The heavy oak doors of the inner courtyard parted with a soft, expensive groan.
Leornars stepped past the threshold, his gaze sweeping over the towering, ornate pillars. He dragged a palm lazily along the cold marble of the wall, letting the smooth, polished stone ground his thoughts. Overhead, massive silver-cased chandeliers dripped with crystalline light, casting fractured reflections across the vaulted hallway.
With a practiced flick of his fingers, he pulled the golden hair pin from his platinum blonde locks. His hair cascaded down his temples, framing a face carved in quiet detachment.
He let out a long, weary breath.
*(What's eating you, Master?)* Althelia's voice chimed straight from his core, bright and weightless.
"The fragility of life," Leornars murmured back, his voice an even, contemplative drone as a human maid scurried past, her eyes fixed fearfully on the polished floor. "We gain, we lose, we earn, and we die. That's all humans ever do, day in and day out."
*(Well, that's just life for you. Nothing is eternal. One thing ends, another begins.)*
"Like you?" Leornars arched a brow.
*(I'm ancient, not expired!)* Althelia retorted, a burst of digital-sounding laughter echoing in his mind.
"I get that a lot."
*(By the way, I finished the skill analysis and replication routine. Want to test drive it?)* She beamed with invisible pride.
"Later. We have a meeting at the Skyvault Citadel."
*(Oh—right. Almost slipped my mind. I just pray it's nothing mind-numbingly pointless like tax reform or bureaucratic corruption.)*
"High probability it is."
*(Ugh. I'm going into hibernation mode until you need me.)*
A low chuckle slipped past Leornars' lips. His crimson eyes scanned the courtyard ahead—and then hardened.
A figure was stumbling toward him at a frantic sprint.
It was an undead soldier, its ashen hair matted with thick, dark mud. Deep, jagged gashes tore across its arms, exposing greyish-white flesh beneath. The creature collapsed onto one knee, chest heaving.
"Reporting, Lord Leornars!" the undead rasped, its voice scraping like dry stones. "We've encountered a crisis. General of the Undead Regalia, Bellian, sent me. He begs for urgent reinforcement."
*(Reinforcement?)* Althelia piped up, her playful tone vanishing.
"What kind of reinforcement?" Leornars demanded, stepping closer.
"Lord... there are over eight thousand poachers and slave traders swarming the very forest you ordered us to comb for corpses. We are hopelessly outnumbered. Bellian... he can't hold the line much longer."
Leornars paused, his piercing gaze dropping to the trembling soldier. "Your name?"
The undead flinched slightly, bowing its head lower. "You... you never assigned me one, My Lord."
"From today," Leornars said, his voice dropping an octave, turning glacial as his crimson irises flared with a blinding, inner fire, "I, Leornars Servs Avrem, grant you the name **Lamech**."
The moment the syllables left his lips, a violent surge of energy flooded the soldier's frame.
Lamech's posture snapped upright. His stunted, endomorphic frame stretched and warped, expanding into a lean, perfectly conditioned athletic build. A dense, crimson aura boomed outward from his chest like a shockwave. When he raised his head, his eye sockets burned with a pure, piercing white hue.
"I accept the name Lamech, My Lord," the newly minted warrior declared, his voice resonant and steady. "I shall serve you until the end of existence itself."
Leornars snapped his fingers.
*Crack.*
The shadows beneath a nearby pillar violently unspooled. A massive black wyvern tore its way up from the ground, wreathed in roiling dark mist, its predatory purple eyes locking onto the sky. It drew in a deep, bone-rattling breath that sent another passing maid bolting in sheer terror.
Leornars vaulted onto its scaled back with effortless grace.
"The forest. Now," he commanded.
The beast surged upward, tearing into the open air.
"Lamech, to me," Leornars flicked his wrist.
In a fraction of a second, without a sound or a displacement of air, Lamech vanished from his previous spot and materialized standing directly beside his master on the wyvern's back.
Lamech blinked, a rare flash of shock crossing his hardened features. "How...?"
"I summoned you to me. It's that simple," Leornars replied smoothly. "I take it you haven't unlocked dimensional movement yet?"
"The what?"
"A high-rank undead skill. It's like how I can snap my fingers and summon Zhylena from wherever she happens to be. Or how she can slip into my shadow-dimension right beneath my feet and instantly bridge the distance to my location. I'll have Zhyier run you through the basics later."
Miles away, beneath the dense canopy of the contested forest, the front line was an absolute slaughter.
Bellian roared, his massive greatsword slicing through the air with terrifying velocity to cleave a mercenary cleanly in two. Beside him, Ascian lunged forward, jaws snapping to tear another attacker apart, before a violent concussive blast caught them both square in the chest. Ascian hit all four paws, letting out a low, rumbling snarl of pain.
"Hold fast!" Bellian wheezed, black blood leaking from his armor. "I've sent word to the Lord. If he arrives, the day is ours."
The surrounding poachers broke into crude, mocking laughter. One of them chanted a heavy holy incantation, hurling a burst of incandescent light straight into Bellian's back. The general grunted, stumbling forward, whirling around to split the caster in two—only for the man to shimmer and vanish, reappearing ten paces away with a sneer.
Before the mercenary could launch a follow-up spell, the sky above them tore open.
A black shockwave slammed into the clearing, utterly erasing the spell before it could form. Leornars dropped lightly from the sky, the tips of his boots touching the blood-soaked soil as his expression settled into an absolute, chilling mask.
*(Master,)* Althelia whispered, her voice sharp. *(I'm reading a localized concealment array—it's designed to suppress necrotic resonance. It was definitely intentional. They knew only a necromancer operates in this sector.)*
"I see. So that's why I couldn't feel my soldiers' emotional spectrums. They jammed my link," Leornars said softly, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "Their sentence is already written. Death."
He strode past the battered lines toward Bellian, snapping his fingers once. The lower-ranking undead scattered across the clearing instantly dissolved into shadows, safely retreating into his subspace.
Bellian dropped heavily onto one knee, his head bowed low. "My Lord... I have failed you."
"Your failure is mine to bear, for it was I who sent you here blind to their trap. Rest now. Leave the rest to me," Leornars said gently.
Bellian dissolved into a soft mist, sinking effortlessly into Leornars' shadow.
Standing a few paces away, Lamech watched his master with a gaze of unadulterated, shining adoration.
Leornars turned slowly to face the sea of mercenaries.
"You have trespassed on Avangard's domain. You have slaughtered my soldiers. And you have wasted my time," Leornars announced, his voice devoid of all warmth. "For those crimes, you will not leave this forest breathing."
The poachers erupted into loud, howling laughter.
"Did you hear him?" one shouted, slapping his knee. "He's gonna kill us with *poetry*!"
"Or maybe he's gonna bore us to death!" another jeered as the ranks dissolved into cackling mockery.
Leornars offered a thin, cruel smirk. With a casual flick of his wrist, he drew an undead blade straight from his shadow dimension.
The laughter echoed on. One bold mercenary took a single, swaggering step forward—
And his head slid cleanly off his shoulders, spinning into the brush.
The laughter died instantly, choking off into a collective, terrified intake of breath.
"Not laughing anymore?" Leornars tilted his head, casually flicking the fresh blood from his blade.
Panic rippled through the front lines. The mercenaries surged forward in a disorganized wave, weapons raised.
Leornars didn't flinch. He vanished in a jagged, visual glitch, reappearing directly in the center of their charge.
"Bubble," he murmured.
Hundreds of translucent, shimmering spheres manifested instantly across the clearing. As the nearest mercenary brushed against one, the bubble popped—releasing a concentrated wave of hyper-corrosive acid that instantly melted through the man's face, eating straight down to the brain before he even hit the dirt.
"Next," Leornars stated coldly.
He flipped his sword upward, caught the hilt, and unleashed a lightning-fast roundhouse kick that sent the blade rocketing through the air like a javelin, pinning a fleeing archer through the eye to the trunk of an ancient oak.
Another mercenary shrieked, turning tail to run.
Leornars flickered forward, a blur of cold steel and dark linen, slicing the man's throat open in a single fluid motion.
"I said," Leornars whispered, his voice carrying effortlessly over the chaos, "no one is leaving."
As a cluster of terrified men tried to scramble away together, Leornars clicked his tongue in mock disappointment. "Why the sudden rush? I thought you said I was going to kill you with poetry?"
He raised his hand, channeling a high-tier spatial manipulation skill.
*Threads of the Abstract.*
In a fraction of a second, razor-thin invisible wires of condensed space swept across the clearing. Two thousand bodies were cleanly halved before they even realized what had touched them, collapsing into neat, synchronized rows of gore.
Leornars turned slowly to face the remaining two thousand survivors, who stood frozen in absolute, paralyzing horror.
"**Authority Skill: The Auditor**," Leornars commanded, his voice ringing out with absolute dominion. "I command you to turn your blades upon yourselves."
Against their own shrieking wills, the surviving mercenaries lunged at one another. Swords hacked and slashed through flesh as grown men wept in sheer terror, entirely powerless to stop their own limbs from carving through their comrades.
When the last man fell choking into the mud, the clearing fell deathly silent.
Leornars walked slowly toward the towering mountain of fresh corpses, his boots squelching softly in the crimson mire. He raised a single hand, his fingers splaying outward.
"Awaken from the land of the dead," he commanded softly, "and serve me for all eternity."
A massive wave of dark, necrotic energy pulsed outward from his palm. Across the mountain of bodies, flesh knitted together, wounds sealed, and eyes snapped open. Even the one-eyed soldier who had lost an eyeball in the fray watched as a brand-new, glowing orb regenerated within its socket in real-time.
Two thousand newly risen warriors dropped as one onto their knees, their forms shifting rapidly as ashen hair and glowing crimson eyes took root.
"Awaiting your command, My Lord," they chanted in unison, the sound shaking the very leaves of the forest.