Drifting in the black was something Tyron had gotten used to over the years. He preferred the darkness to the other possibility. The darkness was constant, steady, predictable and cold. While he slept, he came here sometimes, his consciousness simply existing in an endless void.
To some, it may have been a dreadful, even terrifying place. Such a blank and empty existence wasn’t something a person could conceptualise under normal circumstances. People needed things, they needed objects, conceptual concrete they could use to set their feet in place. They needed other people, to converse and exist alongside, to define themselves against and alongside.
Tyron didn’t need those things. Reality was an existence filled with memories. Memories only brought pain.
Darkness was so much more comforting than dreaming of the things he had lost.
Of course, the brief respite couldn’t last for long. His body was inhumanly durable, and even the absurd amount of punishment he had heaped upon it wasn’t enough to keep him down. Like a diver rising from the depths, he awoke.
“Hah… holy fuck,” he croaked.
His head pounded harder than a smith's hammer. When he tried to open his eyes, the light stabbed as sharp as a knife. Squeezing them shut on reflex, he started coughing, causing his throat to spike with pain. Swallowing felt like shoving razors down the back of his mouth. Head swimming, he could barely move, a weakness gripped his limbs and his guts ached.
“Here, drink.”
He didn’t recognise the voice, nor place the hand that raised his head and placed the vessel to his lips with surprising tenderness. When the cool water touched his lips, he drank greedily, gripped by an overwhelming thirst. He’d barely had a mouthful before it was snatched away again.
“Slowly. Take too much at once and you’ll be sick as a dock dog. That’s what my brother used to say. Mutts roaming the docks were always flea-bitten, mangy things, riddled with disease. Ate too many rats, I think.”“Water,” he managed to say, his lips feeling like they were splitting apart. They felt better than his throat.
“Just a sip.”
He managed the smallest of nods and the vessel returned. Cool and refreshing, he took a tiny sip, holding himself back. After a few moments, he was allowed another, which he accepted gratefully.
Just how weak had he become?
How long this went on, he couldn’t say. A few sips, then he fell back again, breathing, waiting for the roiling in his guts to cease. When it settled a little, he would drink a little more.
“That’s enough for now. I’ve blocked the sun, can you try opening your eyes?”
He would rather not, given how it had felt the first time. He cracked his left eye open a sliver, and once again stabbing pain burst through the gap and right into his brain.
“Blood!” he grunted through clenched teeth.
It hurt like hell, but he tried to endure it. After a few seconds, he managed to see something before he squeezed his eye shut again and let his head flop back onto the grass.
It was Filetta, standing over him, using her armoured frame to block the sun.
“How long have I been lying here like this?” He managed after a few moments to recover.
“Almost a day,” she replied. “We covered you earlier, but thought a bit of sun on your skin might do you good. You’re shockingly pale.
Hardly surprising. The Realm of the Dead was a lightless place. No doubt the reason his eyes hurt so much was because he hadn’t seen the sun in weeks.
“I’m surprised you thought of that,” he chuckled.
Filetta prodded him in the side, causing him to flinch.
“It’s not polite to point out how detached the dead are from the feeling of being alive.”
“I didn’t realise I was in polite society. Ouch!”
She prodded him again, harder his time, and he was shocked by the pain he felt. Shifting a limp hand, he felt his side to check for an open wound, but there was nothing. Why was he so weak?
“I heard some of the mages talking about it,” Filetta told him. “They think your body might have soaked in too much Death Magick.”
“Shouldn’t it make me numb?”
If anything, being drenched in that sort of energy would make him closer to an undead, not more sensitive.
“That’s what they thought at first, but they had a few theories. Your flesh has deadened but the nerves are more raw. You were too resilient and resisted the magick, so it's eaten away at your constitution without actually deadening the flesh.”
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None of those outcomes sounded good to Tyron. Hopefully after he had some water, food and rest, he would recover his strength.
Chatting with Filetta to pass the time, he continued to try and acclimate his eyesight, but it wasn’t until late afternoon and the sun had started to go down that he felt able to stand up and walk around. Someone had managed to track down some edible plants, a few wild herbs and veggies that they boiled up and fed to him in a broth.
The first thing he did was try to assess the damage to his horde. His memory of the final moments was more than a little hazy. He remembered the ghoul sweeping in, trying to seize him, and he’d called on the wyvern to save himself from capture. After that… nothing.
“It was a scramble,” Filetta told him. “Everyone tried to get through the gate while the skeletons were sacrificed. Most of the wights and demi-liches made it, but some were lost. Almost a third of the revenants died and over half of the regular undead. In particular, the frontline skeletons had suffered the most. Those who bore shields, swords and spears, forming the front ranks in the battle had naturally been the ones to suffer the most.”
A devastating blow to his horde at a time when he needed all the strength he could muster.
“Master Willhem is safe?” he asked.
“He was one of the first through the gate,” Filletta assured him. Her ghostly features twisted into a wry smile. “We didn’t need to be told he had to be kept safe.”
“He’s… important to me,” Tyron admitted.
Not only because of his exceptional skills as an Arcanist, but for… other reasons, Tyron did not want the old man to suffer any more than he had to.
The return trip was as imprecise as the going in had been. Try as he might, Tyron still wasn’t an expert on dimensional magick. As best anyone could tell, they had landed somewhere in the middle of the Western Province, likely to the south of Foxbridge.
Tyron sank down onto the grass and gave himself a moment to think. His horde had been weakened significantly. Rank and file skeletons might be the weakest of his servants, but he needed those numbers. He’d run the numbers on an army composed entirely of higher form undead, and it simply wasn’t efficient. A wight required a hundred times the arcane energy a regular skeleton did, and certainly, a powerful enough wight could defeat that many skeletons. With his magickal support, however, those weaker skeletons became much stronger, and his empowering abilities were more efficient the wider they were spread.
In essence, he needed double the number of basic skeletons he’d had before to balance against the number of wights and demi-liches he’d created. Instead of that, his numbers had been cut in half.
Unless he’d received a truly shocking amount of experience from that final battle, there was no way he was going to reach platinum in time to fend off the Golden Legion.
He was running out of ways to resolve the situation.
Should he go into hiding? They didn’t know where he was, so as long as he didn’t rejoin the survivors beyond the mountains, he’d be able to go undetected for a while, grow his horde and try to gain more levels.
He considered it, but found it didn’t sit well with him. His aunt and uncle would never agree to abandon the others, nor would Elsbeth. Georg would, but Richard and Briss? Unlikely.
There had to be other ways for him to achieve his vengeance without having to sacrifice those people. If it existed, he would find it. If it didn’t… then he would do what had to be done.
“What are you thinking about?” Filetta asked him.
He glanced up at her. She stood by his left side as if to protect him, but from what, he didn’t know. She was strangely loyal for someone he’d killed himself.
“Trying to find the best way to defeat the army coming our way,” he said.
Idly, he scratched at his stomach. It felt strange not to be wearing his armour after having it on for several weeks straight. Dressed in a simple robe, he almost felt naked. What broth he’d been able to stomach was finally settling. For some time, he hadn’t thought he’d be able to keep it down. His body felt as if it were rejecting normal sustenance, an effect of the absurd amount of Death Magick he’d soaked himself in.
The Realm of the Dead. It had proven to be far more dangerous than he’d anticipated. What power The Three had leant him was totally expended now, and if he wanted to go back, he would either need to ask for more, or be strong enough to survive there on his own.
At least he had gained something. A rudimentary understanding of Soul Magick could prove to be far more valuable than it seemed right now. With the source he’d crafted stored away amongst the things that had managed to get through the gate in the chaos, he could resume his experiments whenever he wanted.
Witnessing the power of the undead who had come to battle him had also been an eye-opening experience. Different avenues for empowering his minions had come to light, and he was itching to see how they could be applied. What strange blood magick had empowered those ghouls? And the stitched abominations. How had they been formed and animated? Along with the death-infused flesh of the soul eaters and other monsters who lived there.
No, the journey had been valuable, and necessary. What he needed right now was to see just how much he had gained.
With a grunt, he sat up and steadied himself, taking a few deep breaths to help brace himself.
“Can you bring me my pack?” he asked Filetta.
The former thief looked down at him.
“Are you sure you should be doing anything right now? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“It can’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Tomorrow, there is work to do. Depending on the status ritual, that work will change.”
Knowing he couldn’t be persuaded, she walked away, returning a few minutes later with his leather bag. Rummaging inside, he withdrew one of his notebooks, tore out a page, and performed the status ritual.
For a moment, his head swam as the blood flowed, and he grit his teeth. Just how weak could he possibly be?! There was no time for this!
As soon as the blood grew still, he snatched up the page and searched for the number he needed.
Classes:
Imperator of the Endless Horde: Level 78.
“Damn it,” he cursed.
Close, but not close enough.
Looking over his shoulder, Filetta grunted as she saw what he was looking at.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked him. “I doubt you can get another two levels before the army gets here.”
“No,” he replied, looking over the rest of the numbers. “There’s no way.”
Killing regular kin, it would take him months, if not years to get those final two levels. Time he simply didn’t have.
“So, what now?”
Tyron hunched, letting his chin rest on his hand as he stared into the distance. First, he had to finish this ritual, then try to regain his strength as fast as he could.
After that…
“Something I won’t enjoy,” he said. “Not much, anyway.”