They were all shocked.
They couldn't quite understand what had happened. What had happened with Darion. The man had seemingly pulled a shocking twist on them.
And without what he had done, they all would probably be dead now. Eaten as meal by the Bogarts.
It had happened too fast during the fighting for anyone to stop and process it, the skeleton appearing out of nowhere to take a hit meant for Darion, the green mist rolling over the dead wolf, the thing that had stood up out of that mist and proceeded to tear through nine Bogoarts like they were practice targets.
There hadn't been time to think about what any of it meant while it was happening.
There was time now.
Darion could see it moving through the group: the realisation, slow and visible, passing from face to face the way a flame passed down a line of torches.
The skeleton. The wolf. The green light. All of it assembling itself into a picture that had a very specific and well-known name.
Hojj looked at the undead wolf standing beside Darion. Then at Darion. Then back at the wolf.
"You're a Necromancer," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Yes," Darion said, accepting easily. He had no intention denying. If he would be leading the knights and Percvale in the long run then they ought to know, they ought to know of this ability of his.
The word landed in the clearing and sat there. Nobody moved for a moment.
Some faces were unreadable. Some were openly startled. A few of the knights nearest the undead wolf had taken a step sideways without appearing to decide to.
Garren was shocked, but not too much. His was what you would call mild shock.
A thoughtful shock actually because the man was already thinking, realizing something and Darion knew what it was.
The first thing Darion had done as Baron of Percvale was to visit the graveyard and he had spent a considerable amount of time in it.
Then, Garren had suspected something but didn't quite know the answer. But now, looking at all this, the summoning of the skeleton as shield and the reviving of the wolf's corspe, turning it into this? It gave him his answer.
The wolf's green eye moved across the group with complete indifference.
"I'll explain everything when we get back to Percvale," Darion said, keeping his voice level. "All of it. But right now we have dead to carry and wounded to move and I'd like to be out of this forest before something else decides to investigate the noise." He looked around the group. "Start hauling the Bogoarts. We take as many as we can carry."
That gave everyone something to do, which helped.
The knights broke from their stillness and began moving, some toward the Bogoart carcasses, others checking on the men who had gone down during the fight. The work of it pushed the shock into the background, at least temporarily.
Two knights had been found near the center of the clearing. A knight called Aldric, a broad man who had been one of the first to volunteer for the hunt that morning, was confirmed dead, a Bogoart horn had caught him clean and the damage had been immediate.
The other was a younger knight named Piers, who had taken a tail strike that had caved in his left side. He hadn't made it through the fight either.
"Aldric and Piers," someone said quietly. "Gone."
"At least it wasn't more," another knight replied, which was true but didn't make the two any less dead.
Several knights moved to the edge of the clearing where the four who had fallen from the trees were lying.
The snake bites had not gone well. Darion crouched beside the nearest one and looked at the body, the skin had gone pale and waxy, and across the neck and forearms where the bites had landed there were raised markings, dark green and spreading outward from the puncture points like ink dropped in water.
The face was slack and the eyes were half open.
All four were dead. Whatever had bitten them had worked fast.
Garren crouched beside Darion, examining the markings on the skin with the expression of a man trying to match what he was seeing against everything he knew.
It seemed like he was witnessing something so shocking it stunned him. Sure snake bites were deadly and caused death if not given immediate treatment, but not in the way it had done to this knights.
A snake bite able to change the color and texture of the skin?
"I've seen snake bites before," Garren said. "This isn't what they normally look like."
"No," Darion agreed.
"The coloring. The spread." Garren shook his head slowly. "Whatever was in those trees wasn't a common forest snake."
"Something venomous enough to kill four grown men in under ten minutes," Darion said.
Maybe if they had attended to the knights earlier they would have survived?
Darion doubted it. He was certain they would still die nonetheless. Maybe back on Earth, in his previous world where there was anti venom and stuff to treat things like this.
Where there were hospitals that could probably handle something like this. He would have thought this deceased knights would still be alive.
But not in this world he was currently leaving, there were healers capable of healing something like this he knew.
But not in Percvale and if they were to find one, it would be more than ten minutes, which meant that before arriving at wherever the healer was, the knights would have still died.
Darion and Garren looked at each other briefly and left the thought there, because there was no answer available in this clearing at this moment.
Then the system screen appeared across Darion's vision:
[Undead Potential Detected]
He dismissed it. He knew what it meant. Six fresh corpses in a clearing, all of them his knights, all of them died under his authority. The system was telling him what he could do with that.
He was not doing that here. Not in front of all of them, not two minutes after admitting he was a Necromancer while half the group was still visibly processing the undead wolf standing ten feet away.
The system came back.
[Exceptional Undead Potential — Rare Classification. Do not dismiss.]
Darion looked at the six bodies again, then at the screen.
Rare classification?
He had not seen that before.