The undead rat, which Darryl had affectionately named F.E.A.R, waddled through the flickering shadows of the stone hallway. While it no longer had a mind as such, the magical intelligence it had been imbued with still used its remaining brain matter as a convenient mechanism for processing information. As such, elements of its old self sometimes bled through into its new identity as an undead minion. Fear lifted its nose, and sniffed the air; smelling humans ahead. The magical intelligence slowed momentarily as it fought the remnants of the rat’s self-preservation. To approach humans so openly was dangerous, and rats avoided danger. Inevitably though, Fear won out over fear, and the rat corpse waddled forward.

“So I told her, you’ve already met regular Johnny, now it’s time to meet big Johnny!” A guard told the table of four other guards, to uproarious laughter. Fear selected the speaker as its target, and activated a preprogrammed spell.

Overcoming Johnny’s magic resistance proved challenging, and it consumed more than half of Fear’s imbued mana pool, but luckily Darryl had been spending the past two hours stuffing all of his mana regeneration into his minion. With over fifty mana at its disposal, Fear eventually succeeded in casting “summon oxygen bubble.”

After thirty seconds, Johnny coughed and thumped his chest with a wince.

“You good?” Asked one of his compatriots.

“Ya, I think the night shifts are getting to me.” Johnny said, as he thumped his chest a little harder against the pain that was slowly expanding through his torso. “I think I just need to lie down.”

He thumped even harder, and a look of panic blossomed on his face as he doubled over in pain. Fear didn’t stay to watch what happened next. Following its programming, it used most of its remaining mana to cast a summoning spell, reappearing a moment later next to Darryl.

“Five… five hundred and thirty two XP.” Darryl whispered in awe. He scooped up Fear, and petted it absentmindedly as he stared at his notification screen. Without a second’s thought, he dumped three hundred points into the MP, Magic, and Soul stats, increasing them by one point each. According to his book on magic, the magic stat would improve the efficiency of his casting, and the complexity of the magic he was capable of. Meanwhile, soul governed mana regeneration, magic resistance, and some other esoteric benefits he wasn’t currently worried about. Of course MP mostly just increased his maximum mana pool, which was now at twenty points.

“Guess what Fear? We’re in the money!” Darryl whispered to it, still stroking it. It stared up at him with dispassionate dead eyes, and Darryl nodded, thinking. “Right, maybe it’s time for intermediate necromancy. It may cost a couple hundred points, but I bet I could give you an upgrade.” And with that purchase he was back down to thirty-two points. This time the size of the textbook went from a hundred page light novel to a five-hundred page epic. Darryl’s head was swimming by the time he was done, but after sleeping for ten hours, he was ready to continue. Now, he had the mana and magical technology necessary to no longer restrict himself to a single rat. Glancing at Fear, who was standing silently, waiting for orders, Darryl smiled. “Time to evolve little buddy. Ready to become a raticate?”

Snorting at his own joke, he began formulating the necessary spell. Using Fear as the central processing hub, he constructed a kind of undead hive mind, linking all his collected rat corpses together until they functioned as a collective entity; all controlled by the undead rat he had stuffed into his pocket. Even better, he no longer had to imbue magical energy into the individual corpses; instead he could tether Fear directly to his mana pool, allowing the rat hive to draw on his mana at will.

Darryl winced as he saw his mana pool dwindling ever so slowly. “Right, time for me to evolve too.” He lifted Fear up to his eye level. “Send your minions to hunt live rats, then bring their corpses back here. Don’t reanimate them, I can’t afford the mana cost right now. Don’t let your minions get seen by the guards, I don’t want to draw any attention yet. If my mana pool falls below five points, bring your minions back so we don’t lose any, then temporarily cancel all reanimations. When my mana pool is full again, reanimate them all, and resume hunting.”

Though Fear didn’t give any form of confirmation, the sudden mass exodus of half a dozen rats was sufficient for him. To keep himself busy while he waited, Darryl used twenty XP to buy “Basic Summoning Magic” and set to studying.

Reaching level three in soul had a price tag of two hundred, which he reached within an hour. Once he purchased it, his mana began filling faster than it was consumed. As clearly as he could tell, he regenerated one point of mana per ten seconds per point of soul, which seemed both faster than he should have expected, and infuriatingly slow. Still, he was happy that his army could now hunt uninterrupted. After another hour, he bought his third point in MP, and the corpse pile in his cell was becoming harder to hide.

“Hm, it might be time to relocate our operations.” Darryl mused out loud. Soon, his rat army was dragging the pile to an empty cell in a separate wing of the jail, which he had dubbed “the central hub.” The central hub had the advantage of several cracks in the stone that led into a space between the castle’s walls, which living rats used as convenient highways to travel throughout the castle. On top of that, it was a dormant wing of the prison, meaning guards never patrolled there. It was a perfect location for organizing an undead army. It only took two more days for him to fully clear the castle of rats, at which point his rat army was forced to expand its hunting grounds to the surrounding town.

Stolen story; please report.

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“I swear Dave, it’s weird. All of the cats are starving, and we’ve found a few that were torn to shreds.” Said a guard to his companion as they passed Darryl’s cell.

“So what? It’s just some freaking cats, Randy. They probably got torn up by someone’s dog.” Dave replied mockingly.

“I’m not worried about the cats, I’m worried about whether a monster got inside the walls.” Randy said heatedly.

Dave rolled his eyes. “If a monster got inside, do you really think they would be hunting cats? We’d be hearing about torn up people.”

Randy sighed. “I guess. It’s just weird is all.”

The two guards moved past Darryl’s hearing, and he lifted Fear up to look at him. “Have you been hunting cats?”

The rat squeaked innocently, and Dave snorted his disbelief. He had been working off and on for the better part of the past few days to improve Fear, making its reasoning and personality increasingly more distinct. He still didn’t think it qualified as sentient, but it could handle much more complex instructions now. His mana pool was now at eighty, and his regeneration could handle dozens of simultaneous undead. Due to buying a clock and calendar function from the UI store, he was reasonably sure that he had one day left until his execution. Darryl had no plans to wait quietly for death. He lifted Fear to look him in the eye.

“Execute plan omega.” He ordered.

The rat squeaked an affirmative. Plan omega entailed pairs of rat undeads who would use his oxygen bubble spell to eliminate pairs of guards. They would then reanimate the guards, walk them into the closest empty cell, and hide the corpses in the shadows. It was his final push to farm the XP he needed in order to escape. Within a minute, he was hit with a pair of XP notifications totalling a bit over a thousand XP. He bought a point of soul stat. When his mana had refilled, he was hit with another pair of notifications. He bought a point of MP stat. This happened another dozen times, until his MP was over one-fifty, and his mana regeneration had surpassed two per second.

“Execute plan epsilon.” He commanded as soon as the notifications had stopped.

He shuddered as his mana left his body in a rush; reduced by half, and continuing to slowly tick down. He used a UI function he had purchased to link Fear to his screen; watching in fascinated horror from the viewpoint of one of his minions as a horde of undead rats swarmed into the town, accompanied by the visual symphony of a setting sun, from underground tunnels and warrens that had been dug by the rodents when they had been alive. The frightening part was this was only a small portion of his stockpiled corpses. It was hard to imagine that he would ever have enough mana on hand to animate his entire supply at once. People shrieked and scattered as Darryl directed the horde to consume a pair of unfortunate guardsmen who had been patrolling nearby; carefully avoiding harming any civilians. Though the guards had certainly been enhanced by XP, and would be far more powerful than the average human if this were a direct fight, they were quickly overwhelmed by numbers; squashing only half a dozen undead before the pain overwhelmed their minds. When the XP arrived, he funneled it into the soul stat to slow down the hemorrhaging of his mana.

Two more pairs of guards fell to his swarm, netting him another point in soul before a horn sounded loudly enough that he could hear it from his cell. He turned his scout rat to look, and watched as a legion of soldiers marched out from the gates of the castle. Darryl smiled, and looked Fear in the eye. “Disperse the swarm.”

Suddenly, the horde of rats broke apart, melting into squads of a dozen. They continued to rampage, leading the army on a merry chase. Darryl didn’t stop to watch though. Standing, he walked up to the bars. Certain that there were no guards left in the prison, he extended his right hand. “Summon Prison Breaker.” He declared, watching in fascination as a tiny point of light manifested on one of the bars. Soon there were two points of light, then three. The spell continued to multiply itself endlessly until the entire cell was illuminated by a glowing kaleidoscope that burrowed into the bars. Over the course of several minutes, the tiny magical nanites consumed the iron, converting it into magical energy, which they used to propagate their short-lived species until finally there was no iron left, and the glowing cloud fell to the floor; dimming and finally fading into nothingness as their remaining mana was consumed.

Darryl waited patiently until the final mote of light had extinguished; paranoid about spreading an apocalyptic metal-eating contagion into the world.

“Bring me a dead guard that matches my clothing size.” Darryl ordered Fear. Soon, an undead guard ambled into view, and he quickly donned the guard’s armor; strapping the helmet into place to secure his anonymity.

With his preparations finished, Darryl placed Fear inside the side satchel he had looted from the guard, then grabbed a spare rat corpse from the pocket of his discarded pants.

“Guide me to Meryl.” He commanded the extraneous rat. It obliged, using the spy network he had distributed throughout the castle to navigate as he followed.