Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 46: Distant Command

Darion was halfway out of his chair when the words appeared.

[Necromancer Rank Advancement Detected]

[Rapid Growth Acknowledged]

[Upgrade Granted]

He sat back down.

What?

He hadn’t been expecting this. Not now to be honest, not after three days of drilling loyalty exercises in a courtyard, that wasn’t the kind of activity he had associated with rank advancement.

He had assumed advancement would come from something more significant.

And by Significant he meant something actually significant.

Something enough to make his system be like:

"Hell yeah! That’s it!" 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

Maybe killing a hundred healthy and breathing knights, greatly armed with enough power that would smoke him, with just the ten undead knights sitting in his inventory.

And that wasn’t including his undead wild wolf because that was greatly strong and would definitely put up a fight, not necessarily win but kill a lot of knights.

But then, he hadn’t done any of that, not even battles won, large numbers of undead raised or territory expanded.

He hadn’t done any of that, what he had done was only repetitive command training in a cold courtyard while running on minimal sleep.

He asked the system.

[Advancement is not solely tied to combat or quantity of undead raised.

Necromantic growth is measured across multiple axes:

— Depth of binding control

— Consistency of command execution

— Understanding of necromantic mechanics

— Application of ability in novel and effective contexts

Your rapid development across all of these in a short period has triggered advancement.]

Then:

[Rank Advanced: Novice → Acolyte]

Darion stared at that for a moment.

Acolyte?

"What is happening," he muttered out loud, barely hiding a smile that smeared his face.

He pulled up the rank hierarchy in his memory, he had read it in the graveyard in what felt like a lifetime ago but had only been days.

Acolyte meant authority increases significantly, improved undead, a minor battlefield aura. And more immediately, it meant Edric Vorne’s grave was now accessible.

Acolyte or above.

Now this didn’t mean he could revive any powerful corpse he wanted, that wasn’t the case.

With an Acolyte rank, he was pretty sure he couldn’t just revive the corpse of some mighty and powerful elite knight. A corpse that was basically overpowered in a way.

Those corpses were still out of his reach. But then, he was glad he wasn’t Novice anymore because who knew the other tons of restrictions he might have faced.

He kept reading.

[New Ability Unlocked: Distant Command

You may now issue basic commands to bound undead at moderate distance without requiring direct proximity or verbal instruction.

Commands are transmitted through the necromantic binding rather than sound.

Current range: Limited. Expands with further rank advancement.

Command complexity at distance is currently restricted to simple instructions — movement, stop, hold, basic directives.

Complex or conditional commands still benefit from close proximity.]

He read it twice, finding a bit hard to understand.

He could command his undead, give them instructions when they were pretty far from him?

He had already been thinking about the infiltration in terms of positioning, finding a tree with a sightline, using the perspective glass to watch the camp and directing the undead based on what he could observe.

The fundamental problem he had been turning over was the gap between what he could see from outside and what was happening inside the barracks, where he couldn’t see anything at all.

Once the undead went through the door he was operating on the pre-given instruction and the binding’s general feel, hoping the core directive held without needing adjustment.

Distant Command closed that gap.

Not completely, the range was limited and the complexity was restricted to simple instructions. But simple instructions were exactly what the infiltration required. Move here. Stop. Hold. Withdraw. Those were not complex commands. Those were precisely what this ability had been built for.

He could sit in a tree outside the barracks and redirect them based on what he observed from the place he would watching.

A guard moving toward a position? redirect the undead before contact. A change in the camp’s activity? pause the whole operation instantly. A variable he hadn’t anticipated? respond to it directly rather than hoping the pre-given instruction covered it.

The gap between the plan and the execution had just closed considerably.

He pulled up his full status.

[STATUS]

Name: Darion

Title: Baron of Percvale

Class: Necromancer

Rank: Acolyte

Territory: Percvale (Border Domain)

Territorial Resonance: Low (Starving-aligned)

[ATTRIBUTES]

Strength: 40

Agility: 29

Endurance: 39

Vitality: 30

Perception: 30

Intelligence: 37

Willpower: 37

[Knight Undead Inventory: 10/30] — [Capacity Expanded!]

[Animal Undead Inventory: 1/10]

[Skills:

Death Perception

Distant Command]

He looked at the inventory number.

Ten out of thirty. He had been sitting at the ceiling of ten slots for days, managing a careful balance between what he had and what he needed, unable to add without losing.

Thirty changed everything: twenty more slots, twenty more undead he could bind and store and deploy without the constant triage of deciding what stayed and what got dismissed.

For Percvale’s graveyard, which he had barely started on, thirty slots meant the real work could begin.

And for Edric Vorne specifically, the rank restriction was gone now. He was Acolyte. The Battle Commander’s grave was open to him.

Also he got an extra 5 for his Animal inventory. That was pretty useless in a way to him at the moment though as he didn’t have any pet creature or something like that of his (to die) to turn into an Undead.

He put that aside. The infiltration first. Everything else after.

His eyes went to the (Starving-aligned) and couldn’t help but feel amused.

He looked at the territorial resonance. Honest, if not flattering. Percvale was exactly that, a place defined by its lack, by the years of having things taken and nothing replenished. The system wasn’t reading what he intended to make it, only what it currently was. He agreed with that. You didn’t get credit for intentions.

He thought through the infiltration one more time with Distant Command factored in.

The plan had been solid before, now it was something considerably better.