Hello again! Sorry that it was late (but you probably didn't know that I was planning to post it two hours ago, so you didn't know it was late). This week, Chapter 4 of I'm Gonna be a Wizard When I Grow up Again! is out, along with chapters 1+2 of Blood. This Saturday, the release of the first bit of "Of Space and Bachelor's Degrees" will come out. As always, my wordpress site is here.

Necromancer

A Royal Road Fan Fiction

By: Halosty

Chapter 59

Quietus looked at the map once more and regretted his decision. Over a day of travel and he was pretty sure he might have moved a few percent of the way there. If he wasn’t wrong, at this pace he’d take a month of travel to arrive. While this was only one week in real life, that would require him to play without sleep or going to school or any of the other things that he needed to do to survive.

He’d been traveling as a mummy. Although they were a bit slower, he was able to keep a brisk pace, and did not have to drink, nor to eat like if he were a ghoul. He could have gone faster, but he had been stopping to kill everything he saw on the way. After all, he needed to practice making undead. It wasn’t nearly fast enough, though. However, zombies were even slower, and were inferior in every manner to ghouls.

Quietus did some quick calculations. If he ran as sprinted as fast a human possibly could, he could arrive in four days, approximately. This assumed no stopping at all, no detours around geography, and of course, that he could run that fast. Fortunately, he didn’t have to rest, since all undead had unlimited endurance. Quietus thought he could do it as a skeleton, but he didn’t have the ability to mimic them yet.

He studied one he had created. He knew the bone structure well enough, and could name each by memory. However, he didn’t really understand what made a skeleton special, exactly. He knew they could move purely through dark magic, since they had no muscles or sinews to move their bones. He didn’t really understand what it was like to be one, though. After all, he’d always had all of his flesh, or at least most of it. This is why it was fortunate that he came across what he did on his path.

A ghoul he had created ran ahead of him, and started to swim through the lake in an oasis. However, it started rapidly taking damage. Quietus watched as it climbed out the other shore. It was missing some of its skin. Looking around the oasis again, it wasn’t like the others he’d seen. While there was a large pool of water in the middle, there weren’t any plants around. Quietus observed the pool of water again. After sticking his hand in for a second, it was obvious that it was highly acidic. Quietus bandaged his hand. Technically, he was using his repair undead ability, but his bandaging skill helped as well, since he was a mummy.

Quietus knew how he’d experience being a skeleton. However, he canceled his transformation into a mummy first. While he would have liked to not feel anything about what was coming up, he was pretty sure that would make it fail. Quietus almost jumped straight in, but then realized that was a bad idea. First, he gathered together all the undead who had managed to stay with him. Then, he gave them all his equipment, and ordered them to protect it. After that, he cast soul bind on himself, sprinted toward the lake of acid, and jumped in as far as he could.

If Quietus had to describe the sensation as he experienced it, he would have probably said something incomprehensible and full of profanities. If he had the chance later, though, he would have said something like this: “You know how lemons are acidic and sour? It’s kind of like that, except stronger, and your entire body is a tongue. Except it’s not a tongue, and you’re covered in papercuts, and someone’s poured lemon juice all over you. Also, you’re on fire. Sometime after that, it really starts to hurt.”

Quietus had almost missed the death message. In fact, he had rather wished it showed up a bit sooner.

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When Mortimer got out of the capsule, everything he touched hurt. It was painful getting to sleep, but he eventually managed to hold still and fall asleep.

In the morning, the first person he saw was Angela. “Mortimer! What happened to your face?! Your hands?!”

Mortimer looked down at his hands. They were red, as if lightly burned. “Don’t know.” Mortimer said this, but then he had a thought. He recalled stories about people who had real burn symptoms from being hypnotized. He supposed that the realism of Royal Road’s virtual reality had caused some symptoms from the intense feelings he had experienced. This is why the default settings were to reduce painful sensations. Mortimer didn’t like it though, because it didn’t feel real. Well, since the condition was probably mental, Mortimer presumed that it would be healed in the same way. He knew he wasn’t injured, so he’d get over it. It was slightly annoying though. Mortimer decided he should say something to appease Angela. “Just a rash, I think. It should go away soon.”

Angela gave him a pained look, as if calling it just a rash was like saying a missing arm was just a flesh wound. She didn’t bug him about it any more, though. Mortimer knew that if it didn’t get better soon, though, she would.

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Mortimer found Alex at school. Before he could say anything, “What happened to your face?”

Mortimer waved it off. “Don’t worry about it. It’s getting better. Anyway, it should take me somewhere between two days and… three weeks to get to your area.”

“That’s a… vague time period. Planning to go into cable installation?”

“Well, it depends on whether or not I can find this… shortcut, I thought I saw.”

“...Alright, then. Just don’t take too long. It’s boring by myself. Although, I suppose that’s preferable than being surrounded by undead or something.”

Mortimer didn’t particularly mind being surrounded by undead, but he assumed Alex meant the hostile undead around the southern tip of the continent.

“Don’t worry, I can probably get there soon. Then, I’ll look for those landmarks you pointed out. Can’t you just… not log in?”

Alex’s head shook back and forth. “Not exactly. There’s a quest related to the item, and I need to log in for a certain amount each day or it’ll fail, and the item will be lost.”

“Ugh, sounds like a pain. Well, I’ll hurry.”

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By the time he got home, his skin was looking much better. It was barely even pinkish. Before he could head to his capsule, Master Valarao stopped him. “Time to begin the new training.”

After they were logged in to the training virtual reality program, Master Valarao explained more. “Now, you know most of the combat techniques. However, a real battle starts even before the combatants meet, and sometimes ends with one still unaware of the other. Now, I don’t foresee the techniques I will be teaching you being necessary to your daily life, but they are important to understand the entirety of the style. We’ll start with the basics.”

The basics, it turned out, were how to not be noticed, and how to avoid combat entirely. Master Valarao seemed to have realized Mortimer had some practice with such, so the difficulty ramped up quickly. Mortimer got a bit careless, and died twice. Fortunately, they were quick and mostly painless. Relatively, anyway. Especially when compared to jumping in a pool of acid.

After this training, Mortimer was becoming more convinced that Master Valarao wasn’t just a practitioner of martial arts. Of course, there had been plenty of signs before, like the large number of knives Master Valarao had. Still, Mortimer wasn’t going to criticize whatever profession he had chosen. After all, he was an excellent teacher, and he seemed content to just teach Mortimer, and seemed uninterested in making Mortimer into a mercenary… or more likely, assassin. Mortimer had no reason to bring his suspicions to light, so he didn’t.

End Chapter 59