When Emil entered Vermila, it had been just after sunrise. It was his first time outside his home nation, the Kingdom of Mendac. He hadn’t been quite sure what to expect from crossing over into a new country. Though from his perspective, the local scenery hadn’t changed in the slightest. That was obvious in retrospect. After all, why would plants and such care about which side of an invisible line they were on?

But how foliage looked didn’t really matter that much. No, there was something else he did truly look forward to while he had the chance. Mendac was a landlocked country, but Vermila had a long stretch of coastal land by the ocean.

Honestly though, I just hope the ocean is as nice as everyone says it is. It’s always looked pretty enough in pictures, but I’ve always heard that the pictures don’t compare to the real thing. Emil thought to himself as he looked up toward the sky.

He had especially heard that if you had the opportunity, you needed to see how a sunset looked when it was over the ocean. That when seen in person, it was one of the most beautiful things you could ever find in all of nature. He would make a point to see it, just to find out for himself if all the praise over its beauty could be believed.

Emil had been riding through the wilderness of Vermila for a couple of hours at this point. It had been an uneventful morning so far, just a chilly day and cloudy skies overhead. At some point, he would need to find a place to properly start his hunt for Alterum’s tooth. He would need to scour for potential leads.

Since dragons were not a species known to mortals, nobody would likely know the tooth for what it truly was. But if Emil assumed correctly, it would still clearly be the ancient tooth of a large animal. If anyone capable of detecting magic found it, they would most likely be able to sense the…

“Hold on a minute,” Emil said aloud. Raymond halted in place. The Necromancer glanced down at his undead elk, and patted its neck with a small smile. “Oh, no. Not you big guy, we can keep going. I was just thinking out loud again.” Ray adhered to the command, and moved forward once more as its master resumed his previous train of thought.

“But now I’m wondering. If someone with an expertise in magical artifacts saw it, would even they be able to differentiate it from just a mundane creature’s tooth? I mean, regular Mages and such can’t detect death energy from corpses. Otherwise, that phenomenon would have become common knowledge years ago. Honestly, I still don’t even know how one would react if they encountered me or somehow got their hands on one of my memory orbs. But that’s the force of death concentrated down into a usable form. The way Alterum made it sound, it seems like its tooth still contains its power even after who knows how many centuries. Hmm.”

It was then that Emil noticed something. The air around them had changed. It felt a bit heavier than just a few minutes ago. But more than that, the forest had fallen into an eerie silence. Even this deep into winter, the sounds of singing birds and animals moving around the woods accompanied the sunrise. But now, nothing could be heard other than the sound of Ray’s hooves walking across the snow.

Emil squinted as he stared into the woods in front of them. The trees and bushes ahead were clustered together, and whatever was further ahead was obscured by the thick foliage. But the deeper it went, the more everything seemed to become filled with shadows. He had Ray slow down to a stop, and he dismounted his mount. Emil ordered for the undead elk to follow behind him as he began to walk forward.

As he moved into the thicker part of the woods, nothing immediately happened. But as he went deeper and deeper in, the ambient air seemed to become gradually more humid. At a certain point, the branches of the trees above were so entangled that they blocked a large portion of sunlight. So even during the day, it almost felt like it was actually night. But it wasn’t just branches and leaves that formed a living ceiling. There was also what looked like an ever-increasing amount of webs with each step he took.

A sudden thunk came from directly behind him, and Emil quickly turned around. He was ready to cast a spell to deal with whatever had just appeared. But as soon as he saw what it actually was, that readiness immediately dropped. The space between trees had become too tight for Raymond. But in an attempt to continue following him, its antlers had become caught. Emil let out a sigh. He should have anticipated that this would happen.

“Sorry Ray, I shouldn’t have asked you to follow me. You and Theo can head back out of this area. Depending on how things go, I might just have you go around and meet me on the other side. But for now, just stay out and wait.”

With that command, the elk pulled its antlers back out from the tree trunks. But before it could leave, Emil went up to it and opened his supply bag. From it, he pulled out one of his medium memory orbs. The Necromancer had decided to take it with him, just as a precaution. He then nodded to Ray that it had his permission to go now.

There wasn’t enough space for it to actually turn around, so it was forced to walk backwards back the way they came. Emil wanted to keep his undead out of harm’s way. He definitely felt that something lurked in these thick woods, something that would likely cause him trouble any minute now. The main issue he had was that Theo was still too small to do much. And for this area at least, Ray had the opposite problem of simply being too big.

Emil gave a small nod as he watched the undead disappear out of his sight. He then began to continue to walk even deeper into the dark woods. Several minutes later, a low buzzing sound could be heard by him. He glanced around in an attempt to locate its source. However, it seemed to come from every direction.

As he looked around, he caught movement in the corner of his vision. A slimy ball of light grey goop was heading right for him. Emil quickly ducked out of the way. It sailed past him and smacked into the trunk of a tree. It splattered upon impact, and a little bit landed on the back of his hand. It felt just as slimy as it looked, as this substance was warm and sticky.

He quickly darted his eyes toward the direction it had come from. But he saw nothing. Emil looked in every direction, but continued to not spot anything at all. However, even without seeing one, he was able to safely assume what it was that had just attacked him. From all the webs that were around, and the watermelon-sized, gooey substance that was just shot at him, he had more than enough evidence. These woods were definitely infested with giant spiders.

A second grey blob flew out towards him. This time, he managed to see it coming from the start. It was shot out from between a large clump of leaves in the tall branches ahead of him. Emil stepped out of its way, and raised his hand up in response. He quickly channeled the necessary Mana to cast an empowered Negative Void. At the same time, he willed for the System to generate his Sheet. So that he could easily have a visual tracking of his Mana Level during this encounter.

-20 Mana

Mana Level: 280/300

The large sphere of negative energy tore through the canopy of leaves and branches with ease. It ripped open a hole and let in a ray of sunlight. Moments after it passed through, a large creature fell and hit the ground below. It was a giant spider, as Emil had correctly surmised.

The arachnid was easily as big as a large dog, if not even a bit bigger. If it stood directly in front of him, the spider would have probably been tall enough to reach his navel. But for this specific giant spider, around a third of its body had been completely destroyed. However, even after that and its crash into the ground, its legs still twitched.

The low buzzing from before seemed to dip in volume, just by a bit after the creature was hit by his spell. But a few seconds later, its volume grew by several times and became an agitated cacophony of noise. Several more globs of webbing flew out toward Emil from multiple directions.

He hadn’t noticed it before, but each one was accompanied by a wet noise before they appeared. That indicator along with his undead reaction time made dodging each one a simple task. They splattered against the ground and trees, but not one managed to land a direct hit on him. As Emil ducked and weave, he kept his eyes focused on the treetops.

Flickers of movement went across the layered collections of leaves. He knew that the giant spiders were just on the other side of that living barrier. As they rapidly crawled around, the leaves they stepped on shifted in response. From this, he was able to roughly know where one of them was. The issue was how quickly it moved, however.

The movements were erratic, seemingly random. It would seem to be moving in one direction, and then suddenly disappear and reappear in another spot several feet away. Now that they were on high alert, Emil wouldn’t be able to easily kill another spider. If he released another Negative Void, his target would be gone before the spell could reach it. Without direct sight of any of the spiders, getting an accurate shot off would prove a difficult challenge.

Emil considered his next move as he dodged more of the sticky attacks. The webbing obviously wouldn’t hurt him even if they landed. But they would restrain his movements. So until their prey was successfully captured, he assumed the spiders wouldn’t be nice enough to leave the cover of the thick foliage above. Perhaps he could continuously use Negative Magic in random directions. With Negative Arc, he might be able to get lucky and hit a few of them.

Or maybe I could try something else, Emil thought to himself as he considered the memory orb still in his hand. Through his fingers, he could feel the death energy it contained within.

If I just fill it with enough Mana to break it, then it should release an explosion of death in every direction. I did it as a last-ditch resort against the group of flame boar, but it might prove effective now. I can’t say for sure how big the area of effect will be, but if I toss it in the air right before it goes off, then it should hit all the giant spiders nearby. It’s worth a shot anyway. Worst case scenario, it’ll still clear out a lot of their cover.

-50 Mana

The surface of the memory orb began to crack as Emil forced a stream of Mana into it. He tossed it directly upward as high as he could. The orb flew up by a couple dozen feet before its dark surface completely shattered. The incessant, angry buzzing suddenly became silent. A wave of pure death exploded out in every direction. Like before, a black smog swept across and through everything within its range.

The canopy of trees that blocked the sun wilted away as leaves shriveled up and crumpled away. Giant spiders, their legs folded into death curls, fell to the ground one by one. As the miasma of death wilted away the leaves and branches they stood on, their already dead bodies fell to the ground. The arachnid corpses were soon littered in a circle around the Necromancer. There were eight of them in total.

Emil stepped over their bodies and walked toward the endpoint of the death wave. He placed his hand on a tree, and marveled at it. The side closest to him was dry and dead. However, it was about halfway through its trunk that the wave had come to a sudden stop. As such, the other side was still colorful and lush with leaves. He looked back, and walked around the circumference of the explosion of decay’s effect. Emil then moved back over to the center point.

Let’s see, I might be a bit off here. But I think about it like a two-dimensional circle, then I’m estimating that its radius is about twenty-five feet. So that would give it a diameter of about fifty feet. So for the formula to get its circumference, that should be two-pi times the radius. Emil did the math in his head.

I think that’s a little over 150 feet? And its total area should be a bit under 2,000 square feet. Granted, that would be if it were actually a flat circle. In reality though, it would be obviously a sphere since it went out in every direction.

But I’m most interested in that diameter would equal the amount of Mana that memory orb was worth. That might just happen to be a coincidence, but that’s also the same amount of Mana it took for it to explode. So it’s really the only factor I have to determine its range. So in theory, a memory orb worth a hundred Mana should result in a death explosion with a diameter of a hundred feet.

This was a curious aspect of his powers for the Necromancer. It wasn’t quite like a normal spell, which was directed and channeled. He did not cast it by focusing on transmuting his Mana into a new form. He had simply forced it into the memory orb to create pressure that forced it to violently explode outward.

Emil watched as clouds of death began to form from everything that he had just killed. The giant spiders, trees, and whatever small plants and insects had been within range. He began to collect the energy from each of their deaths. He first absorbed enough to restore his spent Mana.

+70 Mana acquired

Conversion into a usable form is required

Estimated conversion time: seventy minutes

Once that was done, he gathered the rest up. Emil believed that the remaining amount of death energy was worth approximately 230 Mana. So when evenly split into medium-sized memory orbs, he would make five. To have used up one orb and seventy Mana, it turned out to be a positive trade more than worth the cost. All in all, this first encounter in Vermila resulted in a favorable gain for the Undead Human.

As he began to pocket away the orbs, Emil sent a mental command to his undead. As planned, they would walk around the dense section of forest and meet him on the other side. He couldn’t say for sure how long it would take until it thinned up again, however.

Right before he walked away, he glanced down at the corpses of the giant spiders. Emil had a thought, and reached down to one. He grabbed it with both hands, and lifted it into his arms. The Necromancer had an idea about how it could be used.

He had been concerned about Theo’s small size since it had returned to its original roach body. So while a spider technically wasn’t an insect, its parts would be close enough. And with them, he would have the material to fix that problem for his loyal undead. The creature’s body still twitched and was pretty heavy. But he would be able to carry it without issue, until he rejoined his two creations.