While Tybalt’s mana pool was empty, he contemplated his mistakes, what he needed to do differently, and the nature of his powers.

  The quality of his defiant-necromancer-and-pestilence-mage mana was different from his class-less mana in ways that were hard to define. Slippery. Tricky. Eager to escape from his control and do mischief. He wished he’d had years of practice as a teenager to get used to it.

  Even though he’d had little finesse with mana as a class-less human, he’d at least developed the skill to control how much he used at a basic level once he got it working.

  With his new mana, it felt like he was learning the ropes all over again.

  Tybalt’s raw mana was now a deep green color—before, it had been colorless—which he found interesting. On one of the few occasions that his father had mentioned nature magic to Tybalt, the Baron had mentioned that his own mana was also a deep green—perhaps hinting at a connection between nature mana and the forces of undeath and anti-life?

  From Tybalt’s interactions with healers, he knew that healing magic was a brighter green. Only mage class holders could see mana other than their own unless it was made manifest as an object, so he had not witnessed how similar these colors were to his current shade before, only heard them described.

  But he imagined that he could fool someone into thinking he was one of those other classes of mage in a pinch, if the lighting and other circumstances were right.

  He found himself thinking of many tricks like that he could play,

  His undead could probably pass as humans if the distance, lighting, and clothing were appropriate. Playing the part of a wounded soldier might be a tactic to use with poor Baldwin, once he was raised up to a zombie. He wouldn’t have been dead for very long once Tybalt raised him, since the Tower was outside of space and time. So Baldwin’s coloration should still be right to play a human.

  He would just have to moan and act like he was suffering—well, depending on how good zombie Baldwin was at acting, Tybalt might just order him to be silent—and the squad would try to save his life.

  Tybalt’s undead could also pantomime simply being dead bodies, the aftermath of a massacre or something along those lines, and then rise up as their ostensible allies came to check for survivors.

  Yes, I can do a lot with this power, he thought, rubbing his hands together gleefully.

  First, he would exterminate his squad.

  Then the Baron and his family would lose everything.

  Finally, Tybalt would tear down the whole power structure of the Kingdom—and perhaps more. The God of Death needed to remind people that he existed, ensure that they knew of his power. There was no reason to confine that activity within any border. And Lord Mudo’s ambitions overlapped with those of his champion.

  The whole world would know Tybalt’s name.

  As his eyes were gleaming with visions of a triumphant future, his stomach growled again. Reluctantly, Tybalt ate his other chunk of hardtack. He had thought he might save some, but the previous day’s meal had left his stomach not quite full, and with the energy he was consuming in both study and practice, the rest of his food and most of his water was the bare minimum required to keep him from being distracted by hunger as he worked.

  Aware that he would have to go outside soon, back to the reality of the Nietian Royal Army and the very dead Baldwin, Tybalt redoubled his efforts.

  Without any dead bodies to practice his necromancy on, he focused more attention on his pestilence mage class for the next day.

  Invisible Enemies was fascinating, in no small part because it gave Tybalt a new sense of his body. The mechanism of fertility for males was also in tiny organisms that lived in the body. For females, it was somewhat more complicated, but Tybalt tried to grasp the basics—beyond the obvious applications, every detail he understood would make him a more potent pestilence wielder.

  Tybalt passed hours lying in the gray soil, buried in his books and lost in thought about methods of using his new powers.

  As he made it to a quarter of the way through Invisible Enemies, his mind began working on solidifying a specific sort of virus that he could craft into a weapon against his squad.

  He chose a virus over bacteria or other microorganism as the mechanism, both because viruses were smaller—and would therefore take less mana to create—and because viruses lived off of the host’s cells but were otherwise inactive. He would not need to do anything to keep his virus alive once it was created—though Tybalt did not fully understand what his book was telling him, it seemed that viruses were only dubiously alive in the first place, while bacteria and protists were clearly living organisms.

  Cutting through the scientific gobbledygook, he began to focus on the desirable attributes of his pathogen.

  I need a virus that will make the sufferers too weak to march, he thought. Ideally, they will also suffer from stomach trouble. Persistent diarrhea often kills people, and it also forces them to walk away from the rest of the group frequently to shit. That will isolate my victims, so they can be killed while they’re off on their own. And if they don’t leave, the waste in close proximity to the camp can be a vector of transmission and reinfection in its own right.

  His mind focused carefully on an image of the sort of virus he wanted—the book included illustrations, and he made reference to them for a vague sense of the shape of the virus—but mainly he focused on the conditions he wanted to infuse into the individual virions.

  Stomach ache. Weakness. Diarrhea.

  Stomach ache. Weakness. Diarrhea.

  Stomach ache. Weakness. Diarrhea.

  He visualized the symptoms, disgusting though that was, as his mind worked through the substance of the virus. People clutching their bellies with cramps. Soldiers lying around, too fatigued to walk. And frequent, liquid bowel movements.

  As the image crystallized in his mind into a single, almost tangible idea, Tybalt drew the mana out of his body and focused it on the concept he had created. He pushed the energy into his left hand, then focused it more specifically into his palm, trying to concentrate all the energy into a small space between two wrinkles in the pale skin.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  He spoke the words for the skill aloud: “Generate Minor Ailment!”

  That was an old mages’ trick for focusing the mind on the magic to a greater degree in the moment of casting.

  Finally, he felt the mana drain from him. It wasn’t quite all his mana, but it felt close to that.

  He could not see a result in his hands, but he remembered that virions were far too small to be seen with the eye. He felt like he had created something.

  A moment later, the alert appeared.

  Tybalt smiled. He was making progress. He looked down at his hands, wishing his eyes could see objects too small for any organism’s vision to perceive. He already imagined his little virion children as beautiful.

  His storage ring, yellow gold inscribed in patterns reminiscent of Lord Mudo’s several heads, sat on the same hand as the virus, but he remembered that he could only store inorganic matter inside it—and somehow, despite not being alive in some sense, he knew viruses contained some components of organic matter.

  So he could not store the virus for easy use.

  But since he was the creator, he at least knew that he was immune to the virus already. He wiped his hands together, then rubbed them over his hair and clothing. He would conjure more of the virus when he was near the squad again, but for now, he would try and make it as easy as possible for someone coming into contact with Tybalt to get some trace of it on them.

  He alternated studying the Unholy Forces and Invisible Enemies books for the next thirty-six hours.

  When he started getting sleepy and having trouble focusing, Tybalt walked around instead of sitting or lying down and pinched himself to maintain his focus. He needed to go back with all of the information he could.

  Beyond the basic philosophies of both books were descriptions of skill options he would have in the future, which only made him more excited to return to his world, where he could gain some real experience.

  More advanced skills from his necromancer side included things like manipulating the human soul, causing objects to decay, and communing with spirits. The more advanced skills of a pestilence mage included powers that would give him more control over his pathogens, allow him to make them more infectious, and give him the ability to craft incurable ailments, among other things.

  After he took a final, dreamless nap and gave his books another once-over—frustratingly, he felt he had hardly made a dent, despite barely sleeping—Tybalt decided it was time to go back.

  He would only get hungrier, weaker, and more lethargic if he stayed here with no food. It would become harder and harder to focus. And he had things other than studying that he needed to get done.

  He pushed a little mana into his storage ring. The ring glowed as its power activated, and with a thought, it sucked in the two books and the holy sword as he waved his hand over them.

  Then he hid the ring, reaching inside his pants and tying it to one of his pockets from the reverse side. No one was likely to search there. Even if they did, they would just assume it was loot from the attack on the beastfolk village earlier. Tybalt had seen similar style decorations to the inscriptions on the ring in beastfolk art before.

  “I’m going, angel!” he said loudly, as if she wasn’t probably watching him carefully. He was certain he was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to her—at least since the God of Death last chose a human to represent his interests on Abadd, which Tybalt imagined was something that happened only every millennium or so.

  “Farewell, brave necromancer,” came the angel’s voice from the air all around him. “Take care of yourself. We do not want to see you in Lord Mudo’s realm too soon.”

  I don’t want you to see me in his realm ever, Tybalt thought. Considering his classes and some of what Unholy Forces suggested, final death was not inevitable for him.

  He nodded. “Count on it!”

  Then he walked to the door he had taken when he entered this place, turned the handle, and stepped back out into his reality.

  As he moved through, he saw that everything was the same as he had left it. The rough ground. The fog. Baldwin’s corpse.

  As Tybalt reached down to touch it, he felt that the body was still warm.

  She definitely wasn’t exaggerating. Outside of space and time.

  Focused on Baldwin, he barely noticed as the door to the Tower of Death slowly shut behind him.

  “All right, no time like the present to test my new powers,” Tybalt said quietly to himself.

  Being back on Abadd and in the flow of normal time meant he had only a limited period before someone would surely come looking to see what had become of Tybalt and Baldwin—and discover Tybalt kneeling over the dead body of his former comrade. Hopefully the fog had covered the sound of their death struggle earlier, and even if it had not, he could pretend that it had been the sound of them fighting ambushers—but he only had until some people arrived to check on them to try turning the dead man into one of his servants.

  Tybalt realized he was overthinking. Am I actually nervous? He looked at his palms and found them sweaty. It was as bad as when he had first taken a tumble in the hay with a girl.

  Ridiculous, he thought. I’m an agent of death itself… everyone else should be afraid of me. What do I possibly have to fear… He wiped his palms on his pants, shook his head, and began pulling mana from within, focusing on the singular task of reviving Baldwin from death—making the corpse move again.

  As he gathered power around his hands, his mind was semi-consciously influenced by the image of Baldwin as Tybalt had known him in life. The man had possessed personality, if not a brilliant future.

  Perhaps that was the reason for what happened next.

  Tybalt spoke the words, “Generate Undead,” his hands glowed with power as he reached down to touch Baldwin with his aura—and he suddenly felt the mana flooding out of his body. More than he had intended to pour in, it pulsed out in a seemingly unstoppable torrent.

  As Baldwin’s eyes fluttered open, Tybalt slumped to the ground, barely sitting upright.

  “How the fuck do I get better control of that?” Tybalt grumbled quietly, his head swimming with the beginnings of a mana exhaustion headache.

  The notification flashed before his eyes.

  The new levels were, of course, good news, and Tybalt felt a big surge in power as the increased stats hit his body.

  But it was not entirely satisfying, because Tybalt still was not entirely sure how he had run through his entire supply of mana—or if that would happen every time he created a new undead. If so, that could be a serious problem until he boosted his pool of mana and the number of his monsters substantially. As he was contemplating that question, the Baldwin undead rose from the ground, turned his head from side to side, and cracked his neck.

  Then his gaze lit on Tybalt. Baldwin let out a low growl, and his facial expression turned dark.

  The young necromancer’s eyes widened in shock as Baldwin’s hands found his throat and began to squeeze.