The Grand Catastrophe

…

“Okay, so that’s how that works,” she said as she let the fireball hit the training post.

Keno, after her mind merged with the other one, and the other one merged with her own, had been busy. Her mind had connected to everyone in the city itself. She had dominated them. It had taken many days, those days had bled into one another. Yet she still had to count them.

She didn’t know when the other undead night lich would hop by. She might need to scare him off, or fight him. She didn’t actually know anything about him other than his race and what group he was a part of. Though, he might not even show up. After all, she wasn’t supposed to have been isekai’ed.

She could feel that she had gotten stronger. She had learned many things about how sorcerer powers, and how they work. She had figured out that only some of her magic came from her race, and the others came from random bits and pieces of her bloodline.

She had figured out that leveling up her racial levels wouldn’t directly empower her own sorcerer powers. In fact, it seemed to cause them to branch out in growth rather than drive them forward. Though, in retrospect she should have expected that. In the end, she had a lot to do.

She looked around the training room. She was the only one in there, with the rest of her zombies simply doing different tasks that she had ordered them to do, like cleaning any dust that was around the place. Some were patrolling the walls of the castle, others the walls of the city.

She herself was here to train. She trained until she was out of mana, with spells that she wasn’t comfortable with or didn’t have the best practical knowledge of yet. Then, after that, she sparred with multiple undead for an hour. She then soaked them in her aura, which took a while to figure out how to do, to heal them up.

After that, she would then do some theoretical research, or do whatever she thought would aid her in gaining more power. She also had started researching rituals for the eating of souls. Granted, there was little info in the castle. There was even less in the neighboring cities. There was some though. Soul-Eaters ate souls, and after which they stayed alive permanently. Vampires could eat souls in some manner, if DnD 3.5e was to be believed.

“All I need to do is grasp it,” she said, and launched another spell, this time {Magic Arrow}.

…

She sat cross legged on the floor of her magic training room. The space was a large box, without really anything of note other than the door on the side of the room that led somewhere else. This somewhere was the Enchanting and Alchemy room.

A book sat on the ground in front of her. There, on the open pages, was a ritual spell that turned a person into a skeleton mage. She wasn’t interested in the spell itself, more on the info that one could glean from it. Besides the book lay another, but empty book. This one had many notes, all neatly numbered and stacked. On it, there were notes describing what she absolutely knew, and what was directly stated. Research was going slow, but steady.

As she finished writing something down in said book, one of her zombies on the city wall alerted her to a problem. There were animals outside the gates. She told the zombie to make sure it was out of the way, and to tell her if they left. She needed something to test her spells on, after all.

…

Keno, still stuck in the body of a 12 year old, stood opposite from a rather massive bear. How did a bear run however many miles it had taken to get here from wherever it was that he had come from? She didn’t really have an answer for that. What she did have was a spear that she wanted to test out.

She had been practising for years now, and she wanted to see if that made any kind of difference. The zombies weren’t really all too skilled, but they made up for it by being many in number when she spared against them.

Keno looked around the area, and saw that her zombies were moving around the bear, to box it in. The bear, meanwhile, stood up on its back legs and roared at her. She flinched, recalling what damage that a bear could do in her past life.

The bear, uncaring for her thoughts, darted forward faster than she had expected, and tried to dive at her with its paws. She rolled to the side as the paws then slashed through where she had been, and jabbed out with her spear head.

The bear swatted aside the blow, but she pulled her spear back up and in. then, after that, she quickly stabbed forward with the tip. The head of the spear plunged into the beast.

The bear roared at her, and turned fully to her. She pulled the spear into a defensive block and darted back as the swiped at her again. The haft of the spear took the blow, and she swiped the jaw of the bear out from under it with the butt end of her weapon.

The bear reeled back in pain. She then darted forward and slashed from the top. The snout of the bear was left with a deep gash. Her foe pulled back and shook itself as it started to truly bleed.

‘Take it, stab it while it’s distracted,’ said a little voice in her head.

She listened, her undead heart thumped once in her chest from pure instinct. She lunged with the tip of the spear, and plunged it into the neck of the beast. The bear roared, and thrashed. After a beat or two, it fell to the ground, let out a sigh, and died.

“Yes!” Keno shouted as she jumped for joy, her arms pumping in the sky.

She did a little dance as the zombies grabbed the dead bear, and started dragging the thing back to the city itself. It was then, after they had brought it past the gates and the gates themselves had been closed, that she enacted her plan. She had the zombies place the bear in the middle of the street.

“{Create Undead}” she intoned, her vampiric eyes glowing bright.

The bear rose from the ground, and huffed as the stale air left its lungs. She smiled and did a little jig to celebrate. This day had gone well.

…