– "I'm starting to suspect that higher necromancy requires a living subject. To properly turn Raghul, I would have needed to fill his whole body with dark magic, not only his core. And of course, add my mark.
Probably the reason why Kalla can't master necromancy isn't because it can't use light outside of first magic, but because has no knowledge of the cores."
"Makes sense." Solus concurred. –
With Kalla's guidance, Lith managed to raise his first skeleton after a few tries, destroying some of them in the process. When he felt sure to have grasped the basics, he even managed to raise Rodimas' ghoul.
Before following Kalla to receive her final gift, Lith went back to put the two badly burned mercenaries out of their misery.
– "A part of me would love to experiment on them with higher necromancy, but honestly, I had more than enough for today. Also, if I manage to turn them into sentient undeads, I would feel responsible for their lives.
I would be either forced to kill them, and that would be a waste, or let them roam free, and that would be plain madness. I'm done playing with powers I don't fully understand. Guess now I have one more thing to research in the library." –
After walking for a bit, Lith started to feel a headache growing, his desire to go back to the academy and rest was almost unbearable.
"Where are we going?"
"To my cave." Kalla explained. "Since I'm leaving, feel free to pick whatever you like from my trophies' pile. That will be my thank you for saving Nok's life."
"Teaching me necromancy is a great gift already. I don't need more. By the way, where are you going?"
"I don't know either. I have reached a bottleneck. All my instincts tell me that either I overcome it or my talent will rot. Now that all my cubs are big enough to be self-sufficient, I can finally set off to explore my limits."
"Have you tried talking to the Lord of the forest, first? Maybe the Scorpicore could help you." Lith didn't dare offer his help directly. He had no idea how men would react to him teaching true magic, let alone magical beasts or monsters.
Yet if the academy was to be in any danger, he would much prefer for someone like Kalla to be present.
"I already did. Scarlett tried to explain to me many times about things like 'cores' and 'world energy', but they are only empty words to me. So, it advised me to travel outside the forest and search for enlightment."
After a while, they reached a small hill. It was about ten meters (33') high, covered by tall green grass, with tilted saplings growing on its sides, fighting with the nearest forest trees for the sunlight.
Lith could see many small animals, squirrels and birds alike, moving around in the vicinity, without care for their arrival. Like a mouse on the back of a lion, they weren't afraid of predators, the presence of the powerful Byk was their lifeline.
The cave was deep, and had an entrance big enough to let two creatures the size of Kalla to move freely in and out, probably to allow her to move with her cubs.
The so-called trophies' pile turned out to be just trash. Weapons, tools, clothes, were amassed together in a random order. Most of them were damaged or broken, making them useless.
"I took those things from humans and creatures that invaded my territory, trying to kill me or my spawn during the years." She explained.
After a little search, Lith could see there wasn't anything interesting in the bunch.
"What about rings or amulets? Didn't they have any?"
"Those I took for myself, silly one. They will be especially useful once I'll be away from here." Lith sighed with annoyance, thinking how he could have already been resting back home, instead of junk hunting.
"But there are some I couldn't figure out their use nor throw them away. I feel they are too dangerous to be left in clumsy hands. Feel free to take them, if you wish."
Kalla touched the left side of the cave, revealing a small secret chamber, holding a pile of small wooden boxes, all identical to the one Rodimas had given Lith.
Suddenly he felt a chill running down his spine, his vision blurring making the headache almost unbearable. This time he saw groups of armed soldiers fighting and destroying entire cities.
– "Not the vision again! What does this mean? Is the war really this close? And what does it have to do with me?" –
Lith saw several envelopes scattered among the boxes, their wax seals still intact. After checking with Invigoration that there wasn't any magical trap, he opened them, discovering that all of them were written in a code he couldn't figure out.
Reading those apparently random words, other images flashed before his eyes. The last thing he saw was an image of his house in Lutia, burning. The barn was open, the animals dead or escaped, while the fields in front of his house seemed to have been trampled upon.
His point of view moved inside the house, allowing to watch the dancing flames, the walls splattered with fresh blood. His father lied on the floor, his head cracked open by some heavy blunt weapon, the brain almost visible.
His expression was of pure despair and terror, his clothes were drenched by his own blood, coming out from multiple deep cuts. His bruised hands still clenched to form fists. He seemed to have died fighting.
The vision moved to the kitchen, where the corpse of his mother, Elina, rested. Her eyes were wide open, a pool of blood was under her head, a huge chunk of her tongue was visible among the blood.
Her clothes were ripped to shreds, not even death had stopped her aggressors. Lith could see human bite marks all over her breasts and genitalia, a pool of white sticky substance defiling her legs and mouth.
Anger was raising inside Lith's chest, a thirst for blood like he had never felt since his days back on Earth.
Then, he heard his sisters' voices calling for help, Rena was calling her husband's name, but Tista was calling for Lith.
He tried to force the vision to show them to him, but suddenly he felt pulled up and away from the ground, watching everything in miles of radius from the sky.
The whole village had been razed to the ground.
Once Lith regained his senses, the headache was suppressed by the killing intent he could barely contain.
"Where did you find them?"
"Most come from the dimensional items of the hunters that I recently killed. In the last months, lots arrived believing themselves to be predators only to end up as prey." Kalla snout deformed into a grin.
"But others I took from the white-furred pups that live in the man-made mountain."
"The students?" Lith was shocked, not at the idea of their death, as much at the implication such event had.
"Yes. It happened when I was chasing the hunters who had killed one of my cubs. They had escaped me the first time, yet days later dared to return in my turf."
Anger overloaded her eyes with mana, turning them in pitch black holes.
"I stalked them, and when the opportunity arose, I exacted revenge. From that moment onward, every time hunters arrived, I would follow closely to kill them along with their pups, to let them know what I felt."
"How did you manage to do that?" His interest was piqued. He doubted to be able to cleanly kill a group of mercenaries and students at the same time, without any of them escaping.
Even with all her undeads, being unable to fly made Kalla weaker than himself in Lith's eyes.
"Clackers, that's how." The Byk's laughter was like stone grinding against each other.
"I know how they communicate, via earth magic. I lure them with their feed call, and when everyone is busy fighting with the spiders, my undead sweep the field. The Lord prohibited us to kill the white-furred, but Clackers do not answer to its orders.
I only take care of the hunters. It's not my fault if the little b*stards don't know how to fend for themselves."
