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Ch061- Necromancy Rocks!
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[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]
[Raise Zombie (II) Proficiency increased to 100%!]
[Raise Zombie (II) rank up available!]
Choose 1 from the following:
Raise Zombie (III):
-Increase CON of all zombies under your control by 10%.
-Decrease the rate of decay by 20%.
-Decrease light vulnerability by 10%.
-Decrease fire vulnerability by 33%.
-Zombies can heal by eating raw flesh.
-Increase the amount of mana returned for zombies by [Dying Breath] from 5% to 33%.
-If a zombie is permanently dismissed it will disintegrate, but [Dying Breath] the amount of mana returned will be increased from 5% to 60%.
-[Requirements not met]
-[Requirements not met]
….
Sylver got up from his seat and looked at the floating words in front of him. He knew the fire vulnerability was from when he was caught in his own explosion and burned most of his skin off. But why did the fact that he killed the rat king unlock the raw flesh healing effect?
“What have I killed? Goblins… Then giants… Pale goblins… Wolves a few days ago… And the rest were all humans, or elves or close enough… I’ve killed at least 1,000 people by now, haven’t I?” Sylver asked, flicking his hands and cutting off the flow of mana. The smoke continued to move around and force itself into the dead rodents’ mouths.
“I wouldn’t say 1,000, but more than 500 definitely. Why? You think a key part of your class is killing monsters, as opposed to people?” Spring offered, as the more heavily damaged rats were being thrown on top of their king.
“It could just be because of the dungeon. It did say that that I gained extra experience from defeating a layer boss. So the system clearly recognizes the rat king as something different from a regular monster,” Sylver said, thinking out loud and sitting back down.
“So you think this is something like a reward for killing a boss monster? If that’s the case, wouldn’t everyone be constantly going down into the dungeons to… Oh.”
“I’m going to assume this is one of those extremely well known and common knowledge things, that Ciege had never heard about because everyone knows going into dungeons unlocks special effects. I could be reading too much into this too. Maybe it only works for certain skills? And this is just the first time I happened to meet the requirements?” Sylver said, sliding his foot slowly forward on the stone floor and causing the ground underneath the rat king and all the heavily damaged rat corpses to descend down into the forming bowl-shaped hole.
“The short and long of it is, who knows? And- yep that’s your ‘I’m about to start swearing because I’m getting a headache’ face. Switching the subject, will this be enough?” Spring asked, turning Sylver’s attention from the gentle warning buzz towards the rat filled hole he had made.
“A bit more. It should be a small mound, there’s more empty space down there than you realize,” Sylver said, rubbing his eyes and looking back up at the floating board.
“The raw flesh one is largely pointless at the moment, I can heal them myself if I need to, but I’m not planning on keeping any zombies around, they’re all temporary. So either I get more mana from them automatically when they are killed, or I can have them as sort of small mana batteries. 60% versus 33%, but keep in mind zombies will all more likely than not die while fighting. And if they ‘die’ and give me the 33%, I can still fix them up if I need them. Dismissing them kills them off for good…” Sylver finished, giving Spring a moment to interject, but sticking to his decision when the shade couldn’t find any fault in his thinking.
Speaking to a creature that was 97% him, was only marginally better than just talking to himself out loud.
[Skill: Raise Zombie (III)]
Skill level can be increased by raising zombies. (Repeat raising of the same zombie will not increase skill level)
I - Turn a corpse into a zombie.
II - Increase the STR of all zombies under your control by 30%.
III - Increase the amount of mana returned by zombies from [Dying Breath] from 5% to 33%.
*Quality dependent on the corpse.
*Quality dependent on the soul.
*Possibility of failure is dependent on the skills of the castor.
Sylver looked around at the 130 rat zombies he had raised, and cracked his knuckles again.
Walking over to the hole filled with dead rats, Sylver touched the one closest to him, and waited for his magic to work for a few seconds. The body started to inflate ever so slightly, and a very distinct sloshing sound was made as Sylver gently shook the corpse.
The rat corpse deflated, leaking a bubbling dark red slush onto the pile below, tiny sparks of yellow lighting up the complete darkness around it. The red liquid melted into the fur and skin of the corpses underneath it, liquifying them, and causing them to fall lower into the hole as the corpses at the very bottom were infected.
“Alright everyone get into a single file line,” Sylver shouted, as the rat zombies behind him quickly ran and rolled into a long curved line, starting from the hole in the ground, and curving around it in a spiral.
Moving his hand over the hole in a spinning motion caused all the semi liquified corpses to start to move, rolling around in the acid-like liquid, pieces of eyeballs, patches of blood-soaked fur, bones, skulls, and intestines bubbling to the top of the large pool, before sinking down below.
A snap of Sylver’s fingers caused the small yellow sparks that were dancing on the top of the constantly moving liquid to intensify and cause the whole thing to turn black for a moment, before returning to its regular dark red color. Sylver made a small cut on the back of his forearm and let a few drops of blood fall into the bubbling liquid, before sealing the cut closed with darkness.
Another snap of his fingers caused the whole thing to start bubbling even harder than before, resulting in a rolling boil, as the pieces of flesh and bone gradually decreased until only a smooth dark red liquid remained.
“Get in, make sure all your claws have a good layer on them, and take exactly one sip of it. There should be enough for everyone,” Sylver said, as the first zombie rat jumped into the pool of poison, and reemerged a moment later. The zombie rat that was next in line jumped in next, then another, then another…
“What is that anyway?” Spring asked, ordering the poison covered rats towards the recently opened hidden door.
“It’s based on something Adema called ‘Cleanser’. It was absolutely brilliant, she created a substance that cannibalized itself. You mix a piece of infected tissue into it, and you’ve got a quick and easy way of getting rid of everything infected inside of you. Near-instant anti-poison, provided you have the poison at hand. Plagues, viruses, infections, parasites, even rotten flesh, everything could be cured with this extremely simple to conjure solution. At least that was its original function. I found out that if you mix a tiny bit of dead tissue into it, and charge the whole thing with a fair amount of death magic it starts to eat anything that’s alive. I call it ‘Living Rot’. Get so much as a drop on your bare skin, or in your blood, and unless you have healing magic, or a fast enough regeneration to outlast it long enough to develop an immunity, you’re done. Perfect for fighting monsters, especially in enclosed environments,” Sylver explained, as his infected rodents lined up one by one, the disgustingly sweet smell in the air making Sylver’s eyes water slightly.
“I see. What happens if it gets into the water supply or something?” Spring asked, sending shades down the tunnels ahead to scout as much as possible. Not that they would be able to find a whole lot, given how little they could see due to the magical interference. It was a wonder they could move through the shadows at all.
“Nothing. It completely disintegrates unless it finds something to infect, once it leaves the rats’ claws and teeth. Think of it more like an advanced poison, rather than a biological disease. There’s also my blood mixed in, to act as a kind of trigger. I can’t pick and choose which living rot stops functioning, I can only turn it all off. I learned the hard way you always need an antidote to whatever it is you make. Once I’m done, I’ll shut it all down, it’ll become completely harmless and inert. Come here a sec,” Sylver said, raising his hand towards Spring who appeared right next to him.
Sylve flattened his hand and pushed it through the shades chest, searching around until he found it.
“Oh wow, down to 95% already. Even Rook wasn’t that fast. Hold still,” Sylver cautioned, as all the yellow cracks on Springs skin flared up, before receding the tiniest amount.
Sylver pulled his hand out and waved it until it stopped smoking.
“That’s actually a lot better, thank you,” Spring said, rubbing his chest until the small hole closed up fully. “We can’t see anything, but there’s a very large amount of moving things in one tunnel. And the rest are fairly evenly spread out all throughout the tunnels. How do you want to handle it?” Spring asked.
Sylver waited for a moment and looked through the raw data the shades were passing onto Spring and him.
“I’ll take ten rats with me to the area with a lot of monsters, it feels like it might be another layer boss. Send the rest out to scratch or get eaten by as many monsters as they can,” Sylver said, watching as the final rat crawled out of the nearly empty pool of poison.
He clicked his fingers and the remains of poison burst into flames, the light blue fire illuminating the large room. After a few seconds the flames snuffed themselves out, and with a kick of his foot, the ground closed up, as if there was never a hole there, to begin with.
*
Jogging through the tunnels, Sylver made a mental note that they were a lot wider here. Big enough that he was certain a horse could comfortably galop without having any issue. Sounds of fighting and screeching and roars of pain and victory filled the tunnel, the noise bouncing around and echoing as Sylver ran.
He’d told the rats not to attack anything that was humanoid, but at the same time, didn’t think there was an adventurer who couldn’t deal with a slow-moving rodent. So he wouldn’t be feeling too bad if one of the zombies couldn’t tell them apart and attacked them. Meeting your end due to a zombie rat, was just one of the many risks every adventurer had to accept when they came down here.
Ahead of him, the 10 remaining rats continued to run, their small feet and sharp retracted claws making a slightly unnerving tippy tapping sound. Thankfully the area with the largest amount of enemies was just around the corner.
With all the mana interference, Sylver was more than confident about distracting something he couldn’t win against, long enough to run away from it. The monsters here might be weak at this layer, but there was nothing stopping them from ganging up on him and managing to successfully overwhelm him.
Speaking honestly, that mimic would have caught him completely off guard, if he didn’t have Spring spring the trap on himself first. Sylver wouldn’t have tried to open it himself anyway, but accidentally running nearby, or hiding behind it, and getting eaten was a possibility.
He had read the book he had bought while raising the rat zombies, and was upset to learn that there were very few monsters that the guards knew about. Or written down in the book to be precise, people who could go down low enough that something as small as knowing a monster’s weakness became important, didn’t readily share that information, and the guards couldn’t afford to buy it off them.
The tunnel he was following was almost a direct path to the next area, the floor seemed almost polished from how smooth it was. The walls were filled with holes and tunnels, leading left and right, higher and lower, and Sylver saw small traces of people fighting in this area. A patch of soot here, a mark from a sword there, some shattered glass near the entrance of a tunnel, but nothing recent.
[??? (???) Defeated!]
[??? (???) Defeated!]
[??? (???) Defeated!]
…
The messages started to pile on, one after the other, surprising Sylver and forcing him to split his focus between running and attempting to work out if there was a way to silence this shit, or at the very least get more useful information out of it. The fact that he was killing something he didn’t see, or hadn’t seen, meant that all that the system would tell him about it, would be what he knew.
Which was nothing. All that he knew was that either the rats killed something or the poison was working, and he was killing a great deal of something. A great deal of something that was of a lower level than him, or at the very most 9 levels higher than he was.
This may have been a bit wasteful from the perspective of other adventurers, since he was killing things and not benefiting from them, unlike lower leveled adventurers who could have possibly gained a level or two from killing all these things, but Sylver couldn’t exactly get the rats to pick and choose which monsters they infected, so he didn’t think about it too much.
Not to mention, low-level monsters bred like… well like rats, so whatever imbalance he was causing by doing this would get corrected relatively soon.
And the fewer monsters for him to deal with, when he returned to the dungeon and wanted to go to lower levels, the better.
Sylver slowed down his run to a walk and stopped completely near the end of the tunnel.
He didn’t need to ask the shades to tell him what they would find, because he could feel the multitude of souls hiding all around the entrance. They were waiting with an ambush. Sylver stood in place for a moment, and thought about how best to deal with this.
He silently made a zombie rat come closer to him, and used the cat sorcerer's scalpel to carve a small framework onto the rat’s skin. Sylver held his hand over the framework, and loaded it up with 400MP.
He silently walked up the wall and onto the ceiling, and got into position. The rat zombies changed places so the one with the framework was first, before charging into the open area.
Sylver heard a loud screeching noise, followed by several grunts, and watched from his safe spot on the ceiling as all 10 of his rats were completely destroyed by small fast-moving rocks being thrown at them. Sylver made them play dead, or at least stop moving, and waited.
After a full minute had passed, and all the rat zombies remained on the floor, completely motionless, Sylver saw a hair-covered humanoid creature jump down to look at the corpses.
It was covered from head to toe in very slick looking dark hair, completely invisible in the pitch-black room, if not for the fact that Sylver could see in the dark. Its arms were thin and long, save for the giant hands at the end of them. Its head was shaped in a slightly squashed and triangular shape, and its back was covered in thin barely visible scars. It had a small pouch on its stomach, and going by the shape and movement, it was filled with the rocks Sylver’s rats were killed by.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) – 43]
[HP-1,941]
[MP-103]
The creature immediately turned around, showing its teeth and grunting rhythmically. It seemed to lock eyes with Sylver for a moment. Sylver waited to see how the illusion over him would fare, and a small smile crept up his face as he saw the telltale signs of the monster being absolutely certain there was something there, but unable to see it or narrow the area down. The creature disappeared into the ceiling, moving near the entrance once again.
Oh… This is too easy… Sylver thought, as he walked forward and towards the entrance.
He came as close as he dared too, before ordering the zombie rats to get up and start making noise.
Almost instantly they were once again pummeled by rocks. Sylver counted to five, until he had as many eyes on them as possible, before activating the framework he had carved onto one of the rats.
It ballooned up instantly, exploding with a deafening pop, and a flash of light so bright, that Sylver could see it even though his fingers that he was holding over his tightly closed eyes. He started to run, even before fully opening his eyes, jumping out of the entrance and into the open area ahead.
Clouds of dust appeared all around Sylver, as rocks flew harmlessly through the illusionary Sylver’s all around him. With a kick of his foot, the ground opened up underneath him, and Sylver fell down into the hole, closing the top before his feet even touched the ground.
Placing both hands onto the wall around him, Sylver spent the remainder of his mana, making a small dome of earth over where he was a moment ago.
*
Up above the few apes that were able to shield their eyes from the flash, or were lucky to have been looking away or reloading, did their very best to warn their blinded brethren, about the black and yellow things that were appearing out of nowhere, and stabbing them in the face and the backs of their necks.
A few dropped dead down to the floor, before all the black and yellow things were killed, each one exploding into a puff of black smoke as the stones made an impact with them. There was a fair amount of friendly fire, but a bruise was preferable to a dagger in the back of the head.
The apes looked at the small mound of earth in the middle of the room, and started throwing rocks at it, each small mana infused rock, chipping away at the earth made dome.
*
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
…
“Only 9, really?” Sylver asked, manipulating the earth around himself to make some room and letting the dark smoke build up on the ceiling.
“We can’t see shit, and they are unbelievably accurate with those rocks, what did you think would happen? And 9 is enough,” Spring countered, gradually pulling all the defeated shades down into the small holes Sylver had made to the top.
Because of [Dying Breath] Sylver was back to full MP and was slowly digging his way upwards. A very gentle tap of the foot caused the ground underneath one of the ape corpses to sink, pulling the body down underground. Sylver felt something grab the body and try to pull it out of the quicksand like hole, and made an educated guess and sent an earth spike to shoot in the direction of the pulling force.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
“Honestly, I kind of love that it confirms all the things I kill,” Sylver said, as the large blood covered body toppled out of the ceiling and dropped down on the floor. Sylver solidified the soft earth through which the body had fallen, and had Spring help him pull it towards the initial area he had made. Making the walls around himself retreat a little, Sylver made his hiding spot wide enough to lay the ape down on its back.
Sending pulses of mana into the body, Sylver was happy to find there weren’t any surprises in there. Spring helped him turn the thing on its back, and Sylver used a dagger to pry open the back of the apes skull. No surprises there either, it was as far as Sylver was concerned, a long-armed human. In terms of raising it as a zombie at least.
He pinched the skin and sealed it shut, and made a gesture at the cloud of darkness swirling above him.
Faint yellow sparks started to flash throughout the giant cloud of blackness, a very small stream funneling down into the open mouth of the ape Sylver was currently standing on. The rest started to force itself upwards, through the small holes Sylver had made.
As the apes hiding all along the walls and ceiling of the large cave kept pummeling the hollow dome in the middle of the room with rocks, they didn’t notice the murky smoke coming out of the floor and streaming directly into the mouths of the dead apes littered around the area.
The one closest to the dome, covered almost completely in rocks that bounced off the earth dome, started to shake slightly. It turned into a full blown seizure, as the other 8 ape corpses started to shake, their teeth clicking in rhythmic unison, as one by one they started to get up from the floor.
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
They were hit by the rocks the other apes threw at them, but the blunt projectiles were useless against the flesh that was purposely forced to undergo rigor mortis, and was very likely almost as tough as the rocks being thrown at them.
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
…
[Raise Zombie (III) Proficiency increased to 2%!]
The zombie apes shuffled over to the crushed dead rats and stomped on their bodies, the bones and flesh turning into blackened mush as they burst open. Another one swept rocks into the newly created mixture, coating the small rocks in the slippery fatty poison.
As the final zombie stood up and grabbed a handful of rocks, along with the others, it aimed completely at random, and through pure luck managed to hit a few of the apes clinging to the walls. The other ape zombies joined in too and started to chuck poison covered rocks in every direction.
While Sylver was comfortably sitting and waiting for his mana to regenerate, up above there were 8 zombie apes standing around a pile of living rot covered rocks, throwing them at their alive counterparts.
Sadly their counterparts were as tough as the zombies were, shrugging off the small projectiles, moving too quick for even a single rock to hit them in the head. Behind them, the walls were covered in sprinkles of shattered stone, slick with the blood of the zombie apes, as well as the quickly spreading living rot.
In mere minutes Sylver’s zombie apes were all hit in the head hard enough that it disturbed his magic, and they toppled over to the floor, as lifeless as they had initially been.
The apes that were sitting on the walls and ceiling, continued throwing rocks at their once again dead breathering, sending splatters of blood and chunks of flesh up in the air. Sylver was even surprised to hear that they managed to hit one of the zombie corpses enough times to shatter the skull and make it burst open.
Sylver continued to sit in complete and total darkness, as the apes above waited for whatever was going to come next.
The human surely can’t stay inside that thing forever? They collectively thought, or at least that’s what Sylver assumed they thought, given that they started throwing rocks at the reinforced earth dome, that was now completely filled in from the inside, and the equivalent of a boulder.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
“Oh, a bit quicker than I was expecting,” Sylver said, as the first ape fell down from the wall and hit the ground.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
The apes that were hanging on the walls all started to rhythmically screech, as some of them gradually started to get woozy, messing up the previously organized noise. Several fell to the floor before they completely lost consciousness, some breaking their necks, others shaking as their bodies tried to fight the infection off, but all gradually dying.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
…
Sylver watched the notifications with a smile, counting them, and waiting for the number to hit 50 before proceeding.
[Necromancer] has reached level 37!
+5AP
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
The noise up above began to get frantic, as the remaining apes all desperately continued to pummel the dome shaped rock up above, the sound of rock hitting rock, mixing up with the sound of dead ape hitting ground.
Total Level: 41
[Koschei-4]
[Necromancer-37]
CON: 30
DEX: 10
STR: 1
INT: 100
WIS: 100
AP: 5
Health: 300/300
Stamina: 139/150
MP: 1344/1000
Health Regen: 4.50/M
Stamina Regen: 2.25/M
MP Regen: 100.00/M
[Skills:]
Appraisal (V) [2%]
Draining Touch (II) [22%]
Optical Illusion (II) [19%]
Auditory Illusion (I) [39%]
Raise Shade (III) [1%]
Raise Zombie (III) [2%]
Physical Endurance (I) [98%]
Magic Nullification (I) [7%]
Flesh Weaving (I) [8%]
[Perks:]
Golden Egg
Dead’s Dogma
Eyes Of The Royal Tiger
Tools Of The Shade
Dying Breath
Hare’s Great Escape
Kindred Spirit Mitigation
[Traits:]
Living Undead
Deathless
Mana Perception
Mana Manipulation
Undead Domination
Deathly Aura
Faceless
Weird, I don’t remember getting a notification about physical resistance or magic nullification or flesh weaving increasing in proficiency.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
Probably just missed it. Sylver thought as he started to breathe out smoke from his mouth and let it gather up on the ceiling of his hiding spot. He decided to hold onto the points for the moment.
Edmund would have pulled me out of the ground and forced me to fight them all barehanded, if he saw me doing this. Sylver thought with a slight grin, as he moved his hand in a circular motion and the smoke started to slowly push itself through the small holes that he had made, and out onto the floor above.
One by one, the streams of smoke crawled along the floor, towards the dead apes, a few of the more intelligent ones throwing rocks at the intangible smoke but achieving absolutely nothing with their efforts.
The smoke forced itself into the mouths of the recently deceased apes, causing their bodies to start to shake slightly.
[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]
[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
…
[Raise Zombie (III) Proficiency increased to 6%!]
The apes at the corner slowly rose up from the floor, some of them pushing their heads back into place, their necks cracking from the motion, others simply standing in place for a moment, as the magic finished making all the necessary connections.
Sylver didn’t even look at however many apes he had raised, and simply gave them all the exact same command.
Attack.
Minus 3 that he ordered to go to the pile of dead rats and living rot, every single other zombie ape, began to climb up the wall and bite, hit, pull, throw, or otherwise harm the remaining apes above them. The three near the earthen dome started to melt almost instantly, throwing up blood and bile onto the pile of rocks, and further mixing them up to get everything as coated in poison as possible.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
Do they all have the exact same class? Probably rock thrower, or something like that. Ambush ape?
Sylver closed his eyes and tried to listen in to what was happening up above him. There was a great deal of screaming and grunting, sounds of flesh hitting flesh, stone hitting flesh, and flesh hitting stone.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
But bit by bit, the noise reduced. The apes in the middle were helping sow chaos by throwing poison coated stones at the apes at the very top, causing them to sometimes fall and pull down more apes on their way down.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
…
Sylver did as he always did in a situation such as this, and tried as much as he could not to look at the screen directly in front of his eyes. It was nice to see confirmations that he was killing stuff successfully, but it was annoying after they started appearing 6 in a row.
[Necromancer] has reached level 38!
+5AP
I should have come here when I first arrived in Arda. Not that they would have let me… And then I was damaged from the cat island curse… Then I went to prison… Then I helped wipe out the Black Mane… Then Yeva and Ciege were kidnapped…. Then the auction… Oh damn, this is pretty much the first time I’ve had the free time to come here.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
A part of Sylver was tempted to jump out of his hiding spot and help out his zombie troops, but he thankfully remembered that all they needed was one lucky hit in the head to dismember him and most likely eat him before his magic kicked in to resurrect him.
If anything, it occurred to Sylver that he was in more danger here, than almost ever before. He’d mostly fought against people before, and the worst they could do was kill him and leave him in a ditch. Considering how rare necromancers were here, it would be unlikely they would have realized he didn’t die for good. He would just wake up, either buried underground, or at the bottom of a river. Or just left wherever he died, and stripped for his daggers and money.
But here, even getting knocked out would mean permanently dying.
Sylver still hadn’t tested the limits of his unique class resurrecting him, and wasn’t all that certain how to test it. Anything that was a small death, would be fixed by his own mana automatically.
And anything major enough that he couldn’t resurrect himself, would mean leaving everything to the system and needle. Which he didn’t trust enough to attempt.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Necromancer] has reached level 39!
+5AP
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
I’ve gained more levels from killing a bunch of overgrown monkeys, than I did massacring what could conservatively be called a small army.
Sylver continued to sit and wait, and very slowly the messages of apes dying went down. Sylver kept an eye on his mana, and was surprised he was still sitting on 1403, only going down slightly as his body couldn’t hold the excess and dissipated it into the air around him.
The fact that [Dying Breath] was working despite the fact that Sylver couldn’t see his zombies was a bit of a mystery to him. But he was guessing he was meeting some sort of requirement for it to continue working, despite the fact that there were several meters of rock between him and his zombies.
But one thing Sylver loved above all else, was that the apes hadn’t even tried to run away. This was strange, to say the least, but given that Sylver felt pressure behind his ears as he tried to figure out why that was, he changed his mind and just accepted it.
Sylver stared at the empty space in front of him, waiting for his mana to tick up, or for notification about killing something to show up. The shades all said there was no movement, but with how little they could see, they could very easily be wrong.
After waiting for a full minute without seeing anything happening, but being certain that there were still zombies up above, Sylver manipulated the earth above him and very carefully and quietly popped his head out for a look. He looked all around but couldn’t see any movement that didn’t belong to his zombies.
“You know, there used to be a saying about picking a fight with a necromancer,” Sylver said, as the ground underneath him moved upwards and pushed him out of the hole completely. He straightened his back, and stretched side to side to get the blood flowing in his legs after sitting still for so long.
He snapped his fingers and made the large rock dome decoy turn into sand and fall down into the area he was occupying a moment ago.
Littered all around him were dead apes, in various degrees of damage, but all unmistakably dead. Some had bite marks on their faces and necks, others had the telltale sign of living rot entering their system, a few had their necks snapped from falling down, and a couple had a rock embedded directly in their face. The 30% increase in strength seemed to have really helped the zombies with their throwing firepower.
Sylver turned towards the zombies standing near where the rats infected with living rot were a moment ago, and carefully started to lower the ground they were standing on into a bowl-shaped hole. They toppled over as the living rot spread upwards into their bodies and started liquifying their legs and torso.
“Well, a poem if I am being honest,” Sylver added, as Spring materialized near him. Sylver turned to look towards the slowly opening hidden door on the opposite side of the entrance he had come in through. He decided not to ask how exactly this door knew to start opening, and saved himself from another headache. There was no layer boss here, but this was definitely something.
“Very catchy, quite long, but the short of it is,” Sylver said, with a flourish, as the remaining ape zombies started to drag the ape corpses towards the middle.
“Don’t,” Sylver said, as the hole in the ground deepened and the poison inside started to bubble and boil, recycling all the blood and gore around it into itself.
Sylver watched the rolling liquid, as Spring ordered for the corpses that were too damaged to be raised as zombies to be thrown into it.
Three whole levels in just a couple of hours. I wonder how long it would take to get to 50?
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Ch061- Necromancy Rocks!
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[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]
[Raise Zombie (II) Proficiency increased to 100%!]
[Raise Zombie (II) rank up available!]
Choose 1 from the following:
Raise Zombie (III):
-Increase CON of all zombies under your control by 10%.
-Decrease the rate of decay by 20%.
-Decrease light vulnerability by 10%.
-Decrease fire vulnerability by 33%.
-Zombies can heal by eating raw flesh.
-Increase the amount of mana returned for zombies by [Dying Breath] from 5% to 33%.
-If a zombie is permanently dismissed it will disintegrate, but [Dying Breath] the amount of mana returned will be increased from 5% to 60%.
-[Requirements not met]
-[Requirements not met]
….
Sylver got up from his seat and looked at the floating words in front of him. He knew the fire vulnerability was from when he was caught in his own explosion and burned most of his skin off. But why did the fact that he killed the rat king unlock the raw flesh healing effect?
“What have I killed? Goblins… Then giants… Pale goblins… Wolves a few days ago… And the rest were all humans, or elves or close enough… I’ve killed at least 1,000 people by now, haven’t I?” Sylver asked, flicking his hands and cutting off the flow of mana. The smoke continued to move around and force itself into the dead rodents’ mouths.
“I wouldn’t say 1,000, but more than 500 definitely. Why? You think a key part of your class is killing monsters, as opposed to people?” Spring offered, as the more heavily damaged rats were being thrown on top of their king.
“It could just be because of the dungeon. It did say that that I gained extra experience from defeating a layer boss. So the system clearly recognizes the rat king as something different from a regular monster,” Sylver said, thinking out loud and sitting back down.
“So you think this is something like a reward for killing a boss monster? If that’s the case, wouldn’t everyone be constantly going down into the dungeons to… Oh.”
“I’m going to assume this is one of those extremely well known and common knowledge things, that Ciege had never heard about because everyone knows going into dungeons unlocks special effects. I could be reading too much into this too. Maybe it only works for certain skills? And this is just the first time I happened to meet the requirements?” Sylver said, sliding his foot slowly forward on the stone floor and causing the ground underneath the rat king and all the heavily damaged rat corpses to descend down into the forming bowl-shaped hole.
“The short and long of it is, who knows? And- yep that’s your ‘I’m about to start swearing because I’m getting a headache’ face. Switching the subject, will this be enough?” Spring asked, turning Sylver’s attention from the gentle warning buzz towards the rat filled hole he had made.
“A bit more. It should be a small mound, there’s more empty space down there than you realize,” Sylver said, rubbing his eyes and looking back up at the floating board.
“The raw flesh one is largely pointless at the moment, I can heal them myself if I need to, but I’m not planning on keeping any zombies around, they’re all temporary. So either I get more mana from them automatically when they are killed, or I can have them as sort of small mana batteries. 60% versus 33%, but keep in mind zombies will all more likely than not die while fighting. And if they ‘die’ and give me the 33%, I can still fix them up if I need them. Dismissing them kills them off for good…” Sylver finished, giving Spring a moment to interject, but sticking to his decision when the shade couldn’t find any fault in his thinking.
Speaking to a creature that was 97% him, was only marginally better than just talking to himself out loud.
[Skill: Raise Zombie (III)]
Skill level can be increased by raising zombies. (Repeat raising of the same zombie will not increase skill level)
I - Turn a corpse into a zombie.
II - Increase the STR of all zombies under your control by 30%.
III - Increase the amount of mana returned by zombies from [Dying Breath] from 5% to 33%.
*Quality dependent on the corpse.
*Quality dependent on the soul.
*Possibility of failure is dependent on the skills of the castor.
Sylver looked around at the 130 rat zombies he had raised, and cracked his knuckles again.
Walking over to the hole filled with dead rats, Sylver touched the one closest to him, and waited for his magic to work for a few seconds. The body started to inflate ever so slightly, and a very distinct sloshing sound was made as Sylver gently shook the corpse.
The rat corpse deflated, leaking a bubbling dark red slush onto the pile below, tiny sparks of yellow lighting up the complete darkness around it. The red liquid melted into the fur and skin of the corpses underneath it, liquifying them, and causing them to fall lower into the hole as the corpses at the very bottom were infected.
“Alright everyone get into a single file line,” Sylver shouted, as the rat zombies behind him quickly ran and rolled into a long curved line, starting from the hole in the ground, and curving around it in a spiral.
Moving his hand over the hole in a spinning motion caused all the semi liquified corpses to start to move, rolling around in the acid-like liquid, pieces of eyeballs, patches of blood-soaked fur, bones, skulls, and intestines bubbling to the top of the large pool, before sinking down below.
A snap of Sylver’s fingers caused the small yellow sparks that were dancing on the top of the constantly moving liquid to intensify and cause the whole thing to turn black for a moment, before returning to its regular dark red color. Sylver made a small cut on the back of his forearm and let a few drops of blood fall into the bubbling liquid, before sealing the cut closed with darkness.
Another snap of his fingers caused the whole thing to start bubbling even harder than before, resulting in a rolling boil, as the pieces of flesh and bone gradually decreased until only a smooth dark red liquid remained.
“Get in, make sure all your claws have a good layer on them, and take exactly one sip of it. There should be enough for everyone,” Sylver said, as the first zombie rat jumped into the pool of poison, and reemerged a moment later. The zombie rat that was next in line jumped in next, then another, then another…
“What is that anyway?” Spring asked, ordering the poison covered rats towards the recently opened hidden door.
“It’s based on something Adema called ‘Cleanser’. It was absolutely brilliant, she created a substance that cannibalized itself. You mix a piece of infected tissue into it, and you’ve got a quick and easy way of getting rid of everything infected inside of you. Near-instant anti-poison, provided you have the poison at hand. Plagues, viruses, infections, parasites, even rotten flesh, everything could be cured with this extremely simple to conjure solution. At least that was its original function. I found out that if you mix a tiny bit of dead tissue into it, and charge the whole thing with a fair amount of death magic it starts to eat anything that’s alive. I call it ‘Living Rot’. Get so much as a drop on your bare skin, or in your blood, and unless you have healing magic, or a fast enough regeneration to outlast it long enough to develop an immunity, you’re done. Perfect for fighting monsters, especially in enclosed environments,” Sylver explained, as his infected rodents lined up one by one, the disgustingly sweet smell in the air making Sylver’s eyes water slightly.
“I see. What happens if it gets into the water supply or something?” Spring asked, sending shades down the tunnels ahead to scout as much as possible. Not that they would be able to find a whole lot, given how little they could see due to the magical interference. It was a wonder they could move through the shadows at all.
“Nothing. It completely disintegrates unless it finds something to infect, once it leaves the rats’ claws and teeth. Think of it more like an advanced poison, rather than a biological disease. There’s also my blood mixed in, to act as a kind of trigger. I can’t pick and choose which living rot stops functioning, I can only turn it all off. I learned the hard way you always need an antidote to whatever it is you make. Once I’m done, I’ll shut it all down, it’ll become completely harmless and inert. Come here a sec,” Sylver said, raising his hand towards Spring who appeared right next to him.
Sylve flattened his hand and pushed it through the shades chest, searching around until he found it.
“Oh wow, down to 95% already. Even Rook wasn’t that fast. Hold still,” Sylver cautioned, as all the yellow cracks on Springs skin flared up, before receding the tiniest amount.
Sylver pulled his hand out and waved it until it stopped smoking.
“That’s actually a lot better, thank you,” Spring said, rubbing his chest until the small hole closed up fully. “We can’t see anything, but there’s a very large amount of moving things in one tunnel. And the rest are fairly evenly spread out all throughout the tunnels. How do you want to handle it?” Spring asked.
Sylver waited for a moment and looked through the raw data the shades were passing onto Spring and him.
“I’ll take ten rats with me to the area with a lot of monsters, it feels like it might be another layer boss. Send the rest out to scratch or get eaten by as many monsters as they can,” Sylver said, watching as the final rat crawled out of the nearly empty pool of poison.
He clicked his fingers and the remains of poison burst into flames, the light blue fire illuminating the large room. After a few seconds the flames snuffed themselves out, and with a kick of his foot, the ground closed up, as if there was never a hole there, to begin with.
*
Jogging through the tunnels, Sylver made a mental note that they were a lot wider here. Big enough that he was certain a horse could comfortably galop without having any issue. Sounds of fighting and screeching and roars of pain and victory filled the tunnel, the noise bouncing around and echoing as Sylver ran.
He’d told the rats not to attack anything that was humanoid, but at the same time, didn’t think there was an adventurer who couldn’t deal with a slow-moving rodent. So he wouldn’t be feeling too bad if one of the zombies couldn’t tell them apart and attacked them. Meeting your end due to a zombie rat, was just one of the many risks every adventurer had to accept when they came down here.
Ahead of him, the 10 remaining rats continued to run, their small feet and sharp retracted claws making a slightly unnerving tippy tapping sound. Thankfully the area with the largest amount of enemies was just around the corner.
With all the mana interference, Sylver was more than confident about distracting something he couldn’t win against, long enough to run away from it. The monsters here might be weak at this layer, but there was nothing stopping them from ganging up on him and managing to successfully overwhelm him.
Speaking honestly, that mimic would have caught him completely off guard, if he didn’t have Spring spring the trap on himself first. Sylver wouldn’t have tried to open it himself anyway, but accidentally running nearby, or hiding behind it, and getting eaten was a possibility.
He had read the book he had bought while raising the rat zombies, and was upset to learn that there were very few monsters that the guards knew about. Or written down in the book to be precise, people who could go down low enough that something as small as knowing a monster’s weakness became important, didn’t readily share that information, and the guards couldn’t afford to buy it off them.
The tunnel he was following was almost a direct path to the next area, the floor seemed almost polished from how smooth it was. The walls were filled with holes and tunnels, leading left and right, higher and lower, and Sylver saw small traces of people fighting in this area. A patch of soot here, a mark from a sword there, some shattered glass near the entrance of a tunnel, but nothing recent.
[??? (???) Defeated!]
[??? (???) Defeated!]
[??? (???) Defeated!]
…
The messages started to pile on, one after the other, surprising Sylver and forcing him to split his focus between running and attempting to work out if there was a way to silence this shit, or at the very least get more useful information out of it. The fact that he was killing something he didn’t see, or hadn’t seen, meant that all that the system would tell him about it, would be what he knew.
Which was nothing. All that he knew was that either the rats killed something or the poison was working, and he was killing a great deal of something. A great deal of something that was of a lower level than him, or at the very most 9 levels higher than he was.
This may have been a bit wasteful from the perspective of other adventurers, since he was killing things and not benefiting from them, unlike lower leveled adventurers who could have possibly gained a level or two from killing all these things, but Sylver couldn’t exactly get the rats to pick and choose which monsters they infected, so he didn’t think about it too much.
Not to mention, low-level monsters bred like… well like rats, so whatever imbalance he was causing by doing this would get corrected relatively soon.
And the fewer monsters for him to deal with, when he returned to the dungeon and wanted to go to lower levels, the better.
Sylver slowed down his run to a walk and stopped completely near the end of the tunnel.
He didn’t need to ask the shades to tell him what they would find, because he could feel the multitude of souls hiding all around the entrance. They were waiting with an ambush. Sylver stood in place for a moment, and thought about how best to deal with this.
He silently made a zombie rat come closer to him, and used the cat sorcerer's scalpel to carve a small framework onto the rat’s skin. Sylver held his hand over the framework, and loaded it up with 400MP.
He silently walked up the wall and onto the ceiling, and got into position. The rat zombies changed places so the one with the framework was first, before charging into the open area.
Sylver heard a loud screeching noise, followed by several grunts, and watched from his safe spot on the ceiling as all 10 of his rats were completely destroyed by small fast-moving rocks being thrown at them. Sylver made them play dead, or at least stop moving, and waited.
After a full minute had passed, and all the rat zombies remained on the floor, completely motionless, Sylver saw a hair-covered humanoid creature jump down to look at the corpses.
It was covered from head to toe in very slick looking dark hair, completely invisible in the pitch-black room, if not for the fact that Sylver could see in the dark. Its arms were thin and long, save for the giant hands at the end of them. Its head was shaped in a slightly squashed and triangular shape, and its back was covered in thin barely visible scars. It had a small pouch on its stomach, and going by the shape and movement, it was filled with the rocks Sylver’s rats were killed by.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) – 43]
[HP-1,941]
[MP-103]
The creature immediately turned around, showing its teeth and grunting rhythmically. It seemed to lock eyes with Sylver for a moment. Sylver waited to see how the illusion over him would fare, and a small smile crept up his face as he saw the telltale signs of the monster being absolutely certain there was something there, but unable to see it or narrow the area down. The creature disappeared into the ceiling, moving near the entrance once again.
Oh… This is too easy… Sylver thought, as he walked forward and towards the entrance.
He came as close as he dared too, before ordering the zombie rats to get up and start making noise.
Almost instantly they were once again pummeled by rocks. Sylver counted to five, until he had as many eyes on them as possible, before activating the framework he had carved onto one of the rats.
It ballooned up instantly, exploding with a deafening pop, and a flash of light so bright, that Sylver could see it even though his fingers that he was holding over his tightly closed eyes. He started to run, even before fully opening his eyes, jumping out of the entrance and into the open area ahead.
Clouds of dust appeared all around Sylver, as rocks flew harmlessly through the illusionary Sylver’s all around him. With a kick of his foot, the ground opened up underneath him, and Sylver fell down into the hole, closing the top before his feet even touched the ground.
Placing both hands onto the wall around him, Sylver spent the remainder of his mana, making a small dome of earth over where he was a moment ago.
*
Up above the few apes that were able to shield their eyes from the flash, or were lucky to have been looking away or reloading, did their very best to warn their blinded brethren, about the black and yellow things that were appearing out of nowhere, and stabbing them in the face and the backs of their necks.
A few dropped dead down to the floor, before all the black and yellow things were killed, each one exploding into a puff of black smoke as the stones made an impact with them. There was a fair amount of friendly fire, but a bruise was preferable to a dagger in the back of the head.
The apes looked at the small mound of earth in the middle of the room, and started throwing rocks at it, each small mana infused rock, chipping away at the earth made dome.
*
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
…
“Only 9, really?” Sylver asked, manipulating the earth around himself to make some room and letting the dark smoke build up on the ceiling.
“We can’t see shit, and they are unbelievably accurate with those rocks, what did you think would happen? And 9 is enough,” Spring countered, gradually pulling all the defeated shades down into the small holes Sylver had made to the top.
Because of [Dying Breath] Sylver was back to full MP and was slowly digging his way upwards. A very gentle tap of the foot caused the ground underneath one of the ape corpses to sink, pulling the body down underground. Sylver felt something grab the body and try to pull it out of the quicksand like hole, and made an educated guess and sent an earth spike to shoot in the direction of the pulling force.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
“Honestly, I kind of love that it confirms all the things I kill,” Sylver said, as the large blood covered body toppled out of the ceiling and dropped down on the floor. Sylver solidified the soft earth through which the body had fallen, and had Spring help him pull it towards the initial area he had made. Making the walls around himself retreat a little, Sylver made his hiding spot wide enough to lay the ape down on its back.
Sending pulses of mana into the body, Sylver was happy to find there weren’t any surprises in there. Spring helped him turn the thing on its back, and Sylver used a dagger to pry open the back of the apes skull. No surprises there either, it was as far as Sylver was concerned, a long-armed human. In terms of raising it as a zombie at least.
He pinched the skin and sealed it shut, and made a gesture at the cloud of darkness swirling above him.
Faint yellow sparks started to flash throughout the giant cloud of blackness, a very small stream funneling down into the open mouth of the ape Sylver was currently standing on. The rest started to force itself upwards, through the small holes Sylver had made.
As the apes hiding all along the walls and ceiling of the large cave kept pummeling the hollow dome in the middle of the room with rocks, they didn’t notice the murky smoke coming out of the floor and streaming directly into the mouths of the dead apes littered around the area.
The one closest to the dome, covered almost completely in rocks that bounced off the earth dome, started to shake slightly. It turned into a full blown seizure, as the other 8 ape corpses started to shake, their teeth clicking in rhythmic unison, as one by one they started to get up from the floor.
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
They were hit by the rocks the other apes threw at them, but the blunt projectiles were useless against the flesh that was purposely forced to undergo rigor mortis, and was very likely almost as tough as the rocks being thrown at them.
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
…
[Raise Zombie (III) Proficiency increased to 2%!]
The zombie apes shuffled over to the crushed dead rats and stomped on their bodies, the bones and flesh turning into blackened mush as they burst open. Another one swept rocks into the newly created mixture, coating the small rocks in the slippery fatty poison.
As the final zombie stood up and grabbed a handful of rocks, along with the others, it aimed completely at random, and through pure luck managed to hit a few of the apes clinging to the walls. The other ape zombies joined in too and started to chuck poison covered rocks in every direction.
While Sylver was comfortably sitting and waiting for his mana to regenerate, up above there were 8 zombie apes standing around a pile of living rot covered rocks, throwing them at their alive counterparts.
Sadly their counterparts were as tough as the zombies were, shrugging off the small projectiles, moving too quick for even a single rock to hit them in the head. Behind them, the walls were covered in sprinkles of shattered stone, slick with the blood of the zombie apes, as well as the quickly spreading living rot.
In mere minutes Sylver’s zombie apes were all hit in the head hard enough that it disturbed his magic, and they toppled over to the floor, as lifeless as they had initially been.
The apes that were sitting on the walls and ceiling, continued throwing rocks at their once again dead breathering, sending splatters of blood and chunks of flesh up in the air. Sylver was even surprised to hear that they managed to hit one of the zombie corpses enough times to shatter the skull and make it burst open.
Sylver continued to sit in complete and total darkness, as the apes above waited for whatever was going to come next.
The human surely can’t stay inside that thing forever? They collectively thought, or at least that’s what Sylver assumed they thought, given that they started throwing rocks at the reinforced earth dome, that was now completely filled in from the inside, and the equivalent of a boulder.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
“Oh, a bit quicker than I was expecting,” Sylver said, as the first ape fell down from the wall and hit the ground.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
The apes that were hanging on the walls all started to rhythmically screech, as some of them gradually started to get woozy, messing up the previously organized noise. Several fell to the floor before they completely lost consciousness, some breaking their necks, others shaking as their bodies tried to fight the infection off, but all gradually dying.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
…
Sylver watched the notifications with a smile, counting them, and waiting for the number to hit 50 before proceeding.
[Necromancer] has reached level 37!
+5AP
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
The noise up above began to get frantic, as the remaining apes all desperately continued to pummel the dome shaped rock up above, the sound of rock hitting rock, mixing up with the sound of dead ape hitting ground.
Total Level: 41
[Koschei-4]
[Necromancer-37]
CON: 30
DEX: 10
STR: 1
INT: 100
WIS: 100
AP: 5
Health: 300/300
Stamina: 139/150
MP: 1344/1000
Health Regen: 4.50/M
Stamina Regen: 2.25/M
MP Regen: 100.00/M
[Skills:]
Appraisal (V) [2%]
Draining Touch (II) [22%]
Optical Illusion (II) [19%]
Auditory Illusion (I) [39%]
Raise Shade (III) [1%]
Raise Zombie (III) [2%]
Physical Endurance (I) [98%]
Magic Nullification (I) [7%]
Flesh Weaving (I) [8%]
[Perks:]
Golden Egg
Dead’s Dogma
Eyes Of The Royal Tiger
Tools Of The Shade
Dying Breath
Hare’s Great Escape
Kindred Spirit Mitigation
[Traits:]
Living Undead
Deathless
Mana Perception
Mana Manipulation
Undead Domination
Deathly Aura
Faceless
Weird, I don’t remember getting a notification about physical resistance or magic nullification or flesh weaving increasing in proficiency.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
Probably just missed it. Sylver thought as he started to breathe out smoke from his mouth and let it gather up on the ceiling of his hiding spot. He decided to hold onto the points for the moment.
Edmund would have pulled me out of the ground and forced me to fight them all barehanded, if he saw me doing this. Sylver thought with a slight grin, as he moved his hand in a circular motion and the smoke started to slowly push itself through the small holes that he had made, and out onto the floor above.
One by one, the streams of smoke crawled along the floor, towards the dead apes, a few of the more intelligent ones throwing rocks at the intangible smoke but achieving absolutely nothing with their efforts.
The smoke forced itself into the mouths of the recently deceased apes, causing their bodies to start to shake slightly.
[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]
[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]
[Zombie (Lesser) Raised!]
…
[Raise Zombie (III) Proficiency increased to 6%!]
The apes at the corner slowly rose up from the floor, some of them pushing their heads back into place, their necks cracking from the motion, others simply standing in place for a moment, as the magic finished making all the necessary connections.
Sylver didn’t even look at however many apes he had raised, and simply gave them all the exact same command.
Attack.
Minus 3 that he ordered to go to the pile of dead rats and living rot, every single other zombie ape, began to climb up the wall and bite, hit, pull, throw, or otherwise harm the remaining apes above them. The three near the earthen dome started to melt almost instantly, throwing up blood and bile onto the pile of rocks, and further mixing them up to get everything as coated in poison as possible.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
Do they all have the exact same class? Probably rock thrower, or something like that. Ambush ape?
Sylver closed his eyes and tried to listen in to what was happening up above him. There was a great deal of screaming and grunting, sounds of flesh hitting flesh, stone hitting flesh, and flesh hitting stone.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
But bit by bit, the noise reduced. The apes in the middle were helping sow chaos by throwing poison coated stones at the apes at the very top, causing them to sometimes fall and pull down more apes on their way down.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
…
Sylver did as he always did in a situation such as this, and tried as much as he could not to look at the screen directly in front of his eyes. It was nice to see confirmations that he was killing stuff successfully, but it was annoying after they started appearing 6 in a row.
[Necromancer] has reached level 38!
+5AP
I should have come here when I first arrived in Arda. Not that they would have let me… And then I was damaged from the cat island curse… Then I went to prison… Then I helped wipe out the Black Mane… Then Yeva and Ciege were kidnapped…. Then the auction… Oh damn, this is pretty much the first time I’ve had the free time to come here.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
A part of Sylver was tempted to jump out of his hiding spot and help out his zombie troops, but he thankfully remembered that all they needed was one lucky hit in the head to dismember him and most likely eat him before his magic kicked in to resurrect him.
If anything, it occurred to Sylver that he was in more danger here, than almost ever before. He’d mostly fought against people before, and the worst they could do was kill him and leave him in a ditch. Considering how rare necromancers were here, it would be unlikely they would have realized he didn’t die for good. He would just wake up, either buried underground, or at the bottom of a river. Or just left wherever he died, and stripped for his daggers and money.
But here, even getting knocked out would mean permanently dying.
Sylver still hadn’t tested the limits of his unique class resurrecting him, and wasn’t all that certain how to test it. Anything that was a small death, would be fixed by his own mana automatically.
And anything major enough that he couldn’t resurrect himself, would mean leaving everything to the system and needle. Which he didn’t trust enough to attempt.
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
[Necromancer] has reached level 39!
+5AP
[Fanged Ape (Rogue) Defeated!]
I’ve gained more levels from killing a bunch of overgrown monkeys, than I did massacring what could conservatively be called a small army.
Sylver continued to sit and wait, and very slowly the messages of apes dying went down. Sylver kept an eye on his mana, and was surprised he was still sitting on 1403, only going down slightly as his body couldn’t hold the excess and dissipated it into the air around him.
The fact that [Dying Breath] was working despite the fact that Sylver couldn’t see his zombies was a bit of a mystery to him. But he was guessing he was meeting some sort of requirement for it to continue working, despite the fact that there were several meters of rock between him and his zombies.
But one thing Sylver loved above all else, was that the apes hadn’t even tried to run away. This was strange, to say the least, but given that Sylver felt pressure behind his ears as he tried to figure out why that was, he changed his mind and just accepted it.
Sylver stared at the empty space in front of him, waiting for his mana to tick up, or for notification about killing something to show up. The shades all said there was no movement, but with how little they could see, they could very easily be wrong.
After waiting for a full minute without seeing anything happening, but being certain that there were still zombies up above, Sylver manipulated the earth above him and very carefully and quietly popped his head out for a look. He looked all around but couldn’t see any movement that didn’t belong to his zombies.
“You know, there used to be a saying about picking a fight with a necromancer,” Sylver said, as the ground underneath him moved upwards and pushed him out of the hole completely. He straightened his back, and stretched side to side to get the blood flowing in his legs after sitting still for so long.
He snapped his fingers and made the large rock dome decoy turn into sand and fall down into the area he was occupying a moment ago.
Littered all around him were dead apes, in various degrees of damage, but all unmistakably dead. Some had bite marks on their faces and necks, others had the telltale sign of living rot entering their system, a few had their necks snapped from falling down, and a couple had a rock embedded directly in their face. The 30% increase in strength seemed to have really helped the zombies with their throwing firepower.
Sylver turned towards the zombies standing near where the rats infected with living rot were a moment ago, and carefully started to lower the ground they were standing on into a bowl-shaped hole. They toppled over as the living rot spread upwards into their bodies and started liquifying their legs and torso.
“Well, a poem if I am being honest,” Sylver added, as Spring materialized near him. Sylver turned to look towards the slowly opening hidden door on the opposite side of the entrance he had come in through. He decided not to ask how exactly this door knew to start opening, and saved himself from another headache. There was no layer boss here, but this was definitely something.
“Very catchy, quite long, but the short of it is,” Sylver said, with a flourish, as the remaining ape zombies started to drag the ape corpses towards the middle.
“Don’t,” Sylver said, as the hole in the ground deepened and the poison inside started to bubble and boil, recycling all the blood and gore around it into itself.
Sylver watched the rolling liquid, as Spring ordered for the corpses that were too damaged to be raised as zombies to be thrown into it.
Three whole levels in just a couple of hours. I wonder how long it would take to get to 50?
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