“Go for it,” Tybalt said, snorting to himself.

  Stanislaw was clearly not impressed by the necromancer taking breaks to manage his women.

  The mummy stepped forward, close to a captured deer that the other undead had brought. An ominous gray aura gathered around one hand.

  As he moved, Edgard was stepping away, moving back toward where Mariella and William were sparring. Tybalt ignored him, eyes riveted to Stanislaw.

  “Watch closely,” Stanislaw said quietly through their bond. “I’m not sure how long the deer will be able to endure this.”

  He extended his hand, and Tybalt felt it as something pulsed through the air between the deer and the mummy. Some energy was pulled out of the deer and into Stanislaw. Intellectually, simply from the name of the skill, the necromancer knew it was the beast’s life force. But it felt like something more profound than that.

  So this is Life Drain.

  The necromancer swallowed uncomfortably. Of all the skills he’d seen that were associated with his god, this one seemed the most like a perversion of the natural order. The deer grew thinner and weaker, appearing to visibly sicken and age before his eyes. Its head turned to Tybalt, and as if it was an intelligent being, it gave him what felt like a pleading look.

  Please, its eyes seemed to say. Nothing living deserves this. Please.

  Tybalt opened his mouth and found it dry. He shook his head.

  Was I about to tell him to stop? he thought. What’s wrong with me? This isn’t more horrifying than the other shit I’ve seen and done myself.

  The deer dropped dead.

  Tybalt felt it when the beast no longer had life in its body, even before the body stopped moving and the life left its eyes. He could sense its life force now, he realized. It was a side effect of having observed Life Drain so closely.

  “That was rather ugly,” the necromancer commented bluntly.

  “Death always is,” the mummy replied. “I hope you have not believed the lies others tell about the noble death, the dignified death, the contented death. It is the nature of life to struggle and rage against the end, and it is the nature of death to come as an unpleasant experience. It is only by the grace of our Lord that something worthwhile can be salvaged from the ugliness.”

  “Well, thank you for demonstrating,” Tybalt said after a moment. He sensed that Stanislaw could probably wax poetic about death for some time, but the necromancer wasn’t in the mood for it.

  Perhaps sensing that, the mummy moved on.

  “Would you like to see something else?” he asked.

  Tybalt nodded.

  Stanislaw’s body was surrounded now with a denser aura than he’d had before. The life force he had drained from the deer had joined with his own power, providing a temporary additional halo on top of his already impressive energy.

  The necromancer wondered how the mummy might use that.

  After a few seconds, he got his answer.

  Stanislaw stepped closer to the dead deer’s body, which he had not touched before it expired. He bent, picked it up, and cradled it like a lost child.

  Tybalt furrowed his brow. The pose felt oddly sincere, as if the mummy genuinely regretted the deer’s loss of life.

  Then Stanislaw put his lips to the deer’s muzzle. He opened his mouth, and gray energy flowed out. It seeped into the deer’s nostrils and spread through its body.

  The corpse began to move again.

  Stanislaw can create undead, too, I kind of knew that from his skill list.

  Tybalt tried to pull up the deer’s status screen, to see what sort of special adjustments Stanislaw might have made in creating this undead, but nothing popped up. The necromancer looked closely and realized the deer had partially recovered from the damage the mummy had done with Life Drain. Its fur looked refreshed, and it had regained some of the weight it had inexplicably lost.

  The recovery was clearly incomplete, but as the deer twisted free of the mummy’s arms and fell onto its side—its legs were still restrained, as with all the other animals Baldwin and Hieron had brought—Tybalt recognized that the deer was not undead at all.

  Stanislaw had brought it back to true life.

  Tybalt swallowed. Was that… Is that something possible? Could I—no, I have to be able to learn this power. He was the High Priest of Mudo. That was his class. I’m a necromancer who’s the high priest now. I have to be able to do it too.

  His hands shook slightly with excitement.

  To have the power to truly raise the dead was something legendary. Some rumors said that the high priests of Vika and Astara could do it, but it was nothing that had been confirmed. But apparently, this was at least not out of the realm of possibility for the High priest of Mudo.

  “I want that skill,” Tybalt said quietly, trying to keep a rein on the hunger in his voice.

  I could keep the ones I love from dying. Given that most of the world hates me and will try to destroy anything precious to me, that power is a necessity.

  “It’s not perfect, master,” Stanislaw warned. “Look there.” He pointed at the deer. “You can see it still doesn’t have the same spring in its step. Perhaps it never will. It is possible to recover from the aftereffects of being saved by Last Gasp, but most of those that are raised with this skill live half-lives.”

  “I still need it,” Tybalt insisted. “You understand why. Don’t tell me you never used this skill for personal reasons.” The necromancer gave Stanislaw a hard look, and the mummy seemed to avert his eyes from Tybalt’s for the first time since they’d met.

  “Very well, master. I had no intention of trying to refuse you. I was merely warning you that the skill may disappoint you, even after you master it.”

  Tybalt nodded.

  Wordlessly, he and Stanislaw pressed on with the lesson. They spent the next half hour running the same experiments over and over again on the increasingly anemic-looking animals.

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  “Why are they like that?” the necromancer asked at one point as he saw a hog barely shudder back to life, looking listlessly up at its killers, all the will to fight gone out of it. “You put their life force back. What’s wrong with them, exactly?”

  “There are no perfect transfers, master,” Stanislaw replied. “When I drain their life force, something is lost. When I try to put it back, something is lost there too. It goes to—” He gestured toward the ground—“our lord. If you want to perfectly raise one who has died, you need more than the amount of life force they had in them. I would suggest that for the best results, you will need to kill two to raise one to perfect condition. You should also never try to use Last Gasp on a person who died long ago. It will only work on one whose body has yet to decompose. If you try it on one who is already rotted—” The monster shuddered—“the truth is, sometimes it is better to be dead.”

  Tybalt nodded, although there was doubt in the back of his mind. A necromancer could fix rotting flesh, after all. All of the powers of restoration and preservation would gradually be at his fingertips, more and more as he grew in his skills.

  Why would I ever have to let go? If I do, it just means that my skills weren’t good enough yet.

  They went through the process again, multiple times more. The necromancer urged Stanislaw to go more slowly with both skills over time.

  Tybalt didn’t fully grasp how Life Drain worked, which meant he couldn’t properly practice Last Gasp unless he was willing to use his own life force as fuel. It was different from other skills, because rather than injecting his mana into someone else, he was supposed to pull something from them.

  But there was a compensation, a reward for his hard efforts observing Stanislaw in action.

  His vision changed slightly once he had the new skill. In addition to the ability to see mana that Tybalt had already possessed, he could now see another faint glow around people, this one colored white. Only the living had the glow. The undead were like a void in that regard.

  The living also gave off a warm feeling when Tybalt closed his eyes and tried to reach for where the glow should be. It was clearly something that could be trained and refined to be very useful, and Tybalt had acquired it just by paying close attention while Stanislaw was trying to teach him Life Drain.

  The day had been fairly productive, all in all.

  Tybalt finally let Stanislaw rest after perhaps the tenth time reviving and killing a single macaque. The former High Priest had gained several levels from helping Tybalt, but he seemed a little bit relieved to take a step back.

  The necromancer turned to check on Mariella and the other mummies at that point.

  She was sparring with Edgard again. Spikes of earth rose from the ground at the chthonic mage’s command, cutting off avenues of retreat to the sides, and the mummy also retreated underground using a skill Tybalt had never seen before and popped out where the fire mage was least expecting him.

  Tybalt observed that the mummy had already gained a few levels from the mock conflict, and neither he nor Mariella bore any notable injuries besides light scratches to her skin that quickly healed.

  “I think it’s time to stop sparring,” Tybalt said after a moment.

  Both Edgard and Mariella suddenly came to a stop and turned to face Tybalt. The mummy dropped to one knee as he did so.

  “You can both relax,” the necromancer said. “I think it’s time for the humans to take a break. As for the mummies, I want you to go and hunt in the mountains. Find creatures, kill them, and bring them to me. Other undead, carry these monsters back up toward where Mariella and I are staying.” He gestured to the bodies littered all over the ground behind him.

  “What do I do, my lord?” Kistana asked quietly.

  The corner of Tybalt’s lip twitched with slight amusement. “You’re with the human group.”

  The catgirl flushed slightly as if she felt dumb for asking the question. She fell in behind them, giving the couple space, when the necromancer and fire mage departed.

  As Tybalt and Mariella walked back in the direction of the Twinleaf hut, Mariella kept ‘accidentally’ bumping him with her hip. He would glance over at her each time, and she would look away and pretend she hadn’t noticed anything.

  After the fourth time, he grabbed her by the hair, pulled her close, and lightly bit her neck.

  “Oh, whoops,” he whispered directly into her ear.

  She let out a little moan and ran her fingertips over his crotch.

  “Tybalt—”

  “Tonight,” he said. “We’ll go out after everyone’s in bed. Under the stars.”

  She nodded eagerly, and they continued walking without further collisions.

  The silence had settled over the two of them—a noticeable absence of sound, but far from uncomfortable—by the time he spoke up again.

  “Do you trust me, Mariella?” Tybalt asked softly.

  A series of little expressions crossed her face. One of them was unmistakably sadness. The necromancer was reminded that after the dream encounter with General Vespasian the previous night, the fire mage had lost much of her trust in one of the only people she deeply admired in the world. It had to have shaken her heart, but Tybalt hadn’t paid enough attention to how she must be feeling. He’d just enjoyed the benefit of it, the way she had seemed to cling to him more than usual, to be more eager to please. Even just a minute ago, she had been acting more lustful than normal.

  But all of that probably wasn’t pure affection alone. There was a whiff of desperation in it. She had become unmoored from the most important part of her emotional foundation, and it was possible she would never be on good terms with her family again. Mariella was leaning a little more on her relationship with the necromancer as a result.

  I have to be careful with her over the next few days, Tybalt thought. Some people, under such circumstances, would try to take their own lives. He didn’t think she was the type, but it was hard to truly know what was passing through another person’s heart.

  “I’d follow you to the end of the world,” Mariella said, snapping him out of his train of thought. Whatever had passed through her mind, her face showed only resolve as she spoke.

  “I don’t want you to follow me that far,” Tybalt said.

  “What?”

  “If I go ‘to the end of the world.’ That phrasing kind of makes it sound like I won’t be coming back. A final voyage. If I’m supposed to go die, I don’t want you to go die with me.”

  “Well, that’s not up to you,” Mariella said sweetly.

  Tybalt pulled her close and kissed the top of her head but said nothing back.

  “Why did you ask me if I trust you?” she asked after a moment.

  “I want to perform an experiment on you,” Tybalt said. “I think I have a handle on one of my new powers now, and there’s something about your status that I want to change, if I can. A skill that’s useless to us right now but could be improved. If you’re afraid, though, I won’t do it.”

  The necromancer already knew he could force Corruption on someone, but with Mariella, that was obviously out of the question.

  She swallowed. “I saw you experimenting on the animals. Will it hurt?”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I think it hurt them because they resisted. But it might hurt you too. I’ll try to get it over with quickly either way. You don’t have to decide now. We could leave it until after our evening activities.” He smiled seductively.

  Mariella stopped. “I’d rather do it now,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll be thinking about it all evening.”

  Tybalt nodded. “If you’re all right with it.”

  “I am. I trust you.”

  Maybe more than I trust myself at this point. But he was confident he wouldn’t damage her, at least. He had practiced Corruption on multiple test subjects already.

  “Sit,” he said.

  She folded her legs and sat down on them.

  Tybalt knelt before her, leaned in, and kissed her gently on the forehead. Then he reached out with one hand wreathed in mana and divine power, and he pressed against her collarbone.

  The way she smiled at him, nervous but receptive, made his heart ache.

  He could tell when she felt his power invading her body. She gasped and forced herself to be still. She offered him a little nod, telling him to go on, it was all right.

  He had placed his hand as close as he could to her mana core without piercing her flesh. Now his energy flowed smoothly down his wrist and into her, caressing the place where her power lay.

  Tybalt focused on the change he wanted to make, the single skill whose effect he found least helpful, most annoying.

  Purifying Fire… Bend and change to serve a new purpose. Follow my will!