Despite its fearsome appearance, the wall separating the inner and outer city freely allows passage to any who wish to travel through it, during the daytime at least. At dusk, the portcullis shuts on either side of the tunnel. This happens simultaneously, and those trapped within the passageway when this occurs are stuck until morning light. While it does take slightly under two and a half seconds to reach the ground, anything under it when it hits would cease to exist in a recognizable form once it does. Unfortunately for the unwary, the entire mechanism is completely automated. Changes are somewhat difficult to make on the fly, as while the gate closes extremely easily, it takes hours to build up the potential energy necessary to open it again. In terms of keeping any invading forces from the central hub of the city, the gate fails extremely safe.

Thing was built by wizards, as most overly exaggerated things tended to be. They set a mana crystal to automate the reset mechanism, and an apprentice of some sort is sent daily to adjust the timing for the closing and opening of the gates. Depending on the season, dawn and dusk would be variable, and it would be annoying to try and calculate a spell to activate at slightly different times at variable intervals when the option of ‘use free student labor’ existed. As such, one unlucky aspirant got to trudge down five stories of stairs twice a day to pull a lever to activate the spell that controls the gate, and then back up. Not the most glamourous task in the world, but someone had to do it.

Unless the city was under attack.

Very few students would raise an army to attack the city just to get out of gate raising duty, but ironically enough it would typically be the necromancers who do so. Instead of raising the gates, they would raise sufficient corpses on the outskirts of town to generate a state of emergency, and sleep in for an extra hour. Generally, that would only come from the combination of specialization and background; it takes influence to prevent reprisal from that sort of action, and enough capital to be able to frivolously waste that kind of power on simply sleeping in.

The necromancer escorting a cart of hazardous magical materials out to a nearby canyon only had one of those factors. Unlike the rich necromancers, this one couldn’t afford reagents, and only specialized in the manipulation of souls and animation of objects thereof because of the family business. They were established outside the city walls, and catered to lower-class, low-tier, low-power adventurers. A small magic shop had to cut costs somehow, and this particular one had gone the route of producing weak magical equipment out of recently exterminated monsters.

A town’s tavern is typically a fairly reliable place to pick up work for a starting adventurer. Back beyond the tables, a bit away from the dark tables in the corner, along the wall, a standard alehouse will put up a wooden board for the local businesses and individuals to stab on parchments advertising goods in exchange for services. Small businesses will put up requests for small numbers of easily hunted monsters, individuals would put up requests for personal meetings, wherein the details of the job would be specified, and the tavern would put up advertisements.

Specifically, the necromancer’s family would order kobolds, put a time limit on the quest, and request the full body. They had a standing arrangement with a couple of the taverns to replenish the posting with regularity, making it a repeatable daily quest to kill mobs and get a small amount of money in return. As an additional part of the arrangements, the taverns were supplied with significant amounts of kobold meat at cost after the shop was done processing the bodies. The adventurers get paid, spend money on food at the inn, and then spend the rest of their coin at the magic shop on their way to stronger monsters.

As it happened, the ability to syphon the souls from the freshest kobolds and use those souls to animate their skeletons is a great way to debone a small reptile with fragile bones. What would take a professional butcher hours to do is completed in minutes by a necromancer, who can then retrieve the used soul for recycling into a power source for a slightly magical object, likely using those very bones as a reagent to allow the mana to bind to the item in question.

Neither of the necromancer’s parents had managed to get in to study at the wizard’s tower, but they were adept enough to grasp the basics of enchanting and animation. The lower level of their two story building is the shop, where bows, swords, leather armors, farming equipment, and various trinkets are held, waiting for a customer to come in, their payment for the completion of their quest in hand, and upgrade their entirely mundane armor or weapon into something that would be just that slightest bit more effective. Conveniently enough, the shop would also be perfectly willing to buy their old, non-magical gear as well, so they don’t have to carry it around town until they can find a buyer. The family wasn’t well-off by any means, but at the very least they weren’t poor.

On the other hand, a fresh necromancer trying to prove their worth needed an abundance of power to impress the administrators of the wizarding tower. That being the case, the parents here would likely attempt to sell a gemstone the size of a melon, rather than make it into a project that would impress the admissions office the supposed standard way. Money was power after all. That was why the young one snuck in the back entrance of the building to get to the second floor without attracting attention.

Upstairs had four different rooms. From smallest to largest, there was the restroom, the child’s room, the parent’s room, and the workshop. With what they knew of the layout of the building, the young necromancer decided it was safest to store the gemstone in the workshop, nearest the tools needed to flay a kobold. Generally, it was the skeletons that did that work, while the enchanters would work on making the equipment bought from adventurers slightly magical. The books could go just about anywhere, as they usually ended up in the restroom until everyone in the building had finished reading it, before making its way down to the shop. It wasn’t exactly like the magical tomes that came into the place were in mint condition to start with anyway.

All of that taken care of, the necromancer sneaks back out, taking the animated wagon out to the canyon. They’ll get to work after they finish with their work.