Chương 47: Chapter 46: Information and Hope

++It is difficult to use the phrase 'asymmetric warfare' for any conflict other than my own campaign against the Gods. Compared to that, no other contest I have read about seems to really warrant such a description. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E My next week at the Winzorth Institute passed as a blur. The students around me were more insufferable than usual, all buzzing with excitement about the battle magic we were soon to be taught.

I myself have never been especially interested in that, seeing combat always as more of a means to an end, and an undesirable one at that. I would always rather watch my enemies swarmed and dragged down by undead hordes from afar than have to fight them personally. You acquired such habits when your most common opponents were magically infused Demigods with the strength to lift tens of thousands of times their own weight. Still, like in so many other things, this life was denying me the luxury of choice.

I would clearly be getting my hands dirty at some point, and so I reluctantly prepared to make sure those hands were as dangerous a pair of weapons as I could make them. Before then, however, was the first of my lessons with the Grandmaster. He did not give me any warning before this one started; one moment I was walking through the hall, the next I was in his office. He eyed me expectantly.

"I've given you more than enough time to prepare," he said.

"Are you going to teach me?"

"Of course." I was furious naturally, with the summons and with his audacity to even doubt that my glorious intellect could give him any kind of knowledge I wanted, but as usual, I had nothing to gain by venting my emotions. Nothing to gain and everything to lose.

"We shall begin now." The Grandmaster seemed almost surprised, but he quickly and eagerly focused his attention as I stepped out into the centre of the room.

"You have prepared something dead, I assume?" I asked him. I very much hoped he did, it would not be a good sign if he was the sort of caster to scrounge up ingredients only when they were imminently called for. Fortunately, he was not. I was soon presented with a dead cat, suitable for my purposes, but not ideal.

"It is somewhat large," I noted. He looked at me, incredulous.

"I've heard stories of you summoning up armies that numbered in the millions."

"Billions," I corrected him.

"And yes, I did. Over time, and at the height of my power. But you do not have millennia of necromantic experience, or even my talent for the craft. Starting with something as big as a cat, right away, will be difficult." I got the impression he would have flushed, were his skin light enough for me to see the blood pooling beneath it.

"Do you have any idea who I am?" he growled.

"You must look at me and just see the old caster. I was a young genius, once. A greater genius than most who attend Winzorth even. I wouldn't be Grandmaster now if I wasn't." I listened to him, then answered patiently, all too aware of how fragile his ego was and how disastrously the men of Garamon could behave when their pride was pricked.

"That may be the case," I replied calmly, "but you are not, and never were, Lord Dread. Regardless, we can see how well you perform with the cat." He grumbled some more, and I suspected this was another slight the Grandmaster would remember for quite some time, but we did eventually get to work. As he had said, I recognised the touch of genius in the Grandmaster. Seeing him listen and acquire skills, it became easy to picture him as a younger man, his mind empty and waiting to be filled with worldly knowledge.

Despite that, shortly into our lesson, his anger flared up. As I had predicted, the cat was proving a very difficult starting line for him. It had been something of an effort even for me to reanimate creatures this large, early on. As I re-taught myself the art of necromancy and re-conditioned my Vessel to do as my mind told it, even now I found it taking the better part of an hour before I could so much as make its limbs twitch. By then, the Grandmaster had managed nothing at all.

"Fine," he snarled.

"A smaller animal then." It was funny, almost. He was so unused to being taught by anyone that he practically squirmed, though I was careful not to let him see how amused I was.

"We need much smaller animal…" I sent a pulse of magic around the room, experimenting even now. I had spent the past hour adjusting my magic to the rhythm and feel of a living creature's dead body, now I turned that adjustment into a larger net of invisible power. Not strong enough to actually affect anything, but more than enough to detect it. There. A fly, at the edge of the office.

The Grandmaster was far from pleased to have his mighty magic turned to catching an insect, but once it was at our feet and conveniently dead, we were able to practice necromancy with more immediate results on his part. The insect's limbs were dancing almost instantly, and the rest of its body soon followed. I was actually more impressed by the old man's focus than I was by his talent, because he kept at it for hours on end.

I actually left midway through his practice, before being called back, ten hours later, to find the fly reanimated and buzzing around him. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"It really works," he breathed. I noted that his awe was more academic than emotional, clearly for a magician of his age and power, the simple display of one reanimated fly did nothing to impress.

"It is a start," I concurred.

"You are still not ready for the cat however."

"I figured that," the Grandmaster sighed. He gestured across the office, to a new animal, this time a rodent. It was still somewhat too much of a stretch, I thought. Less than one tenth of the cat's size, but many hundreds of times the fly's at least. It was worth at least trying. Another hour passed before, once more, the Grandmaster finally accepted defeat.

"It's a fucking rat!" he snapped.

"That rat is orders of magnitude larger than the fly. It is equivalent to going from felling one tree with your magic to blasting down a sizable fraction of a forest." Apparently, hearing me explain the concept did not have a positive effect on his temper.

"So what next then?" he scowled.

"A slightly bigger fly?"

"I normally used hornets at this stage of my teaching apprentices, though I do not know if Garamon has those creatures." He grumbled, searched, and soon produced an especially large beetle, maybe a dozen times the fly's mass. It was perfect. I had it moving and flying within twenty minutes, learning faster now than I had in today's first session. Faster than I had in my first life, too.

I was not sure if that was due to my intellectual knowledge of necromancy being so much greater, my Vessel being less damaged by strain than in my original existence, or both. By comparison, the Grandmaster was a particularly sorry display. In the larger scheme of things he did fine, maybe a half-hundred magicians alive could have acquired the necromantic arts as fast as he did.

It simply looked pathetic when placed next to my own progress, and the fact that my body was less than one fifth the age of his did not make things lighter.

"Billions," he whispered under his breath.

"And you could do that again?"

"Yes," I said, without the slightest doubt. I had limited my previous power by a factor of several times by training the way I did. I did not expect to reach the same heights I once held sooner than centuries, instead of millennia before, but I also knew that there were plenty of new opportunities for power in the modern age. Even knowing that my power growth would slow more over time, I had plans.

"... Could I do that?" the Grandmaster pressed. I considered whether to lie, then decided against it.

"Most likely not, but you can certainly manage armies of your own." I saw him thinking about that.

"It'd be a lot of power to tie up in reanimated corpses."

"No, it would not. Necromancy does not require magical energy to sustain it, once done properly." His eyes practically shot open as I said that, and he stared at me.

"How?" His voice was little more than a croak. I did enjoy surprising people who thought they were experts.

"It involves anchoring the animus, soul, consciousness—whatever word you wish to use for the vital spark that sustains a living thing. That serves as the focus of the spell matrix, as well as its fuel." The realisation dawned on his face quickly, and crushingly.

"Infinite, then," he whispered.

"You could maintain an army of infinite size?"

"In theory. In practice things become more complicated. When I say you could not manage billions, it is because the majority of corpses are too far gone to be easily reanimated. Most of my armies were long enough dead that I spent the bulk of my magic on reassembling their corpses from the soil."

"And Garamon instates mandatory cremation for all but the nobility," the Grandmaster frowned.

"That's because of you?"

"Probably not. I imagine it is because of necromancers in general, rather than me specifically." As much as I liked to imagine the Gods trembling in fear of me for millennia on end, they had probably not thought of me since I was sealed away. They would pay for that mistake. Would die for it. As soon as I had finished inventing and then acquiring the tools needed to kill them, that was.

"Warriors," I said abruptly.

"How do they work?" The Grandmaster seemed unsurprised by the sudden questioning.

"Why did it take you so long to ask?" There was no particular reason, I had simply preferred to begin my questioning when he had already started learning from me. I decided that an exchange of knowledge would get me better information, if only because the Grandmaster felt compelled to out-do my own teachings.

"It does not matter," I replied. He seemed content to let that go, and answered my question.

"As far as we can tell, potential magicians who don't tap their magical power and instead unconsciously focus it through their bodies by physically training. Strength is determined largely by the power they would have had, if they'd studied magic the conventional way." Most of that explanation was composed of things I had already confirmed for myself, and the rest was things I had already inferred.

"Anything else?" I asked, hiding my irritation. Was every magician in this world except me just useless?

"Not all, no. I'm guessing you've already worked out that being a warrior is mutually exclusive with being a magician though."

"I have worked out that the rest of you think that." He sighed, like he was enduring a real child talking to him like that, and not the most intelligent being who could even theoretically exist.

"Well, warriors heal fast and cleanly, their bodies are hardened, they have enhanced strength and speed, and they also boast some natural resistance to attempts at affecting them magically. In my own studies, I've found that their powers quickly dissipate after death." Inconvenient. I had been considering a set of armour made from the skin of a high-level warrior, it would surely be lighter and stronger than steel. … Wait.

Their powers came instinctively, they infused their bodies, they staved off disease, they improved healing, they strengthened every physical ability the warriors had…

"What about aging?" I asked after a moment. The Grandmaster looked suddenly interested.

"It slows that, too, yes. Most warriors only get an extra few years, ones as high as the third order have been known to live two or three decades longer than average. The handful of fifth orders produced in each generation tend to live close to two centuries. It seems aging slows far faster the more powerful they are. You don't look surprised, why?" Because I had just worked out what the warriors of this era really were. And I had gained a vital clue to working out what the Godtouched were, as well.