Necromancer
A Royal Road Fan Fiction
By: Halosty
Chapter 41
Mortimer had taken down five guys almost this size, he was confident he could take down another even without the element of surprise. If he were the other guy, he wouldn’t have asked who he was, he would just have attacked. Actually, that did seem a bit odd.
It seemed the large fellow refused to make the first move. In fact he just stood there, with a lopsided smile. Then, he made a movement toward Mortimer’s waist. Mortimer was about to perform a counter when he recognized the movement. It wasn’t particularly fast, and he thought it might not be a threat.
“I’m Robert,” said the big man as he held out his hand. “I hear you’re responsible for putting five of my teammates in the hospital.”
Mortimer waited for this person to get to a point or make an aggressive gesture. He wasn’t allowed to start the fight, much as he might have preferred that. After all, the first move was important.
Robert stood there somewhat awkwardly with his hand still out, but still smiling. “They were pretty good players too. We’ll probably lose more games without them.”
Mortimer took a small step back covered by moving to a more comfortable position. This guy was apparently going to take his time.
“Did you know that our head coach resigned due to an ‘unrelated incident’? If we don’t find a good replacement, we might lose even more.”
Mortimer figured it would probably be rude to yawn.
“In total, that means my team will be losing a lot more. I have to thank you.”
Mortimer gave him skeptical eyes. “You like losing?”
Robert glared back at him and leaned closer. “I hate losing. But I hated those guys more. Picking on the weak. Never showering. Disrespecting women. They made the rest of us look bad by association. I couldn’t even get a girlfriend.”
“Okay?” said Mortimer. He wasn’t sure why he needed to hear this.
“Anyway, I’m still glad they’re gone, and I plan to win despite not having them. Maybe I’ll get a girlfriend too. So, thanks.”
His words seemed genuine, so Mortimer shook his hand. “You’re welcome.” He had to at least act a little bit properly.
“Maybe I’ll see you around.”
Mortimer watched him walk away. He finally entirely relaxed his stance.
“That guy was big,” a voice next to him said. Mortimer did a small jump.
He turned to see Alex standing right next to him. “When did you get there?”
“I was here before him. We were heading to class.”
Mortimer thought for a second. “Oh yeah. We should do that.”
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When Mortimer got home, he headed straight for his capsule. However, before he could get there someone stepped in front of him.
“Hey Angela.”
“Hello. Are you still near the Plains of Despair?”
“Well, I’ve moved a bit to the southwest.”
“Aren’t there just weak zombies over there? Anyway, there’s a dungeon nearby and we need a rogue.”
“Um…”
“It’s just the four of us you know, and I know you’re not on an important quest because you’ve been sleeping normally.”
“...Ok, where?”
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Quietus entered the dungeon, Skeleton Hall, with the rest of the party. He didn’t like fighting undead since they were immune to many of his abilities like poisons and bleeding. They were also highly resistant to dark magic. Still, he would take the opportunity to study the various kinds of skeletons. As for his role in the party, he was mostly there to deal with traps anyway.
The various skeletons, soldiers and archers, were around level 80-100, depending on type. Near the beginning of the dungeon they would be closer to the low end.
Angelo explained the reason to be there besides hunting. “I heard that this dungeon hasn’t been fully explored yet, but nobody can find what they are missing. Think you might be able to find it, Mortimer?”
“Maybe, but I don’t really have any skills to detect secret doors. Just enemies and traps.”
The combats against the skeleton soldiers went generally as planned. Angelo got the attention of the enemies and the rest of the group helped to kill them. Ruby gave buffs to the party and sometimes debuffed the enemy. Maratis either healed and buffed people or used holy magic to damage the skeletons, as necessary. Nilrem did the only thing he ever did, but he did it well. Many skeletons fell to his various lightning spells, Chain Lightning being among his favorites. Quietus just went around behind the gathering skeletons and did what damage he could. Critical hits were still quite effective. Nobody noticed that the skeletons never attacked Quietus first.
Throughout the dungeon were various kinds of traps. Mostly, they consisted of spears, arrows, and poison darts. They seemed traps that would do little to hinder the skeleton inhabitants. Once there was a poison gas trap, but Quietus disarmed it without issue.
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As they wandered the dungeon, the members of the party chatted amongst themselves. Except for Quietus, obviously, because he didn’t really chat with people much. He did notice that Maratis seemed to be talking to him, or perhaps at him, more than the previous time.
As they progressed further into the dungeon, the enemies became a bit more varied than just the skeleton soldiers. First there were the archers. Quietus and Nilrem dealt with these while the rest of the group dealt with the soldiers. Since they didn’t shoot at him until he was close, usually because he attacked one of the group, Quietus found himself quite capable of taking them out. They did more damage than the skeleton soldiers, but had much weaker defense. Once engaged in melee, they damage was less as well, since they had no weapons to use up close. Sometimes they were far enough apart that one or two of them could still shoot at Quietus while he was killing one, but he evaded enough of the arrows to do reasonably well. Of course, he was also healed by Maratis if things were getting dangerous.
There were also skeleton mages. Their attacks were harder to dodge and more dangerous than the archers, but they also died even more easily. Sometimes they used dark magic spells such as Dark Arrow. Quietus was happy when they did, because he was quite resistant to those spells, and familiar with how to avoid them. Sure, they hurt when they hit, but the actual damage was not too much to deal with. The other party members grew to hate them, though, since both the damage and pain were high for them.
During and after the battles, Quietus took some time to look over the skeletons. After observing the way they were held together (mostly magic) and fell apart, he learned something about their weak points. He also gained some proficiency in his repair undead skill, even though he didn’t do any actual repairs. He did fiddle around with the bones some.
As they were turning a corner, Quietus noticed a missing stone in the wall, near the ground. He tried to look into it, but it was too dark. The light from the torch was blocked by his head. Not that it stopped him for long. His darkvision skill took care of the problem easily.
“What do you see?”
“I’m not sure, it’s hard to tell. I think there’s a room over there.”
“Hmm, on the map there hasn’t been anything found there. Can you figure out how to get it open?”
“I’d have to be able to see inside there, I think. Maybe…” Quietus thought for a moment. “I think I have an idea but it involves some… secret tricks. So you’ll have to look away.”
The group rolled their eyes, but turned around. They heard a weird squishing sound, then some muttering. Keen listeners might have heard “Specral Hand” as well as the name of another spell. When they turned back around, Quietus had a hand over his left eye.
“It’s a… vision spell… kind of.” Quietus sat down against the wall. “I need to concentrate.” Quietus closed his other eye.
Maratis noticed a small trail of blood below the eye with his left hand over it. “Hey, you’re bleeding! I’ll heal you.”
“No! Wait! Umm… that’s part of the spell? It will mess it up if you don’t wait until after I’m done to heal me.”
“Oh, okay. Does it hurt?”
“Not really. I need to concentrate now.”
“Sorry.”
Quietus sat there for a minute or two before making some weird gestures with his right hand. “I think I found a lever…”
Then, there was a grinding sound, and the wall he was leaning against sunk into the floor. He managed to not quite fall over backwards.
“Ok, I need to go in first to… search for traps.”
Quietus did, indeed, search for traps, but he also went in to retrieve something. There was another squishing sound, and then Quietus came back to the group. “I’d appreciate being healed now.”
“Of course! … What a weird vision spell.”
“...Yeah.”
Quietus took his hand out from in front of his left eye after being healed. It seemed to work just fine.
“Be careful guys, inside was a big skeleton. It looked like a boss. We should get ready.”
The group nodded, wondering what kind of boss they had found.
End Chapter 41
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