The group exited the home and paused. About a dozen young men were waiting outside with angry expressions on their faces. What surprised Norman was the fact that they weren’t wearing any headwraps, which couldn’t be good in this sweltering sun. And going by their sun-burned faces, it wasn’t. Then Norman spotted the sun-shaped patches or crudely hand-drawn suns on their clothes. They clearly matched the ones from the attacker's clothing or as close to it as these men could make them.
Noorani took a step forward and was about to say something before Norman clasped her on the shoulder to stop her. They weren’t here to get into a fight, and he knew anything she was about to say would likely set these men off. Not that he thought these men were much of a danger with their ragged clothing and improvised weapons. He was too tired from the walking and the heat to get into a fight if he could avoid it.
If they could get out of there without getting into a fight, it would also probably help with their diplomatic talks. Not that these men seemed like the diplomatic type.
“Is there something we can help you gentlemen with?” Grobert asked politely.
The men collectively spit on the ground towards the trio before wiping their hands across their sweaty foreheads and flicking the perspiration their way. Going by the collective silence of the other townspeople, milling nearby, this was either a vulgar insult or a dire threat.
Norman glanced at the men’s hands, taking in the crude weapons of sticks and clubs. Only one of the men looked to have an actual machete and it looked old and rusty. Norman was more likely to get tetanus from it than an actual cut.
The three of them walked through the gathered men. The men didn’t try to stop them, but they collectively turned to glare at them as they passed. It was honestly kind of freaking Norman out and he was nervously rubbing at the necklace around his neck that would deploy his armor.
The three made it through the wall of men and kept walking. The group followed behind and Norman could see some of their glares turn into cruel smiles as they neared the edge of town.
Norman sighed, “I was hoping to avoid a fight,” he spoke quietly so only his companions could hear.
“Aye, it appears they are not happy to just let us leave. Although they seem extra fixated on the ol’ priestess over there.”
“That’s because I represent an uncomfortable truth that they cannot come to terms with,” Noorani boasted proudly.
Norman decided not to call her out on the hypocrisy of that statement. It wasn’t worth starting an argument right now.
The trio didn’t get more than a hundred feet from the town before the angry mob surrounded them again.
“You are not welcome here, heathens,” one of the men hissed.
“You cannot fool us, we know what you are,” another man spoke up.
Finally, the ringleader took a step forward and pointed his weapon at Norman. “You are foul abominations from the deepest pits of the underworld. And even worse than that, is you.”
Norman pointed to himself, “me? What did I do?”
“You consort with the darkness! Apolon has decreed that we bring those that consort with death to him to be purged in his righteous flames. Do not fear, once you are purified, your soul will be set free.”
Norman looked around at the determined looks on these men’s faces and sighed. “Yeah, you can tell your boss, I’ll have to take a rain check.” Norman didn’t know if the saying translated across cultures, but he didn’t wait to find out as he activated his armor.
The white liquid flowed over his entire body, encasing it in the exoskeleton toughness with all of the cracks filled by the dense muscle fibers and connective tissues. It was just in time for Norman to lift his arm to block the leader’s downward swing of a club. Norman grunted from the blow but didn’t really feel much besides that. The man obviously didn’t have a calling, Norman doubted any of these gathered men did.
He wanted to tell the others to just disable these men, but it was already too late for that. In the short time Norman was distracted, Noorani had already killed three of the men with some spell. Norman had been too preoccupied with his own safety to see or hear what she cast, but whatever it had been, it left a bloody mess of her target’s torsos.
Grobert wasn’t holding back either. He slapped the machete wielder’s blade away with a flick of his wrist and backhanded the man in the face with his other hand. Norman heard the man’s neck snap as he spun away, landing in a nearby bush.
Norman’s attacker grabbed him by the arm and tried to yank him forward, but the bone armor gave Norman more mass than it appeared and instead the man yanked himself toward Norman.
Not seeing any other option, Norman punched the man in the face, sending him reeling back from the blow with a broken nose and purple blood pouring down his face.
He didn’t really have that many offensive options in a situation like this. He could toss out one of his orbs, but the attackers were too close and Norman didn’t feel like walking home naked after his clothes were turned to dust. If norman was better at air casting he could remotely trigger one of the corpses to explode. When he used air casting against the zealot back home it had been pure luck that it had worked.
That left Norman with few options. Thankfully, Norman thought up a rather ingenious idea at that moment. He tossed one of his pocket zombies on the ground right in front of himself. As soon as the zombie appeared, Norman drew a hasty spell circle on its back and kicked it toward the recovering man.
Norman covered the exposed eye slit of his helmet with his arm and a moment later there was a loud popping sound followed by pained screams. Norman weathered the peppering of bone fragments from the Corpse Explosion before lowering his arm.
The man he had kicked the zombie at was dead, his body riddled with spikes of bone and just a whole lot of blood and guts.
A few unfortunate men nearby were injured by bone fragments, and Norman watched as Grobert pulled a few out of his shoulder.
“A bit of warning next time.”
“Sorry.”
Grobert let out a grunt as he tossed the last bone fragment away. Noorani was unhurt, and not so much as a drop of blood marred her clothing. This surprised Norman, considering she was standing in a sea of blood and death from her own attacks.
“A few ran off, do you wish for us to chase them down, Life Bringer?”
“No, leave them be. Finish off the wounded and let’s get out of here.”
“You do not wish to convert them?” She asked in surprise.
“I don’t want to risk that they are protected like that one that attacked the city.”
Noorani said some arcane words that made Norman’s head hurt as she waved at the bodies. Bugs boiled out of the ground around the corpses and began to devour them like rabid piranas. As for the wounded, it looked like roots grew out of the earth and wrapped around their bodies. Norman looked away as the roots squeezed the life out of them. Once dead, the bugs scurried over to clean up any remains. All that was left was a lot of blood and a few broken plants.
Norman sighed. “Let's get out of here. I don’t think we’re going to have any luck changing these people's minds and I would rather be at home than wandering around this hell hole when they attack again.”
The trip back was almost worse than the trip out, with each day spent in the company of the priestess making Norman more and more annoyed with her. Thankfully they parted ways at her village and Grobert and Norman took the teleporter back home. That’s where Grobert left, saying he needed to look into some things and he would be back in a day or two.
Norman nodded to the man, not upset with him but too annoyed to respond verbally.
As soon as Norman returned home, he threw himself on the couch… and immediately regretted it. Grobert may have been a decent builder, but he sure as hell didn’t understand comfort. Norman winced and rubbed his butt after he got off the couch. He popped a sip of healing potion to repair his now likely cracked tailbone.
At least the pain had distracted him from his annoyance over the affairs to the south.
He was annoyed with the short-sighted and belligerent zealots and the fact that they disrupted his nice and quiet life. There was no smoothing this situation over with them, that much was made clear by their attitude the moment Norman’s group came into contact with them. But he was even more annoyed with Priestess Noorani for inciting the whole event in the first place and her attitude afterward. She had been smug the entire way home like it was some great victory. The woman just couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
There was also a nagging sensation in the back of Norman’s mind that she hadn’t been completely honest with him about the events preceding the attack. Maybe not an outright lie, but something felt off about the whole situation. Otherwise, why would the Brotherhood travel hundreds of miles out of their way to target Norman instead of her? An attack of that magnitude wasn’t warranted based on the exchange of a few simple words, no matter how angry it made them feel.
Was she hiding the real reason these people attacked due to embarrassment or some other reason? He just didn’t know and he wasn’t in the mood to deal with her after the trip back. He would get the truth out of her eventually though. Norman had learned his lesson about ignoring warning signs after Toby’s betrayal.
The way Norman saw it, the whole trip was a complete cluster fuck, unlike Noorani who saw it as a victory. But all he could do now is prepare for the enemy to make their next move. He wasn’t about to attack some defenseless city to salve his ego no matter how much Noorani seemed to want that to happen. And it wasn’t like he knew where these zealots made their headquarters, so striking them directly wasn’t an option currently. He doubted the rabble that attacked him outside that town was indicative of this Brotherhood’s forces. They needed information, which means they needed to capture some of them. Norman didn’t look forward to that.
With a sigh, Norman headed toward his workshop to get his mind off of this nonsense.
Ever since arriving in the deadlands, he had put off expanding his magical arsenal to work on other projects. Projects like trying to control the undead, the improvements to his armor, or even the ability to raise the dead from corpses. While not all of those projects had been successful – he glared at the failed pile of notes for his work on trying to control the undead – some had. Most of his successes had come after a lot of time and effort though. Even after a year, Norman still felt like he was barely scratching the surface of what the magical circles could do.
The time he hadn’t spent improving his current spells, he had spent resurrecting bodies. It was time-consuming and draining work but rewarding in its own way. Norman could resurrect fifteen greykin a day before he was drained of mana. Not that he did that many on any given day. And he had significantly slowed as the months went by and he shifted to other projects. But it still amounted to a little over two thousand resurrected greykin. Norman had gone a bit overboard with his collection of bodies before leaving Grothlosburg.
He hadn’t slowed down because he didn’t want more undead around, but simply because it was tiring and he was nearly out of bodies. Grobert could get more for him easily enough but he hadn’t bothered asking yet for a couple of reasons. He was hesitant to raise more undead due to the weird devotion and trust they felt toward him.
Norman appreciated being liked over being a pariah, but it went beyond just liking him. He was pretty sure some of Noorani’s teachings were starting to trickle into the village. Which made the greykin look at him like some sort of savior or messiah. He didn’t know how to feel about that.
Actually, he did, it made him feel fucking weird.
Norman had never had people rely on him for anything before and he was afraid of fucking it up or worse, disappointing them.
It didn’t help that Norman already felt like he let the greykin down when he failed to resurrect both Nolix and Renton, the two guards that had given their lives to defend the castle during the attack. He was able to piece Nolix back together and successfully resurrect him but Renton was a complete loss. The attackers had savaged his body pretty badly but it was a single cut into the man’s skull that made him unrecoverable. Norman’s potions didn’t work on corpses and he couldn’t repair brain injuries.
Norman knew from experience that any sort of brain damage to a corpse made it impossible to resurrect them fully. He still could but the man would be mindless. Not even feral, just a wandering corpse with no drive or goal. It was almost worse than being a feral, at least in Norman’s eyes.
Angry at himself, Norman grabbed up all the notes on controlling the undead and shoved them into the trash bin next to his bench.
After spending so much time among the greykin, he just couldn’t see himself controlling these people like some sick puppets. He should have given up on that line of research a long time ago, seeing it now just made him sick.
The feral undead were a different story but even that wasn’t him controlling them, he simply used them like wild animals. No, if Norman was going to keep going down the road of being a Necromancer – which is the only road he could go down – it was going to be as an ally to the undead and not a master. With his desk cleared, Norman set a new sheet of paper down and began sketching out possible new spells. It was time to protect what he had created.
The group exited the home and paused. About a dozen young men were waiting outside with angry expressions on their faces. What surprised Norman was the fact that they weren’t wearing any headwraps, which couldn’t be good in this sweltering sun. And going by their sun-burned faces, it wasn’t. Then Norman spotted the sun-shaped patches or crudely hand-drawn suns on their clothes. They clearly matched the ones from the attacker's clothing or as close to it as these men could make them.
Noorani took a step forward and was about to say something before Norman clasped her on the shoulder to stop her. They weren’t here to get into a fight, and he knew anything she was about to say would likely set these men off. Not that he thought these men were much of a danger with their ragged clothing and improvised weapons. He was too tired from the walking and the heat to get into a fight if he could avoid it.
If they could get out of there without getting into a fight, it would also probably help with their diplomatic talks. Not that these men seemed like the diplomatic type.
“Is there something we can help you gentlemen with?” Grobert asked politely.
The men collectively spit on the ground towards the trio before wiping their hands across their sweaty foreheads and flicking the perspiration their way. Going by the collective silence of the other townspeople, milling nearby, this was either a vulgar insult or a dire threat.
Norman glanced at the men’s hands, taking in the crude weapons of sticks and clubs. Only one of the men looked to have an actual machete and it looked old and rusty. Norman was more likely to get tetanus from it than an actual cut.
The three of them walked through the gathered men. The men didn’t try to stop them, but they collectively turned to glare at them as they passed. It was honestly kind of freaking Norman out and he was nervously rubbing at the necklace around his neck that would deploy his armor.
The three made it through the wall of men and kept walking. The group followed behind and Norman could see some of their glares turn into cruel smiles as they neared the edge of town.
Norman sighed, “I was hoping to avoid a fight,” he spoke quietly so only his companions could hear.
“Aye, it appears they are not happy to just let us leave. Although they seem extra fixated on the ol’ priestess over there.”
“That’s because I represent an uncomfortable truth that they cannot come to terms with,” Noorani boasted proudly.
Norman decided not to call her out on the hypocrisy of that statement. It wasn’t worth starting an argument right now.
The trio didn’t get more than a hundred feet from the town before the angry mob surrounded them again.
“You are not welcome here, heathens,” one of the men hissed.
“You cannot fool us, we know what you are,” another man spoke up.
Finally, the ringleader took a step forward and pointed his weapon at Norman. “You are foul abominations from the deepest pits of the underworld. And even worse than that, is you.”
Norman pointed to himself, “me? What did I do?”
“You consort with the darkness! Apolon has decreed that we bring those that consort with death to him to be purged in his righteous flames. Do not fear, once you are purified, your soul will be set free.”
Norman looked around at the determined looks on these men’s faces and sighed. “Yeah, you can tell your boss, I’ll have to take a rain check.” Norman didn’t know if the saying translated across cultures, but he didn’t wait to find out as he activated his armor.
The white liquid flowed over his entire body, encasing it in the exoskeleton toughness with all of the cracks filled by the dense muscle fibers and connective tissues. It was just in time for Norman to lift his arm to block the leader’s downward swing of a club. Norman grunted from the blow but didn’t really feel much besides that. The man obviously didn’t have a calling, Norman doubted any of these gathered men did.
He wanted to tell the others to just disable these men, but it was already too late for that. In the short time Norman was distracted, Noorani had already killed three of the men with some spell. Norman had been too preoccupied with his own safety to see or hear what she cast, but whatever it had been, it left a bloody mess of her target’s torsos.
Grobert wasn’t holding back either. He slapped the machete wielder’s blade away with a flick of his wrist and backhanded the man in the face with his other hand. Norman heard the man’s neck snap as he spun away, landing in a nearby bush.
Norman’s attacker grabbed him by the arm and tried to yank him forward, but the bone armor gave Norman more mass than it appeared and instead the man yanked himself toward Norman.
Not seeing any other option, Norman punched the man in the face, sending him reeling back from the blow with a broken nose and purple blood pouring down his face.
He didn’t really have that many offensive options in a situation like this. He could toss out one of his orbs, but the attackers were too close and Norman didn’t feel like walking home naked after his clothes were turned to dust. If norman was better at air casting he could remotely trigger one of the corpses to explode. When he used air casting against the zealot back home it had been pure luck that it had worked.
That left Norman with few options. Thankfully, Norman thought up a rather ingenious idea at that moment. He tossed one of his pocket zombies on the ground right in front of himself. As soon as the zombie appeared, Norman drew a hasty spell circle on its back and kicked it toward the recovering man.
Norman covered the exposed eye slit of his helmet with his arm and a moment later there was a loud popping sound followed by pained screams. Norman weathered the peppering of bone fragments from the Corpse Explosion before lowering his arm.
The man he had kicked the zombie at was dead, his body riddled with spikes of bone and just a whole lot of blood and guts.
A few unfortunate men nearby were injured by bone fragments, and Norman watched as Grobert pulled a few out of his shoulder.
“A bit of warning next time.”
“Sorry.”
Grobert let out a grunt as he tossed the last bone fragment away. Noorani was unhurt, and not so much as a drop of blood marred her clothing. This surprised Norman, considering she was standing in a sea of blood and death from her own attacks.
“A few ran off, do you wish for us to chase them down, Life Bringer?”
“No, leave them be. Finish off the wounded and let’s get out of here.”
“You do not wish to convert them?” She asked in surprise.
“I don’t want to risk that they are protected like that one that attacked the city.”
Noorani said some arcane words that made Norman’s head hurt as she waved at the bodies. Bugs boiled out of the ground around the corpses and began to devour them like rabid piranas. As for the wounded, it looked like roots grew out of the earth and wrapped around their bodies. Norman looked away as the roots squeezed the life out of them. Once dead, the bugs scurried over to clean up any remains. All that was left was a lot of blood and a few broken plants.
Norman sighed. “Let's get out of here. I don’t think we’re going to have any luck changing these people's minds and I would rather be at home than wandering around this hell hole when they attack again.”
The trip back was almost worse than the trip out, with each day spent in the company of the priestess making Norman more and more annoyed with her. Thankfully they parted ways at her village and Grobert and Norman took the teleporter back home. That’s where Grobert left, saying he needed to look into some things and he would be back in a day or two.
Norman nodded to the man, not upset with him but too annoyed to respond verbally.
As soon as Norman returned home, he threw himself on the couch… and immediately regretted it. Grobert may have been a decent builder, but he sure as hell didn’t understand comfort. Norman winced and rubbed his butt after he got off the couch. He popped a sip of healing potion to repair his now likely cracked tailbone.
At least the pain had distracted him from his annoyance over the affairs to the south.
He was annoyed with the short-sighted and belligerent zealots and the fact that they disrupted his nice and quiet life. There was no smoothing this situation over with them, that much was made clear by their attitude the moment Norman’s group came into contact with them. But he was even more annoyed with Priestess Noorani for inciting the whole event in the first place and her attitude afterward. She had been smug the entire way home like it was some great victory. The woman just couldn’t keep her mouth shut.
There was also a nagging sensation in the back of Norman’s mind that she hadn’t been completely honest with him about the events preceding the attack. Maybe not an outright lie, but something felt off about the whole situation. Otherwise, why would the Brotherhood travel hundreds of miles out of their way to target Norman instead of her? An attack of that magnitude wasn’t warranted based on the exchange of a few simple words, no matter how angry it made them feel.
Was she hiding the real reason these people attacked due to embarrassment or some other reason? He just didn’t know and he wasn’t in the mood to deal with her after the trip back. He would get the truth out of her eventually though. Norman had learned his lesson about ignoring warning signs after Toby’s betrayal.
The way Norman saw it, the whole trip was a complete cluster fuck, unlike Noorani who saw it as a victory. But all he could do now is prepare for the enemy to make their next move. He wasn’t about to attack some defenseless city to salve his ego no matter how much Noorani seemed to want that to happen. And it wasn’t like he knew where these zealots made their headquarters, so striking them directly wasn’t an option currently. He doubted the rabble that attacked him outside that town was indicative of this Brotherhood’s forces. They needed information, which means they needed to capture some of them. Norman didn’t look forward to that.
With a sigh, Norman headed toward his workshop to get his mind off of this nonsense.
Ever since arriving in the deadlands, he had put off expanding his magical arsenal to work on other projects. Projects like trying to control the undead, the improvements to his armor, or even the ability to raise the dead from corpses. While not all of those projects had been successful – he glared at the failed pile of notes for his work on trying to control the undead – some had. Most of his successes had come after a lot of time and effort though. Even after a year, Norman still felt like he was barely scratching the surface of what the magical circles could do.
The time he hadn’t spent improving his current spells, he had spent resurrecting bodies. It was time-consuming and draining work but rewarding in its own way. Norman could resurrect fifteen greykin a day before he was drained of mana. Not that he did that many on any given day. And he had significantly slowed as the months went by and he shifted to other projects. But it still amounted to a little over two thousand resurrected greykin. Norman had gone a bit overboard with his collection of bodies before leaving Grothlosburg.
He hadn’t slowed down because he didn’t want more undead around, but simply because it was tiring and he was nearly out of bodies. Grobert could get more for him easily enough but he hadn’t bothered asking yet for a couple of reasons. He was hesitant to raise more undead due to the weird devotion and trust they felt toward him.
Norman appreciated being liked over being a pariah, but it went beyond just liking him. He was pretty sure some of Noorani’s teachings were starting to trickle into the village. Which made the greykin look at him like some sort of savior or messiah. He didn’t know how to feel about that.
Actually, he did, it made him feel fucking weird.
Norman had never had people rely on him for anything before and he was afraid of fucking it up or worse, disappointing them.
It didn’t help that Norman already felt like he let the greykin down when he failed to resurrect both Nolix and Renton, the two guards that had given their lives to defend the castle during the attack. He was able to piece Nolix back together and successfully resurrect him but Renton was a complete loss. The attackers had savaged his body pretty badly but it was a single cut into the man’s skull that made him unrecoverable. Norman’s potions didn’t work on corpses and he couldn’t repair brain injuries.
Norman knew from experience that any sort of brain damage to a corpse made it impossible to resurrect them fully. He still could but the man would be mindless. Not even feral, just a wandering corpse with no drive or goal. It was almost worse than being a feral, at least in Norman’s eyes.
Angry at himself, Norman grabbed up all the notes on controlling the undead and shoved them into the trash bin next to his bench.
After spending so much time among the greykin, he just couldn’t see himself controlling these people like some sick puppets. He should have given up on that line of research a long time ago, seeing it now just made him sick.
The feral undead were a different story but even that wasn’t him controlling them, he simply used them like wild animals. No, if Norman was going to keep going down the road of being a Necromancer – which is the only road he could go down – it was going to be as an ally to the undead and not a master. With his desk cleared, Norman set a new sheet of paper down and began sketching out possible new spells. It was time to protect what he had created.
