I finally got next to the darned mages who had very rudely aimed their ice spears at my nether region and I was angry. "You are so dead, you have no idea!" I grinned like a maniac as I grabbed the face of one of the remaining 4 mages, and activated mana drain close up.
The thing about mana drain is that if you have contact with your target, it only affects them, but the rate it drains them is absolutely terrifying. I think it's a fair trade-off to be honest, because how often does any mage or necromancer get close enough to touch their target. None really because that would be suicide.
After the mage had his face grabbed by me he started screaming and tried to tear his face out of my grip but I clamped down harder as the mana drain started to do its work. The man started to show signs of mana fatigue within seconds, and my mana pool was full so I started lobbing fireballs at the other mages, with a mix of ice spears and rock bullets. "Bahahaha! Guess who has a mana battery that doubles as a meatshield? This guy! Go on, hit me. You won't!" I hoisted the poor mage up while still crushing his head and waved him around in front of me, blocking a fireball with him. "Gahaa! W-where are you aiming you morons?! Hit him, not meeee!"
I chuckled as I continued to drain the guy and lob fireballs in happiness. Well, in a maniacal serial killer sort of happiness, but happiness nonetheless. They deserved it for nearly shaving off my main man down under.
I felt that particular tingle that meant I was in danger and instantly threw my mana battery behind me, and heard a very loud explosion followed by the sound of shattering ice. I quickly erected walls of stone around me and peered behind me. What I saw made me sweat buckets.
"Who's bright idea was it to launch a freaking ice pillar at me?! You just killed your friend you morons!" I huffed in anger as I kept staring at the crushed and skewered remains of the sucker that I threw, then remembered that these guys are bandits, they have little to no morals. Why would they care if one of their mates died, as long as they lived and got paid.
"Well it looks like you lived through that, but my mate over there didn't. Ahh well, sucks to be him I guess, though you'll be joining him soon!" I saw a gruff looking man in leather armour, with scars covering his arms. He had a large greatsword that he was wielding. "Oi, were you the retard that sent that ice pillar my way? You're a warrior so I doubt it but there's no one else behind me, so that leaves you." was how I responded to the man who looked like the spitting image of a bandit leader. He waltzed over but stopped as someone behind me yelled "Careful boss, hes a necroman-Gaaah!" I silenced the man with a swift stab through his gut, sending him collapsing to the floor.
The man, who was now confirmed to be the bandit boss, backed up slightly and sent a large pillar of ice at me without warning, and the 2 mages behind me sent several fireballs at me. "Seriously, why do you guys have more mana than me?! I'm the one that should have more mana than you! Screw you guys!" I reinforced my walls of stone that I had around me and made a hole in the ground with earth magic.
A second later the 2 walls collapsed, sending chunks of stone flying and scorching the ground around me as the fireballs impacted near my hole. "Hey is he dead?" I hope so, Necromancers are scary, but why didn't he summon skeletons? Shouldn't all necromancers do that as a basic rule of thumb?". I heard the bandit mages chatting away as if I had already died, but was too busy reeling from the info I just heard. "I forgot to check my status after killing so many damn bandits. I probably leveled a few times by now and unlocked some fun new magic.
Name Zane Northwood [Age: 17] Class Grand Archmage, Grand Necromancer Level 11 Health 1,051/1,100 Mana 201/300 Strength 60 Agility 29 Stamina 41 Wisdom 243 Skills Basic Elemental Magic, Mana Drain, Basic Undead Summoning, Basic Dark Magic Titles Reincarnator [Status is Reset upon reincarnating, allowing you to reincarnate successfully]
"Oh I have some new stuff to play with." I instantly started using Basic Undead Summoning from inside my hole, not wanting to leave it because everyone in the village would find out that I was the one who summoned them, so I simply stood near the top of my hole and hid there while peering out. "Hey dumb and dumber, I felt bad about killing your friends, so how about I revive them for you!"
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Yes you guessed it, I used the summoning on the dead bandits, and since they were mages they turned into undead mages. The bandit leader and mages were rather surprised to say the least.
After several screams of pain as undead mages kept chasing the bandits around, they were eventually felled by the bandit boss, who was breathing heavily, partially from anger and partially from exhaustion. He tore a zombie bandit in half horizontally, sending blood flying and killing the zombie instantly. "You going to face me head on or are you going to cower in your hole?!" He summoned a large boulder of ice and had it hover above my hole, but I hadn't been sitting around doing nothing while the undead chased him, as comical as it was. No, I had been summoning and combining fireballs repeatedly, while feeding it dark magic from my dark magic skill. I was aiming to copy a skill that I used to be able to use before the whole reset incident.
"Finally I'm finished!" I yelled as I hopped out of my hole, with a hovering skull of dark flames that looked very menacing. The flame's also had the opposite effect of normal flames, instead of me feeling heat from the flames, I felt my heat being leached away, sucked greedily into the flames. "You wanted me to fight back?! Well here ya go! Eat some Darkfire Skulls!". I had combined fireball and dark bullet to make a darkfire skull, something that I shouldn't be able to use but I was a Grand Necromancer. Even if I didn't have the skill's, as long as I had the means to recreate it I could use it without the assistance using the skill. I also didn't care if others saw this skill because anyone can use dark magic if they tried hard enough to learn it, it's just that necromancers used it as their main skills so it had a bad reputation.
"W-What the hell is that?!" was all the poor excuse of a bandit leader got to say as he was engulfed in Darkfire as the skull exploded when he tried cutting the projectile in half. "Seriously, the Goblin Shaman was more challenging than you. You should go learn some basics of fighti- oh he's dead." By the time my rambling was half finished the bandit had died, with a look on his face like he had seen the devil himself, and had icicles forming on his body from how cold he was due to the flames. "Seriously? I was expecting a whole lot more, like a whole boss fight scenario where I had an epic fight with you, but nope. You just kicked the bucket from one attack". I was slightly disappointed to be honest. I had lost a good test dummy to practice my new skills on after all.
"How is the village doing anyways? I spent way too long fighting these mages to even pay attention to the progress of the fight." I jogged over to the entrance of the village, where I saw there were no bandits left, other than 2 that were tied up and being interrogated. I continued walking and saw Ronia, Herald and Ray chatting amongst themselves. Ronia noticed me walking over and called out to me.
"Zane! You ok? If you need healing theres a medical station set up at the church" I was about to respond when Ray interrupted us. "Ronia, you should probably let Zane relax and get some food in him. They burnt down 3 buildings and damaged some farmland, but everyone's ok for the most part. At least they caught 2 of them. But did you see those undead appear out of nowhere? They took out a quarter of the bandits themselves. Also, what was that terrifying skull thing you sent flying? It looked crazy."
I spent several minutes chatting with the group as we walked over to the place we were eating before the whole fiasco, sat down and began chowing down without a second thought. Everyone was tired from that fight. I also was tired but more importantly, I wanted to get the image of dead villagers out of my mind. Those faces would probably haunt me in my dreams for a few days at least.
It was different when you knew this was a game, then it was all Npc's and you knew no one actually died, plus the gore wasn't as realistic as this was. That one kid with his arm chopped off, and that grandma who had her guts spilling out of her with that dead look on her, and all the other dead faces kept lurking in my mind and reminded me of the whole reincarnation situation, making me not want to eat and feel sick to my stomach.
Herald noticed something was wrong with me and pat my back. "Calm down Zane, there was nothing you could have done. You did the best you could to protect them. So eat some food and relax." The big guy trying to be kind was comical, what with his massive frame and all, but was reassuring in an odd sort of way. I smiled and simply responded with "Thanks Herald, but I'm alright." I once again pushed all the thoughts of reincarnation and all my other worries to the back of my head, trying to forget about them. But you know what they say about problems, they always came back bigger than before, so I was wondering how long I could avoid thinking about my issues.
I remembered something and said "Where were you the whole fight Ronia? I didn't see you at all when I was fighting". She had been off somewhere on her own when the fighting started so I didn't know where she was but now I wanted to know, and so did Herald and Ray it seems. "I was off fighting off to the rear of the village, where there was another group of bandits attempting to climb the walls stealthily. They were probably going to pincer the defending group out front and wipe the whole group out quickly, and would have succeeded if not for your's truly!" She stuck a thumb at herself and smiled in a way that made you want to smack her for being annoying.
All three of us were surprised and started discussing with what happened on her end. It seemed like it was one hell of a fight, with her chugging 3 mana potions and 1 health potion the duration of the fight, telling us it was a long drawn out fight, to say the least. By the time we finished chatting, we head outside to see how the village was doing. The repairs were going swiftly and were nearly complete, probably due to miss nature mage standing next to us helping out earlier on. The villagers were fixing the place up and trying to stay in high spirits after the whole ordeal, which was brave of them in its own way. They didn't sit around mourning the dead all day but continued to live and try to thrive.
It was dark out by the time we finished helping with the repairs so we decided to head to the inn and sleep. "Wait, I don't have any money to spend for a room at the inn" was what I said as the group stared at me incredulously. "Don't blame me for being poor, I still didn't get a chance to sell any of my materials!" I tried to justify myself for being poor as we head into the inn, with the group staring at me the entire way. Seriously, this was going to be a pain in the ass to deal with.