Necromancer

A Royal Road Fan Fiction

By: Halosty

Chapter 65

After leaving the dungeon where he found the journal, Quietus was taking a nice, quiet stroll through the woods. There were lots of woods here, actually. These were elven lands after all, though Quietus hadn’t seen many of them. Granted, he’d headed directly for the dungeon, and then left directly away from it. At least, as directly as he could, without any sort of ranger skills.

Although the walk was relatively quiet, since everywhere Quietus went he walked quietly, the forest itself was a bit noisy. Birds chirping. Wind blowing. A strange rumbling sound passing by underground occasionally. Still, it was very peaceful.

Suddenly, something burst out of the ground, and dirt sprayed all over Quietus, including into his mouth. Quietus spit the dirt out. Yep. Peaceful. Quietus looked down at the tranquil little rabbit sitting in front of him. If Quietus thought that anything besides Ruby was cute, this rabbit would have been one of them.

For some reason though, Quietus felt it was familiar. Where had he seen a rabbit… no, this one was different. This one didn’t have a spiked collar. It did, however, have those weird paw ring-bracelets. Plus similar patterns on its fur. On the other hand, it wasn’t dripping with blood and ripping out his throat, but chewing on some kind of root. Therefore, Quietus figured it was on break from its murder spree, or something.

The strange rabbit looked at him, sniffed the air a couple times, then suddenly burrowed into the ground, but at a speed that looked like it was just swimming. Quietus spit out another mouthful of dirt.

As he was walking away, he remembered that he wanted to learn how to burrow. Specifically, so he could teach his undead minions. First, he tried it with his bare hands, but it was… unpleasant. Although he could get through a few inches of the soft dirt on top, it quickly became much harder. Pretty soon his fingers were bleeding. Well, Quietus had a solution to that. Since his minions would be the things be the ones doing most of the burrowing, it wouldn’t hurt if he practiced while undead as well.

Mostly, while as a ghoul. They were strong and had claws suited to burrowing. Still, he couldn’t move at anything close to the speed of that rabbit. If he wanted to ambush people with undead at this rate, they’d have to be near the surface and the people would have to wait around for a few minutes to be ambushed. Well, it was very low level after all.

Quietus made some undead minions from the various monsters around. From that, he learned that some animals were highly unsuited to burrowing… like deer. Not that he’d expected much else. All of his undead minions were worse at him that burrowing by a large margin, but Quietus noticed that they improved along with him, even if they did nothing. After some experiments, it seemed they could use certain skills at about half the level Quietus had, if they had souls in them. Otherwise, they were about a quarter of the level. Since skills only had 50 levels, 10 at each stage, even if he’d been at the very top, a quarter of the skill level would only barely be in intermediate level.

Occasionally that rabbit would move by, although Quietus usually only noticed because of the rumbling sound underground. Once or twice he caught a glimpse, and gained a little bit of insight into burrowing.

Quietus had started to make some progress on his technique, when it was becoming dark in Royal Road again. He decided he would log off for the day soon. He would just dig a nice U shape back to the surface, a few feet away. Then, there was a rumbling sound nearby. After that… Quietus felt no pain, since he was a ghoul. However, it was obvious to him what had happened.

You have died!

Cannot log in for 15 hours.

Oooh, looks like The Power to Accept Death leveled up to Intermediate Level 9, Quietus thought as the screen faded.

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Mortimer thought about his death. The rabbit had seemed perfectly friendly during the day. However, in the dungeon before that, and at night afterwards, it was terrifying and killed him. He shrugged. He’d been about to log out anyway. It would probably be best to avoid the area though, since dying earlier in the day, in the real world, would mean he couldn’t play until the next day, even with the significantly reduced death timer.

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Mortimer was in Dr. Stevenson’s office. While he definitely hadn’t been caught done anything, he still felt awkward being in a teacher’s office. Still, there wasn’t too much reason for him to be nervous. They got along quite well, and Mortimer knew the reason he was there today anyway.

“Since the new semester is coming up soon, you will need to decide where your future lies, so you can pick the right classes. Otherwise, you’ll have a much tighter schedule later.”

Mortimer sat back and thought. Personally, his most preferred future was to sit back and do nothing while spending his parent’s money, but he knew that wouldn’t stand. Plus, he could get bored of that pretty easily. Therefore, he thought hard about what he was good at and what he liked to do. Professional gamer… was not something he was interested in. Since he was already going to this school… based on the classes he’d taken and was good at, and even the things he’d learned in Royal Road, he could only think of one thing. “Hmm, I guess I’ll be a doctor.” After all, he’d learned about Stitching, Bandaging, Anatomy, and even Alchemy, although that was a pretty bad representation of medicine. Still, it was prestigious enough that his parents couldn’t complain, and there was no way he was going into business. So, besides doctor, Mortimer couldn’t think of a single career path that would work for him.

After he made that decision, Dr. Stevenson helped him pick out his classes for the next semester, and outline what he would need to do for at least the next few years.

Then, Mortimer headed home. After all, before playing Royal Road he needed to get in some training with Master Valarao.

End Chapter 65