Chapter Thirty-Eight
In an achingly sore moment of empathy, Harmony lay down next to the disassembled corpses in Ricort Healers Association debt processing site three, locally dubbed Mell’s Morgue. Rather than wasting energy healing additional damage, her body focused on recuperating, in case of a real emergency. That was the physical side. Spiritually… “I know, you have it worse.” She told the detached skull. Spiritually… since evolution it was rare to suffer such a deep bombardment that her skills felt as unsettled as they did when authority destabilized at gaining aristocratic status. She'd underestimated the gauntlet and the staff.
False confidence, earned rightly or not. In retrospect, her graduate student combat instructor, Ryder, talking to some fellow staff handling the obstacle course should have been a warning. But as she toed the startling line with her group, her thoughts were on completing it quickly. It wasn’t a race. It was a reminder that while you were without most of your skills, your enemies would not be.
The signal to go had her, along with everyone else, spasming on the ground as their bodies sized up from a non-lethal shocking snaking through the crowd. That was only the warning shot.
This was not the time to wallow in pain. With a grunt, Harmony sat up. [Eternal Fable’s Heart] reminded her she could feed it pain for a little bit of fate to be used later. Bad habit, that. The fact that all of her skills nudged her about was a sign of how much it had pushed her. Work first.
Closing shift at the morgue meant she’d arrived as Mell was leaving. It was a janitorial shift where all the valuable materials and tools had been packed up for the night to be cleaned at a different site. Some students preferred the late night alone to study because no one cared as long as the building was clean for the arrival of the fresh bodies, both staff and corpses, in the morning.
Mell ran her crew well, despite bitterness about being stuck in this position. Most of the corpses were properly disposed of during the shift. For Ricort, that was an incinerator in the basement where the processed remains would be turned to ash for a small metal urn to be delivered to some next of kin, or, missing a destination, one of the temples for honoring the deceased. Wasteful, but they didn’t have Old Bones to support.
Their strange reverence for bodies took a lot of getting used to. [Keen Investigative Awareness] and [Poise and Bearing] made sure Harmony didn’t do anything too unusual, but it wasn’t something she felt like she could fully adjust to. Sometimes, people who were a waste of existence while alive were expected to be treated better after they’d died. She’d seen that over and over again after the criminals Hexio Curie brought in died. Those same foreign morals didn’t stop them from milking every bit of value they could from those who owed a debt.
Squeezed out and souls flattened with stripped flesh. The necromantic tools had done a number on the bodies and containers that remained for her to clean up. She’d never imagined this was how the guild sold Old Bone’s loot to be used. As good as the lessons on how to extract value were, flaws in the system existed. One was that the labor was based on volunteer workers. No matter the training, you couldn’t expect perfection from young students who’ve interacted with human corpses only a few times. Little pockets of what would be soul-binding agents remained. Useless to most students left without tools. Their problem now was that she was a necromancer.
The practice she’d performed on the guards in Orrty’s Tomb left her with a solid understanding of how to do manual extraction. The materials gathered there helped give her the new, annoying title. She’d worked on Bea and the undead in her home dungeon, so ideally, this should be easy. Surprise hit when it turned out to be more difficult than she expected. The tool usage was squeeze and pull….
The first thing she had to fight was the desire to blame this on the fault of her bruised soul. Climbing walls as graduate students, under Ryder’s direction, pelted her with skills trying to knock her off, was too easy a thing to lash out at while still hurting. Non-lethal had been personally adjusted against her because the force it took to break her skin and send her swinging by one hand would have been enough to kill someone with a weak, half-step body. The eraser profession in her wanted to latch onto easy answers. It was the kind of revelation she’d learned to pay attention to and manage. It reminded her of the time when the necromancer class wanted to extinguish all life, or the maid’s subservience battled with the lady’s demand for attention.
The truth was that humans were simply more complicated organisms than dungeon monsters with three skills. The corpses often had one or two evolutions under their belts and a body type to contend with. One wrong move had her squirting degrading fat and tissue instead of the magical soul essence that existed between spaces she needed to save for potion making. The essence extraction tool made simple a complicated process of accounting for spiritual and physical density in the best of circumstances, and squeezing the pulp out of an already juiced human wasn’t the ideal situation for her to work on without the tool. A few messy mistakes, and she had enough for a little more than one dose to experiment with when the time came, not ideal, but workable.
“Oh, don’t look at me that way. I’ll do better next time.”
The skull's grin was permanent and silent in its response.
Leaning into [Style and Grace], Harmony unhunched her back after all that closely concentrating inches away from the spiritual container, finding packets to squeeze between her thumb and forefinger. Realigning her body and stretching allowed for another self-check-in on how the healing was going. She’d planned on stopping by Versus’s lab but ended up collapsing in bed for a couple of hours before [Recall] woke her up to go to volunteer work. Turned out, entering the gauntlet, living off the fact that you could use your skills to pretend you’d gotten enough sleep during the last few weeks, had been a terrible idea. Once that support from her morning routine was beaten out of her, she’d been fighting exhaustion the whole time. The crack of getting the bones properly in place didn’t send any twinges of pain from fractures. A win.
Within her soul space, the rotating extra pool of mana was slowly tightening and syncing up around her still irritated and softened-up skills. It was hard to think of how bad she’d feel if she hadn’t completed the gauntlet, even with the extra attention. They had to be measuring the quality of her body in the process. It made sense for them to gather data for their ranking system. She would need to ask Von Trell if she could have access to those numbers.
Gathering the expensive human-based soul-binding agent had only been a minor goal in taking this shift. [Familiar Bond] reached out to Hyacinth. His patrol around the building had yet to find any snoopers, stalkers, or people who might interrupt her more serious business. Raising her hand, she summoned her blood sickle from her room. The tool of violence’s curiosity at her current state showed that any violence would get it humming.
Harmony lifted up the skull she’d focused on upon arriving. “It would be a shame to let you go to waste.” The other deceased all had next of kin who would receive their small metal tin she’d pack up at the end of the shift. This poor girl didn’t deserve to be put in some dusty temple vault. “Marci Winters, time to see exactly who you were.”
One of the worst things about The Academy was that she wasn’t allowed to practice necromancy. That had been one of the motivations for signing the vassalship. If and when she chose to use that relationship depended on feeling secure in it and understanding exactly what she would be able to do under its shield of protection. Defense Against the Forbidden Arts merely gave her a taste of what she was missing, and with the next class not on necromancy, this was her opportunity to use and combine what she learned while it was fresh in her mind. Even [Recall] wasn't perfect.
Without ghost lace, necrotic cores, Hazeldown coal, and other materials provided by class, she was going to be powering this without a source or outside connection to undead energy, and that necessity required invention.
There were enough dead bodies that passed through the morgue that death was in the air, and while it gave [Manipulate Dead] something to play with, it wasn't undeath, nor resurrection. The magic of necromancy was multi-layered, encompassing bonds, soul magic, healing, cold, and fear. Now she could pull some aspects from her skills [Claim the Remains of Power] to reach beyond the physical and [Shadowed Graves] to access the generational fears around death that seemed pervasive to the living, and use [Renew Spirit] to try to breathe life into things. But most of her fooling around had been done on the already living or already undead. This was a puzzle, but one she had a secret ingredient for.
Adric Highsmythe, certified undead, one vial of his blood. She'd only borrowed a little bit. Even if he passed Von Trell’s test, Old Bones and the Ascendant Games' growth chamber confirmed what he was despite his resistance to most of her skills. Pulling Saccerate from his chest had been a pain, yet there was a deeper connection to the spirit world within his vitality. Could it act like a bridge to spirits like coal had if twisted properly? Could she use that vitality away from his body?
With Hyacinth on guard duty, Harmony got to work incorporating her forbidden magic lessons together, careful to take breaks to actually clean the morgue as she worked. Hauling bodies to the furnace and prepping urns while using her maid experience to make the place spotless.
Maybe if she hadn’t run the gauntlet, she wouldn’t have needed so many breaks, but the lingering injuries let her connect with her evolved class and profession in a way she felt more attuned to what it wanted. Even the whispers of her heart, an inkling to dive into the dungeon once more, leaked through. Things to know even if you knew better than to listen.
The crafting project became a technical and mental problem to solve that her profession dove into, while she could feel her revivalist class appreciated the idea of bringing some aspect of Marci back better than saving Hexio Curie’s cursed fools. Simulated necrotic cores crafted from the shards of skills too broken to sell as pet food were built, held together with [Mend]ed [Shadow]s crafted of awe, Adric's blood, and a touch of hers. Four sat on thin dishes of fate oil, the Hexio had provided as a reward previously. There was a mostly complete spiritual servant contract on human skin, that’s what was available material, written in Adric’s blood. Marci’s skull was now carefully engraved and treated, only waiting for the finishing touches. She’d even crafted a prepared body to place the skull into. Once assembled, they should all work as a singular unit -- hypothetically.
Worst comes to worst, they could all go in the furnace, forever to be forgotten about, and never to be mentioned again.
This wasn’t actually raising the dead. She had no skills for that. The body wasn’t even a human body, but a mannequin crafted from the overly metallic bones of those with Iron bodies and tweaked so they’d still be more metal than bone. She’d designed it to match the many of the custom golems walking the streets, and with such a high metal content, even [Manipulate Dead] had a hard time shaping it without adding muscle to bend pieces. [Beautician] made sure it was a pretty girl, as Marci had been a woman according to the slip of paper. It would be hollow, no skills, but a soul-container was required for movement like with the rats, and the summoned spirit would help direct the movement, so she wouldn’t have to give it orders. There was a spot in the head casing for the skull, basically making the whole thing a fancy moving suitcase for a skull book powered by three different undead skills she’d learned in class. The last necromancy lesson wasn’t useful for this, but still important to know.
Optimism. She’d expected implosion when she blew up that chunk of reality inside a shadow prison, just maybe not that alarm. [Stride Before the Fall] was waiting anyway in case something more unexpected happened. Assuming the Adric-powered cores even worked, it was time to put it all together.
Marci’s skull slid into the head, ready to accept its power. Chest slot hung with the spirit contract affixed inside and tied by a line of blood to the body animation working. With a container so large and empty, the fourth core spot was added in for additional power to fill the body. A rat was one thing, but the body of a small human must take more than one. Three small marks with the tip of her sickle doused in Adric’s blood to connect the working and then [Claim the Remains of Power] to shove the engines into place.
There was the finish line just one step away, and all she needed to do this time was not mess up and fall face-first over it as she did during the Gauntlet. At least there, the crowd had cheered more than laughed. Of the attendees, only about three hundred completed it, and she was two-hundred-and-seventeenth when accounting for time. You earned a badge for completing it, but it bristled not to be highly ranked, enough that she had silently chastised herself for feeling that way at being close to last.
Looking at the now carefully carved skull, red lines fused with crystalized blood mixed with old death, remains from the person's body, and a drop of soul-binding fluid, it was enough of a work of art that [Beautician] and her necromantic nature were appeased. Failure was always an option; she’d made half a dozen core attempts before these. Despite her title, there were no real guarantees. “Marci, Marci, Marci, time to see what you know.”
First, she prepped the space, then picked up the cores, two for the body, one for the spirit, and one for the brain. The cores snapped in on the spiritual level in quick succession, as close to simultaneous activation would cause less jaggedness in the separation between the living and dead.
The body filled up with energy, no explosions to a ghost dimension yet. The contract for a spirit tugged on the lines of the frame. Cutting the line with the scythe would make a deeper groove and not help. Perhaps filling in the grooves and undoing how she tied the three spells together? The contract yanked on the powering-up skull. She’d only tied that to the body so it wouldn’t rattle, and make sure the memories of body movement might help the spiritual entity driver that could end up a raccoon, bird, or amorphous blob.
The whole thing started to rattle. They weren't just hooking and pulling; the energy flowed from the four cores as a circuit through all the lines in the skull, body, and contract. Filling it would probably make it explode, as a sudden blockage seemed unwise. Necromantic energy was surging anyway, calling nothing to take over the body and give it direction.
“Ashes.” Chronostasis kicked in, giving Harmony time to think.
Not that there was even enough time as the disaster rumbled ahead as the energy spun around in the loop without purpose. What was missing was structure. Slicing the palm of her hand open, [Manipulate Dead] cast a spray of her blood over the whole thing.
[Shadowed Graves] extended out, forging a connection with what she crafted, connections and synergies formed with [Renew Spirit] toward her necromancy, and being a revivalist. “Settle down.” She commanded with a heavy dose of authority.
The chest and face compartments snapped shut, ending the shaking. “Yes, Ma’Lady,” it said with a honeyed voice with way too much personality as it knelt, completely quiet and waiting.
That “had” to be when the necromantic alarm triggered. That final day of schooling had been about setting those up and noticing them. All of the other acts she’d done in this morgue hadn’t done it, but the pulse of energy, as this… Harmony sniffed… unsure what she had made, finally triggered the thing.
[Final Silence] interrupted the alarm. She’d had that skill in reserve since she started this experiment. Nothing should have cleared the building or alerted anyone other than herself.
What was that puzzle someone had told her about, figuring out if a creation could actually reason? “What is your name, class, profession, and how many R’s are in the word strawberry?” She asked her creation.