Tybalt tried mustering his mana to perform the same task again a moment later.

  Generate Minor Ailment.

  The power moved to his hand, it tried to materialize into tiny microorganisms, and once again, he felt it fizzle. Something just slipped in the creation process.

  “Damn it…”

  No, I could swear I thought this through completely…

  “What the fuck are you doing?” asked his experimental subject.

  “Shut up, Graven,” Tybalt said. “I’m doing mage shit. And I need that wound to stay open until I figure this out… Be quiet so I can think, or I’ll end up having to cut you again.”

  He had thought he had tinkered with the virus as much as it needed when he was in the meditation stage of this process. Evidently not.

  He used Generate Minor Ailment again, and this time, Tybalt carefully monitored the process. With his eyes closed, he examined the virus he was constructing in his head, and he quickly saw the problem, the reason why it kept failing.

  I was a little too ambitious, he thought.

  Tybalt had maximized and minimized key features of this virus in the concept stage. Once it was introduced, it would spread through Graven’s body extremely quickly, causing him to become sick within as little as twelve hours of exposure. It would have the major effect Tybalt had intended, turning Graven’s cells into undeath mana producing machines, though it was very difficult to say how long that would take. Duration would probably depend on the patient’s immune system.

  Taking longer wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. Graven would be infectious for most of the period that the virus took over his body. He should remain infectious for several days even after he had fully transformed into an undead, but once he no longer had a functioning circulatory system, that would gradually end.

  There had been compromises Tybalt had needed to make.

  He had been unable to avoid the likely symptom of fever, though he tried to ensure that the temperature spike would at least be mild. He had been forced to accept that the virus would take a minimum of three days to spread fully through the body.

  He had wanted the virus to spread through sneezes for ease of quick transmission, but as he struggled to make his power add that feature, he now discovered that this virus needed a different method. That was why it kept collapsing.

  There was a contradiction in his plan.

  If it spread via droplets, the virus would be too short-lived, at his current skill level, to complete its transformation of the body. Tybalt had tried to brute force it, order the virus to be simultaneously resilient, capable of performing the task of transforming the entire human body, and spread through sneezes, coughs, sweat, and the like.

  But that was asking too much.

  He pivoted as this latest attempt to Generate Minor Ailment failed.

  He would create a bloodborne virus instead.

  Bloodborne viruses tended to last longer inside the body than those spread via droplets. That should fix the resilience issue, so the virus would be capable of performing its primary task. It would need to be directly introduced to the victim’s bloodstream to be effective, which was a big loss, but that was still doable.

  Fortunately, direct exposure to the bloodstream ended up being the biggest compromise Tybalt had to make.

  With that conceptual change, he used Generate Minor Ailment once more.

  The mana built up, pulsed through his body into his hand, and this time, something was different.

  He imagined that he felt the virus pop into existence. It was probably just in his own head, but it was a pleasant feeling nonetheless. He didn’t have the sensation of failure, at least. Then he brushed his contaminated fingers against the long slit he had cut into Graven’s arm. It was still open, albeit only barely, after the time Tybalt had spent in contemplation. The other man looked up at him with a fearful expression.

  “What’s going to happen now?” Graven asked.

  “Now you should start to change more along the lines I wanted you to,” Tybalt said quietly.

  As he pulled his hand away from Graven’s skin, he knew he had just made his greatest achievement as both defiant necromancer and pestilence mage.

  Right on cue, the alerts began to flow in.

  I guess I succeeded, he thought.

  With the levels and title, a massive surge of strength and well-being like nothing he had ever felt before flowed through Tybalt. It was intensely pleasurable for a few seconds.

  Tybalt felt invincible, unstoppable, god-like. When he could think in words, his thoughts were arrogant.

  I have a title? Like a figure from some legend? Am I going to go down in history?

  Despite the lofty goals he’d been pursuing for the last several days—the ideas of overthrowing the Kingdom, building his own legion of the dead, taking revenge on his father, and even becoming a king himself—he suddenly realized he hadn’t quite believed he could truly live up to his vision of grandeur.

  That changed. The necromancer’s ego grew three sizes in that moment.

  I’m the greatest! he thought, his hands shaking with euphoria. I’m already one of the greatest damned necromancers who’s ever existed. And one of the greatest pestilence mages. No one else came up with a virus like this. None of them, with their years of study! Not with whatever wealth and backing they had. No one had such a bold vision before. Only me! The unwanted bastard. In a few days! With a handful of skeletons and a few zombies under my control! Eat it, lich! Take that, world!

  He found that he wished that Mariella was there so she could see what he had accomplished. Mariella and Vidalia. They could all… celebrate together. He allowed himself to forget for the moment that Mariella at least would likely be horrified by what Tybalt had done.

  Then he would kill Volusia with his bare hands, strangle the man with his own entrails. Fuck the God of War’s blessing, no one could stop Tybalt right then…

  After a few seconds, Tybalt’s brain was able to process thoughts somewhat more complex than sheer arrogance, sex, and violence again.

  Even drunk with power as he felt, the necromancer wanted to know all the details of what he had gained. He turned his attention to the Title first. He focused his mind’s eye on it until the system’s description appeared.

  Progenitor of the Infectious Undead: For the first time, through millennia of Defiant Necromancers, your experiments and your secondary class permitted you to create a biological weapon that renders the undead condition infectious. For this unprecedented advance, which significantly furthers both your potential growth and that of others who will share your classes in the future, you receive a permanent boost of 20% to your Fortitude and Will. This increase will scale with future gains to those stats. In addition, the first hundred undead you directly create with this pestilence will benefit from an increased probability of retaining their intelligence.

  Gods, Tybalt thought, still slightly giddy. The experiment really was just as promising as I’d hoped, then. And if I fail to overthrow the Kingdom with armed force, now I know I at least have the option of trying to infect the population with… this.

  It would be terrible if he unleashed it without restraint, he knew. The worst war crime in history.

  But the necromancer couldn’t stop smiling at the thought of everyone he hated, suffering and fighting his virus before finally succumbing and turning into his tools.

  You all deserve it, he thought. You know you do…

  The necromancer only wished that they could all know, as they died, who it was that was destroying them. But if they became intelligent undead, they could know who it was.

  He looked over at the miners’ faces, but nothing had changed over there.

  Tybalt was just conscious of them, because the question of what he would do with them had changed. With this experiment, he didn’t need to learn anything new that night. He needed to decide if he was going to infect them all with his virus or not. He needed to think.

  So, what am I going to do with these miners? I could infect them and just see what happens, maybe. We’re out at the extreme edge of the desert, closer to the open ocean than to civilized settlements. The middle of nowhere. There’s no possibility the virus will spread beyond the immediate area. Even if someone I wanted to spare got infected—like if the beastfolk captured these people—I could just deactivate the virus inside of them specifically. That’s something I’m capable of, if I know who’s sick.

  The big issue: if I infect them, will people be able to tell they’re sick? If I send them back to the squad, will Volusia get suspicious? He’s been dealing with people being sick for a while. Wouldn’t it be suspicious that they came back alive from an encounter with the evil necromancer, but they’re all feverish? He’s not stupid. For that matter, I basically just told Graven what’s going on. I don’t feel any sense of control over him yet. Assuming the virus doesn’t take over his whole body before he gets back to the squad, he could be a problem. None of the others will have heard what’s up, though. I could just kill Graven and infect the rest.

  He turned to look at the Private again, to see if the man’s face had changed at all, if he was giving off obvious signs of being infected yet.

  But as the necromancer moved, the light changed, dimmed slightly all of a sudden.

  What? What’s this? What’s blocking my light?

  Tybalt looked up at the moon. His eyes widened as he saw the obstruction.

  A great winged shape, who knew how many miles up, glided between Tybalt’s field of view and the moon.

  The size of a castle. The size of a mountain? It was impossible to be certain from this distance, but the shape was massive.

  His mind didn’t want to process what he saw for a moment, but he forced himself to. The massive, predatory shape couldn’t be anything but what it was. Fortunately, it was not looking in his direction. There was no indication that the creature took any notice of him at all. But it would be silly to deny that he had seen it, no matter how frightening it was.

  No matter how much he wanted it not to be real.

  D-dragon, he thought. His hands shook slightly again, but for a different reason this time. Right. I’m still… small. Not quite invincible yet. Still… weak. Insignificant, compared with the great powers of this world. I’m still a tiny competitor in a race against gods and powers that can contend with gods. My backer is the silent but steady God of Death. But even he’s been down and out relative to the other gods lately. Remember that. Don’t get cocky. Don’t make a mistake. You could still be crushed so easily.

  That notion brought him down to Abadd once more.

  And it gave Tybalt an idea of how he wanted to deal with the others.

  Author's Note: I am starting to go back and add flavor text to some old chapters. It will generally be excerpts from reports or books that exist in this setting. See chapter 5 for the first example of what that looks like. I'll probably aim to have flavor text in chapters that are multiples of five or ten, as I continue to expand my worldbuilding.