The First Lich Lord - Chapter 183

The next city we came to fell with ease. More so than we had expected. Now that the friar was truly involved, the forces of Olattee were stretched far thinner. That and the city was not well defended. The juggernauts broke down the gate and my horde overran the city. It was a good thing too, I needed the bodies.

Reinforcements continued to arrive from Vito and Kellnock, but they were getting farther and farther behind. I finally sent a messenger back to Vito to tell him to hold the troops and consolidate them to send in a larger forces. I was nervous they would get attacked and destroyed before they got to me.

From the materials gained in the city we took, I diverted from my pattern. Instead of creating more monsters, I added over 500 bone knights and a few flesh golems with the leftovers. I preferred the bone guard from Vito over my bone knights because the bone guard were coordinated and worked together.

Lesser Bone Knight

Level: 100

Bone knights are powerful foot soldiers for any necromancer. They can be created in a variety of different ways and often make up large contingents of any self-respecting undead army.

In a line of combat, my bone knights could deal out more individual damage, but the bone guard could hold the line where the bone knights would be overwhelmed. Still, I needed to strengthen my front line, and the bone knights were as good as I could get at the time.

I’d thought about using the death cores I gained to create death knights, but after seeing the effectiveness of the banner I decided to save them. Not only during the fight in the city were my troops more effective, they marched faster and responded quicker. Having the banner up as often as possible had to be a good thing.

***

Two days out from the City of Rivian, a large group of players caught up with us. They were all mounted on some kind of magical creature, I had not been alarmed. When they were spotted, Raven had fallen back, and my sister, Jess, was with her. When they’d seen Raven scouting them, Jess had ridden ahead of the players.

I didn’t recognize about half of them, but I was happy to see both Aaron and Ezra’s teams. They rode through my formation, joining me near the front where I waited on Shadow. Abimelech kept the people she didn’t know away with a nasty glare, passing glances with Othniel who watched me like a hawk.

Maxwell was on Snappy, and most of the teams hung out around him, demanding a song. Before long, Maxwell was playing a ballad from a metal band. Those always fell out of place to me in an album of heavy metal. Not saying I don’t like them, just they seemed out of place.

“Glad we caught up with you,” Ezra said. I noticed something different about her. Not only was her spear different, but it had a large black feather attached near the blade. Her armor was no longer bright and shiny.

I put it together. “Don’t tell me you’re a paladin for the raven god now?”

Ezra laughed. “That I am. Being a paladin for a light god was getting problematic. So much so I’m pretty certain Anouk was relieved to see me go, though she did threaten to burn my soul in eternal light if she ever caught me.”

I snorted. Anouk was a god of light in the local pantheon. She’d never liked me, and I was pretty certain she had not been thrilled when Ezra had become living dead. However, the thing about players, and the gods knew it, is that unless they are a hard-core role player, they can be very fickle. Some gods will put up with it, but most see it as get what you can while you can. After all, players can be very useful.

“Marcus is now following Thiar,” Aaron said. “I’m not certain if it was that he needed a new patron or if that high priestess swayed him by other means.”

“You mean Freya?” I laughed. “I think the good monies on,” I made air quotes, “other means.”

We all got a laugh out of that. All of their teams had become living dead, which had been the most problematic for the religious types. But now that we had a good old death pantheon going, they had options. “I can’t imagine you’re here to join my army, are you just passing through?”

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“No,” Ezra shook her head. “We actually have a quest from Rhea. Evidently she got a message from the friar and he needs some help.”

“Why didn’t you say so.” I immediately turned to find Abimelech. “We need to get moving.”

“You’re heading in the right direction already,” Erza said. “I guess we get some free experience for doing what you were already going to do on your own. I didn’t expect you to be this far though. How are so few troops conquering so much so quickly?”

“I don’t know, it seems weird to me as well,” I shrugged. “I’ve never had more than 10,000 troops and that’s counting the cannon fodder.”

“It’s not as weird as you think,” Aaron said. “Sorry, I’m a little bit of a history buff. It’s a fairly common misconception about how big armies were back in the Roman and medieval era. Heck, Valdor isn’t even that populated when compared to back then. Rome, at its peak, had thirty-three legions, which was about 450,000 legionnaires, counting auxiliaries. At that time the conservative estimate of the Roman population was 65 million people.”

“Oh,” I said in surprise. “That’s definitely not how it’s portrayed in movies.”

Aaron snorted. “I’ll pretend like I didn’t hear you say that. You’re smarter than getting info from media.” He shook his head. “Anyways, population wise, Valdor is way smaller. So your force is a much bigger threat. And that’s not even counting the friar, the civil war, and the other armies that Vito has deployed.”

“Other armies?” I asked, “Like plural, I knew about the one.”

“He said Ezekiel might not be thrilled by that,” Ezra reminded Aaron, her tone very flat. “In fact, I’m pretty sure we just failed a quest named ‘Don’t Tell Ezekiel About the Armies.’”

“Right…” Aaron smiled.

I just rolled my eyes. I had no doubt Vito had given them that quest.

“In the medieval ages, the population to soldier ratio was higher,” Aaron soldiered on, clearly hoping to move beyond his mistake, “but even still their population was much higher, and by those standards, your army would still be considered large. It wasn’t until the Napoleonic wars did armies get really big.”

“What you’re saying is I should just march on the holy city and call it good?” I asked.

“No,” Aaron shook his head. “While your army is bigger than you realize, that would still be crazy. You’ll need support to do that. Honestly, that’s why you should go help the friar.”

***

“What am I looking at,” I asked, my voice was a little more tinny than normal. I had done the bare minimum to give this body the ability to speak. Most of the effort had gone into stealth, speed, and strength. While I could stand up on two legs, this body was meant to run on all four.

“It looks like a fortification under siege,” Nick said.

“I can see that,” I retorted. Abimelech was leading the army to catch up with us, my Lich body currently sitting on the back of Snappy with Maxwell. I had possessed this construct to sneak forward with Raven, Nick, and his sister, Jessica, from Aaron’s team, Ehud, and two other rogues from the players. “Those don’t look like Olattee forces to me, nor do they look like the soldiers we’ve been fighting.”

Both Jessica and Nick got a distant look as they used some kind of skill or ability to zoom in their vision. Of the group, they were the rangers and had the best ability to see things farther away. We were hiding at the top of a small hill covered in grass, all of us crouched to remain hidden. It was late afternoon, the others were sweating, even the living dead under the intense heat.

As we approached, the group had fanned out taking out the scouts stationed behind the unknown army, ensuring we would not be alerted. No doubt they knew we were headed their way, but even though Aaron had assured me we did not need to rush, we had sped up. While the friar might not be in dire straits yet, things could’ve changed, and if we changed how quickly we were advancing, the enemy would be caught by surprise.

The friar advanced even more rapidly than I had once he finally made a choice. It was helped along by the secular forces not necessarily as willing to fight him as they were me, and the fact that the clergy were divided. Some thought the friar was a heretic, others thought he was right, but the vast majority were someplace in the middle. This meant the forces he’d faced were not overly motivated to fight him.

Rhea and Nonus had been sent to assist me when news got back to the friar of how quickly I’d advanced, running into another force gathered to deal with me. The fort under siege was built on a large stone overhang that rose out of the ground rather abruptly. The fort was named The Plow. Beyond and around the stone rise was farmlands, looking just like a plow blade stuck in the ground.

We had to divert straight south at a crossroads to reach the friar instead of continuing on the southeast trajectory. If Aaron had not come to us, we would not have come this way. Since his arrival, it took us three days of marching to make it here. We hadn’t had time to conquer all of the small villages and hamlets we passed unless they were on the main road.

The friar had conquered the fort and had been marching northwest, intending to meet up with me where our paths crossed at the City of Dagar. That plan was interrupted when a large force suddenly engaged the friar. There were multiple very strong individuals, none were the equal of the Friar, but working together they managed to push him back. He’d fallen to the fort where he dug in. He had used a ritual to send a message to Rhea requesting help.

“There was no information from her about who this is?” Jessica shook her head as she looked back at me. “The banner has the symbol of Olattee on it, but it’s changed, there’s something in the middle of the star and the background has a checkered pattern of black, white, and red lines running through it.”

Raven, in her lynx form, had scouted forward just to make sure nothing was looking our way. When she returned and transformed back into her human form I knew we were safe.

“I guess for our purposes it doesn’t matter who they are,” I said. “We’re here to help the friar and these are the assholes giving him issues.”