"Damn," Darion muttered, staring at the Bogoart in front of him.
It was exactly as Garren and the knights had described: the body of an ox crossed with a goat, carrying that long serpentine tail behind it. Seeing it described and seeing it standing twenty feet away were two very different experiences. It was the kind of thing that would root a normal person to the spot.
Darion pushed past it.
He had already worked out why his undead had been destroyed so easily, and it wasn't about blood. The undead had been sprinting through undergrowth, bone feet crashing through leaves and dry brush, making exactly the kind of noise a blind creature built around its hearing would lock onto immediately. The Bogoart hadn't smelled it. It had heard it coming and simply waited.
He filed that away.
His eyes moved between the scattered bones and the Bogoart, which had retreated slightly but hadn't gone far. It knew something was still here. Whether it had detected Darion yet or was just orienting itself, he couldn't be sure, but he wasn't going to wait to find out.
He needed it to move first. If he rushed in, he was dead. But if the Bogoart committed to a direction, he would have a window.
"Come down!" he called up to the skeletons still positioned in the trees. "Attack it, now!"
They descended fast, too fast, actually, dropping without any particular grace, and the Bogoart reacted before the first one even hit the ground, driving its horn upward and shattering the skeleton mid-fall.
The remaining three landed and immediately ran straight at the creature.
They had no tactics or formation, only a direct charge, all three of them, in a straight line.
"Tsk… tsk," Darion muttered, watching them go. "What I get for being Novice rank."
But it was his opening.
The Bogoart was fully occupied now, thrashing, turning, smashing into whatever was immediately in front of it. It had no attention left for anything else. Darion began moving forward quietly, spear in hand, closing the distance while the creature worked through his undead one by one.
It shattered another. Then turned on the next two simultaneously.
He thought of the lanky knight's story: twenty-seven men going into these woods, two coming back, and understood viscerally now how it happened. In a normal situation, this was exactly the moment you turned and ran. The creature occupied, the path behind you open, your legs still working.
He threw the spear instead.
Whoosh!
He aimed for the neck. He missed the neck.
The spear buried itself in the Bogoart's eye.
The creature's roar shook the trees. It reeled backward, abandoning the last remaining undead entirely, thrashing and screaming in a way that had nothing controlled about it. Darion was already moving, he snatched the sword from the ground where the first undead had dropped it, got low, came in underneath the creature's flailing and drove the blade into the soft underside of its neck. He wrenched the spear free with his other hand and drove it into the side of the creature's belly.
Another roar, lower this time. Weaker actually. The Bogoart's legs were already giving, it staggered, swayed, and the sound it made dropped from a roar to something barely above a moan. Darion brought the sword across the other side of its belly and the creature went down, heavy and final, shaking the ground slightly as it landed.
He stood over it for a moment, breathing hard.
[Congratulations on Killing a Bogoart!]
[You Lost Four Undead — Close to Losing Five]
[STATUS]
Name: Darion
Title: Baron of Percvale
Class: Necromancer
Rank: Novice
Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)
Territorial Resonance: Low (Death-aligned)
[ATTRIBUTES]
Strength: 25 [+5]
Agility: 17 [+5]
Endurance: 17 [+3]
Vitality: 15 [+2]
Perception: 17 [+2]
Intelligence: 21 [+4]
Willpower: 18
[Undead Inventory: 1/5]
[Skills:
Death Perception]
He looked over the stats quickly, not lingering on much, except the undead inventory. One undead remaining. The skeleton was still standing beside him, motionless, waiting for a command.
He checked its stats out of curiosity.
[Undead Knight – Decaying Tier]
Former Rank: Percvale Infantry
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 10
Endurance: 10
Loyalty: 55
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
The Decaying one.
It had survived because the others had been more persistent about getting destroyed first. He thought about the Rotten Tier undead with the strength of 1 and endurance of 15, he had written it off as useless when he first saw those stats, but now he wondered if that was the one that had lasted longest before going down. Endurance meaning exactly what it said.
Four undead gone to kill one Bogoart. That was the reality of it.
He looked at the dead creature and thought about what he had told the knights. 'Maybe two.'
That wasn't happening. It had cost him nearly everything just to bring down this one, and beyond the cost, the Bogoart's dying roar had been loud enough to carry through the entire forest.
Whatever else lived in these woods had heard that. Standing around reflecting on his stats wasn't something he could afford right now.
He turned to the Bogoart's body.
Getting it back to Percvale was its own problem. The thing was enormous, he wasn't dragging it through a forest on foot. But he had a horse, and he had one undead left.
He'd figure it out.
Then it occurred to him, his undead. The way they had performed today was still sitting at the back of his mind, something he hadn't fully resolved yet.
From everything he had ever read about undead, they were supposed to be blunt instruments. Mindless and slow, the kind of thing that lurched forward and attacked whatever was directly in front of it. But his had climbed trees on instruction, held their positions without drifting, watched specific directions, and responded to a whispered command by sprinting into darkness without a moment of hesitation.
That wasn't exactly mindless.
He suddenly remembered this line from their system descriptions:
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented).
He turned it over properly now. They weren't thinking, he was certain of that. There was nothing reasoning behind those green-lit eye sockets.
But somewhere in the bone, something had survived that went deeper than thought. Not memories of names or faces or the people they had been. Just the body's habits. How to hold a weapon. How to move quietly over difficult ground. How to receive an order on a battlefield and execute it without needing explanation.
Muscle memory. Except the muscles were long gone and only the memory remained, stripped down and fragmented, but still there and still working.
That was why they could act like this. Not because they were smart. Because they used to be.
He exhaled quietly and let his thoughts drift to the loyalty stat.
It had seemed like a strange word to put on a skeleton. Loyalty belonged to people, to choice, to history, to something built between two living things over time. But now he understood it differently. It wasn't loyalty in any personal sense. It was control. The firmness of the connection between him and the undead, how cleanly they received commands and how consistently they executed them.
High loyalty meant clean obedience, fast response and no resistance. Low loyalty and the connection probably started to break down. Commands lagging. Responses becoming unreliable. And at some point, maybe the binding failing completely.
Which meant if the loyalty had been lower, his carefully positioned scouts might not have held their positions at all. They had still been rougher than he would have liked though, like the undead charging the Bogoart in a straight line with no tactics wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind. But they had done enough.
He looked at the Bogoart one last time, then at the forest around him.
Time to go.