Derestra had watched as the new, more powerful undead took the field. She had thought the previous ones impressive, but the newcomers put their contemporaries to shame. The massive skeletal walls stopped her forces dead, and the armored ones at the front were practically machines of devastation, churning up every ant that approached.

Knowing that her current opponent had held back such capable soldiers was disheartening. It indicated a level of confidence and reserved power that made her anxious. She couldn’t predict any enemy she had no knowledge of.

All this simply made her lean harder into her first difficult decision. If she couldn’t predict the opponent’s next attack, and her tactics were countered at every turn, she threw them aside. It still stung, realizing how outclassed she had been in something she prided herself on. But she wouldn’t let that pride become her grave. She was here to win, not prove some kind of point.

Fortunately, it seemed her decision was paying off. The dead ants were stacking up, yes. But despite the added forces, the number of ants flowing toward the undead army was only increasing. They might be holding their ground more with the reinforcements, but it wouldn’t save them when they were drowning in a literal sea of insects. She would crush them with the sheer weight of numbers if necessary.

It was only a matter of time.

{}

“Boss, raise all the ants.”

Hecate heard Dave’s command, and she almost keeled over in excitement. Finally! It was time to tap into a portion of her Necromancy that had gone underutilized so far. There had been a multitude of factors standing between her and the most basic skill of her evolved domain. Many hurdles to overcome.

Initially, Hecate had used Necromancy as a summoning platform to bring undead from the Necroverse. Not really knowing what she was doing, it was only afterward that Dave had informed her how strange that was. Summoning, in general, was an atypical skill for a Necromancer. Most didn’t do it at all.

The reason why it had happened that way for her was evident after a little study. On the surface, Hecate had created summoning spells because she drew them from the designs of her spectral soldiers. But why that had happened was interesting.

In the first place, transferring mnemonics between splinters was odd, though not unheard of. When two domains had significant overlap, a shroud could assist in bringing a mnemonic from one domain to another. It was only possible with splinters, so dual-shrouded like Caeden and Erik couldn’t do the same thing with their separate shrouds.

The compatibility between Soul and Necromancy was obvious. Both domains dealt with manipulating the fundamental underpinnings of life, just in vastly different capacities. But that same underlying principle was enough common ground to transfer mnemonics.

Except, it wasn’t that simple because Necromancy was a magic shroud. It ran on different principles, even used a different form of energy to operate, Mana instead of Ki. This had caused the process of mnemonic transfer to take a strange turn.

Since Hecate’s aura senses had awakened, she had learned that her specter mnemonics worked by creating a new soul on the soul plane, then granting that soul a construct in the physical plane for it to control. Dave had described it as ‘a soul piloting a shroud-made robot.’

When she tried to transfer that mnemonic, there were issues. Ki was, according to Dave, a different kind of energy from Mana. It worked much better for creating something from nothing and was far more efficient at doing so compared to Ki. In fact, Necromancy generally couldn’t make a physical substance from nothing. Energy like Necroflame was a simple matter, but actual physical objects couldn’t be created from Necromantic Mana.

So, when her shroud tried to copy a Ki-based mnemonic into a Mana-based spell, it balked at creating the bodies. Instead, the process side-stepped oddly, focusing on the cross-planar aspect of the mnemonic that connected the soul plane to the physical plane. From there, the Necromancer shroud latched onto the familiar energy form and linked back to the Necroverse. The strongest source of Necromantic Mana in existence.

That was how her shroud managed to make a summoning spell. A few strange disconnects between her two splinters. That, and the fact that Dave’s summoning business was constantly blasting Mana signals into the void, just waiting for a wayward summoning spell to pull them in. He’d made it easy for Hekate’s fluctuating and uncertain Mana to solidify into a solid spellform. Without his company working from the other side to encourage her Mana into the right form, it likely would have failed.

At least, that’s what Dave guessed. He was also uncertain about the validity of that claim. For all he knew, Hekate’s shroud would have adapted and actually managed to force her Mana to make an undead from nothing. He fully admitted to not understanding shrouds. Dave had told her on multiple occasions that they regularly broke his understanding of what was possible.

Dave himself was a prime example of how shrouds subverted his understanding of the rules. A simple familiar binding ritual shouldn’t have changed what kind of undead he was. In fact, according to Dave, nothing could change an undead’s type once it was created. It was supposed to be impossible.

Once they had time to settle down and work on their skills, Dave had informed Hecate how odd her situation was. He also informed her how a typical Necromancer operated. Hecate hadn’t been completely unaware. Undead were a naturally occurring monster on the Starry Sea, along with liches, which gave her some framework for how Necromancy worked.

Initially, she had been excited to raise her own undead. Creations made and empowered by her instead of borrowed from somewhere else. It was at that point that the hurdles started appearing, one after another. The most obvious being that she had no mnemonic equivalent to Raise Undead and had to learn the spellform from scratch. Which meant she had to learn spellforms from scratch. Her shroud-assisted summoning spells didn’t impart any actual understanding of the spells she was casting.

While learning the spell was the first barrier, it certainly wasn’t the last. Once she managed to properly cast Raise Undead, Hecate learned that she’d essentially been spoiled this whole time. Necromancers from across realities received the call of the Necroverse, and she learned why millions accepted that call.

First of all, procuring corpses to work with without committing mass murder was a hassle. Hecate was lucky she lived on the Starry Sea, where she could find a shrouded to provide her with the corpses, even if it came at a certain expense. Dave had a million stories of Necromancers that had walked dark paths in pursuit of their craft.

Then came the disappointments. She’d been so excited when she raised her first undead. It was…extremely underwhelming. And that was when Hecate learned the horrible truth. Compared to the undead she could summon, Hecate’s own creations were garbage.

It wasn’t just that she’d only created a lesser-rank undead. Even the basic Zombies she summoned were far superior to her personal creation. It was night and day. The one from the Necroverse was faster, stronger, more durable, and more responsive to her commands than her unique creation. Hers needed highly specific commands to operate and couldn’t understand anything that was even slightly ambiguous.

This was why Necromancers flocked to the Necroverse in droves, she learned. Dave explained that not only did the Necroverse contain an endless stream of corpses, it was soaked in Necromantic Mana from the air to the soil. Bodies from there had steeped in undead energies and more readily made the transition to undeath. They were just better.

There were ways around these limitations. In this regard as well, Hecate was lucky that she lived where she did and had the powers she had. Hecate’s Mana reserves would be considered inconceivably vast when compared to most Necromancers outside the necroverse. She could easily flood a space with Necromantic Mana, throw some corpses in, and let them stew. It achieved the same effect as the bodies landing in the necroverse.

But that wasn’t the only problem. The Necroverse was steeped in Mana, every inch of it. The ground had soaked up absurd amounts of the stuff and changed because of it. The universe of undead had, hands down, the best materials for making more powerful undead out of anywhere in existence.

Trial and error with her shroud had revealed that, with time, Hecate could use her shroud to make similar materials. Injecting massive quantities of Mana into stone gave her gravestone, and doing the same with steel gave her deathsteel. But it wasn’t of the same quality that could be found on the other side of a summoning circle. Not yet.

And this was Hecate’s frustration. She wanted to make her own undead, but the pragmatist inside her recognized what a waste of energy and effort it was compared to summoning strictly better undead from the Necroverse. An interesting new source of power turned into an annoying and bitter lost potential.

And that was why she was so excited. It seemed the situations in which she’d have a reason to use Raise Undead would be few and far between. Now, she’d stumbled into a perfect situation for it. And she wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste.

The circumstances could hardly be better. Her enemy was a simple mob rather than a collection of organized and powerful individuals. Given her limitations, raising most opponents after they died would only result in weaker undead than the person they came from.

With the ants, it was practically the opposite. Undead had certain benefits that the ants did not, such as being able to keep fighting with most of their body missing and use the lowest form of Necroflame. Dave’s buff to all undead under her command would take the raised ants to new heights, out-competing their living counterparts.

A mass of weak creatures was the perfect fodder for the lesser undead she could raise. And Hecate was hardly going to let the opportunity pass her by. Concentrating, she prepared the spell, then let it loose.

Making undead was a simple process with Necromantic Mana. So simple that it could happen naturally when enough Mana gathered around enough corpses. Essentially, the Mana reached onto the soul plane and grabbed whatever ambient scraps of destroyed souls edited there, collecting them together and shoving them into a ball to animate a body. The corpse was then powered by the Mana, which took the place of muscles and neurons to control and move the body.

The soul plane was chock full of the remains of broken souls. Those bits didn’t necessarily come from the dead, either. Hecate had learned that souls, much like people, changed over time. Sometimes that changed included parts breaking off. It was a natural thing, and the soul moved on, never noticing the change in any way that Hecate could see.

This was the sole area in which Hecate had the advantage over Necroverse undead. Instead of letting her spell latch onto random scraps, she simultaneously used Soul to create souls that would perfectly suit controlling the ants. Complete, functional souls attached to her undead.

The advantages were limited, but noticeable. The soul’s quality affected the control it had over the corpse it piloted, so Hecate’s undead would be more dexterous and accurate than the equivalent Necroverse undead. But the bodies she was using were still lacking, so that advantage was mitigated somewhat. Overall, her undead were easier to control but physically weaker than their equivalents.

It didn’t matter.

Hevate’s spell completed, and a pulse of green-black energy raced across the battlefield, diving into tens of thousands of ant bodies. Some of them were destroyed beyond usability, but most were not. Mass Raise Undead completed, and her new army rose up under the feet of their living siblings. The living ants had been walking on a carpet of their own dead, and now that carpet started to bite.