V3Ch74-Evil Preparations

The next weeks were spent in making final preparations for battle.

The situation felt unpredictable and challenging in ways he was ill-equipped to define as yet. Some sort of future-manipulating power on the enemy General’s side? Forces specifically tailored to fighting his undead.

The most important thing he could do to ensure he was ready was to have real time information on the enemy’s movements.

To that end, the necromancer had sent the many undead creatures he’d been using as his spy network toward Niet’s capital of Enh, where the opposing army was located. But the various undead animals had wildly varying rates of speed.

The birds traveled the fastest. They crossed vast amounts of land more swiftly than any horse could ride.

One night, Tybalt was suddenly awakened by a shock to his system.

He immediately sensed it was the activity of those birds. He bolted upright and reached out for them through their telepathic bond.

He felt nothing reach back in response. Just chilling emptiness.

Accepting that he couldn’t make contact with them at the moment for some disturbing reason, Tybalt tried to read the memories from the creatures he’d lost contact with, but there wasn’t anything there at all. It was as if they’d been erased from existence entirely and didn’t even have a past.

There were still a few birds left, stragglers that hadn’t reached the city yet - and, of course, all the many undead vermin under his control, from insects to rodents - but everything that had been in the main flock was gone without a trace.

He knew what must have happened. The entire flock of undead birds, dozens of creatures of different kinds traveling as one, had reached the capital and genuinely vanished into nothingness. They were either destroyed or pulled entirely beyond his reach somehow, and Tybalt thought the former was more likely. Simply destroying them would be far easier than wrenching them from the necromancer’s control.

The surviving birds, the stragglers, were just close enough to Enh to see the city walls.

I don’t understand. Is the capital holy ground? Are the walls consecrated? How did they do this?

It wasn’t a problem he’d ever run into before, his undead simply being unable to enter a settlement.

He would need to get Vidalia to help him better understand the defenses that protected the city from the likes of him, once they had dealt with the more immediate obstacle of General Caracalla.

“Tybalt, what’s wrong?” a soft voice asked quietly from beside him. A gentle hand rubbed his shoulder.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Vicky,” he said, forcefully calming himself. There was no point in worrying the foxgirl when there was nothing either of them could do about what had just happened.

“Forget about that, talk to me,” she said, sitting up straighter. The sheet fell away from her naked body as she looked up at his face, concern etched on her brow.

“It’s nothing you need to worry about.” He kissed her softly on the lips and rubbed behind her ears.

“If it’s something you’re worried about, then it’s something for me to worry about, husband,” she said seriously as soon as their mouths had separated.

He could see she wasn’t going to just fall asleep now, and keeping secrets from his women hadn’t done him much good in the past. He took a deep breath.

“All right then…”

He sent a silent order to his remaining birds, vermin and insects to stop advancing toward Enh at staggered locations between Whadesgart and the capital, to give him warning and ongoing information once the Army began to move.

Then he told Victoria what had happened.

“Maybe some sort of divine blessing would allow your creations to survive contact with ground the enemy has blessed,” she suggested once he was done.

“Perhaps. It’s a solution that I’m open to trying when we have the chance to experiment. These creatures are hundreds of miles away from us now, though. It’s something to work on after we defeat General Caracalla and his forces…”

***

Elsewhere, Edgard reported that he had located the body of a dragon.

It had taken longer than Tybalt would have liked just to locate it, but the body was also better preserved than the necromancer had been expecting. The magic-resistant scales remained in place. The desert air seemed to have kept the dragon in good condition until it was buried, and the organisms responsible for much of decomposition had been unable to reach it.

But the location was a big problem.

The corpse wasn’t just buried within a mountain. It was under the mountain, like all those billions of tons of rock and soil had been dropped over the top of it.

Probably an unceremonious burial. Maybe this dragon was dumped there by its enemies. That might be why Eolas was willing to give me the information at all. This was a creature he was willing to see become an undead, so they certainly weren’t friends.

He could practically hear the dragon laughing at him. 

Tybalt provided a workforce of zombies and skeletons to begin performing the labor of moving the mountain, but he expected that it would take years, even with whatever magical help he could employ in the future. Dero confirmed that the dragon’s body would probably be too large for her to Teleport with, and even if she could, she would risk leaving some of it behind.

So Tybalt’s prospective undead dragon wouldn’t be a part of any fighting anytime soon.

***

One key measure Tybalt took to make ready for war was withdrawing from direct governance, leaving all political matters to his wives in order to focus entirely on strengthening his undead forces and crafting new diseases.

He had sworn not to create an undeath plague in his negotiations with Eolas. He had deliberately avoided making any more restrictive promises than that, for this specific moment.

He was determined to have the most powerful undead force he had ever assembled, and to weaken the enemy with disease before they had drawn near the site of battle.

Tybalt called all the skeletons and zombies he’d ever made back into service. Even those which had been digging up the dragon might be necessary, so Tybalt summoned them to his location. As for undead that had been given to beastfolk as servants, he sent his apologies through his subordinates but drafted the creatures anyway.

He would give them back later if he could, but he needed all his monsters right then. The ogres he’d had to send away would have given the necromancer a commanding numerical advantage, but they weren’t exactly subtle or good at hiding - Tybalt’s preferred style of warfare. And in the desert, it was better to focus on fielding as many troops as possible that he didn’t have to feed. Here, the undead should have a unique advantage.

Tybalt began working on the zombies and skeletons, combining some to make them bulkier and more powerful, or grafting on additional materials to make them more difficult to kill. These would be a far cry from the undead he had unleashed against Commander Volusia months ago. This time, the enemy had given him ample opportunity to prepare.

Where he could, the necromancer corrupted the skills each undead creature had to make them more harmful to humans. The skeletons that had become skeleton knights had each acquired a Penetrating Blow skill, which Tybalt corrupted into Corrosive Blow. Saoirse’s Shattering Shriek was enhanced into a Sanity-Shattering Shriek. The handful of Enlightened Ghouls all had the Personal Illusion skill, which Tybalt turned into Haunting Vision.

But mostly he improved his creations on a physical level, adding stone to bone structures and additional padding around the heads of his undead to make them harder to destroy, sharpening their limbs so that every part of each creature included bone blades - much like what he had done with Baldwin. He ignored the fact that it hadn’t worked for Baldwin himself.

The necromancer holed up in the Charnel Fortress for most of these efforts, allowing only Hieron and Brunn to assist him with attaching, sharpening, poisoning, reinforcing, and making various other improvements to the undead’s various parts. Tybalt wanted to teach Stefan, too, but the two fexts had the massive advantage of being undead and therefore immune to the Charnel Fortress’s strange, mind-altering atmosphere.

Stefan ultimately had to content himself with performing repair work for Tybalt near the fortress. Through observation and training, the boy’s ability to use mana to stitch body parts together was almost on the same level as the Undead Repair skill granted. Tybalt tasked him with fixing the human centipede - which was missing some bits of flesh after Eolas scorched the tunnel the monster was occupying during the dragon’s attack on Whadesgart - with modifying Tybalt’s flesh raft into a combat ready form, and with crafting fresh corpses into new monstrosities that Tybalt would bring to life later.

“This is good,” the necromancer said, reviewing Stefan’s work on the raft. “The bone oars are all sharpened into weapons, and you hid the head under layers of flesh and fat so thick that people won’t know where it is, let alone being able to destroy it.”

“Thank you, teacher,” the boy said humbly, bowing his head. He seemed very distant from the resentful kid Tybalt had met a few months prior, but that was what the seriousness of the situation had done to him. They were too close to war for moody juvenile attitude or behavior. The boy had people he cared about among his tribe still. Now he had a chance to protect them.

And if Stefan made himself useful to Tybalt here, they would begin to take some of their revenge for everything that had been done to the foxboy’s family.

The necromancer did not neglect his pestilence mage class in this period of industry. His Generate Minor Ailment skill had evolved into Generate Ailment previously, which opened up new levels of deadly disease that he had not yet had occasion to experiment with.

For several key days, he forced himself to take a step back from necromancy and apply his imagination and knowledge of medicine to creating new pestilences.

He tested these on the small number of prisoners that his forces had arrested in their short occupation of the Salt Waste, men who would otherwise simply have been executed for robbery, rape, or murder.

Tybalt ensured that they were adequately punished before death.

“How does this make you feel?” became a repeated line, to the point that the prisoners could have parroted it back to Tybalt before he said it, if not for the fact that he was terrifying and could easily choose to make their conditions worse.

They were already living in the jail cells of the Charnel Fortress as he conducted his experiments, where the men whispered that they saw visions of things that could not be real and heard the voices of the departed, telling them to harm themselves.

So they made no efforts to defy him or potentially worsen their situation, unless one counted suicide attempts.

In the course of his experiments with disease, Tybalt ended up creating three separate strains of illness, reflecting his three great priorities in the battle to come.

First, Tybalt crafted a stronger version of the stomach virus he had used on his old squad when he was first trying to weaken them. The goal was to ensure his enemies would be vomiting and shitting themselves even as they were trying to hold shields and spears.

He confirmed that when his prisoners were in their cells, suffering from this disease, many of them couldn’t even make it to the chamber pots, let alone fighting.

“Pale, feeble, openly begging for a quicker, cleaner death,” read Tybalt’s notes in his notebook, beside his description of the virus’s design. “Soiled themselves at both ends. Had to be washed by the cleaning crew.”

The cleaning crew, naturally, was a group of non-sapient undead who were assigned to dirty jobs Tybalt was unwilling to perform himself.

Next he created a variant of the common cold optimized for speed of symptom onset, for creating fatigue, and for hampering mana usage. This was meant to weaken the enemy mages while the gastrointestinal virus crippled the physical combatants.

The prisoners were practically grateful to try this infection after the previous one had left them almost wishing for death. None of them were mages, of course, so the effects were less obvious.

The necromancer was pleased, though. He could detect, via Magic Sense, how weakened the men were by the virus just twelve hours after exposure. He knew that in any army, especially a small group composed of relatively more elite forces, mages would be at the core of its strength and efficacy.

Tybalt also noted that it was likely all infections suffered inside the Charnel Fortress were more severe than those endured outside its walls. As confirmed through diligent observation, infections he created spread more quickly and lasted longer than should have been possible in the evil, disease-fostering atmosphere of the Fortress.

So he would have to factor that in when setting his expectations for how they would affect the enemy.

After days of tinkering, Tybalt created one final, impossible, miraculous disease.

Something like nothing the world had ever seen before.

It’s all for you, he thought darkly, picturing a certain person’s face. This one’s just for you.

That illness was also how he reached another tier of pestilence mage.

With his new skill selection, Tybalt chose Injection Touch without a second thought. His mind was still on this virus. He wanted to ensure he would be able to infect his desired targets with it, but the virus itself was likely to be difficult to spread easily. Injection Touch was a surefire way to infect at least one person.

“Will you test this one on the prisoners, master?” asked the Charnel Fortress, which often asked questions about the mechanics of what Tybalt was doing - apparently trying to learn for itself how to become deadlier to humans. It sounded almost giddy at the prospect of human trials for this particular infection.

“No,” he said immediately. “It works too slowly for testing it on them, and it’s optimized for a specific target. I’ve tested my skills enough by now. I just have to have faith that I know what I’m doing.”

It’s also a bit cruel to use on strangers. They deserve death, but I’ve tormented them enough.

“I see.” Its tone was disappointed.

“But if all goes well, you will get to witness me using it,” Tybalt added finally. “We’ll be confronted by our enemies soon enough.”