Maid with Necromancy

Three hundred students filled the Tomb of Orty seminar.  The room was now at maximum capacity, with two-thirds of the seats booked in advance and the remaining third reserved for students with the highest rankings. Motivation for performing well was how it was explained, but it felt like the rich were merely getting richer. An uncomfortable thought for someone who’d lived in the streets.

[Poise and Bering] masked those ruminations as Harmony took her seat, a golden badge with the number three stitched to her uniform. The badges were delivered with the dorm rule book, neatly placed on the bed of her room, with a tiny candy as a welcome gift. She walked in on that surprise the night after leaving Warden’s Rest. Nothing like leaving a gift in a locked room to exemplify the fact that there was no expectation of privacy.

The rules weren’t better. Badges were required to be displayed upon earning them until you had at least ten; after that, you could choose. No different gender visitors during late hours. No practicing forbidden arts, an extensive list that included love potions, demonology, sentient sacrifices, and, of course, necromancy.  Other rules existed, but didn’t weigh on her mind as much.

“Healer White, may I sit next to you?” Xera asked.

Harmony suppressed a grimace. The oath attempt had been cute in an imprinting duck or gnome kind of way. On the second day, the youthful student was everywhere she went. Even hopping shadows only slowed the persistent defender down briefly. That had been an attempt to ignore the issue and hope it went away. Clearly, a direct approach was more necessary.

“You may sit.”  With students still finding seats, they had a few minutes before the lecture began. After the girl sat down, Harmony continued. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to complete the solidification of the defender-healer companionship link. We are the rock that holds firm against danger. It allows us to share in facing that danger.”

This babe of a girl wanted to… With one slow breath, Harmony grounded her perception. Xera looked like the youngest student here, which was probably a quirk of her lineage. It’s not like Harmony wasn’t used to being assumed to be much younger than she was because of her height, even playing as a child when needed. Xera hadn’t displayed anything other than competence outside of this misplaced attention, even dragging the drunk Alex and Tasha home. Xera believed this connection was valuable, but what strings did it come with?

“Is this link removable? I’ll also need the specific name of the skill to be run by my academic advisor to get their opinion on how it will affect my educational plan.”

“It’s only beneficial, and it can be removed.  As for the name of the skill…” Xera leaned in, and Harmony matched her so she could listen. [Final Silence] buffered the sound around them for further privacy, as clearly the woman didn’t want to announce this ability. “ [Two Against the End].”

That’s about as long as [Claim the Remains of Power] and nearly as ominous. Having that spot hollow inside of her still itched with hunger. Perhaps Xera’s skill had imprinted a strong desire to link. The offer sounded like one more problem on an already full plate of needing to do things like feed Night, wait for Adric, and learn how to be a proper student.  “I’ll check with my advisor tomorrow.”

Applause started. Harmony joined in not to stand out as Professor Chastain walked into the full room. The woman with blue hair was followed by three metal constructs: a tall humanoid one not too far removed from the servers in Warden’s Rest, the second shaped like a large dog or wolf, and the third was a large three-armed, three-legged metal golem twice the height of Tun-Knee. The clapping died as she stepped up to the podium.

“The Tomb of Orty is a tier three dungeon. That means that in a one-on-one situation, even the weakest guard unit can defeat any of you easily. I don’t care how blessed your childhood was or how expensive your tutors were. Every year, several students perish in the Tomb before the end of the first week. History has shown us that even top students with a full team will perish if they enter early and unprepared. It is my job to scare you enough to make sure you are not one of those handful of students.”

That didn’t align with Von Trell’s description of dungeon ranks or this dungeon. [Recall] played back that conversation. “Dungeons don’t really go to tier zero, even Old Bones is tier one, the same as Nae’s Garden, though that should technically be upgraded to a low tier two because of the lack of solo clears, outside of yours. Tiers are assigned based on bureaucracy, statistics, and good old-fashioned greed. Having a higher-ranked dungeon gets you more benefits. This one is probably upper-tier two, but the influence of the first guild house and first academy gives them that boost. But I’ve never been to this one. It should be fine for you to farm it with your pet prince and toad.”

“This could be you without training.” The professor continued, and so began a steady stream of projections of corpses or gruesome injuries from those that had been retrieved from the dungeon.  Most of the students turned green. A few hurled their breakfast onto the classroom floor. Several got up and left. The scene made Harmony hungry enough that she chastised [Claim] for its greedy eyes on those corpses.  [Keen Investigative Awareness] took in the injuries using necromantic knowledge of the dead, assisted by [Recall] to pull from various memories, both from damage to others and the many, many times she’d died or received an injury while using [Stride Before the Fall]. It painted a picture of how the guards, dogs, and tripods fought. Almost every corpse had  two or three crippling leg or arm injuries, as well as a lethal blow to the head or heart of a student. Single-shot kills were rare, but it wasn’t that they were playing with prey; the crippling was brutal-looking, but methodical in that the damage didn’t come with superficial injuries. Hurt them, and if they didn’t turn back, then kill them.

That was mostly the case. It was the injuries that didn’t fit the pattern that churned up unease. Defensive wounds mixed in. Single blows to the head that were destructive enough to cover a blow from a different source, but not enough to erase the signs if you had the experience to see them. People might have used the guards or dogs to assist in the injury pattern, but many of them were dead first, as the old blood patterns did not match what a fatal wound on a living person would look like. The Academy had a murder problem. Nothing like that to add additional confidence around going into a dungeon with a group of strangers.

Profession Chastain never mentioned that risk. The projections were a backdrop rather than a focus as the professor talked about the details; only notable students were mentioned by name. The Seventh Prince of Saloum, or the Prodigy of the Verdant Green Waters Sect, and others, Harmony lacked the context to understand, but produced reactions from the crowd that drove home the point that powerful people died in The Tomb.  “Dogs are introduced on the second floor. It is a mistake to think of them as weaker than the guards.  They have twelve rotating skills for their three slots instead of nine, bringing added variety. We have fewer examples to show because rarely do any first-years, even in groups, make it to the second floor.”

[Familiar Bond] rumbled inside her, pulling some attention away from the lecture. Reflexively, Harmony’s hand went to her empty pocket. She’d left the toad snoring on the bed this morning when he croaked at her after she tried to nudge him awake. He’d taken to sleeping at the size of a mid-sized dog in her bed. The sneaky black toad was up to something. Having the frackling around had turned up some competitive fire inside him. He’d better not be trying to hunt the resident associate’s familiar.  

“I could stand here for days showing you bodies, telling you facts, but what I really want you to do is come down here and see how weak you are against these armors. Because of the number of silence-type skills in the Tomb of Orty, you’ll try this with no skills, only strength. If you really think you’re strong, the tripods will humble you. What are you waiting for? No one is getting out of here for the class credit until you try at least once.”

A vital body should put her at an advantage over any student without a stronger body-type. Not that she’d had time to fully explore its capabilities, from dashing over to Hazeldown to join the games where it was sealed, to racing over to school. It’s not like she wanted to demonstrate the capabilities of all the things she could do.  Hiding her true strength was up there in her list of good bodies to bury and only bring out when needed.  From the carnival to this, much of the school seemed to be focused on showing off students' abilities.  All those murdered corpses were a reminder of why not to.

Harmony joined the line to tackle the tripod; mass alone, combined with the thickness of the armor, would make one of these difficult to accidentally damage too much. Xera followed. Ricort’s economy was based on harvesting and refining this high-quality metal. The city is built on the corpses of these guards, and yet necromancy is anathema. These testing dummies were only walking puppets; only old traces of the spiritual container remained after they’d stripped the insides out.

[Keen Investigative Awareness] watched those ahead strike the three-legged behemoth to little effect, keeping track of the speed at which they moved. [High Kick], through its lens, looked at the martial form of their blows and how they transferred energy. A few small dents when they focused their punch to a point. A blow with wider force distribution would shake the leg.

Xera was beside her as they approached. “After you.” Harmony insisted.

The youthful girl stretched back, foot touching the base of the closest leg. Her whole body twisted, transferring effort from her legs to her body and up through her arm as she whipped forward, her palm slapping the metal. The leg rang like a bell had been struck, a feat unmatched, and when her palm left  the metal, the imprint of her hand remained, creating the deepest blow yet. Sixteenth ranked among first years and a physical class, which would make her maybe one of the top ten strongest here?  It was all an estimate.

No one should expect much from a healer. Emulate the more inefficient stances she’d seen so far. Match the speed of about the middle range she’d seen from participants. The density and efficiency of this vital body will add a good bit, but with all the half-step and fully formed evolutionary bodies that’ve taken their shots, it shouldn’t be too much of an advantage.  Wind up, flex, make sure most of the force behind the blow is coming from only the arm – Don’t put your hips into it – a nice, undented spot that looks sturdy – Harmony landed the blow after putting a lot of thought focused on failure into it.

The metal buckled with a decent-sized dent. Not as big or profound as Xera’s, with no resonance but instead a solid clank. Bloody corpses. There should be a way to save this. Leaning into her mother's acting lessons, Harmony let out a loud yelp, clenched her hand, and used [Renew Spirit] with a touch of [Cold Touch] for a bit of glowing, healing-looking effect. “I might have tried a little too hard,” Harmony confessed, letting her mind rest on the fact that she should have tried less to get a lesser effect to skirt anyone watching with ways to detect lies.

Hyacinth, through her bond, was laughing.

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