“I get it now!” Tybalt exclaimed.

  Graven had been writhing under his palm for five straight minutes this time, suffering in relative silence. Tybalt had stood by, waiting and observing until he was fairly certain he knew what was happening.

  “Get what?” the Private rasped, seemingly curious despite himself.

  “I think I understand how your body is fighting me. Check your status and tell me what your mana’s doing right now.”

  Tybalt was pretty sure Graven was one of the other members of the squad who could read, at least a little. He remembered the Private having mentioned at some point, with great pride, that his uncle worked in the Great Library of Enh.

  If he can’t, I’ll just explain what the letters look like.

  “Fucking fine.” Graven looked up, presumably staring at his screen. “Oh, looks like my status is telling you to fuck right off!”

  Tybalt jabbed Graven’s shattered cheekbone with a single finger, drawing a yelp of pain from the soldier.

  “Look, smartass, I’m trying to ask nicely,” the necromancer said. “I don’t even hate you, despite how you’ve… provoked me in the past. At this point, you’re just a damned experiment to me. But if you’re not willing to answer my simple questions, I’ll have to keep going by trial and error. That will only prolong your suffering.”

  “If that’s you asking nicely…” Graven trailed off. “Fuck, all right, I have twenty points left in mana. I started with thirty-five, so it looks like I somehow used up fifteen?”

  “Excellent. That’s a good start.”

  Was that so hard?

  Tybalt checked his own status.

  In the back of his mind, Tybalt had begun to recognize that what was really fighting his energy off when he tried to turn Graven into an undead was not just the soldier’s living tissue, which did not wish to become undead. It was his mana specifically. This confirmed that theory.

  So, maybe unaffiliated mana works like a second immune system, specifically for when the body is invaded by hostile foreign mana, Tybalt thought. Considering that I used some mana fighting them earlier, and I just used Bonebreaker to shatter Graven’s cheekbone, plus the time I had to regenerate mana after using it earlier… I think that when he fights off my mana invading his body, his mana probably has roughly a two-to-one home field advantage. That is, he spends half as much mana keeping himself from being taken over as I do trying to turn him into an undead.

  In the back of his mind, Tybalt thought this was very concerning. If the way his mana performed inside of Graven’s body was any indication of how direct exposure to his mana worked in general, then Tybalt’s unique version of Mystic Blast, when and if he eventually acquired it, would be unnaturally weaker than most other mages’.

  The human body wasn’t naturally made to have special resistance to freezing, lightning, fire, or other forces a mage might be able to harness, at least not relative to other random objects. That is, the only special resistance one might have to fire was that the human body was mostly composed of water. The human body was worse at resisting freezing than many naturally occurring substances.

  But it does naturally resist me. The best way to think about it is that every cell in the body is trying to stay alive, so it’s like there’s a sort of ‘life mana’ that is a kind of exact opposite to my undeath mana, and that ‘life mana’ is powering his resistance. If his resistance is normal, my Mystic Blast would be pretty ineffective, unless there’s some other thing I could do to empower it besides shooting my regular mana. Even if I aligned my mana more towards pestilence, making people mildly sick in battle isn’t as useful as just punching them really hard.

  He pictured his enemies just sneezing or getting the runs when they were hit by his energy, and he shook his head.

  As amusing as that would be, it’s practically useless… All right, well, what about right now? Focus on right now. The ratio of mana burn Graven and I are each experiencing means that continuing to try to turn him is going to take virtually everything I have. At that point, I’ll have completely run through his mana, and hopefully that will leave him defenseless. But I won’t succeed unless I get down to less than ten points of mana myself. All right, then. Headache, here I come. For greater knowledge!

  Tybalt reached down to Graven’s abdomen, evoked the feeling of Generate Undead within himself, and then forcefully pushed almost his entire pool of mana straight into the soldier’s body. He kept his status screen open so he could watch as his own mana numbers ticked down, and he only stopped forcing the continued intrusion when he had five points of mana remaining.

  Then he sat back and simply observed the way the energy moved inside of the other man’s body. Tybalt could sense the struggle of forces taking place within Graven. The soldier twisted and writhed, screaming through clenched teeth as Tybalt’s mana worked its way through him.

  But Tybalt thought Graven’s mana was losing the battle.

  Good…

  The miners Tybalt had captured looked on in mute horror as Tybalt continued attempting to turn Graven. All of them were awake by now, but they were outnumbered by the undead and, at any moment they had attempted to resist, they’d been held down with strength that, in aggregate, outstripped their own. Tybalt hadn’t noticed it at the time, but he could tell by the way his undead were positioned that two of the miners had put up at least a little bit of a fight. That last man who Tybalt had told not to be afraid, and a graybeard.

  Respectable, he thought. My kind of guys. They don’t just lie down and give up.

  Both were now in uncomfortable restrained positions, though, held down by a skeleton and a zombie each.

  The skeletons that Tybalt had with him were not the same puny creatures he had created in the desert a few days prior. Those that had not been smashed apart had been hardened by their experiences hunting with Hieron on the mountain. They had further enhanced their strength by killing soldiers during the beastfolk ambush of the squad.

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  With their increased levels, they were still significantly weaker than the average soldier, but strong enough to compete with the average human.

  The zombies, of course, were each roughly as strong as they had been when they were alive.

  With two undead working together for each captive miner, keeping them in place was easy enough, despite these bits of resistance.

  Tybalt silently ordered the undead to ease up the pressure slightly, but tighten their grips again if the resisters made any sudden moves.

  Then Graven’s body seized up as if he was in an epileptic fit, and Tybalt’s attention turned back to him. His eyes widened slightly.

  Is it working? Is he going to turn into something else? Maybe a new type of undead?

  He felt it, the moment when the resistance inside Graven broke. Tybalt sensed how his mana had defeated Graven’s, and how the necromancer’s mana ran roughshod through the other man’s body, tainting various things, in the aftermath of its victory.

  Graven stopped moving completely, eyes open but vacant. Tybalt thought he must have passed out.

  The necromancer simply observed for a few minutes what his energy was doing inside Graven’s body now that the resistance had been broken. Then he frowned.

  What’s wrong? he wondered.

  None of the places his mana had touched seemed to be turning into undead flesh, and the energy just kept on moving as if it was already having its intended effect.

  He reached out and guided his power. He could still control it, even without physical contact with Graven’s body. A part of him wondered if that was the key to unlocking the Mystic Blast skill, but he made that curious part of him shut up for the moment.

  Focus, he ordered. Turn him. Go through his body systematically.

  He reached out with his power to the nearest bit of Graven where he could sense there happened to be a decent concentration of undeath energy. It was the soldier’s liver.

  Tybalt felt the problem almost as soon as he began turning the organ’s cells undead. With every inch of progress he made, the mana he’d injected into Graven began slowly using itself up. Where before, it had just been traveling around the dead man’s body, now he was actively burning through the energy.

  I can’t do this, then, he realized. I would need to continuously supply energy, and my mana regenerates far too slowly right now to keep this up. Plus, Graven will regenerate his own mana, and unless it regenerates at less than half the speed of mine, his defense will rebuild itself faster than I can keep breaking it down. And if I’m going to keep transforming his flesh while also defeating his mana immune system, his mana regeneration would have to be even slower than half my speed for this to work. So the target would need to have much less mana than I do. Against Graven, this will never work. I guess that’s why this skill is supposed to be used on those who are already dead. The living body puts up so much resistance that it takes much more power to do the undead transformation. But… in principle, this shows that it can work. It’s just a massive power drain. I need to try again when I’m at a much higher level, and ideally against a target whose mana is already really low.

  He reached out and reshaped the intent of the bit of mana that remained inside Graven.

  Don’t raise him as an undead, then. That’s too much to ask. Just destroy that liver you’ve got hold of.

  He felt as the mana under his influence stopped turning Graven undead and simply rotted the bit of flesh it was closest to. It happened very quickly, to the point that Tybalt felt certain he could get a skill if he kept doing this over and over. Probably the Mystic Blast skill.

  There was definitely an aggressive offensive application of his undeath mana. The organ he had touched would be irreparable now, unless someone with holy power stepped in. But it was not necessarily the most effective attack that he could wish for, assuming an opponent who wasn’t already helpless. If Tybalt rotted, for example, the surface of someone’s chest, it would take a lot of mana and wouldn’t even be fatal.

  Nice. Tybalt couldn’t help but wonder if making Graven’s destruction so slow and drawn out was the reason for his quick progression from level 11 to level 12. Killing someone slowly and more painfully than necessary was evil, by his standards, at least. It was just necessary evil in this case, or so he could tell himself. Now, what else can I do with him before that ruined liver kills him?

  He sat crosslegged and calmly contemplated his next steps as his mana slowly recovered.

  It was disappointing to think that he could not easily create a living undead right now, but not surprising. The textbook had never hinted that he could do that, although each type of undead beyond the basic ones, and many of the different rituals that existed in the book, were the product of some necromancer’s experimentation.

  There was no way it was going to be easy, trying to do something the previous necromancers hadn’t done. Probably hadn’t been able to do, despite trying.

  He suddenly straightened.

  That’s right! They couldn’t do it, despite trying. So, maybe don’t assume necromancer powers alone can accomplish this. But I have another power set, one that most of them probably didn’t have. I’m a pestilence mage. Is it possible I could use that to change the result next time…?

  He thought about it, and the more he turned the idea over in his mind, the more certain he felt.

  I can do this. I can create a virus that turns people into the living dead.

  The concept wasn’t as ambitious as it sounded.

  A virus that turned the victim’s cells directly into undead cells would be an insane overreach for someone whose pestilence mage offensive skill was still just “Generate Minor Ailment.”

  But what if the goal Tybalt set was more innocuous?

  Viruses overwrite cells’ functioning all the time. That’s how they spread. And all living things produce mana… which I’ve just discovered extends to every cell of the body. So, what if my virus alters cells so that instead of producing the victim’s own type of mana, they start producing mine? If their own cells are producing mana and effectively using Generate Undead on themselves, then I’d take over more and more of the body over time. It might even be more powerful the stronger the victim’s mana was, and it might accelerate with heavy use of mana. But that’s just a theory. I need to test this.

  He looked down at Graven and then over at the miners, who stared in Tybalt and Graven’s direction with looks of despair. They were wondering if they were going to suffer as the Private was suffering.

  Tybalt wasn’t sure himself.

  I might need more test subjects than just Graven if this starts to really materialize… and it could be the most important project I ever undertake. It definitely has more potential than just using Generate Undead on all of them.

  He shook his head. First, he needed to carefully envision this virus. He needed to specify how it would spread and how it would work overall. Then, perhaps, he could create something. After that, he would have to figure out what he was willing to do to forward his experiment. One step at a time.

  Tybalt sat with his eyes closed for almost an hour, trying to picture the perfect virus for his purposes. He could feel, to some extent, whether an idea was feasible if he focused on the Generate Minor Ailment skill while thinking of the specific virus he had in mind. At least, he could get a broad-strokes idea of whether something was impossible or not.

  There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with a virus that changed the type of mana cells generated, at least in principle.

  Now, how do I make it as fast-spreading as possible…?

  The necromancer didn’t move until he heard Graven stir in front of him. Then Tybalt opened his eyes.

  “Oh, I had a terrible dream,” Graven said, slowly blinking awake. His eyes focused on Tybalt. “Fucking gods, it was real…”

  “Indeed,” Tybalt said.

  “What the fuck did you do to me, bastard?” Graven asked. He put a hand to his abdomen and whimpered with pain.

  Oh, right, I destroyed your liver, sorry about that.

  “Nothing you’ll have to live with for very long,” Tybalt replied.

  He drew his dagger, then slit a thin streak of red along Graven’s arm before the man could pull away.

  “The fuck?!” Graven exclaimed, clutching his injured arm with the opposite hand.

  Tybalt quickly pushed mana into his left hand, concentrated on the image he had conjured of the undeath virus, and then used Generate Minor Ailment.

  He was in the middle of reaching for Graven but paused halfway. He felt the failure of his skill in an instant. A virus had been on the brink of being created in Tybalt’s hand, but then something had fizzled.

  Damn it…

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