Vandal awoke the next morning, but Dalshia still wasn’t back.
This is strange. I don’t like this. I need to go and find her.
A baby of 6 months normally wouldn’t plan to go outside alone, but if Dalshia didn’t return today, then Vandal would have to go out alone anyway. There was still one live rabbit, but he’d drink that dry today for sure. After that, he’d need to find food for himself, but his 6-month-old intestines couldn’t handle much but his mother’s milk and blood.
A baby eats more than you’d think. Five or six feedings a day. In my case I’m burning even more energy than normal on magic training and building muscles. That meant Vandal needed a lot more food than a normal baby. If he just sat here waiting like a normal baby might, he would starve to death in a matter of days, although he was a dhampir, not a human, so he couldn’t be sure about that timeline. I need to get ready.
But much less than running off to find Dalshia, he couldn’t even walk. He needed to prepare, and the first thing to prepare was a way to get around.
“First—rise.”
Focusing his mind behind the command, the wild rabbit that he himself had drained of blood twitched and started to move.
It hadn’t returned to life. He had used magic to make one of the spirits wafting around in the vicinity possess the body of the rabbit, turning it into an undead. Such was the art of making undead using death magic.
It worked, Vandal thought. My death magic is only level 2 so I wasn’t sure I could pull that off, but it looks like I can brute force it with MP. At such a low level, I can barely make more than an animated corpse, but at least it will get me around. All the rabbit was good for was moving around, and with none of the agility it had boasted in life. He had planned an escape from the military facility on Origin using much the same tactic as this, but the security had been too heavy for pawns of this magnitude to help him out.
It had also taken a massive volume of magical power to turn a single rabbit into an undead, especially when compared to using Death to Bacteria and Death to Bugs. He checked his stats to see that his MP had decreased by 10,000. Death to Bacteria cost 1 MP. That was a big step up.
“But one rabbit isn’t going to be enough. More of you, rise. You too, and you, rise! You there, rise for me!”
Some vines that Dalshia used as a rope started to writhe around like snakes. The small knife that she used for cooking rose into the air. The roughly made bed with its wooden frame started to clatter and shake. He could possess more than dead bodies with spirits. It was also possible to possess vines, wood, and even inorganic matter like metal. He got the idea by reflecting on some of the fantasy and occult properties he had encountered back on Earth, featuring elements like weapons possessed by evil spirits, cursed gemstones and jars, and poltergeists moving furniture around the house. One big caveat was that possessing inorganic matter cost significantly more magic power than creating undead.
All of that cost a cool million. My head is starting to throb…I’d better top myself off. He sucked the blood of the last remaining rabbit, drinking it dry to recover his MP, and then turned that into undead too before leaving the house riding on his bed.
“Come on, rise, rise, rise! Which way to town? Which way toward lots of people?”
All sorts of new additions had joined in on carrying Vandal’s bed: a skeletal deer, a mummy bear wrapped in the tatters of its own fur, a boar missing a head and internal organs, and even a bleached human skeleton. Anyone who might have seen this sight, if not a stalwart adventurer or soldier, would have probably collapsed in terror. A white-haired baby, with one crimson and one violet eye, commanding a horde of undead. A terrible scene, for sure, but actually not as much of a threat as it may have appeared.
He had turned the animals into Living Dead and Living Bones. The undead tools and furnishings were considered Cursed Tools. A hale farmer swinging a hoe could take any of them out one-on-one, and an adventurer would hardly even need to draw their sword. Vandal knew all of this, and so he kept making more of them even as he hurried onward.
She isn’t in the forest.
He had turned winged bugs into undead to search the forest, but they found no sign of Dalshia. He asked spirits wandering the forest for help, but didn’t get the answers he desired. It felt like the inside of his head was boiling and he felt dizzy. He had used millions of MP already, losing track of the expenditure in his haste. But his bad feelings about this situation were only getting worse.
I should have tried to make undead sooner! I should have sent them out with her! Then he would have at least known her location. If anything happened, he would have been able to sense it right away. If Dalshia had known what he could really do, she might have decided to leave the forest sooner and head back toward her hometown. But he hadn’t pushed himself. Even after his skill level increased, he had just let time pass in the haze of Dalshia’s affection.
Quickly! To the town!