Despite all this, I thought that Necromancy was powerful because the living dead were upward compatible. You see, my previous examples were only based on the dirt simple application right there on the tin. Once you got more ambitious than just rustling up corpses to do your grunt work, things got ugly fast.
“Crap, they aren’t your usual pushovers...”
Climbing up the ladder was a waste of time, so I leaped up the footholds and sped up the watchtower. In the reddish light of the setting sun and the purplish haze of twilight, I could see the enemy force squirming toward us. Typical—of course they had to come at the moment in the day when our vision would be most impaired. Although they seemed like they had been hastily dispatched, this precision in their strategy spoke of quite the nasty character leading them.
Their number looked to be just over a hundred—easily double our own forces—and made for quite the sight. They were a literal army of the dead, moving with the coordination of the living paired with a relentless forward momentum that was only possible in the absence of any complication posed by distractions like “morale” or “fatigue.” The army didn’t move quite as smoothly as a human formation would—a difficult task even for an adept necromancer—but I was surprised at how fluidly they marched in formation with spears and shields at the ready. To top it off, I could see that their back lines were occupied by soldiers holding slings, able to provide support from far away.
This was a literal nightmare.
People were tough in the broad strokes, but we had lots of small, individual, horribly deadly ways to break for good. A single arrow could injure you, force you to drop out from the front lines, and maybe bust your fighting career for good. But for zombies with a steady drip of mana keeping them up and killing? Well, I’d learned more than enough about that terror in the Craving Blade’s ichor maze.
Zombies kept their intellect even without a head. Zombies kept on walking even with an arrow in the brains; they wouldn’t be fazed for a moment if you clawed out every scrap of their vital organs. Bare minimum, you had to sever the arms and head to neutralize a zombie, and if you didn’t want it still running around, you had to dispense with the rest of the limbs. Even then you couldn’t rest easy, because it was possible for a necromancer to reattach a zombie’s constituent parts. Worse still, you could also stitch together two incomplete zombies into one Frankensteinian creature. All it took was enough bits and bobs to assemble something basically functional.
I’m not sure I’d ever been confronted with a scenario scarier than dealing with this many of the bastards at once.
Up against the might of the Empire, there were all too many ways to deal with zombies. You could call in people of the cloth to nullify them—though not without a fight, mind. You could use cannons or Great Work polemurgy. Then there were all sorts of developed battle tactics to fight back, such as combined arms or maneuver warfare. But we were just a small group. There was no more suitable word than nightmare for this.
Ugh, hell... I know some systems said that using the graveyard was crucial, but this wasn’t that kind of world! I wanted to sock the puppetmaster behind all this and tell them they were breaking the rules. I wondered if there were some handy tricks that could, I don’t know, keep someone from reusing corpses. Well, I guess it wouldn’t come in handy now, seeing as the undead soldiers were already on the march.
We didn’t have a bishop who could call on divine forces to rebuke the undead, and I certainly couldn’t put the Harvest Goddess priestess with the sunshine girls out on the front line. If we had a saint here, we could unleash such radiant vengeance that the GM would only be able to cradle their head in their hands.
Whatever—I needed to stop thinking about what I didn’t have.
This wasn’t the worst-case scenario that I’d envisioned. Some true-blue necromancers could relieve their undead soldiers of the shackles of the living so much that it was scary. It wasn’t unlike how things went in jiangshi folklore, for example. Similarly to how such fabled creatures could obtain intelligence if created by a talented enough daoshi, a powerful necromancer could pour enchantments into a zombie for a terrifying result. With the right constituent parts and high-power spells, you could create an undead monster that could treat even the most well-trained living fighter like a laughable excuse for a threat.
Fortunately for us, the enemy force seemed like it didn’t have any abominations or specialized soldiers designed to sow chaos in the roster. Not that they would be pushovers as is anyway.
“Oops...”
I’d stood out a bit too much. Even though they were still far away, arrows came my way. I picked a new pillar to hide behind and made a note of where the archers were. There looked to be around a dozen. Along with the sling-wielding soldiers, it would be tricky taking them on without a plan. We were pain-feeling mortals. Even in armor and chain mail, arrows were still scary.
“Boss, please come down! You’re too exposed!”
“Enough of that nonsense! A leader needs to be abreast of the situation! I’m not so weak that I’d cringe away from the first volley!”