularly deadly as he nearly nailed me several times.
"Berk, that necromancer's not some weak minion, he's the real deal! Don't you have that skill ready yet?! My throwing daggers aren't doing jack shit!" Screamed Jarrl as he tossed a few daggers my way every so often while he sliced more undead goblins. He was getting dangerously close to me when a soul-caged goblin blew itself up and stopped him in his tracks, dealing minimal damage but it sure caught him by surprise.
I ordered the remaining 7 soul-caged goblins to do the same thing when they got close and went back to ressurecting more goblins. By now I was finding the process far easier than when I had started off doing it in this world. Could be the levels or just practice but I don't know.
"Do I have enough cores? Hmm, oh I got plenty, thanks to those guys clearing the golems for me, I've got a few hundred stored up. Perfect." I tossed the cores in and yep, resurrected a hundred soul-caged goblins. Err, was I the process of doing so.... making soul-caged undead was still relatively new for me and I was having a bit of a hard time doing so, but this was going to be some good practice nonetheless.
"Practice in the middle of a god damn battlefield but practice nonetheless..." I muttered to myself while I heard 6 more explosions go off during my spell casting. I finished the spell eventually as one of my soul-caged ogres finally bit the dust and blew up, though this time the duo were well aware of my trap hidden in the big guys so they had backed up a fair bit before killing it. Damn it, no easy kills I guess.
"Alright then. 50 of you morons head off and hold them off for as long as possible, the rest of you stay and defend me." I ordered my undead as I started to pull out 3 golem cores and 3 ogre corpses. I also pulled out some iron that I had collected from the fallen golems. "Man, I can't wait to see what the hell happens this time. hehehe... Right, right better get started, those 2 aren't sitting idle it seems." I looked over and sure enough, the second ogre had fallen with a fiery bang that did little to no damage to the tag team, but instead killed 2 regular undead goblins.
"Be careful with your self destructs you morons! Urgh, why am I arguing with undead? Those guys don't even have the brain capacity to argue back. Might as well finish this project fast and get out soon. Shit's getting a bit too intense for comfort."
The 2 seemed to have heard this and had a rather interesting reaction. Rather than be glad I was leaving, they were anxious and started to fight more furiously, no doubt using up a lot of mana to cleave through the undead that were almost piling onto them at this point in an effort to hold them off. I pulled out large lumps of rocks that could be used as clubs from my inventory and dumped them in a pile and ordered my defence force to arm themselves before moving back to my project.
I started to do the resurrect undead spell to make a soul-caged ogre but I didn't stop there. Instead of letting the spell finish I instead fed the iron to the soul cage that was being constructed, making it reinforced. I also decided to add iron to the body's of the golems. I kept fiddling with them while feeding more iron into the spell at a considerable rate. By the time 6 minutes had passed I had finished but noticed most of my defensive force was decimated. The armed goblins did marginally better than their unarmed ones but still did practically nothing to the two encroaching on me. It was the self destruction of the soul-cages that caused any actual damage and held them off for as long as they did.
I watched as the tendrils of pitch black finished enfusing into the corpes and watched them twitch before rising up. They looked cool as hell man.
"Holy shit you guys are badass for lesser undead. You guys have old looking iron armour and is that an iron club?? Where the hell did that come from?" I looked over them a second time before ordering my ogre soul warrior to charge forward and finish the two over there. "Ah shit, #3 stay back and defend me! I don't wanna be held out in the open. I learned my lesson the last time." With that order my newest experiments went into battle. These big guys seemed to have a longer lifespan according to the skill menu. They had a 2 hour lifespan because their soul-cage was reinforced and had more intelligence than my other undead.
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"They're still dumb as a sack of bricks but they at least know some basic strategies and follow orders better it seems. Oh shit Berk just got his ass handed to him!"
Sure enough When I looked back I had saw that my ogre soul warriors had flung Berk across the room with a massive baseball esque swing. One of them had gone and ran in guns blazing, attracting the attention of both the humans while the other got the goblins to run from both sides of the two and ran behind where he promptly swung his crude iron club like a baseball and batted him. Berk noticed it seemed and used a skill to block the impact but didn't completely soak all the damage as he got up shakily. Jarrl backed up and got the big guy some breathing room by fending off the rushing undead, causing explosions to occur everywhere as the soul-caged died off with every swing of his. He was gasping for breath at this point and so was Berk. They were rather tired from the endless fighting but the undead were still raring to go.
Berk looked at me and then Jarrl before shaking his head and saying "We need to use a recall shard. We're going to die here otherwise. Sir Erabalt will understand...hopefully." Jarrl looked incredibly surprised to hear about this proposition coming from his comrade and agreed right away, considering who had said the suggestion in the first place and how tired he was.
"You're right. These damn undead won't stop! Let's leave. The necromancer will die when he gets near Sir Erabalt's main force anyways so we have nothing to fear for our lords life." They had been killing undead as they continued that and the Ogre soul warriors were pressuring them as hard as they could but they were still undead ogres at the end of the day. The crude iron armour they had on was turned to scrap metal at this point and one of them had lost an arm and had a massive gash on its chest.
"Leaving so soon? We just started the experim- I mean fighting!" I hadn't been sitting around doing nothing when my minions were fighting. No sir. I had been trying to make a new version of Mana Drain. I had tried to fuze the spell into a golem core but had blown up over 4 dozen golem cores in the process. I had only succeeded 3 times and wasn't sure if it was even a good success. I looked at my new creation once more before using it.
Nercon Heart: A necromancer tool created for the specific purpose of draining all mana and health out of any living enemies within the range of use. The core stores all energies within for future use in nercomantic spells or other usages.
I smiled with glee as I wound up and tossed the thing at the two fighting and trying to abandon ship. The Nercon Heart bounced and rolled and eventually stopped within 7 metres of the two. It then started to glow with dark purple and black energies seemingly emanating from it. The thing then started to hum which caught the attention of the 2 and they looked over to see the thing powering up. They didn't like it one bit and rapidly abandoned everything to use their escape items and activated them with no hesitation. Too bad the thing powered up before they could leave. The thing started to pulse with purple energy before it violently started to suck it inwards, along with blue energy and some neon red fog that was being torn out of the two. They were in incredible pain it seemed and the undead didn't hesitate to take advantage, clawing, clubbing and punching with their entire might. I was sitting there in awe at what I had just made.
"That's a total cheat! What the hell?!" I started smiling as I was imagining how many more I could make and what else I could create with experimentation, but that's when I felt something was off. Berk had already vanished using his escape tool but Jarrl hadn't yet and he tossed several knives at me. I quickly dodged out of the way as more and more came flying my way. I made a barrier of mana but my mana wasn't fully recovered, only around a tenth full so I wouldn't be able to block much more. I ordered my ogre soul warrior to tank the hits for me. I started to back up and head for the exit and saw that Jarrl finally left, but not before tossing a glowing orange dagger at me, which my ogre blocked. The dagger instantly tore into the ogre and caused it to catch fire and burn constantly. The fire wouldn't go out and it couldn't pull out the dagger either. There was some mana holding it in place. The ogre died and I saw that Jarrl was finally leaving, looking nearly dead but with a face of contempt as his last minute attack on my life failed.
I breathed in a few deep breaths to stop my rapid breathing from my near miss with death. "That dagger was definitely enchanted with everlasting flames or something. If i'd been hit with that...." I shuddered as I realized I again nearly died. It was decided. I was going to power level soon and get rid of my weakness. I was tired of nearly dying at every turn. I turned to the slaves that were left behind and handed out most of my healing potions and collected my Nercon Heart then left silently, heading for the exit to the dungeon. I ordered my undead to head deeper into the dungeon, attacking anyone that looked like the guards and ignoring anyone else.
It was time to get my grind on and I was going to do it soon. That I promised myself.