Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 64: Retribution

Darion walked out of the treeline and the knights came with him.

He summoned as he walked — the wolf first, appearing at his left side, the green eye catching the distant firelight from the settlement. Then the bats, released upward into the dark air above the column.

Then the undead knights, thirty of them materializing in sequence behind him, the green light of each revival fading quickly into the dark, until there was a column of bone and dead flesh moving across the open ground toward Gonnb’s outer edge that hadn’t existed thirty seconds ago.

The living knights came behind. A hundred and fourteen of them. Garren was at Darion’s right.

Nobody spoke.

The settlement was in the specific state of chaos that happened when a threat had no shape.

People were moving between huts, calling to each other, trying to locate the source of whatever was happening to the men around them.

Warriors who should have been the settlement’s first response were sitting on the ground or leaning against walls, their bodies beginning to fail them in ways they had no framework for understanding.

The venom didn’t announce itself. It just made things stop working, quietly and progressively, until the person it was working on couldn’t stand or lift a weapon or form a coherent sentence.

The wolf hit the settlement’s edge first.

It went through the outer huts fast and low, the way it moved through the forest — committed to the task and without hesitation, the half-flesh body carrying the same disproportionate strength it had shown against the Bogoarts.

The first warrior it encountered was on his feet, one of the few who still had his legs under him, and he had enough time to raise the weapon in his hand before the wolf was already past his guard and the encounter was finished.

The bats swept overhead and went to work on the people still moving freely, the ones the venom hadn’t reached yet, the ones who might have organized something if given another ten minutes.

The contacts were fast and invisible in the dark, and by the time the undead knights reached the settlement’s center the secondary venom was already being delivered to whatever remained of Gonnb’s functional population.

The thirty undead knights spread through the settlement without instruction beyond the general command Darion had given them at the treeline which was: move through, eliminate resistance.

They didn’t need more than that. The fragmented combat instinct that made them functional did the rest, each one responding to whatever presented itself in its immediate vicinity with the brutal efficiency of things that felt no hesitation and no fear.

The living knights came in behind and filled the spaces between, moving through the settlement in groups, working quickly and without the confusion that normally made night engagements difficult.

The disarray that should have been working against the attackers was working for them: Gonnb’s warriors, the ones still capable of standing, were isolated and disoriented, responding to individual threats rather than presenting a coordinated defense because there was no coordination left to present.

It was brutal and it was fast and it was one-sided in exactly the way Darion had planned for it to be.

He found the village leader in the largest hut, near the settlement’s center.

The man had made it to his doorway, gotten that far, which made it obvious that he hadn’t been bitten.

Well, that was because Darion made it so, he wanted to kill the man himself.

Now the village head was standing in the doorframe with a hand on each side of it, holding himself upright, a weapon at his belt that he hadn’t drawn because his hands were occupied with the business of staying vertical.

He was older than Darion had expected. Somewhere in his fifties, heavyset, with the kind of face that someone really dumb normally had, like some cartoon character.

He looked at Darion when Darion stopped in front of him, and then looked past him at what was happening to his settlement, and the expression that crossed his face was one Darion recognized: the specific shock of a man whose understanding of the world’s order had just been revised without his consent.

"Percvale," Darion said.

The man stared at him.

"You sent three of my knights back in their undergarments," Darion said. "You took their horses, their armor, their weapons, and the food they were carrying. Then when I sent a letter asking for an explanation, you put my messenger’s head on a spear and planted it in the road." He kept his voice even. "You did all of that because you believed there was no cost for doing it to Percvale. That we were finished. That we normally don’t fight back."

The village leader’s mouth opened. He said something that might have been an attempt at justification or might have been an attempt at denial.

"Spa... spare my..., I’m..., let’s make...pea..."

Bro was just stuttering like he had been electrocuted or something.

"Fuck you!," Darion said.

He drew his sword and aimed for the neck, chopping the head off with perfect precision. The man tried to shout before the sword struck, but the blade was faster.

Now Darion grabbed a spear and thrust in the head, taking it with him, smiling at the now headless body of the man.

He had thrust Calder’s head in a spear and sent it to him. Darion had just done the same.

The sounds of fighting had largely stopped. What remained was the sound of his knights moving through the huts, the low calls between them as they worked through the settlement systematically.

The wolf was somewhere in the northern section, visible briefly between two huts before it moved out of sightline. The bats were overhead, invisible.

He started walking.

"Livestock," he said to Garren when he found him near the settlement’s eastern edge. "Everything they have. Goats, cattle, cows, anything that’s penned. Food stores too, check every hut, take whatever they have that’s worth taking."

Garren was already organizing it. He had apparently anticipated the instruction and had knights moving toward the pens visible at the settlement’s southern edge, the animals inside them audible and agitated from the noise and the smell of the night.

Some of the villagers had run. Darion had seen them going, people who had been on the outer edges of the settlement when phase two began, who had enough instinct to recognize that leaving was the correct decision and enough legs under them to act on it.

He let them go. They would carry the story of tonight to wherever they ran, and the story was the point as much as anything else.

Most had not run.

His aim wasn’t to kill the ’innocent’ citizens by the way.

The living knights worked through the settlement for another thirty minutes, clearing the huts, gathering the food stores into a collection point near the southern pens, moving the livestock out and organizing them for the march back.

The undead knights held the perimeter in case anything returned from the direction the runners had fled. Nothing did.

When the collection was done and the livestock were ready to move, Darion looked at the settlement one last time.

"Burn it," he said.

The fires started at the edges and worked inward. The huts caught quickly: old wood, dry from the season, the kind of material that had been waiting for this for a long time.

Within ten minutes the outer structures were fully involved and the center was beginning to catch, the light of it visible for a considerable distance across the flat ground surrounding the settlement.

Darion turned and walked toward the road, handing Gonnb’s leader head to a knight beside who was pleasantly appalled by what he was seeing.

The column formed behind him, living knights, undead knights in inventory, the livestock moving in a group at the rear, the wolf unsummoned and the bats unsummoned. Garren fell into step beside him.

The road north toward Percvale stretched ahead in the dark.

Behind them, Gonnb burned.

Darion didn’t look back.

That was until one of the knights suddenly called out from the settlement’s southern edge, just as the column was forming up to leave.

The Knight’s tone wasn’t urgent. From the looks of things he had found something unexpected and wasn’t sure what to do with it.