After quickly introducing Kalia to Saliu and the others, she was immediately focused on them, completely forgetting about her condition and him. He stood there awkwardly for a bit while the three discussed magical theory way beyond him. He may be good at magic, but he had a long way to go in his understanding. And unfortunately, most of the stuff he had figured out, wasn’t relevant to what the enchanters were doing. That didn’t mean it was all worthless. His Transfer spell was a huge hit back when he first showed it to them.

Not wanting to interrupt their discussion and feeling a bit like an outsider, Norman quickly left. He had his own stuff to accomplish anyway.

After leaving Kalia and the others behind, Norman went to speak with Eugene.

“What can I do for you, Boss?” He asked from behind his desk.

It was a bit depressing that Norman found the man more often behind his desk doing paperwork than out patrolling. But things changed and people grew. “We need to plan an assault against the Gorfan.”

“About time. What are the goals of this mission?”

“I want to cut off their entire hierarchy.”

“Oh, so nothing too big.”

“I understand it’s a major ask. But they were the ones that attacked us. Even if it was Gail that instigated it.”

“So you want a decisive strike to eliminate them as a threat, similar to how we dealt with the Brotherhood?”

Norman sighed and shook his head. “I wish that were possible. But they have a whole country behind them. I think the best we can accomplish is leaving them in a state where they can’t afford to attack us or anyone for that matter. There is no doubt the Council will take advantage of their weakness to do whatever it is they want to do against them.”

“Ok. So how do we go about this? We don’t exactly have the numbers for a full-scale invasion.”

Norman laid out his plan for Eugene.

“That could work,” the man agreed.

“We need a team to gather the resources required first.”

Eugene rubbed his chin in thought. “That shouldn’t be an issue. It may take time though. We also need to worry about those Gorfan weapons.”

“Saliu and his group are looking into them.” Norman would have preferred to do it himself but he didn’t have the time to dedicate to researching the items. Besides, with Saliu, Kalia, and Varter on the project, it would probably get finished much faster. They could also research countermeasures against it, something he couldn’t afford to spend time doing either.

It took a bit of time to gather a team together and relay the orders to them, but once that was done, Norman headed back toward the castle. He didn’t need to wait for them to complete their mission, he had some samples Grobert had brought back already. There were only four of them and they were currently corpses, but he could fix that.

He sealed himself inside his testing chamber along with Princess, Dante, and Lucifer. Normally he kept the two males out of the room because they weren’t quite as intelligent as Princess, but it seems like she understood this and kept them in line while he worked.

The first test he did was turning the ostrich-sized dinos into greykin. His previous tests had all been with live subjects, so it would be important to find out if he could skip that step.

The creature was angry, and a bit confused when Norman raised it from the dead. That didn’t stop it from lunging at him with its vicious beak, but it couldn’t bite through his Bone Armor. Princess and the others were quick to corral the creature into one of the corners where he had a makeshift pen surrounded by Bone Protectors and a gate made from the earlier Bone Wall version of the spell setup.

The dinos were rather timid beasts, or at least this one was. It would snap at his hellhounds, but it kept backing away until they trapped it inside and Princess pulled the wall back to cover the opening.

They were also rather stupid. It kept trying to run at the wall and jump over, only for the spiked tentacles to slap it away with prejudice. He was glad he finally found a good use for that spell.

Norman summoned the remaining three animals and stuffed all but one into the pen. The last was kept inside a shielded spell circle for the next test.

He pulled out his vial of black blood and created four of the Orbs of Abomination. He really didn’t have a good name for the spell, but the current name was fine for now. Anyway, once the orbs were complete, he moved over to the trapped dino and activated it using his living blood. From his experience, it shouldn’t change the outcome of the spell, but he would find out shortly.

The orb passed through the one-way barrier and impacted the undead creature. There was the white light that got sucked into it. But what happened next was quite a bit different than what happened with Princess.

Instead of a similar transformation process as his hellhounds had gone through, the creature's feathers started to fall off. It didn’t take long for Norman to realize, it wasn’t just the feathers falling out. Entire patches of skin were simply sloughing off. This was followed by the muscle fibers breaking like old rubber bands. He flinched back as a large section of muscle slapped against the barrier right in front of him.

This process continued for some time until all that was left was a skeleton. It turned towards him, its eyes empty sockets filled with white fire.

“Huh… So that’s how you create a skeleton.” Well, technically, he now knew two ways to create skeletons. He wondered if this way had fewer downsides to it.

In its skeletonized version, its resemblance to a bird was much more pronounced. Only it didn’t have frontal appendages that birds later developed into wings. Also, he knew they didn’t have hollow bones like birds, so really the only trait similar to a bird was the beak and maybe the three-toed feet.

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He let the barrier exhaust itself. As soon as it dropped, the skeleton rushed at him. Norman intercepted it with a bone shield, which the thing promptly bit through.

This was when Norman realized he didn’t have any way to deal with unruly undead, other than giving them their soul back. And this thing already had a soul. He quickly activated the spell that would hide him from the undead and let his hellhounds deal with the angry skeleton.

It was a bit disconcerting watching them tear the creature apart and swallow its bones in only a bite or two. The light didn’t leave the skeleton’s eyes until its skull was cracked apart in Princess’ strong jaws. It made it look like she was eating the sun as the light escaped her closed mouth.

Norman made note of this… success? Failure? Eh, kind of a bit of both he surmised. He successfully made a skeleton, but he failed at what he had been trying to do, which was create hell mounts for his Death Knights.

He tried again, this time using a small sample of his unprocessed undead blood as the catalyst.

The results were the same, an angry dinosaur skeleton. At least his hellhounds were enjoying the failures.

It seemed the spell would not convert undead creatures into hell beasts. It was annoying because he would need to restore them to life before he could continue experimenting.

After having a group of grazers delivered, he was able to get back to testing. Reviving the dinos was easy enough, he had that process down. But it turned out using human blood to activate the Orb left the creatures… alive. It was hard to tell since there was no physical change. Maybe it got a bit smarter as it was able to escape from his hellhounds for a few minutes before they finally corraled it back into the cage but even that was hard to quantify at this stage. He marked down human blood on the living host as a failure.

Maybe he should rename the spell from Orb of Abomination to Orb of Chaos because this shit was nuts. He had never seen a spell have so many differing outcomes based on the blood type used to activate it. Most spells simply had one function or feature. The only problem with calling it an Orb of Chaos was that the steps were easily repeatable. He ran them three times to make sure.

The next test consisted of using his undead blood in his living form on the living dino. This specific dino was the one he had done every test on so far. Well, all except the skeleton ones, those were consumed by Princess and the others. After each test, he killed and reanimated this dino. He had a theory that Princess’ intelligence was based on just how many times he had used her to test spells. He wanted to verify the truth of that. If he could make intelligent undead mounts and not just undead mounts, that would be much better. And his tests so far indicated that he might be able to increase a creature's intelligence.

With that goal in mind, Norman killed and revived the creature a dozen more times. The thing never gave up trying to escape the room though. Which was fine, Norman got extra practice using his armor and increased strength to pummel the dino into submission on more than one occasion. His training sessions with Eugene had been paying off. Norman could now hit like he meant it instead of like a wet noodle according to Eugene.

The dinos were tough but they were normal-creature-tough. Easily handled by superhuman strength. He wasn’t dumb enough to convert them to hell beasts – assuming they would change that way – until he was completely ready.

As he was testing this first dino, by constantly using the Orb of Abomination on it, the second one got a different treatment.

In order to rule out a fluke, Norman used every spell at his disposal on the second dino. This would let him know if it was a certain spell that caused Princess’ change or if it was the accumulation of many spells that did it.

It would have been good to have a control sample but he worked with the two remaining beasts as best he could.

He continued his testing for two days before he felt satisfied that he had killed and revived these creatures enough to see a noticeable change. If this worked, it would be awesome. But it would also mean a hell of a lot of work to replicate it for every single mount.

Norman put the dino, whom he had affectionately nicknamed Scar, into the holding circle. The creature was wary, and maybe a bit resigned as it had lost a bit of its fight over the last few days. That didn’t mean it was passive though. It tried one final time to lash out at him but Princess bodily slammed it through the barrier.

It was finally time. He shook his hands and arms, limbering himself up. If this spell went wrong and he created an intelligent hell beast that had no loyalty to him, well… it was gonna be a tough fight. He knew based on Princess’ and the others' playtime that the creatures were extremely hard to kill. Which is why Norman had his staff with him this time.

After he psyched himself up as best as he could, Norman activated the orb using his undead blood and threw it at the caged dino. As soon as the white light sunk into the creature, the change began.

Almost immediately, Norman saw it was different from his hell hounds. While the dino’s size was increasing, its skin wasn’t splitting apart. Instead, all of its vibrant feathers fell out, and in their place ones as black as pitch grew in. The growth wasn’t nearly as much as Norman expected either. The dino went from ostrich-sized to draft horse-sized. Still big, but not the extreme size change that his hell hounds had gone through. It was probably why the skin hadn’t ripped apart.

Once the spell was complete, Scar looked around with newfound intelligence. Its eyes locked on Norman and it slowly started to approach. Princess growled at it menacingly and Scar paused.

“Let him come,” he patted Princess on the head.

She still growled but she stepped off to the side to let the dino approach. Norman held out his hand and Scar extended his long neck to sniff him. Norman chuckled softly at the exchange, only for Scar to snap his head forward in a lightning-fast motion and take his hand off. Norman was so stunned by the act that he was frozen for a moment.

Princess wasn’t though, she reacted to the attack almost instantly, but even she wasn’t quick enough for what happened next. Scar opened his mouth and screeched. Norman felt the waves of sonic energy batter against his armor for a moment before the attack sent him flying across the room where he impacted the wall hard enough to shatter his armor and all of the squishy bits inside.

A few moments later, Norman awoke. When he glanced down at his hand, he saw it was back, sans armor. That meant he died. With an exasperated sigh, he got back up and approached the scene of chaos unfolding in front of him.

Princess, Dante, and Lucifer were trying to tear Scar apart but the dino was fast and now just as smart, if not more so than Princess. And he was doing a fine job of avoiding the three and lashing out with his six-inch talons and razor-sharp beak.

After watching the fight for a moment, Norman realized Scar wasn’t trying to kill them. Norman decided to test something.

“STOP!”

All four broke from the melee, wearily eying each other. The three hellhounds trotted over to Norman, their wounds already hardening into new armor.

As for Scar, he was chirping and… wagging his butt. At least that’s what it seemed like to Norman. “Stay here,” he said to Princess and the other two as he approached again. He could tell Princess didn’t like that order but she remained behind.

This time when Scar sniffed him, he let out a happy chirp and pushed his head into Norman’s hand to get a rub. “Huh. Guess you didn’t recognize me as human. I should have accounted for that,” he said as he caressed the dino’s massive feathered head.

He removed the rest of his armor and inspected the creature, finding the feathers to be quite unique. As Norman ran his hand against the grain, it sliced through his skin like butter. But with the grain, it felt like the softest substance Norman had ever felt. It also didn’t harm his Bone Armor. That along with the Sonic screech meant he did indeed create another undead magical creature. He couldn’t call them hell birds, it didn’t really fit. Then he remembered a show about Phorusrhacids or terror birds and he thought that description fit Scar perfectly.

“How do you like the name terror bird, Scar?” Scar paused for a moment, and chirped once in agreement, before going back to rubbing its head into Norman’s hand.