The Hob’s blood was currently still pumping out onto my clothes. A promotion of sorts I suppose. I crawled out from underneath him and considered what to do about my other problem, come to think of it I probably should have done that a little more often before now.

You see I’d survived this far largely on luck. When my village was raided by a Necromancer he’d recognized my affinity for the art. Though that isn’t nearly as impressive as you might think. I swear the Gods must have wrote the laws of nature such that every burnt down village comes with either its own budding hero or evil overlord in training as part of the package because you can’t jerk off a small dick in the Halls of the Chosen without jizzing onto some monument to someone or other whose family or lover or most favoritest pet was killed in an attack by undead or whose village was consumed by demonfire from a rogue summoning.

I’d have thought maybe after the first couple hundred horror stories people would learn to stop building villages on top of battlefield graveyards or near where the ethereal plane most closely intertwined with our own but they neeeeever do.

My affinity for the arts meant I ended up enslaved alive instead of enslaved dead which was at least slightly better and over the course of a few weeks I was broken. The stupidest part was at first I wasn’t even worried. I’d been told all those stupid stories about the Chosen and figured this must just be my chance to prove myself to the Gods. Can you believe it?

Oh, sure I was a little scared. But part of me was excited I just knew I’d survive, becomes a hero, slay the necromancer and get the girl! So no worries, he couldn’t possibly break me, nope, no way. Which was a great idea for the ten minutes it lasted. Then the other boy beside me spat in the necromancer's face and was reanimated three hours later with his dick bisected in half and a spear still stuck up his ass and I couldn’t be more helpful in the process.

I won’t go into details but needless to say, it works out better if you give in early. After being broken he put me back together again as a Neophyte and I started a new life of sorts. Which when the alternative was being a zombie actually constitutes luck.

I’d gained the rank of Acolyte doing the only thing actually required to advance in an undead raiding party, being the one re-animating those that failed instead of the one being re-animated. In a world where the dead still serve and every error is punished with death, I’d been lucky enough not to be sent charging naked into a shield wall with nothing more than a reek of desperation and a dagger. Score two for me.

To understand how I was even luckier you first have to understand what a necromancer is. A necromancer is two things, A controller of necrotic mana through which to manipulate the undead and also a corrupter of other manas to forcefully convert them into necrotic instead. This is because necrotic mana isn’t so much its own mana as it what remains when mana decays or is corrupted somehow. Turns out I’m excellent at utilizing necrotic mana. My ability to take other forms and corrupt it though was only slightly above those killed for incompetence. Being great at one and poor at the other meant my skill had been neither so abysmal as to warrant death nor so great as to be made a personal apprentice. Thrice lucky, few people survived the first problem and even fewer the second.

That made me the perfect candidate for selling off. I was traded to nearby Hobgoblins for some well-preserved corpses and sent raiding. There had been me, Acolyte Ryzen. A neophyte sold along with me whose name I never bothered to learn. My skeletons, skeleton one, skeleton two, skeleton three and skeleton four and finally the raid captain of our little group who was known only as Captain.

Unless you’re talking about in my head in which case he was also known as that stupid fucking hob.

There was also a girl the neophyte had taken in our last attack on a small farm a few hours earlier in the day. A part of me felt sorry for her as he dragged her away from the farm. I’d been her once, broken and used for the benefit of another, though she’d perhaps soon be broken and used in different ways, still, we were kindred souls after a fashion. Nothing to be done for it though and besides, it could have been worse, I could have had skeleton five in my group.

The Captain had decided to make an attack on a caravan even though this particular one was guarded by a group of mercenaries. I can only assume our repeated attacks on the exact same stretch of road for weeks massacring everyone we found had finally made someone consider they’d not all just got lost on the way and start protecting the ones passing through. He’d commanded me to lead the attack and I made the mistake of suggesting to him that a charge across the open desert into a hail of ranged fire before you even reached the enemy might not be the best idea. Sounds reasonable right? Never try to reason with a hob. This is probably where my luck should have run out and my story as a zombie should have begun.