Tybalt silently named it “Red,” for the reddish-brown color of the bones. He kept the name quiet, because he wasn’t interested in Baldwin’s feedback at that moment. “Red” was better than “2,” at least.

  He would save “2” for the next vanilla skeleton he raised.

  “That one seems different,” Baldwin said, standing stock still as a thrown pair of socks smacked him right in the face.

  “I gave it a little something special, to bind some of Lieutenant Sperry’s flames to the bones. They already tasted that magical fire while they were freshly dead. It turned this one into a scorched-bone skeleton, which sounds good. Hopefully it helps if we ever have to fight her.”

  Baldwin nodded respectfully. “You thought hard about this,” he said.

  “Skeletons are the easiest and most basic form of undead to animate, and they require the least precision out of all undead except zombies. I made you through sheer luck, not skill. But this—I didn’t want to mess up the first creation that I’m actually attempting to innovate with.”

  “Innovate,” Baldwin pronounced slowly.

  “It means trying to do something special or create something new,” Tybalt said.

  “Ah.”

  There was silence for a few seconds as Baldwin seemed to be trying to commit the new word to memory, while Tybalt had started organizing the next skeleton he intended to reanimate.

  “Are you going to be able to raise all of them tonight, you think, master?” Baldwin asked, gesturing at the other piles of bones.

  “I don’t know yet, Baldwin,” Tybalt replied, not looking up. “I’ll check my mana and look at the skeletons’ statuses too before I make the next one. If it’s too much for me, we’ll hide the remaining bones under the sackcloth dress, use the extra skulls to weigh them down, and then bury it all under a thin layer of sand. We can assign one of the skeletons to stay near everything and let us know where it is once we can come back again.”

  He opened up this latest creation’s status as he spoke. Might as well check that out while he worked. He could use his hands to organize the third skeleton while his eyes performed another task. He was getting to know the humanoid body quite well by this point.

  Damn, Red is even weaker than I was after getting reset to level zero. He had heard of classes that developed to summon monsters or tame animals, though those were controversial and had occasionally come in for persecution by the Divine Trust. But those creatures were invariably stronger than the average human. I guess I can make up the difference with levels for the skeletons, plus sheer numbers. But I think this thing would literally lose to an average twelve-year-old child. Let’s see how 1 is…

  With the two statuses open side by side, the comparison was clear.

  The regular skeleton outcompetes the special version in every category except will, where they both stink. The only other distinguishing factor was that the scorched-bone skeleton had a skill. As Tybalt had hoped, it appeared to be something that would allow it to do something with flames.

  He focused on the skill name, and a description appeared.

  Scorch Storage: Store energy from fire or fire magic inside the matter of your body. Unleash it on targets within range at a moment of your choosing or when you take sufficient damage.

  That’s pretty good, Tybalt thought. Can it be charged on purpose? What does it look like when it gets unleashed, an explosion?

  He wished he could test it out and see how the absorption process worked, but of course, it wasn’t a good idea to do so out here. Tybalt could certainly create a small fire with mana. It was not nearly as efficient as it would be coming from a fire mage like the Lieutenant, but creating a spark to start a fire was one of the most basic applications of mana. But there was no wood here to set the spark to. Even if there had been, he could not afford to produce smoke with his squad so close. Not if he wanted his walking skeletons to remain a secret.

  He opened his own full status, to check his mana and see how close he was to another level.

  I got a level in pestilence mage while I was sleeping. Nice!

  His virus must be spreading or having steadily more and more effect on the squad. That had to explain the quick growth in his second class.

  Of course, these early levels in each class were relatively easy to acquire, and they still wouldn’t put him on an even footing with someone who had spent significantly more time leveling than him, whether they had a class or not. They were crucial nevertheless.

  He tried to remember what his status had looked like before his class reset to zero, then gave up and simply opened Baldwin’s status up. It wasn’t quite a proxy for Tybalt’s own level of power pre-class acquisition, but it was close enough to where other class-less humans would be—including other members of their squad—to still be useful.

  Oh, Baldwin gained his first level. From helping me, maybe?

  Baldwin wasn’t even paying attention to Tybalt—he was back to playing catch with the skeleton—so Tybalt didn’t bother asking him when the level had hit. It ultimately wasn’t very important, because accruing experience at this pace was far below what Tybalt wanted for the revenant.

  Instead, Tybalt compared the two statuses side by side. He considered both where he was currently and where he was going to be.

  In another few days, I might be strong enough to kill a class-less human in a straight, one on one fight. This is definitely good enough for me to kill someone by ambush, but I can’t count on the element of surprise. Need to try and raise more undead right away. I still have plenty of mana. More total mana pool than Baldwin now. That’s a good start to finally feeling like an actual mage. Considering my natural recovery rate—that was determined by will—I’m guessing I have spent five or six points of mana per skeleton raised. Seven at most. I could definitely raise the rest of these, if I had the time.

  The only issue was how slow Tybalt’s careful methods had been thus far.

  He looked over to Baldwin.

  “How long would you say I’ve been out here?” Tybalt asked.

  “Almost an hour, master,” Baldwin replied immediately.

  Tybalt groaned quietly.

  “I ran into the Commander on the way here. He asked what I was up to, and I said I was having stomach trouble. He bought it, because of the mysterious stomach virus that’s going around, but I don’t know if the guards and Volusia will believe I was really out here all this time taking a shit and burying it.”

  “This could be the dump that decides our fate, eh, master?” Baldwin replied dryly.

  “You’re enjoying this too much, Baldwin,” Tybalt said. But he smiled thinly as he spoke. There was an aspect to the risk-taking and danger that he enjoyed too.

  “We just have to sneak back in, master. If you’re willing to take the time, you could animate all of the skeletons, right?”

  “The sun could be up by then,” Tybalt objected, though he deeply wanted to do exactly what Baldwin was suggesting—just spend as much of the night outside, raising the dead, as he could, and figure out the matter of returning to camp when he had to.

  “The dump of a lifetime,” Baldwin replied.

  Tybalt ignored him and considered whether to stay out long enough to actually finish his work.

  I don’t really need more sleep…

  He reached over to some of the small group of bones that hadn’t been needed for the skeleton piles he had assembled. The extras. He chose some of the smaller ones—mainly finger bones, but two longer bones as well—and tucked them in between his pants and his clothing, beneath his shirt. The cold of the bone—which had been sitting out under the cool night air for the last hour—drew a shiver from him at first, but he quickly got used to it.

  “Um, what are you doing now?” Baldwin asked.

  “Arming myself. If I get up to the next level, I get a skill called Scrimshaw. It lets me reshape bones. I could turn these things into improvised weapons, make them sharper than our usual stuff. Not as good as our spears in terms of quality, but having extra weapons could be useful in a pinch. Maybe just to stall until the skeletons can come help me.”

  “So, you are thinking about raising more skeletons and getting to the next level?” Baldwin asked.

  Tybalt shrugged. “I’m at least going to keep trying for—”

  He cut himself off as a sudden commotion broke the peace of the night from behind them, back in the abandoned beastfolk village.

  Tybalt turned and saw torches lit, a few people running around yelling. They would rouse the whole camp soon.

  “What kind of disaster have you unleashed now, master?” Baldwin asked.

  “It wasn’t me this time, Baldwin,” Tybalt replied. “But the squad is waking up. We need to sneak back in. Cover the bones up as I suggested, use the skulls to weigh the cloth down, and bury everything so only we can find it.”

  He didn’t need to turn back to see Baldwin already nodding. Instead, Tybalt reached out and touched the group of bones he had almost completely organized before he started gathering his spare parts.

  I’ll just do one more… He reached for his dagger, clumsily carved the sealing rune into the upper jaw of the skull, and then hastily drew the mana from his body once more.

  Generate Undead!

  He only stayed long enough to see the creature twitch, get the notification—

  —and name the second scorched-bone skeleton “Gray,” before he rushed back toward the squad.

  Hopefully this unexpected emergency would give Tybalt the opportunity he needed to slip back into the group unnoticed. He couldn’t help wondering what it was, though.

  I really didn’t cause whatever this is, right?

  Tybalt rushed back to the lines of huts that made up the abandoned village.

  As he moved, he recognized that it was almost sunrise there. The low light climbed up the horizon as the sun hinted at rising from somewhere far below the line of mountains that dominated the landscape—wherever it was not dominated by the endless dunes of the desert.

  The twilight had crept up on him while he was focused on the skeletons and Baldwin was distracted playing with Prime. Tybalt felt even more grateful now for the commotion, whatever its cause might be. He had been so concentrated on undeath that he might very well have been caught out of the village bounds in early daylight—though he wasn’t sure if that would actually cause him any problems now that he considered the possibility carefully.

  He could simply have claimed that after his stomach trouble, he was too ill to return and had been lying in the sand waiting for his strength to come back. With his recent injuries and apparently suffering from the same illness as much of the camp, it was a plausible enough excuse. Embarrassing but functional.

  This thought did not stop him from moving surreptitiously now, though. There was some half-formed idea in the back of his head that he might still gain some benefit by acting in secrecy.

  Men continued rushing back and forth as he approached, but there were also people coming out of the doorways of the commandeered huts, disheveled and half-asleep.

  Most of the men were moving toward a focal point at the opposite end of the village from where Tybalt was. No one looked his way.

  It was loud, disorganized, chaotic—perfect. There was no actual guarding of the camp being done. It probably seemed superfluous with the squad increasingly awake. There was no point—except to stop someone like Tybalt who was part of the squad and trying to sneak back in.

  How do I take advantage of this?

  Tybalt slipped in between two huts—sensed someone up ahead on his left and froze—then turned his head slightly to look.

  He saw the squad’s cook, Private Lorenzo, standing outside of a hut with an expression of tense uncertainty. Six feet separated them. The man was distracted, however. His eyes were on the moving people heading toward the focal point outside. The cook wanted to join them, Tybalt guessed. At the same time, Private Lorenzo was clearly reluctant from his body language: a distinct combination of leaning forward while keeping his feet planted back toward the hut.

  The cook stood there a few seconds—long enough for Tybalt to notice that he was already genuinely awake, not suddenly roused from slumber, but fully dressed in the day’s clothes.

  Private Lorenzo must have been in the middle of his morning work, preparing porridge for the squad’s breakfast.

  He had not noticed Tybalt, and Tybalt tried to lean back into the shadows to keep that status quo. This could be his opportunity to double up on his infection. If the pot of porridge was left unattended, Tybalt would only need a moment to season it with his virions.

  The cook took a single step forward as if he’d finally made a decision. Then Lorenzo muttered something that Tybalt could barely hear. It sounded like “I have to know.”

  The Private’s curiosity apparently getting the better of him, he quickly strode away from the opening of the hut.

  Using everything he knew about stealth, and keeping to the shadows as much as possible, Tybalt slid in after him. He sent an accompanying message to Baldwin this time.

  Going to infect the morning porridge, Tybalt sent. Give me cover if you’re close. Otherwise don’t worry about it.

  Understood, master, Baldwin replied instantly.