Rise of the Supreme Necromancer-Chapter 55: A Growing Unrest

Three more days have passed. In three more weeks, the royal army would fully gather in Erstain.

In Oakdale, a priest was walking down the street.

On a market square, a herald was telling about the Burial Tax, which would go into effect starting today. He was so pale-faced that he could be taken for a zombie, just like the ones that guarded him.

Only a small group of people was actually listening.

The priest walked as far away from the guards as he could and hurried to the city’s slums. He tried to keep closer to the shadows and was constantly looking over his shoulder, but nobody was watching him.

The city’s inhabitants were either hiding in their houses or trying to avoid the undead as much as the priest.

Things changed when the priest reached the slums. Its inhabitants: haulers and construction workers, tanners and butchers, immigrants, beggars and thieves, were much bolder.

They were gathering in groups and talking angrily about the need to do something. Some of them carried wood axes, knives, hand saws, and clubs; others were making simple torches from sticks and oiled cloth.

Their voices were loud enough for the priest to hear some things as he scurried past.

"I swear, my eyes didn’t deceive me! That zombie—it was tiny! A kid half my height, but he was carrying hauls together with the others... The horror..."

"...also, he has a skull instead of his face and carries with it a head on a pike. Which talks! How did Light allow that creature to live?"

"Have you heard? The Burial Tax! It’s worse than it sounds, mates..."

Finally, the priest entered a dead-end alleyway and hid inside. Only after looking around and making sure that there was no one in sight, even above him, did the priest relax.

He opened his sack, revealing a cage with a mail pigeon. The priest had stolen from the Temple of Light’s aviary, which was currently watched by the undead by the order of the defiled "Chaplain" Lodimar, so that nobody would send letters to the Church. Thankfully, these zombies were from outside of the Temple and didn’t know that there was a ladder that could be used to get into the aviary through the roof.

The priest knew that if he was caught now or later, his punishment would be worse than death itself. But this was worth the risk.

He took a prepared letter from his pocket and tied it to the pigeon’s foot, then released the bird.

The priest watched the bird fly toward Erstain with a message that detailed all that he could find about the abominable necromancer.

Then, he walked out of the alley and looked around. From the ground, he picked a long stick with a slightly sharp end.

The priest grabbed it like a sword and went to the largest group of people in sight.

"Sons of Light! We can’t let the necromancer rule over us and desecrate the bodies of our ancestors. People, are you ready to fight?!"

***

Aleric was in the dungeon, recovering his mana. He was spending a lot of time there lately.

The dungeon was where the most convenient rooms for sacrifices were located, and where he spent a lot of his time turning living prisoners of war into his dead, but loyal soldiers. The gags and castle’s thick walls swallowed their screams, making the other less afraid of their fate.

The bang of the suddenly opened door made Aleric’s hand slip, and instead of making a painful, but non-lethal incision on his bound prisoner, he cut deeply into his stomach.

"Mmmhm!"

"Damn it!" Aleric spun on his feet and grabbed the Spine Staff from a zombie slave standing nearby just to hold it. "I thought everybody knew better than to interrupt me at work!"

The prisoner moaned on the torture table. Blood poured from him in a thick stream and went down the drains in the stone floor.

In the door was standing a visibly nervous zombie soldier.

"Master Fenn, I’m so sorry—it’s urgent news! Master Fenn, the citizens are revolting! There’s a crowd that marches toward the castle. Justicar Esvan already went there with whatever soldiers were at hand."

"A revolt?" Aleric set his bloody dagger aside and wiped his hands on a wet rag lying nearby. "These people have less sense than I hoped, then. Fine! Lead me there."

***

"Death to the undead!"

"Light protects those who protect themselves!"

"We are the righteous!"

"Burn them all!"

A massive crowd was marching down the street with torches, axes, wood saws, and other improvised weapons against the undead. When they started the march, there were mostly only the poorest people, ones with the least to lose.

But the farther they walked, the more and more people joined them, emboldened by the strength in numbers. Beggars and merchants, men and women, innkeepers and acolytes from secondary chapels in the city, all of them walked together. Many were praying loudly to ward off evil.

Soon, there were too many people even for the city’s widest street. The mob spilled onto the nearby streets like water and began to gather people even faster.

Whenever they saw an undead on their path, the mob rushed them with their improvised weapons. Even zombie servants were hacked into pieces within seconds.

For the first time, the overwhelming numbers weren’t on the side of the undead. Those zombies who saw the rebels and realized what trouble they were in ran away immediately—to save their undead lives and serve Aleric another day. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

Since the mob first appeared in the slums, it grew like a snowball with each street they passed. At first, there were only a few hundred people, but now the count was approaching three thousand—a third of Oakdale’s populace! There was no end to the people who hated the undead.

The mob stretched so far over the twenty-feet-wide street that when Aleric saw it from the back of his zombie horse, he couldn’t see the other end of it.

By this point, the mob was only a district away from Castle Arstain itself, assuredly marching down the main street!