Chương 105: Chapter 104

Caxir"Akarr denib ashi denn takaz dera," chanted Caxir, and he felt his mana respond, eagerly obeying his command as it empowered the runes within the ritual circle. It was not only his own mana that he was drawing on to power his spell. He was draining the life from the very land itself. He smiled then, for the first time in over seven hundred years. It had been so long that the muscles in his face had forgotten how, and his lips curled into a pained, twisted sneer.

When the shortsighted old fools he had once called his masters had imprisoned him, they had stolen his freedom. Worse still, they had attempted to prevent him from fulfilling his destiny. They had called him a monster – but had they possessed even a little wisdom, they would have called him a saviour. He had tried to explain it to them as they dragged him down the steps of the crypt and threw him to the ground as though he were little more than dirt.

"What is life?" Caxir had roared.

"It's pain. It's suffering. It's loss. Don't you see? I can take it all away! How long do our people live? A hundred years if they're lucky? I can grant them immortality!" Alibeus, the master of his order, had merely shaken his head sadly.

"I'm sorry, Caxir," he said.

"We failed you. It is our duty to protect our students and prevent them from walking such dark paths, yet here we are." He sighed and knelt beside Caxir.

"It is true that if you were to kill a living being and then raise them from the dead, you would be taking away any sense of pain, suffering, or loss. But you would also be depriving them of the very things that make life worth living. They would feel no happiness, no sense of accomplishment, no friendship, no love." Alibeus rose to his feet and cast one glance back at his student.

"To feel is to live, Caxir. The good and the bad. I know it is unlikely you will ever be able to comprehend that again. Once you give yourself over to the dark powers of necromancy, something inside you dies. The candle flame that is your humanity is snuffed out. This prison will also be your tomb, and I can only pray that, before the end, you find your way back to the light. Goodbye, Caxir." Caxir snarled as he cast the memory aside. They were the fools.

Did they truly believe that someone as great as he would succumb to something as trivial as death? No. When he realised the war was lost, he had taken steps to ensure that he could one day continue his great work, no matter how long it took. He had performed a ritual upon himself, transforming himself into something that was neither living nor dead. If he had wanted to, he could have stripped away his emotions and sense of self, enabling him to wander through eternity in blissful ignorance. But at what cost?

There would have been nobody to fulfil his glorious purpose: to grant every living thing the mercy of death, freeing them from the shackles of pain and misery, before raising them from the dead and bestowing upon them the gift of unliving. So instead, he had endured seven hundred years of imprisonment. He had experienced every single painful second of it. The boredom. The loneliness. The anger. The madness. It had been truly awful, and more than once, in rare moments of weakness, he had attempted to end it…

but there was no ending it anymore. His imprisonment had also given him time to think, to plan. As his gaze wandered over his ritual formation, he knew that it had all been worth it. Once the spell was complete, his power would split into a million threads and spread across the kingdom, seeking out the remains of every person who had ever lived and raising them as one of the undead. The ritual formation was a masterpiece of his own devising.

He stood at its centre, and as he recited the chant and fed his power into it, he couldn't help but admire its intricate complexity. There were seven rings, each one larger than the next. Within each ring, thousands of runes had been etched in painstaking detail, each one a minuscule but integral part of the enormous construct. It was an ambitious and incredibly complex spell, and it carried no small amount of risk, but he'd had over seven hundred years to perfect it.

The tomb in which he had been imprisoned was vast, and he had scraped the formation into the stone thousands of times. He had practised every gesture and recited every chant, deconstructing each word into its individual syllables. Wait… His thoughts were interrupted by his Life Sense. For the first time since his release, he detected the presence of two living beings. They were close, perhaps only a few miles away. Both of them shone even brighter than his masters had. They were… powerful.

Caxir felt a shiver of fear, but it was quickly burned away by the fires of his anger. He was so close. He would not allow them to interfere with his plans. He returned his attention to the ritual. It was almost ready. If he could distract them for only a few minutes, he'd be able to raise his army. No matter how powerful these two strangers were, they were no match for a million undead, each one empowered by his ritual with unnatural speed and strength.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. He split his consciousness, diverting a sliver of his power to form a projection. It flew from the temple, soaring through the air as it headed to intercept the interlopers. * Part of me was more than a little tempted to fly straight to the pyramid, crash through the walls like I was the Kool-Aid Man, and do my best to take the necromancer's head off with one punch.

Alas, seeing as it was our first three-star Tier Five quest, we decided to play it a little safer. We had no idea how strong the necromancer was or what sort of arcane voodoo he had in store for us. We landed on the road leading into the city and began walking towards the centre. The passage of time was much more obvious at ground level. The road was paved, but enormous cracks had formed over the centuries, and weeds had forced their way through them.

That was another similarity between Earth and the Trial Zone: the absurd resilience and invasiveness of weeds. We were in an abandoned city saturated in dark magic that had killed all the grass and turned the trees into withered husks. But had the weeds suffered? Fuck no. Those little shits had thrived. They were tall and strong and everywhere. If you ignored the fact they were brown, they looked perfectly healthy.

"You know what?" I said.

"I've got a bad feeling this place is going to end up being just as creepy and disgusting as Floor Three."

"I don't think so…" replied Rel. That gave me a little hope. Rel knew his stuff when it came to magic, so if he thought it would be okay, that probably meant–"I think it'll be much worse." For fuck's sake. Rel's expression changed, the humour vanishing. He looked up, his eyes narrowing as they scanned the sky.

"Talking of which…" he said.

"We have company." I followed his gaze to see a hooded figure descending from the sky. It landed a dozen or so metres in front of us and stood silently, presumably studying us. There was something strange about it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It looked real, but at the same time, it didn't. I activated Aura Sense and was not at all surprised when no yellow glow appeared around it. Whatever it was, it wasn't alive – at least not in the conventional sense.

It was either a summoned minion or some sort of projection. Sensei would have been so proud of me in that moment. I'd used my Aura to analyse a potential enemy before doing anything stupid. Okay, proud might have been pushing it a little. He'd probably have offered some very minimal praise disguised as an insult. Perhaps something along the lines of, "Boy, are you expecting a pat on the back for finally taking some initiative and using your Aura in the most basic way imaginable?"

The being's robes were black, and when it threw back its hood, it revealed a creature that looked kind of like a male orc. His skin was ash grey, setting him apart from any of the other orcs I'd encountered so far, but that was only one of the differences. Every orc I'd met – whether it be a fel orc, frost orc, or a 'standard' orc – had looked powerful. Some had been heavily muscled, while others carried some chub, but every single one had looked like they were capable of shifting some serious weight.

This orc, however, was a skinny little bitch. In fact, 'skinny' might have been an understatement. His robes hung off him like he was a child wearing his dad's clothes, and his face was so gaunt that his cheeks looked hollow, almost like one of those celebrities who'd gone overboard with the buccal fat removal. Hell, all he needed was Botox and some lip filler and he'd be killing it on Instagram.

Even though he didn't look particularly old, his hair was white, and it looked so wispy that it'd probably blow away if he ever got caught in a strong breeze. Despite how feeble he was, there was still something about him that was undeniably menacing. I wasn't sure whether it was his entirely white eyes or something else, but the guy definitely put me on edge. It was like passing someone on the street who was clearly unhinged.

Even if they aren't showing any obvious signs of aggression, a voice in the back of your mind – probably the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution – screams at you to be careful, because there was no telling what that motherfucker might do next.

"I will not allow you to interfere with my work," he said.

"Leave now." His voice was higher pitched than I'd expected. In fact, it almost sounded a little nerdy and whiny. I don't know why, but I'd assumed that a seven-hundred-year-old necromancer might have sounded a little more... badass.

"Caxir?" I asked. He smiled at that. Well, I say smiled, but it was more like a weird twisting of his face that made it look as though he was having a stroke.

"My name is still known? Even after all this time? Excellent. It would seem that history–" I held up a hand to cut him off before withdrawing Mindguard of the Blackstar from my inventory. I slipped the signet ring onto my finger, then sighed and felt my shoulders relax. After my experience with the Aurak during the yeti quest, I wasn't taking any chances with enemies that had the potential to go balls deep in my mind. I blurred forward and smacked him.

When he exploded into a cloud of black mist, it gave me confirmation that he was definitely some sort of projection and not the real deal. It took several seconds, but the mist pulled itself back together and the clone of Caxir took form once more.

"Fool!" he spat.

"You cannot harm me in this–" I smacked him again. The black mist took a little longer to gather this time, and when it finally did, the projection didn't look quite so solid. I guessed my bitch slaps were putting a strain on the magic holding it together. Caxir did not look happy now. In fact, he looked downright demented. His white eyes were wide and wild, his lips curled back to bare his teeth.

"You brutish cretin! I am going–" I drew back my hand again, and he flinched.

"Oh," I said.

"I know I can't actually hurt you." I grinned.

"But I can annoy you."

"Annoy me? You pathetic, childish–" Caxir drew in a deep breath and visibly composed himself.

"Before you strike me again, allow me to explain what it is I'm trying to accomplish here. Necromancy has a reputation for being a dark art, but that is not true. While I do not deny that it can be used for nefarious means, so too can every other branch of magic…"

And so began five minutes of rambling about how much of a genius he was, how his plan was going to bring an end to pain, suffering, and even death itself, another few minutes reminding us just how much of a genius he was, and finally a pitch as to why we should let him murder us so he could bring us back as generals in his army. When he finished, he stared at us expectantly. I got the distinct impression he thought we'd clap.

Then we'd thank him for opening our eyes to the truth, drop to our knees, praise him for his greatness, and beg him to ram a knife into our hearts so we could join him.

"That was quite possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever heard," said Rel.

"And I once had to listen to Pete explain that our animal companion, Winterclaw, was something called a Pokémon, before insisting that we needed to collect every single one. He then sang a ridiculous song about wanting to be the very best."

"Just wait until Winterclaw evolves. Then we'll see how idiotic you think it is," I said. Caxir laughed then, a shrill, grating sound. For a moment, I thought maybe he had a sense of humour after all. He did not.

"Fools! Did you really think I'd sully my glorious army by inviting two such witless imbeciles as you to serve as generals? No, I was merely trying to distract you. You see, I needed just a few more minutes to complete my ritual." He gestured to the pyramid.

"Bear witness!"