Rise of the Supreme Necromancer-Chapter 81: A Counter-Raid

"What?! You and your ridiculous demands again, Inquisitor!"

Garron met the king’s ire with a hard look of his sole seeing eye and walked to the table.

"I have just received a message from one of my agents. As if this weren’t clear already, the raids are merely a distraction meant to slow your forces. The necromancer knows that despite all his efforts, he’s outmatched. If he had more sense, he would already run and hide..."

The inquisitor pointed at a point on the map.

"Instead, he wants to take Soromill and make a stand there. Your Majesty, we will never be able to take a city of undead by starving them out, and a direct attack... I don’t need to tell you how many losses we might take in the process."

Rafael gritted his teeth. Although his reason told him that Garron was saying wise things, the king just wanted to punch him. Or the table.

Instead, he only clenched his fist.

"Then, a part of this army can still go after the raiders, while our main forces march to intercept the necromancer before Soromill."

"Your Majesty," Praetor Bosnor said. "You forget that the undead will march day and night. It will be a tight race even if we push our forces to move as fast as possible. If we make a pause to disembark soldiers to chase after the raiders, we might not get to Soromill in time."

Garron nodded.

"Exactly. Pray for the souls of these people, but don’t abandon an entire city for a few villages, Your Majesty."

"No!" Rafael slammed the table for the third time. "I had enough of these... Sacrifices! We are not Dark mages to spill rivers of blood of our own people. No more! Marshall, order the barges to stop at the nearest convenient place and disembark the templars to the eastern side of the river. They will remember their duty to our people, and the reason they gather their tithe, or the High Magister can forget about any agreements we had!"

At this moment, Garron also wanted to hit something... Rafael’s head with his cane, for a start.

"Then we will disembark our own riders on the western side of Esta. They will travel ahead of the main army as fast as the horses will carry them and slow down the undead with their own raids!"

Whispers flew over the tent.

"The cavalry... That’s us, the knights! We will have to abandon armor to travel quickly enough..."

"Do you think there’s a chance we might slay the necromancer himself? Whoever gets his head will become the hero of all Aleshat... No, of all who worship the Light!"

"I knew that His Majesty wouldn’t just let the raiders pillage as they want. He got the title of Defender of Aleshat because he dispatched ashen barbarian raiders, after all..."

"Is Garron really a cleric? He looks more like a Dark mage to me... With his suggestions, too..."

Garron sent the spectators a glare that made silence return to the command tent.

"This is a... decent compromise, Your Majesty. But ordinary soldiers won’t be able to do much against the undead in the necromancer’s army, not on their own. I suggest that you take their horses and put your battle mages on them. They will be able to create much more destruction," the inquisitor said.

"Oh yes, Your Majesty! Especially the fire mages—aren’t undead weak to fire?" the marshall exclaimed.

"Among the common kinds, only vampires and ghouls, and it’s only because fire reduces their ability to regenerate. The rest are as easily to burn as ordinary corpses," Praetor Bosnor said.

"But the necromancer doesn’t travel only with the undead. He has supply carts with equipment that ARE made of burnable wood," added Garron.

"Then I will agree with your suggestion... This time," Rafael said. "You heard my orders, people—now do them!"

***

The undead army was marching—running!—down a road between gently-sloped hills. For once, the horde paid no attention to the villages and roadside inns in sight.

The zombie slave horses that pulled the carts were pushed into a fast trot, even if it meant that they would stumble and fall even more often than usual.

If one of them broke its legs so hard that it couldn’t walk anymore, it was just replaced with another slave horse.

Even so, the supply carts were the slowest part of the army. For the sake of reaching Soromill faster, Aleric let the faster part of his army—the zombie servants that could actually run—travel ahead.

The supply carts were instead guarded by hordes of skeletons and zombie slaves, still controlled by their servant sergeants. But over the first ten hours of travel, the skeletons still got ahead of the marching line. They were lighter and could run faster.

And the scouts that Aleric had around his army were mostly just left behind and forced to get in the tail of the army, unable to scout anything. This was because he sent all his riders to raid, and now had no one left to scout. The only servant horses in the army right now belonged to Samuel and Aleric.

It was a risk, but a calculated one.

’I feel like I’m wasting my time by not using travel time to learn something. Maybe I can focus on repeating the names of major Dark sigils in my head before I forget them,’ Aleric thought, sitting on the back of his horse.

It was running at a trot pace alongside the supply carts. Unlike Samuel, Aleric couldn’t gallop ahead for a day long, or even ride at a slower pace. He only came out of his cart because its insides at the moment were being shaken like dice in a cup.

At this moment, a group of thirty riders appeared from behind a hill. They were far away, but they rode at full speed toward the undead army. Focused on the march, the able-minded undead didn’t notice them until they were only two hundred meters away from the army...

Because they started shooting, and not with arrows, but with bolts of magic energies!