After having secured his 211 undead, Bokan had them loot the Academy buildings thoroughly. The ones that had survived the fire had rapidly recovered, their magically-formed bodies being capable of recovering of any damage short of the destruction of their mind or soul.
An interesting question was now posed to Bokan, what to do about Egro? He had done his best to recreate his mind, which had cost him 50 death mana, repairs were expensive! Regardless, the levels he had gained from raising 200 more undead had helped him to do so expertly, yet he still wasn't sure. If someone dies and their mind is preserved, one could think of their life having not truly ended. However, if someone's mind is destroyed and then reconstructed, is it truly them? If every part of a building was replaced, was it still the same building? Whatever it was, Egros mind had roughly been recreated, only without the vast majority of his memories. He could still remember basic things like how to speak, and even his progress in magic, yet he had to receive his name from Bokan. He had all of the aptitude of Egro, but without any of the... Egroness.
Fred was inconsolable.
On the other hand, levels! Roughly 200 more raised undead was a lot of skill levels, and Bokan was glad to get into it:
Name: Fabien
Race: Human (tier 2, +2 to every stat every year)
Class: Dark mage (necromancer) (1) (+5 to all magic stats every level) (The ultimate magic archetype, grow by creating a powerful undead army.)
Profession(s): novice enchanter (5) (+1 to all magic stats every level) // novice alchemist (5) (+1 wisdom and willpower) // novice clerk (5) (+1 intelligence) // novice warmage (5) (+2 intelligence) // novice researcher (5) (+1 intelligence and wisdom)
Level: 70
Intelligence: 50
Wisdom: 45
Willpower: 50
Strength: 25 (My grandma's stronger than that!)
Dexterity: 25 (You are more dexterous than any humans who have never been reinforced by magic)
Stamina: 25 (You would make a great punching bag, for grandmas maybe!)
Charisma: 25 (Peak human charisma. Still less than that scaly car salesman, I'm convinced he was an alien.)
Manipulation: 25 (For humans unreinforced by mana, your manipulation borders on mind control.)
Poise: 25 (Peak human poise, the super human element being so insignificant it isn't worth mentioning)
Mana: 0 (0/hour)
Radiant mana: 511 (230/hour)
Death mana: 40030 (18013/hour)
Damage resistance: 36.2%
Skills:
Fine magic control (Level 5)(MAX)
Spells:
Display status (Level 5)(MAX)
Raise dead (Level 15)(15/40)
Death link (Level 5)(15/20)
Death mana conversion (Level 6)(6/20)
Death mana manipulation (Level 1)(12/20)
Masteries:
Wraith's wrath (Initiate) +5 intelligence, +5 wisdom, +5 willpower
Magic incarnate (Initiate) +5 intelligence, +5 wisdom, +5 willpower
Available skill points: 48
Available attribute points: 5
Level up! For...
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Skill shop:
Death bolt...
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Corpse explosion: Pour overwhelming amounts of death mana into a corpse, but rather than raising it, blow it up in an explosion which will expand in radius until it has dealt the full amount of damage expected. (Cost: 1000+ death mana Damage: cost*skill level)
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Mind thief: Use your knowledge of mental constructs to extract some of a living person's memories by flooding their mind with death mana. (Amount of memories stolen(gigabytes): cost*skill level Damage: cost)
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Field of bones: Create or travel to an already formed field of bones. This pocket dimension will be altered based on the amount of death mana you invest into it. After creating it, it will be twice as expensive to improve it per death mana, so investing as much as possible upfront is advised. Upon purchase of this skill, related skills will be made available at character level 50, 80 and 100. (Cost: 1000+ death mana Area: 1m^2 per 100 extra death mana invested
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
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Soul stealer: For a set amount of time after raising one of your minions, if they are destroyed you will be able to raise them again. (Cost: normal cost*(1+e^-0.01(skill level)) Time limit: 1 second per skill level after they were originally raised.)
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Several new things had changed, and one major set of choices available took the form of the several newly unlocked skills.
Many were just attack or curse skills which Bokan was uninterested in, his minions had already proven they were able to cast his more straightforward skills just fine, and their sheer quantity allowed them to wield far more destructive power than he alone could.
However, there were several more interesting skills that had been made available. Corpse explosion, for instance, could theoretically give him the power to wipe all life from the universe if he simply invested enough death mana into it at a high enough level, assuming he could avoid its effects himself. Still, it was clearly too dangerous for him to use, as it didn't promise to differentiate between friend and foe. While his skeletons would no doubt be fine, death mana wouldn't attack them since they were basically physical manifestations of a complex death mana construct, Bokan was another matter entirely.
Mind thief was another interesting one, however if he needed information Bokan would simply kill the person and raise them, then he could ask all the questions he wanted. It would be a waste of a skill for him, although he imagined it might open up a path to mind-controlling living people at some point in the future.
Field of bones held a lot of promise, and Bokan purchased it without another thought. It immediately unlocked for him a skill called "Wall of despair", which he purchased. It seemed to be a passive skill that would give his field of bones a wall, though he wasn't sure what effects it would have until he actually had his field up and running.
Finally, soul stealer. It was a worrying name, though he supposed that, at least at early levels, all it did was hold a newly-raised enemy's soul to them for a few more moments before they passed. In future, it might allow for his army to endlessly regenerate itself unless it was completely destroyed to the last without him even having to step in. Momentarily entranced at the thought, he bought it.
There were several other skills that admittedly held some promise, however for now he needed to conserve some skill points, his raise dead skill was improving rapidly and he needed the skill points to hopefully evolve it in the following years. He had no idea what an evolved form of a spell as powerful as raise dead would be, but he had high hopes.
For now, however, there was a pressing question. What to do about the rulers of this floor? It was clear that they could communicate with the empire, even send for help, so either they needed to not find out about what happened here until he was too powerful to stop, or they needed to be unable to send for help until he was too powerful to stop.
Realistically, the floors would get harder the higher he went, so Bokan resolved to simply kill everyone on this floor, and then hopefully no one tried joining the tower too soon.
The "last empire" had a population of about 4 million. In that population, around 3% were magic users, which is 120k people.
Of those 120k, not all of them would be identified as a magic user. Some poor areas, and some rural areas, didn't have enough soul stones for everyone's class to be identified. A soul stone would not bond to an unclassed person, however there were more classed persons than soul stones already by this time.
Roughly 1 in 2 magic users were identified as such, 60k people. Of those 60k, only 20k typically qualified for the tower, the remaining 40k either dying along the way or simply lacking the talent and work ethic to reach the power required by the age of 30 to cast the status spell.
For those 20k who qualified for the tower, for a given sample of 4 million humans, they tended to live longer than other humans, some of them much longer. As a result, at any given time there tended to be 25k magic users who were "owned" by the tower, roughly speaking. All this was according to some estimates that various scholars had made, anyone who had written anything more precise than that had disappeared to Bokan's knowledge.
In normal circumstances, magic users would be brought to the tower in waves each year. There were still a few months left until the next "wave", with the previous one having occurred several months before Bokan's arrival. The cause for him having been transferred to the tower as soon as the time was appropriate was mostly due to it being a part of the punishment his father Osk had received.
Realistically, killing everyone on floor 1 would win him the months until the next wave at most, but sparing the rulers would likely result in his deeds being discovered the next time one of those 5 masters or their apprentices in the village visited the Academy. Despite their obvious distaste for one another, Bokan suspected they would have met to at least exchange research findings once in a while, anything less would have been a waste their geas doubtless would not permit. Half hearted obedience was not tolerated, from what he could discern in conversations with his minions.
Raising his 211 minions, and not forgetting to take a quick inventory of the Academy they had looted (a lot of good stuff had been gained, Bokan himself took none of it for now though, since he would not be fighting directly in the following battles), Bokan moved on the village.
It took about 1 day to get everything ready for his ambush, and then his minions struck. They had split up into groups of 20. Death energy excelled at locating life and magic users excelled at detecting concentrations of mana, so locating the magic users was not difficult.
Bokan positioned his forces far enough back in the forest that there was no direct line of sight with the village, and every one of his skeletons hid behind their own tree, branch or boulder. The attack was sudden and swift, with Fred, Egro2.0 and Mark now joined by the 10 other undead who had survived the conflict in the academy and through it gained several levels and skill levels being the attackers.
In each group, there were 1 or 2 of the more powerful undead surrounded by weaker undead, and those more powerful undead absorbed the death mana from their weaker compatriots via their death link and shared subservience. They then used that to launch several simultaneous death bolts (though Mark succeeded in launching a death lance instead, since he had been focusing on the making-things-dead component of his new array of skills) against the life forms within the village.
The exchange was totally silent, no obvious bodily damage was caused to a single one of the magic users in the village, but with their relatively weak stamina, several of them immediately fell down dead.
In an instant, every apprentice, adept, novice and journeyman magic user in the village disappeared. Of the 5 masters, 3 survived, barely.
Next, Bokan came forward and used his death mana conversion while Mark pulled death mana from him to fuel his spells. As a result, several more death lances were thrown. Over and over they were blocked by magical wards and blunted by magical resistances. It only took a few seconds, but several explosions lighted up the village as the 3 remaining masters tried to strike back against those who were killing them. Due to the instant nature of death-based attacks, however, they were unable to even discern the direction of their attackers.
Two minutes later, it was over. Bokan had his forces rest of an hour, then sent them to overwhelm the castle containing the rulers. They employed the same tactic as before, striking from afar. Bokan stayed back, shielding his eyes and mind from the artistry on the castle walls while his minions, immune to their effects, slaughtered the now-defenceless rulers.
He didn't mock them, though. Their hubris mirrored his own, they believed their defence could be used to deal with any situation and were wrong. That was all there was to it. Most likely, the same would happen to him one day, so Bokan pushed down his desire to look down on his defeated foes. He had won this day because he understood his enemy and they did not understand him. There was nothing more to it.
Finally, the time had come to deal with the monster that guarded the exit to the first floor of the tower and advance to the second. It was time to begin the climb.