I landed Orochi at another US army base, ravaged by bomb blasts and armed conflict between the living and the undead. My Death Knight had been successful in bombing the base before crash landing in their living quarters and causing bloody mayhem in their midst.

This Death Knight formerly known as Tyrone, a US soldier was armed with a M249 squad automatic weapon. A long barrelled gun, that could fire bullets with great speed and accuracy.

Tyrone had been upgraded with memories of flying jets, firing a wide variety of guns and advanced unarmed combat techniques. He also had a couple of spells at his disposal specific to Death Knights, [Limit Release], [Life Drain] and [Bone Strengthen].

[Limit Release] allowed Death Knights to move faster and hit harder in short bursts at the cost of damaging their body. [Life Drain] allowed him to drain the life of an enemy to recover from low level injuries and [Bone Strengthen] simply increased the durability and denseness of bones to better deal with blunt blows.

There were only a couple hundred of corpses intact enough to animate as zombies. Arnie and I collected the souls of the recently deceased, draining them of soul energy and storing their memories within Soul Books. We shared the souls between us equally.

I had gained memories of converting books into a digital format from a deceased librarian of this world and the memories of compressing files and executable files from a low level hacker. I had yet to find the best way to convert my Soul Library into a digital version.

It had never really been a problem previously as to how to store millions of souls before. I simply delegated from time to time, some of my least treasured ‘books’ to lesser Liches under my employ whenever I needed more room for new additions.

Now I had millions of new books in my mind, most of which I had only flicked through briefly to confirm manner of death and to see which section they’d best fit into.

I needed a Librarian for my Soul Library at this rate, which would require me to bind a different soul to mine and subjugate it’s will enough that it would be beholden to me but not enough as to make them useless.

First things first, I needed to solidify my position as undead King of this country. It wasn’t an ideal country for my ambitions as it was a small island nation with a history of cremating it’s dead. However there was a dark irony in using the corpse of the hero and his home land to catapult myself into Ascension to Godhood.

Normally, I wouldn’t be this aggressive and domineering from the start of a military campaign. My usual practice was to slowly build up a base of operation over years, steadily gaining a small but elite force of undead of my control to eliminate potential threats.

And yet I had attacked civilians on my first day in this world, rampaging like a mindless beast. Despite my age and the state of my existence as an undead Lich, I am bound to my body partly due to my endless rage against the Gods.

Or I was bound to my previous body through my wrath. Body hopping is an inconvenient and unprecedented action. I am not in favour of doing it again, unless it was back to my original body or the ideal body I’ve been aiming at for so long.

I shook my head, to shake off the unnecessary thoughts. This was the problem of being mostly a creature of the mind/soul, it was so easy to get lost in thought, especially when your Soul Library has piles of unsorted Soul Books everywhere.

I needed a bigger head, smaller books or more heads.

It would be far too hard to increase my mental capacity any further at this point.

Smaller books would require me to work out a magical equivalent of compressing a life times of memories into a compressed digital file. Far too complicated at this point.

The only remaining option was to use the historically convenient method, simply on a larger scale. Time to recruit more heads into service.

I glanced around at the recently animated corpses that Arnie had raised, searching for those with stronger than average mentalities.

Zombies are not well known for their intelligence at this stage of development, being creatures more of raw instinct. Arnie had in my tradition reanimated them with a mix of hunger, the ubiquitous rage against the living and an inkling of ways to improve the human form through cannibalism.

There were only a handful of those that still had traces of their original intellect, presumably those who had died the most recently. When a body dies, the soul lingers for a time, the more time that passes the less chance that the soul and body can be returned to it’s former state.

However even after death, an animation, or a possession of a corpse can stimulate the meat of the brain and old memories or echoes or fragments can be identified. This is because even though the soul is at it’s essence an intangible existence, it is first realised by a sack of meat, gaining form from the body or sense of self and strength from the mind of the individual.

I raise up 5 of the zombies and transform them into Liches, there’s little visible difference to the untrained eyes as the Liches don’t look much different from the zombies. Other than that they stand straighter and their eyes are more alert than their more animalistic brethren. They also tend to linger in the back of formations directing their minions.

These new lesser Liches of course are gifted with a fragment of my soul, giving them memories of basic necromantic spell craft and the ability to communicate with me over long distances through [Soul Communion]. More importantly I gave them a pile of Soul Books each, freeing up some room in my Soul Library.

I gave Arnie a few piles of Soul Books for him to sort out into his own Soul Library. I think Arnie has the potential to become a personal pupil of mine.

Arnie still harboured some lingering humanity, but at his core, he was a survivor and any niggling hints of inconvenient morality was easily brushed aside at this chance of power and immortality.

I gifted him control of this base and the surrounding area. He would be a noble under my kingship, he would have lands under the proviso he managed them on my behalf and raised a militia for his Lord.

I left on Orochi, Arnie was a useful second, not as powerful as Tom could have been but he had a more useful quality; manageable ambitions. Arnie only wanted safety and security and a little bit of power and influence. He held onto some lingering sadness about his inability to get laid now but I had comforted him with the image of all my subjects having the bodies of demi gods soon.

They were already partially there after all, undead are immune to sickness and the mortal peril of old age. They just lacked certain functions, relating to conventional reproduction.

I needed a lot more Liches, there were 8 Regions in Japan split up into 47 Prefectures.

I would have a Lich run each Prefecture with lesser Liches providing assistance and Lich Lords running each region, under my ultimate authority.

I sent a message through [Soul Communion] to Arnie as to my intentions, he was in the Kansai region, it would be his mission to subjugate the area the best he could, training up the lesser Liches into being field commanders of lesser undead.

I travelled into the Chubo region and landed in the middle of a busy road, with Orochi crushing a few cars underfoot. It was time to collect some more Liches and undead for my army.

I enhanced the density of bone in my skull and reached out with a wide area [Energy Drain] a combination spell; stealing mana, life energy and soul energy from the nearby humans. I walked through the masses of people, raising the undead, only a few had souls strong enough to be considered worth transforming into Liches. Those who tried to attack me were killed and turned into Death Knights and those who simply ran away were turned into Zombies or Zombie food.

I raised a few skeletons from those ravaged by the Zombies to help pad my numbers. Skeletons were mana intensive to create, but due to their very natures had a higher chance of becoming skeleton mages or warriors. Skeleton warriors typically were mediocre but skeleton mages weren’t a bad way to provide cover fire for a large army.

Skeleton Mages usually only had one spell they could cast but due to their persistence they could fire it off frequently. They tended towards simple level 1 or 2 spells, fire ball, frost bolt, magic arrow, the higher spells are from the lightning family, shock and static field.

I flew Orochi at low altitude skimming over the incoming traffic, which ultimately crashed into each other at the sight of the tide of zombies following in my wake.

The Zombies were in the vanguard position with a couple of Death Knights leading them into battle against the metal vehicles. The handful of Liches took up position in the middle of the formation providing plague to weaken opponents and directing the Skeleton Mages in disposing of potential threats.

The only real opposition were the armed police and a small army of poorly trained swordsmen that kept appearing from out of the wood work. They were mostly out of shape, either too fat to chase after my tireless army or too skinny and weak to properly crush the bones of skeleton warriors or hack off zombie arms.

The policemen were far less effective without the support of the US army which had been summarily undermined by their own forces turning against them as undead soldiers.

The poor visibility caused by the constantly growing expanding cloud of [Blight] probably didn’t help them either.

I travelled through Chubo region, killing civilians, raising their corpses and promoting the worthy few into various levels of Liches. I finally halted my advance at Nagano to calculate my total forces.

I had gained a couple hundred Liches, 150 Death Knights, roughly 20000 Zombies, 10000 Skeletons, 1000 Skeleton Mages and one extra Bone Dragon.

Just as I was readying my new troops into various formations in order to maximise their offensive strength, fiery death rained down from above. My newest subjects were obliterated by powerful explosives and the devastating impact of machine guns. I was also damaged along the right side of my vessel as was Orochi.

I [Spirit Walked] to find out what kind of force was arrayed against me now. I flew higher in my astral body to locate the source of these attack aircraft and eventually found it. It was the USS aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan.

This would be a problem. The fighter aircraft moved too quickly for Orochi to bring them down and my ground troops were useless against them.

I would have to do my best to eliminate the threat at the source somehow. I should have kept some of the US jets for air defense instead of kamikazeing them all into the US bases as a opening salvo.