“*All’s fair in love and war. Sorry chaps, but your boss is a wee bit too racist.*” As Kuguhk and Khtkra looked at each other, simply thinking I was using words they didn’t know, two flashes of silver embedded themselves into their throats, followed by a at each of them.

“*Ahahaha! It’s mine! All mine!*”

Apparently I had been stupidly close to leveling up again. Man, today was a really great day wasn’t it? Even if things were getting a bit on the repetitive side, I was really seeing some results! What was that, Level 14, Level 15? Things got fuzzy in the middle of battle with all the subsequent levels.

If I tried using the next spell I desired, that would be a good diagnostic test.

That being a more rational though, it didn’t come until a while later. At the moment avarice overcame prospects of the future and I summoned Clavi and the Freshmen to help me gather up the wealth in the room. Giving them some simpler instructions, they collected up the coins in the room to start, while I spent my time grabbing the items of greater value.

Inventory once again brought its hammer of arbitrary limitations down upon me. Almost none of the objects stacked with each other, particularly any of the soul items. It seemed there may have been a bit of consistency, something about souls was just incompatible with stacking. That didn’t apply to the elemental beads, though the different elements did not overlap.

The regular, nonmagical crystals didn’t seem to want to stack if their size or color varied either.

Cut me some slack, Inventory! You expect me to haul all this stuff out of here like some peasant? As if!

“*Oh denizens of the deep dark, arise! Commanded by the might of my black magics, come to do my bidding, enslaved under my yoke to carry out the foulest and most miserable of tasks—manual labor!*” Cackling, I pulled out a few generic goblin corpses to zombify and serve as pack mules.

Wantonly stacking piles of necklaces and bone armors along each, half a dozen zombies quickly garnered the appearance of skeletal amalgamations. Their agility, already quite poor, fell even further; the fact that the items covering them needed to remain safe limited them as well.

As the larger goods were loaded onto them, I pondered over the six or seven additional items I could take. With the Clavi and the others out of the Inventory, four more slots were opened up for use. Settling on only using six, I would keep one as a safe house for Clavi; no harm would come to my little skeleton!

Eh, the other three could fight for their survival. They could get by, maybe—if not it would be a bummer, but nothing too terrible.

Reaching into the piles of junk I sifted about for something that I could spirit away en masse other than gemstones. Spotting a quiver of imbued arrows, their enchantments weren’t great, but could be useful. Before actually taking them I made sure I could find more than one set of arrows to stack. Honing in on similar auras, I tracked down two grosses of arrows—about two dozen per quiver. Naturally Inventory would only accept one type of imbuement, so I used two slots to come away with 14 dozen.

Away from the combat oriented items, a faintly glowing pair of thick lensed glasses sat on the ground. Putting them on, they enhanced the light of the room. made that fairly useless, but I stuck them on one of the zombies because they fit. After that, I found another bag of nuts, however unlike the the ones from earlier, a thin aura of evocation hung over them.

Resembling a walnut, green twigs were jammed into the split that around the center. There were tons of them, so I tried to figure out what its purpose was.

“*Alakazam! Abrakadabra! Bippity-boppity-boo!*” Poking and prodding and prying, the ‘magical’ item acted rather stubborn and refused to unveil its secrets to me. Resistance is futile! Do you think I reached my level without any hint of divination abilities?

{Ancient Memories}—Activate!

{Ancient Memories} is a very peculiar class ability, while thematically necromancers tend to have access to forbidden lore and ancient knowledge, that usually is in reference to their ability to raise the dead. Other than access directly from the departed, divination is an aspect frequently dismissed from the necromancer’s repertoire.

Not so in Underworld of Armok; Necromancers were defined less by their ability to raise the dead than their ability to bend souls to their whims. The forceful manipulation of souls is an important point, as there are other classes, such as the Ancestral Totemics, which have a more cooperative relationship with the departed. {Ancient Memories} was one of the abilities that blurred the line between the two schools, accessible to both types of classes—though the skill trees weren’t the same in many cases, and naturally led to different fusions between Class Abilities.

At its core, {Ancient Memories} was built around detecting traces of souls. In Underworld this meant divining a monster or player’s trail and stats. More arcane, and useful abilities such as [Forgotten Dreams] and [Echoes] gave nifty buffs, and the ever desired Disruption of the Rivers series of spells with excellent offensive power. According to in game lore the later effects were caused by stirring up the spirits in the air(the lands in Underworld were essentially permeated with souls of the damned); which made me quite desirous of completing the tree to see how the effect would carry over.

While in the later levels I would possibly be able to influence them, the Alric in the moment could only use {Ancient Memories} to try and listen in to what the spirits of this realm were saying. Holding the nut, I put it to my ear to try and listen.

The ear, because it seemed most similar to an auditory sensation. Listening to the echoes of something that happened long ago, slippery whooshes and spiked snapping noises came from the past. Like sight, there is very little point in breaking what is observed into parts too small to recognize. Playing a game of free association, I cross referenced the different feelings gotten from various objects in the room.

It all swiftly turned into white noise, and my head began ringing. Massaging my temples, as I strode around the room trying to find the loudest and most shrill memories that cried out. New senses were not easily assimilated into the brain; that said, neither was it an impossibility. A large selling point of many of the later VR games was integrating new senses into the mind. Of course, very few devs could build a totally foreign sense from the ground up, and typically modeled their new sense after an old one. Brains also found senses with similarities to old ones easier to process, being able to take shortcuts by fusing them together somewhat. The more discrepancies there were, the more likely a player would experience too much latency to play the game, unable to process the data well enough on their own causing some network problems.

Allegedly, the headache inducing feedback I experienced while trying to comprehend the sound-textures of {Ancient Memories} would still be considered an average affinity. Honestly, I think the testing gear may have had a problem when my diagnostics were run, but according to the machines this level of incompatibility should be easily overcome. I wasn’t about to fall to the left of the bell curve and give up because it was too hard, so pressing on I made associations with my new sensation.

As though stepping into the blazing sun from a dim cave, the incomprehensible cacophony subsided into a merely confounding tone. They were still things I had no prior knowledge of, but comparing them with one another, I could begin to understand. Whatever the walnuts were, they served a sly and deceptive purpose.

With that knowledge along with the quantity present, I hypothesized that the nuts served as some sort of disposable distraction device. It seemed that actual mages, or shamen, or whatever, didn’t make up a great deal of any population. So it would follow that the objects did not require magical activation, though given how much tKlor’t’t referenced their affinity for the spirits, that might not have been the case.

At least needing to try, I rolled the walnut in my hand, and got ready to run silently. Bouncing on the balls of my feet, I tossed it aside in a long arc while stepping forward.

Naturally being in a small cavern meant the seed bounced of the ceiling, rebounded off a wall and fell somewhere into the piles of junk I’d not deigned to look upon. Clavi shook his head, and would have been rolling his eyes if he had any.

Shk shk— starting to grind his jaw side to side in an amused fashion, Clavi leapt into the air as a clatter came from the pile of treasure behind him, clocking his noggin against the roof. Several times a second there would be a clatter, until the nut propelled itself out. Hopping around a bit like a clam, it clacked across the ground in a rhythmic fashion.

“*Hahah! I knew it! Serves you right for doubting me bonehead!*” Swiftly gathering up the popper nuts, they would definitely come in handy. The way it quickly paced itself and impacted the ground made it sound a bit like footsteps; probably as designed. The ‘Popper Nuts’ could quickly be activated by bending some of the twigs by closing the hand, and then thrown a distance, after which they would bounce about. A very advanced version of throwing a rock into the bushes, developed probably because forest creatures had good hearing.

I found a less unique item that also functioned around sound—a thunderstone. It’s not like they could have copied an idea from another dimension, but since the concept was so much more familiar, it didn’t warrant the same level of intrigue. They were much more fragile than I expected, two exploding in my hands as I picked them up, giving me a hearing impaired debuff for a few seconds. Even so, three dozen or so made it into Inventory without trouble.

The other two slots remaining I used to grab many more medium sized earth and water elemental beads. Making sure to stack similar kinds of my original samples, even if they were expendable, I was set.

No more space for treasure, I collected up the coinage sifted out by the skeletons and it looked like I wouldn’t have to worry about money for some time yet. Hundreds of cupra and argent, there were 33 aurum in the mix as well. Fairly distributed towards the high end, made sense since travelers wouldn’t want to lug around huge quantities of cash. Inventory obsoleted such worries in my case though.

I was making out like a bandit, now all I had to do was head back to the village.

By heading out through the goblin nest with a vulnerable caravan.

Hmmmm….

Having spent so much time joyously prancing about in the room of loot, the imprudent nature of my level already began fading enough that I realized I should better consider the path of retreat. Escaping wouldn't be a problem, it was escaping with maximal profit that really bothered me.

Since the battle ahead had been justified in the name of helping tKlor’t’t, I would repay his kindness by making sure that I properly weakened Khtraal’s power base. No cardboard boxes for me and my crew, the only thing we hid behind were sharp blades.

My undead army was at least an hour away at their speed, so I had to make do with what was on hand already. I did have a nigh infinite supply of bodies piled away, and against goblins I didn't really need to go the quality route. However the unholy legion of the battlefield was better suited to long periods of grinding, and I wanted to get back to the village.

The DPS of our group needed to be raised. Cheap and high damage. Zombies were tanks, skeletons were speedsters, and ghosts...they were the heavy hitters.

I ain't afraid of no ghost, but a terror was about to descend on the Khtraal.