Any joy anyone had felt about their progress after the river crossing had long been wiped away by the brutal force march. For a night, a day, and then another painful, slogging night in the midst of the stinking and slowly decaying corpses, the metallic smell of blood and the smell of pierced guts making the army stink like a butcher's latrine, they had relentlessly advanced toward Portguard, the city Rüdiger had described with shining eyes, while mumbling something about needing better shock troops.

  Adarin had to agree, tactically speaking. Portguard held the Great River, the central vein of trade, traffic, and traffic into the Holy Land. Claiming it would be a coup. And who could say no to improving the troops?

  Liora had leveled her healing again, keeping the necromancers and soldiers on their feet, and she herself had more and more come to resemble a shambling corpse.

  Regenerative Transfusion, Early Tier 1 → Regenerative Transfusion, Middle Tier 1

  That was, until the insane goblin Gavin handed out small potion vials. Adarin had studied several necromancers, including Liora, who had consumed the thick brown liquid closely. Half-closed eyes and hanging postures had been replaced with jittering white eyes and fast breathing and an almost manic energy. Adarin had attempted to get the goblin to tell him what was in his product and what the consequences would be, but he had only giggled about coming down hard and disappeared to hand the substance to more of the soldiers.

  Luckily, I don't need sleep.

  Adarin trotted onwards, keeping a watch on Liora and the mumbling Rüdiger. Nonetheless, he had split his mind, and only a fraction of it was focusing on walking.

  No. A being like Adarin did not need sleep, but he needed time to reconsolidate, order, and process his memories. Not rest, but time for self-improvement. And the cursed system rewarded his efforts.

  He had done it for hours now and barely noticed that the march had stopped. His wooden spider body had just frozen in the middle of an emerging camp. A system message rippling on his wooden skin broke him out of his reverie.

  Limited Protocol Database, Early Tier 1 → Limited Protocol Database, Middle Tier 1

  He blinked and recognized a thread of recorded sensory input, Liora throwing up time and time again and the dozens of necromancers, white eyes, manic expressions and sickly green faces and Rüdiger pacing in front of them.

  Adarin quickly replayed his memories. How they had stopped. Rüdiger had collected several dozen young necromancers as well as his insane goblin and his dour, black-scaled kobold. Then, two of the mages had excavated pits the size of small swimming pools. The soil had been compacted, and water was extracted from it.

  Next, Rüdiger had floated above it in an impressive display, unleashed hellfire from his hands in both of the pits, turning their interiors to a glassy ceramic. Other mages had cooled it down, and under the terse instruction and literal hissing of Devon, half a dozen necromancers had inscribed several layered circles with more of the star-shaped pattern the system infection was so fond of into either pit.

  Finally the pits had been filled, as the magical circles lit up. Water had been added and a large amount of ash had been added into one pit. After a while, the water had started steaming as the soft orange glow of the formation heated it. But there was something else mixed into it, a sickly note of decay.

  The other pit had been turned into a latrine for the necromancers. Buckets on buckets of feces had been thrown into it. Well, I think I'm going to push the develop-a-sense-of-smell project back further.

  Adarin smirked to himself. Then, the inevitable component had been added. Zombies had marched en masse into the first pit, over a hundred of them, and just entered the steaming bath of the alkaline solution. And Adarin couldn't make neither heads nor tails of it.

  The other pit's procedure had been significantly more horrifying. This was where Liora had thrown up the first two times. A zombie had walked up in front of her. Standing next to Johan, she had been handed a knife.

  Johan held a strange, long, metallic hook on a stick. The naked zombie had stood there, staring idly into the distance. A vicious face wound had killed him, and he had only one eye left. Dried blood covered his once well-trained body.

  Johan had explained that cutting right along the line of the lowest ribs was required. That way the core musculature didn't get damaged, and the zombie could continue to fight.

  Liora's face had hardened, and her knuckles had grown white as she clasped the knife and inserted it. She cut with the steadiness of a trained healer. From a handspan beneath the solar plexus along the lower ribs down to the side of the hips she had cut with trained discipline.

  Then, she had been handed the stick. Johan demonstrated it on the first zombie. He rammed it straight into the incision, and then pulled hard, steadily, and with inevitable determination. One by one, glistening intestines had come out, and Liora had thrown up all over the zombie, creating a gloriously disgusting mixture.

  After her stomach calmed down, Johan instructed her where to cut the harvest from the body, and the offal had been thrown into the pit. All around the pit, necromancers had performed the same gruesome work.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Liora retched again, joined by others in the line, but even as bile spilled they kept cutting—obedient to the arch-necromancer’s example.

  Liora had thrown up again, but developed a rhythm as she worked alone, and gutted dozens upon dozens of zombies. The first zombie had taken half an hour, but soon movements developed a practiced speed. Fifteen minutes. Five minutes. Finally, she finished the butchery in under two minutes. Twenty-seven times. Adarin chuckled. I guess practice makes perfect.

  The pit filled with a disgusting mixture. Only now Adarin noticed that another two mages were keeping a shimmering barrier alive above the pit, and that the offal and intestines were decomposing at an accelerated rate, creating gas.

  He tore himself from memory and forced his mind back to the pit—back to the present atrocity unfolding before his eyes.

  The current round of vomiting was the result of Rüdiger’s lecture, or rather, his demonstrations.

  Several hours after the work had begun, the sun had risen to high noon, and, using longer hooked sticks, the corpses were extracted from their alkaline hot tub. Their skin was wrinkled and seemed to hang from their bodies like a loose piece of clothing.

  Rüdiger stood over the corpse of a woman stretched out on a wooden rack, her back toward the sky. Her naked body was dripping and her skin grey. A dozen similar contraptions with young necromancers stood in front of the man.

  “Ja, ja, it is hard work, but this is important, so watch up. You cut,” he held up a curved knife. “at the base of the spine,” he tapped the blade carefully against the skull of the dead woman.

  Adarin swallowed as he realized that she wasn’t just dead, she was a zombie growling weakly at the treatment.

  Adarin shivered. Oh my God, they are aware. At least on some level.

  “You incise the knife here,” Rüdiger continued, pressing the curved knife into the back of her head. “You may have to watch out for the hair.” He brushed her hair with an almost gentle gesture to the side and continued the lecture. “...and cut all the way down till you reach the anus.”

  He cut along the spine and thick blood oozed forth. This was when Liora vomited again, alongside several of the other green-faced necromancers, but they all followed the arch-necromancer’s example without complaint.

  “Now,” he clapped his hands together and grinned like a child who had been handed a new toy, “this is the first of the five cuts we have to make.”

  The blonde-haired necromancer girl vomited again. Numbly, Adarin observed the butchery of the writhing zombie. They still feel some level of pain. Oh my God, why haven’t they killed them for it?

  The further cuts went down the legs and arms, and Rüdiger fed Adarin’s morbid curiosity.

  “And next, my dear students,” Rüdiger made an expansive gesture, seemingly indifferent to the sickly state of his audience. “We will see why we are using undead instead of the dead. We begin with the back—ja, the side you are standing on—perfect, ja. Use the skinning knife,” he held up a curved blade, a sickle whose outside was sharpened. “And cut deeply,” he drew out the word, as he cut between skin and flesh on one side of the spine, all the way from head to ass.

  “Next,” he continued as the green-faced apprentices followed his example with very audible swallows.

  Adarin observed Liora. She seemed beyond caring. Her face had grown detached, the same expression she wore when she was healing the Olivists back in the camp. I guess she is classifying this as healing work. Great compartmentalization.

  “Now comes the muscle work,” Rüdiger said, almost cheerfully. “That’s why they’re undead—their pain makes the skinning fight back, which helps you peel faster.”

  He demonstrated by folding back with a single strong yank the entire half of the back skin of the woman. Adarin walled off his disgust, forcing himself into the role of observer. Data, not horror. Just data.

  With clinical detachment, Adarin observed the rest of the process. How cut by cut, the corpses were flayed. How the stumps where hands and feet used to be were sewn shut. How the rotting offal was filled into the calves, forearms, and heads of the creatures. Another round of vomiting ensued as the gas was funneled with tubes out of its magical containment. Poor Johan went down into the pit and shoveled buckets full of the rot to his fellow students.

  Adarin forced himself into clinical detachment, ticking off each step as if in a lab: the flaying, the sewing of stumps, the stuffing of rot into limbs and skulls.

  Next, the cuts in the skin were sewn shut again and reinforced with sticky tar. Finally, over the course of an hour the packages of gurgling rot, sewn-together skin, and animating magics rose up like a sick parody of balloons.

  One of them seemed to look straight at Adarin. Mouth, eyes, and nose were black stitched slits of tar. Its throat was strangled together by a rope, keeping the offal in the head. The lower half of the head was full of fluids. The upper half was a deformed balloon. The Hollow One hung like a grotesque marionette, handless arms dragging its ballooned frame down, bloated calves pinning the floating corpse-thing to earth.

  Then the first batch began walking. No—not walking. They were jumping, floating like astronauts on a low-gravity world, with the eerie jerkiness of unbalanced marionettes.

  The first batch had taken an hour. The second was done in 40 minutes. By the time Liora turned the butchery into a field medic’s production line, Hollow Ones rolled out by the dozen every twenty minutes—like a factory of nightmares.

  Rüdiger floated above it all, a proud smile playing on his face. Slowly a vicious grin spread over Adarin’s face. This horror will do nicely. May God have mercy on our enemies, for I shall have none.

  A rider burst into camp—sweaty, gasping, half-falling from the saddle—as he was dragged before Rüdiger.

  “Archmagister vom Erlenwald,” he gasped, and before he could continue, Liora was by his side, slicing into her scarred palm and flooding him with Regenerative Transfusion.

  He touched her elbow, smiling gently and thanking her from the depth of his heart. Johan bristled, but Rüdiger’s smirk made it obvious what he thought on the matter.

  “The Marholdians and Seaguardians are attacking Portguard, sir. The city is under siege. We are too late.”

  The Hollow Ones twitched, focusing their grotesque attention on the messenger. Adarin grinned predatorily. Our enemies may outrun us—but death is patient. And it always catches up.

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