99. Welcoming The Guests (2)

Shave the bone down to just the right amount, engrave a Reinforcement Circuit on the inside, then fuse fresh bone onto the Skeleton Warrior’s armor with necromancy.

— Grrk. Grrrk.

The grating screech of bone being ground away set Yujin’s teeth on edge, but the System’s response that followed right after tugged the corner of his mouth into a smirk.

“Next.”
“Ge-ge-gel.”

The Skeleton Warrior he’d just finished modifying slid off to the side, and the next of the dead in line stepped forward.

“I’d like to fix up your teeth more than your body, but never mind. It’s not like you’re heading out on a blind date.”

…

Grasping a Skeleton Warrior’s structure took three seconds on average. Trimming the bone to fit took ten more, and reshaping and reinforcing it with [Bone Armor] another ten.

‘Twenty-three seconds all told. My touch isn’t what it used to be.’

Before the regression, this was something he could have handled at a single glance, no hands-on work needed. A cottage-industry(?) pace of twenty-three seconds. How humiliating.

‘Our Constellation hasn’t the faintest idea how delicate a job reinforcing undead is.’

It came down to understanding the structure, interfering with the mana, carving the bone, and at last fusing the pieces together. One slip at any of those steps and the undead’s specs didn’t merely fail to climb; they took a sharp dive. If the margin of error ran wide, the thing shattered outright.

‘It’s a matter of touching ever so delicately on the part that becomes the core of the spirit-power.’

Kronos let out a short Hmm of a groan, then sent another thought his way.

‘Certain conditions have to be met. And I’d need materials.’

To remodel a Skeleton Warrior into a higher-grade undead, he’d need a [Lump of Iron Steeped in Obsession] refined through alchemy. And he could hardly drag Shin Junseok off the Paju workshop while the man was busy setting up the [Saint’s Tears] mass-production line. A Unison meant finding a soul that synced well with the dead one’s body.

‘You know monsters are only half-existences.’

Monsters were beings the gate cores conjured by absorbing the mana of the ley lines and the air. Their flesh could be molded from elements like earth and wind, but it never yielded a whole, intact soul, which was why the things that crawled out of gates ran on pure instinct. A monster’s soul could be repurposed well enough for a job, the way he had when he cleared the crimson camouflage, but it could never form the body of a Unison.

‘A freak like Eye-Patch might be another matter, but ordinary monsters won’t do.’

Two hundred Skeleton Warriors, two hundred and fifty Returners. Crafting all four hundred and fifty undead and reinforcing each by hand ate up half the day. Whenever his spirit-power ran low he drained the life from a monster he’d kept barely alive, and with his concentration no longer holding the way it had before the regression, he had to stop and catch his breath now and again.

“Aah. This is brutal.”

‘I told you once before. Undead, I rate lower in combat strength than something of the same Stellar Rank.’

The first reinforcement during crafting inflated their specs. The second remodel pushed their stats higher still, until they wielded power above a 3rd-Rank monster; but against a Hunter of the same Stellar Rank, they came up a notch short.

‘An edge in specs still can’t beat gear.’

However many ways an undead was reinforced, against a Hunter kitted out in assorted items and carrying consumables besides, it fell a little short. One-on-one there was room to find an angle, but in large-scale combat that gap yawned wider still.

‘Their composition’s simple, too.’

The Necropolis’s mainstays were the Skeleton Warrior and the Returner, both close-quarters specialists. The Returner was slow on its feet besides, which made a numerical edge hard to leverage. One hand has a hard time holding off ten, sure, but cashing in a numbers advantage to the full still meant surrounding the enemy.

‘My long-range support is below par, too.’

The Skeleton Mage was 2nd Rank. Even reinforced it fell short of 3rd, and it carried little mana, so a war of attrition turned against it. He’d have loved to bury the enemy under sheer numbers, but making a Skeleton Mage took a corpse with an aptitude for magic, which turned scaling them up into a headache.

‘That obvious?’

‘I’ve got ways to deal with long-range firepower besides the dead.’

Once every one of the newly crafted undead had been remodeled, Yujin headed for the Necromancy Research Lab.

“How’s the research coming along?”

“Good. So you didn’t slack off after all.”

“Just keep it up.”

A 5th-Rank mage. Even bound by the limits of an undead species, the Dark Minion, and unable to wield the full might she’d had in life, the Unison let her exercise a fair share of her innate abilities, so the Research Lab’s first-stage tasks were easy work for her.

‘Good. With this, let’s move on to the next preparation.’

‘I need to arrange a means of long-range interception.’

The advantage of a siege defense — I ought to milk it for everything it’s worth, shouldn’t I?

Yujin laid a hand on the Black Obelisk and checked the territory’s information.

The territory window had changed dramatically. The first thing to catch his eye was the Necromancy Amplification Range, tripled now to 3km. Necromancy Amplification Range = fog.

‘Undead are reinforced, and the living are forced to bear a vision penalty.’

The Rakshasa Guild wouldn’t come crossing into the borderlands with no countermeasure at all. If Arahan had finished its background check, it would have grasped the ominous fog hanging over the Necropolis too. Even so, forcing a disadvantage onto the other side was pure gain, whichever way you cut it.

‘Still not enough.’

Unless he could plant corpses in the ground ahead of time, the way he had during the spider hunt, his forces were too thin to meet them head-on. So from here on, it was time to make “fighting on the Necromancer’s own turf” mean something.

‘The conditions are already met.’

Fafnir had combed the area around the Necropolis under the pretext of gathering 3rd-Rank monster corpses. Running into monsters along the way was inevitable, and monsters were hardly about to say “Yes sir, go right ahead” and step aside, so the corpses had only piled up further. The one nuisance was separating bone from flesh on the dead with [Flesh Control].

“Construct the Bone Tower of the Dead.”

When he called it out with firm resolve, an eerie light spilled from the surface of the Black Obelisk.

The fog the Black Obelisk conjured, the Necromancy Amplification Range itself, spread across Yujin’s field of vision like a 3D hologram.

‘The Bone Tower’s maximum range is about three hundred meters.’

A standard projectile-type spell struggled to keep its power past a hundred meters. The Bone Tower of the Dead, by contrast, boasted a fairly wide range in theory.

‘I said “in theory.” In practice there’s plenty to factor in.’

The borderlands were a patchwork of hills and ridges large and small, dotted with thickets. Away from open ground, the Bone Tower’s strengths were hard to bring to bear.

‘Which is why I scoped out sites for the tower in advance.’

‘Correct.’

You catch on now without my even saying it.

When he selected the terrain he’d marked out beforehand, the bones heaped in the Profane Graveyard sank down into the earth.

Two days. Set against modern construction techniques, it was a staggering pace.

‘Build three more Bone Towers.’

That used up nearly all the corpse-bone Fafnir had stockpiled, and adding more Bone Towers within the domain stretched the wait time out sharply.

‘It would, if I just sat back and watched.’

Defensive structures were essential to holding the Necropolis. They demanded range, combat endurance, and durability all at once, and not one of those could be allowed to come up short. Until now he’d had no occasion to defend the Necropolis, so he’d shoved their construction to the back of the queue; but having resolved to make the Paju area a base and expand his power, it was time to invest in earnest.

Defensive structures weren’t like the Hall of Death or the Black Obelisk; he couldn’t crank their build efficiency sky-high on the Necromancer’s discretion alone. All he could do was pour in extra spirit-power, or lend a hand with the formula calculations the construction process called for.

“You two come work as well.”

Fafnir and Jo Seungcheol, who had both learned necromancy, were summoned to the Black Obelisk as well.

The two undead together still managed less than Yujin on his own. Still, this much was plenty.

‘I hope I can get my hands on a good lot of magic-line corpses from the Rakshasa Guild.’

In my past life, I made any number of magic-line undead and set them to running the Necropolis. This time I’m building my power faster — so I should be able to put that old system together sooner than before, right?

— Clank. Clank.

A freight train lurched hard. Anti-Hunter weaponry was stacked neatly in the open space, and armed Hunters filed aboard with sluggish steps.

“Aah. Damn it. Why a cargo car?”
“Guildmaster’s orders.”
“That damn security again. What a pain.”

The train the Rakshasa Guild had arranged was originally used to haul cargo inland from overseas. That was exactly what made it the ideal way to slip weapons and Hunters past every watching eye and run them all the way to Paju.

“Finally got my hands on something fun to do, and they sap all the fun right out of it.”

— Whrr.

The Rakshasa Guild’s action-squad head, Kim Mijeong, a Hunter who’d reached the peak of the 6th Rank, made no effort to hide her displeasure.

“Yo, bro. Just bear with it this once.”
“I’m a woman, you know? Don’t call me bro. Guildmaster.”
“Talk like that and it hurts my feelings.”
“Goddamn it. Like I give a damn?”

The Rakshasa Guild’s master, Park Jinsu, still hadn’t dropped his playful manner.

“This job. It’s going to be fun, I’m telling you.”
“…Really?”
“This Cheon Yujin kid. Turns out he’s pretty something.”

Yujin’s track record, the one the Arahan Guild had run down to the last detail. As Park Jinsu summed it up for her, interest began to flicker at the corners of Kim Mijeong’s eyes.

“He’s really only 3rd Rank?”
“Going by when he first entered a gate, that’d be about right.”
“Kihi. They said he handles summons too, didn’t they.”
“Cheon Yujin’s summon specializes in hand-to-hand, not twin swords, I’m told.”
“That’s a little disappointing.”

Kim Mijeong couldn’t shake her lingering regret over what had happened at the strong-moss supply. If only. If only Yujin’s summon had fought with twin swords instead of bare-handed; then, purely by chance, she could have tied the incident on that uninhabited island to his record.

‘Though I’d have to skip over a few of the supporting facts.’

Kim Mijeong had no idea she’d closed on the truth purely on her own gut instinct.

“Anyway, off you go. It’s a job that’s giving Arahan headaches, so it’ll be fun.”

Park Jinsu leaned on the word “fun,” using it twice over.

She ranked third in the Rakshasa Guild, yet her actual combat strength was reckoned second only to Park Jinsu himself. The woman moved purely according to her own whims, and that was the single flaw that kept her from being entrusted with any key role.

“Kit. Off I go, then.”

Kim Mijeong boarded the cargo car with a smirk on her face.