Chapter 84: The Pack Grows
He found their confusion genuinely interesting.
Five predators, ready to attack, and a human had just thrown them a large quantity of meat and was standing there watching them process it.
He could see them trying to fit that into a framework that made sense. It didn’t fit. Humans didn’t do that. Humans ran or fought or died, they didn’t stand in the dark and offer food.
They were still looking at him when he felt something.
It was the same sensation he had felt in the forest when the wolf had walked out of the trees and pressed its nose into his palm.
A pull, a connection, the system noting something in the relationship between him and these animals that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
His inventory was full.
He remembered that immediately. Ten animal slots, all ten occupied with nine bats, and the undead wolf. No room for five wolves regardless of what he felt through the binding.
Then the notification appeared:
[Animal Undead Inventory Expanded]
[Animal Undead Inventory: 15/15]
He stared at it.
He looked at the five wolves, who were now beginning to approach the meat with the careful attention of animals that still didn’t fully trust the situation.
They looked at the corpses for some seconds, then they started to eat them, slowly.
They would look at Darion for some time, then at the corpses.
Darion, observed, thinking about how he was going to make them his undead now. Time to kill them?
Inasmuch as that was the obvious option, Darion didn’t want to do the killing himself.
With his undead wild wolf, he hadn’t killed it. Instead, he had used it to face the Bogoarts while it was still a normal wolf, and the Bogoarts had done the killing.
So that had been something kind of unfortunate as he hadn’t been planning to kill the creature. It just happened and he went with it, reviving the corpse and creating an Undead wild wolf.
He looked at his undead wolf standing beside him and suddenly smiled at his own slowness.
He didn’t have to kill them himself.
He had a ruthless and very powerful undead wolf to do it for him.
He didn’t even wait for the pack to finish eating. He just commanded his undead wild wolf to go kill them.
"Go," he said to the undead wolf.
The pack had no warning. The undead wolf covered the distance between them before the nearest one noticed it was moving, hitting the closest wolf with the full weight of its Fleshbone Tier body at speed. The pack scattered and reformed, five living wolves against one undead one, and for a moment the numbers made it look competitive.
It wasn’t competitive.
The undead wolf had no pain response, no fatigue, no fear, and strength and endurance stats that sat significantly above anything the lean pack wolves were carrying.
It moved through them with the systematic efficiency of something that had been given an instruction and was completing it.
It wasn’t even showing signs of slowing down to the fatigue from handling five of its type at once.
Fatigue was something that would have impacted a normal living creature, using much strength for creatures made you tire out eventually.
But this wild wolf felt no fatigue, no pain... no nothing. So when the pack of wolves bite it and used their sharp claws to hit it, it felt nothing and feeling nothing enabled the undead to not be slowed down.
Eventually one down in the first thirty seconds, two more in the next minute, the remaining two putting up a fight that lasted longer than the others but ended the same way.
The undead wolf made sure of the hits, it hit them hard and rough, tearing some of their flesh from their bones.
Five bodies on the ground.
Darion watched the wild wolf retreat, standing still, looking at nothing exactly, seemingly waiting for the next command.
It was a good fight, Darion acknowledged. It was good to watch and had all things that made a good fight in it. Though it was a short one and seemingly one sided, it was something that one enjoyed watching.
Darion walked to the first one and crouched.
"Revive."
The green light spread through the wolf’s body, threading through the fur, settling in the eyes. They opened, green and cold, the familiar light of something bound. The wolf rose and turned its head toward him.
He moved to the next.
"Revive."
And the next. And the next. And the next.
When all five were standing, he checked the stats.
[Undead Wild Wolf – Fleshbone Tier]
Former Rank: —
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragmented)
Strength: 25
Endurance: 44
Loyalty: 72
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Wild Wolf – Fleshbone Tier]
Strength: 28
Endurance: 41
Loyalty: 74
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Wild Wolf – Fleshbone Tier]
Strength: 20
Endurance: 38
Loyalty: 70
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Wild Wolf – Fleshbone Tier]
Strength: 32
Endurance: 40
Loyalty: 73
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Undead Wild Wolf – Fleshbone Tier]
Strength: 27
Endurance: 43
Loyalty: 71
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
[Congratulations on Creating Five Undead Wild Wolves!]
They were Smaller than his original wolf, having lighter builds, lower stats across the board, the natural consequence of animals that had been leaner and less developed than the creature he had first raised.
But five of them. Five Fleshbone Tier wolves with loyalty sitting between seventy and seventy-four, tireless and bound to him.
He looked at the six wolves standing in a loose group in the dark, his original and the five new ones, and then willed all six into inventory.
The green light came and went six times and then the road was empty.