The Greatest Archmage To Have Ever Lived [OP MC, LitRPG]

It wasn't a particularly famous one. Historical records didn't even preserve his name; if trolls bothered with names in any way humans would recognize. But the territory had been his: fifteen square miles of mountain and valley, rich with iron and copper and, occasionally, gold.

Trolls and precious metals went together like fire and dry timber. Where you found one, you usually found the other, along with violence, territorial disputes, and the broken remains of anyone foolish enough to try claiming what a troll considered theirs.

The old king had ruled this region for perhaps a century before someone—probably an adventuring party, possibly a rival troll—ended his reign permanently. The details were lost to time. What mattered was that he'd left behind a domain honeycomb with caves and tunnels, some natural, some carved by massive clawed hands.

Concordia had been mining these mountains under House Eryndor's name for sixty years.

So it did not come as a surprise to Sergeant Beric Dormer that there would be troll corpses found when you dug deep enough.

Dead trolls were practically a geological feature in former troll territory. You'd break through into a new chamber and find bones the size of support beams. Sometimes whole skeletons, curled in corners where the creatures had crawled to die. Sometimes just scattered remains, evidence of fights that had happened decades or centuries ago.

The miners had found seventeen troll corpses over the years. Dormer had been present for the discovery of three of them himself.

What he—and Captain Dernwell, Major Wren, Lieutenant Commander Ford, Lieutenant Sever, and Corporal Thane—did not expect was for a dead troll to be standing in front of them after they'd broken through the collapsed section of tunnel.

The smell hit first.

Rot. But not fresh rot. This was the smell of decay interrupted, preserved, and then animated anyway. Sweet and sour at once, with an underlying reek of corruption that made Dormer's eyes water. Like meat left in the sun for a week, then dragged through a sewer, then set on fire and extinguished with vinegar.

Corporal Thane made a sound in his throat that might have been a gag.

The creature was enormous. Twelve feet tall, hunched in the tunnel but still scraping the ceiling with what remained of its scalp. The skeleton was mostly intact—thick bones that looked like they could support a building, yellowed with age. Ribs like the bars of a prison. Arms that hung nearly to the ground, ending in hands the size of shields.

And there was still flesh. Not much. Patches of it clinging to bone in strips, leathery and black. One arm was almost completely skeletal. The other had enough desiccated muscle remaining that you could see the tendons like dried rope. Its torso was a patchwork of exposed ribs and sagging, mummified tissue that shifted wetly when it moved.

The face was the worst.

Most of the flesh had sloughed away, leaving a skull with a prominent brow ridge and tusks that jutted from the lower jaw like yellowed daggers. But there were still bits clinging to it: a strip of skin across the cheekbone, a patch of what might have been scalp, an ear that hung by threads of dried tissue.

And the eyes.

The sockets were hollow. Empty. Just darkness where eyes should have been.

Except for the light.

Purple light burned in those empty sockets. It was steady and pulsing. The same sickly violet that had glowed in the mages' veins, but concentrated here into two points of wrongness that seemed to stare directly into Dormer's soul.

The troll's jaw hung open, revealing a mouth full of broken teeth and a tongue that had rotted to a black stub.

It took a step forward.

The movement was wrong. Jerky. Bones grinding against each other with sounds that made Dormer's skin crawl. Its left leg was missing most of the foot, so it dragged with each step, scraping bone against stone.

Behind Dormer, Lieutenant Sever whispered something that sounded like a prayer.

Out of all the magical schools, Beric Dormer hated Necromancy the most.

Hated it with a passion that bordered on religious fervor. Hated it the way some men hated spiders or heights or the dark. He hated it so thoroughly that he'd once punched a man at a tavern just for suggesting that raising the dead could be useful in wartime.

He was a fervent believer that making it a legal and regulated practice instead of a forbidden one, fifty years ago, was the single most idiotic decision the Council of Mages had ever made.

And the Council had made a lot of idiotic decisions.