I don't know why I have started recording right now. The only thing that I am doing is driving the ship, after all. There is nothing of note to record in that. I guess I want something to distract me from the depressing scenery around me.

  Normally, I would have somebody from my troop here, giving me company. After all, you never leave the pilot of a ship alone. Having someone keep me company keeps me focused, at least during these long stretches. Right now, though, everybody else on the ship is sleeping. So naturally, I am alone.

  Even if everybody were awake, nobody except my troop would be coming here. I would not prefer to talk with anybody from my troop, since they are just going to talk work with me. Right now I don't want to think about the alliances they must have already started trying to make. That just pushes me into thinking about the many ways the mission will get derailed. That anxiety is something I don't enjoy at all.

  Anyway, everybody should be sleeping right now. If they were awake now, they would be working themselves into a needless panic like I am right now. To put it in simple terms, the scenery around us has taken on a really creepy turn.

  I will be honest, looking outside the ship, politics does seem to be a lesser priority. The view right now gives me an idea of what we are going to be facing. That is not comforting me because, at the moment, I am not sure if we will be up to the challenge.

  Right now, my ship is stuck in the river. The valley has narrowed to such a degree that the only way we can keep going forward is by the river. I could try and fly through this, but I am not confident that I will be able to get my ship through this place. I can feel the mana flowing to the base of my ship, resisting the death mana in the water.

  Two mountains rise on either side of the river, like walls on either side. They stand above us like pillars. The mountains themselves are nothing special. It is what is on them that is the cause of all the bad vibes.

  Both mountains are full of undead, which are visible in my sensory formations. They all barely move, to such a degree that you would think they were corpses. You can see the odd undead twitch as if they are trying to move while glued to the mountain.

  Overall, the place looks like a battlefield that has not been cleaned. There are just mounds and mounds of corpses piled in mass graves. In this case, though, every single corpse up there is a natural undead. (Also, none of these bodies has any flesh on it. Thank the gods for that, since that stench I don't even want to imagine.)

  The undead are all in their present situation because of one thing only. The death mana in the air is not strong enough to sustain them. If there were enough death mana, we would be surrounded by a wave of these corpses attacking us. (And each other.) I am not sure we would survive that.

  Right now, all of these undead are sleeping. (Or something similar to it at least.) This allows them to preserve the little mana that they have to survive. All of these undead originate from the bone pits. They are the ones who could not keep up with the eternal battle that happens in the area.

  I guess that I should speak about the bone pits before speaking about these undead. Much of what I know about the place comes from records that my master procured for me. The problem with that is my master has antagonized the scholars. There is no way that they are giving me anything actually useful.

  Still, I will record the little that I do know. To put it simply, bone pits are massive pits in the ground that create undead. Every day, undead creatures pop out from the pits.

  Nobody knows what these pits are. Nobody knows how they are powered. Nobody even knows where all of the corpses to create these undead are coming from. All in all, they are enigmas. Still, they are a menace that the entire southern part of the continent must suffer from.

  The one thing that we know is that all undead have to make use of death mana to survive. It is kind of like their vital mana. They say that so many undead are created in a bone pit that the death mana there is not enough to sustain them all.

  That is why these undead fight each other. The winners get to remain in the pit. The losers die to feed the winners. Still, a few of these losers manage to escape the pit. Outside the pit, there is even less death mana to sustain them. So they have to fight each other for this little bit of mana. This cycle continues as the losers get further and further from the pits.

  This ends up with the undead getting stuck in places like this. Where the death mana is not enough to sustain these creatures. where there isn't even enough death mana for the undead to raise their limbs, much less fight.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  You could say that every one of those creatures here is on the verge of death right now. (Which is pretty ironic considering that they are undead.)

  Soon enough, all of these creatures will fully die. Their mana will dissipate into the atmosphere. Maybe one of the other undead will be able to absorb this death mana and move for a bit longer. Maybe it will just dissipate into the air, polluting the environment around.

  If this were to happen for long enough, this place would become like the bone pits. (That is why the bone pits are such a threat to the entire southern part of our continent.)

  Normally there shouldn't be so many undead this far from a bone pit. There would only be a fraction of these corpses on the mountain any other time. The problem is that we are trying to enter the bone pits during a death wave.

  Now, a death wave is a period when all the bone pits begin to work at their full capacity. Entire hordes and armies of undead come out of the pits fighting and killing each other. So everything that I have described right now gets about a hundred times worse in this time.

  As if that were not enough, new varieties of undead pop out of the pits, which makes fighting them even tougher. (Where these new types of undead come from is a question that everybody wants the answer to.)

  Only a fool would try to escape into the bone pits during the death wave. Well, necromancers can survive a bit better in the bone pits. They would be able to fight their enemies at an advantage there. Looking at the piles of corpses around me, that particular line of thought doesn't leave me happy. Thinking about all of this is causing me to shiver in cold sweat. That could be the death mana, though. It is increasing in concentration the closer that we get to the bone pits.

  Leave it, we will deal with the necromancers when we reach them. As for the bone pits, there is no use thinking of them now. I think that we can manage that later.

  After all, we will be popping into the outer regions of the bone pits. That should be something that we will be able to manage even during a death wave, right?

  I have heard that that is how the local powers of this place train their elite soldiers. They just leave them in the outer reaches of the bone pits. They have to survive and make their way to the nearest bone fort.

  The strikeforce can be considered to be at an equal level to these elite soldiers. (I wouldn't be surprised if they were stronger.) I am sure we can handle the normal undead in this place. They would already be starved of death mana by the time they reach anywhere near us. They are a problem that we understand. I am sure we will manage.

  The necromancers we are chasing are a problem that we don't understand one bit. Where are they trying to go? What is their plan? What hidden aces do they have, I don't know any of those things.

  The mayfires certainly know something about them. They are keeping completely quiet about it, though. I have to assume that it is some kind of politics that I don't understand. I could pressure the Mayfires into revealing it, though I will leave it to when I have no other option. The way that my master interacts with them makes it clear that they are pretty important allies.

  All I know about them is that they are going to be a pain to handle. After all, necromancers are like fish in water in this environment. There are just too many things that they can do to screw us over.

  Even now, I cannot be sure if the necromancers are not hiding in these piles of corpses surrounding us. They can supply mana to these corpses to make sure that we are under constant assault. We wouldn't even be able to do anything to attack them. After all, how exactly am I supposed to find them in these literal mountains of bone?

  It would kind of beat the point of leaving a trap, though. Then again, if it was supposed to be a trap, would they have left one of their own with it? Now that I think about it, they don't even need to do that. They just need to throw around mana stones full of death mana. That would be enough to wake up most of the undead in here. Then these undead would have all fallen on top of us.

  We will be able to stop such an attack, of course. Still, it will slow us down significantly. Well, I shouldn't have gone down this line of thought. Even now, I find myself looking at the corpses around us. I expect one of them to suddenly get up and start attacking me. If it is only one, I will still manage. I wonder what I will do if it is an army of them.

  All of this is what makes me wonder. How do people even manage to live close to a bone pit? Just the worry of living near it would cause me to lose my mind. Thankfully we don't need to worry about it on the other side of the death peaks. The Death Peaks are the mountain range that separates us from the bone pits.

  The mountains themselves are nothing impressive. The hex mountain is surrounded by four such mountain ranges. Of them, the Death Peaks are considered to be the smallest. The greatest peak on this mountain can only be considered to be a foothill compared to the hex mountain. (Granted, most mountains are.)

  Still, it can be considered to be the most important mountain range that surrounds us. It is the barrier that separates us from the bone pits after all. The undead that end up coming from the bone pits get stuck in these mountains, as I have already explained.

  If we did not have this mountain range, the undead would have an easier time entering our territory. Without the death peaks, the first place to come under threat of these undead would be the Soldar Plains. A significant chunk of the border of the Soldar plains is with the Death Peaks.

  Without the mountains, we would lose a significant chunk of the Soldar Plains. After all, the land would lose much of its fertility with the bone pits encroaching like this. Well, it is good that I have explained all of this right now. After all, once we enter the region of the bone pits, things are going to get pretty hectic.

  I don't know if I would have been able to explain all of this then. I have managed to work myself into another panic, though, so I am stopping this recording.