5. This Is Why You Play Necromancer (2)

There’s a saying that gets passed around among Necromancers.

“Well begun is half done.”

It’s meant to say that any undertaking is hard to begin, but once the mind is set on it, the rest falls into place step by step. For a Necromancer, whose craft works through corpses as its medium, it carries a second meaning: crafting a single undead takes exactly that much doing.

To put it the other way around…

“Answer my call.”

The zombie count kept climbing higher, and Yujin pushed deeper into the forest, bolder now.

“Kikikit.”

— Pfft! Ptt!

Darts came flying in from every direction, smeared thick with a paralytic poison brewed from goblin venom glands and crushed weeds. The zombies took a whole hail of them from every clump of brush and advanced without so much as a twitch. Poison did nothing to the dead. Not one bit.

“Kireuk. Rotten corpse. Won’t go down.”
“Kik. Paralytic poison. Doesn’t work.”

The goblins set down their blowpipes and charged instead. Against the zombies, sluggish with rigor mortis, they were far quicker, and they put the agility of their small frames to work, going for the vitals: the napes of necks, the Achilles tendons.

“Grrrk.”

The zombies, by contrast, kept it simple: flailing both arms, or snapping down with their teeth. Even so they held their own, thanks to Yujin’s superb craftsmanship. Had their stats not been nearly doubled, the goblins’ speed would have beaten them down and toppled them.

And then.

“Bone Control!”

A long staff sheathed in faint white energy punched clean through a goblin’s chest.

This was a Necromancer’s true worth. The more chaos a battlefield held, the more Yujin’s power came into its own.

The corpse was flung back several meters and slammed into a boulder. The force packed into Bone Control was nothing a mere goblin could withstand.

“Come back to me.”

The bone staff buried in the boulder tore free and came whipping back to his hand. The staff doubled as a spear, bone serving as its catalyst; loosing it and recalling it both cost mana, but that beat fashioning a new one each time.

“I’ve watched a whole lot of people die looking for that dignity, you know?”

“Get used to it. This is how a Necromancer fights.”

A clash of wills? For a Necromancer, that kind of fight was a luxury. The method ran simpler than that: break the enemy’s will, raise the carcass the moment its breath stopped, and defile even a dead man’s death. His Constellation Lordship had better get used to it, and quick, or he’d keep drawing front-row seats to sights not fit for the eye.

He’d spent odd moments while roaming the forest studying Life Drain, and he’d worked out a few of its properties.

The instant a body dies, the life force inside it starts bleeding away.

It behaved like food: the moment the package opened, the clock on freshness began racing down. The best window came right after a kill, or while the breath still lingered. Once more than a minute had passed since death, the life force left in the corpse dropped below ten percent.

And the conversion had its limits. Turning life force into stats wasn’t boundless: the more goblin life force he drank in, the slower his stats climbed, as though his body were building a tolerance. A single species’ life force, it seemed, could only carry his stats so high.

Run Life Drain on a different monster and I’ll know for certain.

The longer the fight dragged on, the more the zombie count swelled, and the goblin pack found itself steadily cornered.

“Kireuk…”

“Answer my call.”

— Tsk.

He’d hit the ceiling on how many undead he could handle at 1st Rank.

Even with no Necromancer penalty, this is a separate matter, huh.

When it came down to it, this wasn’t a penalty unique to his class but a limit bound to one’s Stellar Rank. He’d tested it on the off chance, and the result was plain as day.

Yujin clicked his tongue in disappointment.

“Kikikit. Let’s run.”
“Kikit. Can’t beat the rotten-smelling corpses.”

The goblins whipped around and bolted away from Yujin.

“Chase them.”

With their stats boosted to nearly double, the zombies kept a pace close to the goblins’ even on stiffened legs. And undead whose breath had already stopped never tired, so the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

The zombies had all but run the fleeing goblins down.

A flaming arrow came streaking in from the direction of their flight and punched clean through a goblin’s nape. The monster let out a strangled kek and crumpled.

“Hold for a moment.”

Yujin ordered the zombies to halt their pursuit and cut a sidelong glance toward the brush.

“These zombies are my summons. Quit hiding and come out.”
“I’m sorry. We didn’t realize they were prey you were hunting, so we just…”

Three Hunters pushed out through the brush. Before the regression, word of Necromancers hadn’t reached the public until years later, so it was only natural they wouldn’t know.

One of them, the one who’d worn a guarded look, gave a start.

“That guy from earlier?”

Ah. So it was these three. The same Hunters who’d worried over him right before he entered the gate, two men and one woman. Yujin looked the mixed-gender party over for a moment and let slip a short, startled laugh.

The Mirror Hunters. I saw these guys before the regression.

Yujin’s eyes sank deep.

Kang Minho and Kang Minyeong.

Fraternal twins, freelancers who’d built a name for themselves before the regression, Hunters who toyed with their marks through coordination so seamless the two of them might have shared a single body.

These two. They’re pretty strong.

That’s just because the twins are only 1st Rank right now.

Entry to this gate was capped at 1st Rank, so the future Mirror Hunters were, for the moment, still beginners.

He’d crossed blades with the twins before the regression, so he knew exactly how fearsome they could become. By the old reckoning, Dmitri aside, they had numbered among the ten strongest opponents he’d ever faced.

But there was one wrinkle.

There were three of them, not two.

The party he’d just run into numbered three. He’d wondered why he hadn’t placed them at once when they crossed paths outside the gate, and now he had his answer: there was one extra member. The Hunter bringing up the rear, wearing a troubled expression. A Magic-line type, by the look of him, though no matter how he propped his chin on his hand and racked his brain, he couldn’t place the face.

Why would I kill them?

They were hired to assassinate me, that’s all. It wasn’t that bitter a grudge.

His only ties to the Mirror Hunters were professional. The friction between them came down to the theatrical bond of assassin and target, nothing more. There was no real bad blood on either side.

Actually, this works out well.

I was in need of porters anyway.

If the Mirror Hunters had one thing going for them beyond any doubt, it was reliability.

Their reason for taking up Hunter work was money, wasn’t it?

Just the right makings of a partnership. There was one extra in the mix he didn’t recognize, but, well, what of it. At the very least, by their pre-regression record, the two of them could be trusted. Whatever else they were, they were Hunters who honored a contract.

“You lot. Do one job with me.”
“What sort of job are you suddenly talking about…”
“I’ll leave the mana-stone harvesting to you. Split’s eighty-twenty.”

Mana stones had been the core material of the mana-driven Fourth Industry ever since the Great Cataclysm. Lodged in the hearts of monsters, they were also the backbone of a Hunter’s income.

Too much hands-on work to leave to zombies.

Harvesting them took a fair amount of delicate handiwork: slicing open a monster’s chest and prying the mineral loose. Laying hands on every last corpse once the hunt was over simply didn’t pencil out, and running Life Drain plus dissection on top of it would gut his hunting speed.

“I handle the hunting entirely. You make the money.”

Not a bad offer at all.

At those parting words, the three 1st-Rank Hunters of the Scraps couldn’t hide how rattled they looked.

Two members of the Scraps, Kang Minyeong and Lee Seongmin, kept stealing pale-faced glances at the zombies.

“Big Bro. What is that guy saying?”
“Senior Kang. I never heard of no Hunter who keeps zombies as familiars.”

Their pupils had gone as lifeless as a dead pollack’s, drool sliding steadily from their slack mouths. Zombies, the lowest grade of undead. Just standing across from creatures said to move on nothing but hatred for the living was enough to drain the strength out of a person.

“Let’s do it.”
“You serious?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t seem to be lying.”

Kang Minho was quick on the read. If Yujin had meant to jump the Scraps, he’d have had no reason to bother floating a proposal at all.

Mana-stone harvesting is hands-on work. He means to fob the tedious part off on us.

A few exchanges and a glance at the situation, and Minho had Yujin’s intent pegged. Exactly the kind of judgment that would, in time, win him the byname Mirror Hunter.

There was nothing he could do about the tremor in his chest, but he feigned composure and parted his lips.

“That split. Is the eighty ours?”
“Twenty.”
“Make it fifty-fifty. Even then, split between us it’s one-point-seven each.”
“Seventy-thirty. Anything more than that, go on your way.”
“Understood.”

As Minho took the deal, Lee Seongmin cut a glance up ahead.

“Senior. This really gonna be okay?”

The grumble slipped out under his breath. The zombies, working their rigor-stiffened limbs in those awkward jerks, looked several times more dangerous than the goblin pack the Scraps had just put down.

“Trust me. If he meant to jump us, he’d have done it long ago.”

Minho answered calmly.

A man who walked into a gate bare-handed, without a single proper piece of gear, was a man with absolute confidence in his own skill. Going along with Yujin’s proposal, Minho reckoned, would net them more than their usual haul.

Thirty minutes later.

“That Hunter. Is he trying to wipe goblins off the face of the earth?”
“Who cares. Let’s just call this a real big score for once.”

One hour later.

“Wow. Here come more of them. Guess the Garden of Antiquity really isn’t popular.”

Yujin watched the goblins keep popping up one after another, a broad grin on his face. The Scraps, by contrast, looked to have aged a good twenty years.

“…Hhuk. Hek.”
“Just kill me instead. I want to rest.”

Minho looked at his teammates and shook his head.

I didn’t think he was an ordinary guy, but.

The hunting speed was staggering. Yujin butchered the goblins without giving anyone a moment to breathe, and the Scraps simply couldn’t keep up.

“Why don’t you take a little break instead of pushing yourselves?”
“There’s mana crystals rolling around over here, too.”
“…”
“Ah. I’m not pressuring you. It’s just that there’s money lying tossed on the ground, is all.”

Yujin grinned.

To the Scraps, that grin was more terrifying than anything else around them.

“I’m not pushing you, so take it slow, nice and easy.”

And even as he said it, the goblin corpses kept piling up, one after another.

Yujin tossed the bone-dry goblin corpse to the ground.

“This one’s the last around here.”

Three hours into the hunt. In that short span, his stats had shot up considerably.

A grand total of 21.2!

All told, Life Drain had handed him the equivalent of four levels’ worth of stats.

“Wow.”

A cheer slipped out of him. Even Yujin, who’d piled up every kind of experience before the regression, could hardly rein in his admiration. He hadn’t even spent the bonus stats from leveling up, and the numbers were already this high.

Makes me wonder just how strong I can get.

And his head still held all the experience and knowledge of the time before the regression. There was Kronos, the Constellation he’d raised by boring into the flaw of its own self-worship, the very being that ‘defied death.’ Picturing the new holy spells that would unlock each time Kronos grew stronger, Yujin felt an ambitious fire kindle in his chest.

Absorbing goblin life force over and over did blunt the efficiency bit by bit. But he wasn’t disappointed; wanting more than this would have been a highwayman’s greed.

Cutting down goblins right and left as he pushed on, Yujin reached the edge of the forest.

“Um, Hunter, sir.”
“Call me Yujin.”
“Past this boundary is the territory of the boss monster, the Goblin Shaman.”
“If you want to pull back, now’s the time. I’ll pay you fair for the work you’ve done so far.”

He’d come this deep into the forest to level up, true enough. But that wasn’t the whole of it. To set off the Garden of Antiquity’s hidden element, he needed to get his hands on the shaman’s blood.

“You for real?”

Lee Seongmin’s face lit up as he said it.

Just by turning back here, they stood to collect a payout in the tens of millions of won. They’d hunted goblins by the hundreds over the past three hours, so even a flat ten percent came to a staggering sum. And the Goblin Shaman ranked in the upper tier of difficulty even among 1st-Rank gates. Walking away clean and still coming out ahead was a winning deal all around.

But.

“I’ll follow you.”

Minho answered in a clear voice.

This man. If we stick with Yujin, we stand to make far bigger money.

Of that much he was certain.

The Garden of Antiquity, open only at 1st Rank. How many Hunters of that very same Stellar Rank could throw around power this absurd? And harvesting mana stones was hardly hard labor.

Which is exactly why we have to stick with him.

Yujin caught the gist of it, snorted a laugh, and sent the zombies forward.

Goblins had gathered in the middle of the plaza. Unlike any he’d faced so far, some seventy of them stood massed together, fully armed. Behind the throng, perched on a chair, sat a goblin decked head to toe in bone; even its ornaments, on a closer look, were carved from the stuff. The staff in its hand was black, and from this distance there was no telling what it was made of.

The boss monster of the Garden of Antiquity’s southern region: the Goblin Shaman.

“Behold. A foolish human has come.”
“Kik kik. A foolish goblin trusting in nothing but its numbers.”
“What was that?”
“Right, what’s your deal? You got some kind of bone fetish? You’d reek worse than a zombie.”

Yujin pinched his nose shut with one hand.

“In-insolent human!”
“Insolent goblin. You can’t even talk straight, and you want to fight with your mouth?”

The Goblin Shaman, apparently lost for words, worked its mouth open and shut, then kicked the chair aside and rose to its feet.

“Bring that human to me on his knees.”
“Kikikit!”

The goblin troop came charging forward, shoving to be first. The ones who can’t win a war of words are always the quickest to lose their heads.

“Devour him, bones and all.”

The instant the order left his mouth, all twenty zombies surged forward in a frenzy.