The Lich King Reincarnates as a Baby

++Fighting similarly skilled opponents is not to my liking, but, obviously, it is something I am willing to do.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

I may have taken too much stimulant. I was not exactly a habitual taker of that substance, and could not, as a result, be sure, but I was fairly confident that my hands were not meant to shake quite as much as they had been, nor was a person indulging in the stuff usually expected to perform an average of three rotations per minute as their peripheral vision seemed to pick up sign of imminent danger behind them.

This was not all bad, however. I also felt extraordinarily alive. Far from simply banishing my fatigue and sleep deprivation, my body seemed to have been supercharged well beyond its natural scope.

Had a warrior announced his presence before me, I may well have challenged him to a wrestling contest to test this new vigour. Fortunately, that did not happen. I had more pressing matters to turn my attention to.

With my device prepared and my magic fully mustered, there was nothing left for me to do.

Except, of course, from actually firing off my opening attack into the warehouse, and bringing sheer chaos to touch down onto the face of the world. I blocked my ears with plugs of aether as I loosed the power, and even with that, and my ten paces’ distance from the weapon, I felt a stabbing ache run down them from the sheer sound of it.

My enemies, actually inside the building that was being struck, probably found things altogether less pleasant than that.

Heavy stone was impacted by something not quite as heavy as cannon shells, but a great deal faster. I fancied there were streaks of fire in the air as it caved in, though I knew for a fact I had not included any incendiary material in the projectiles. Rubble shot in and debris went high; in moments the whole area around us was actually darkened by the thickness of dust blotting out the very sunlight.

Whoever had been occupying that building, they were probably quite disoriented. I decided to worsen their day by hurling yet more magic out, missiles made to flash and pop. Unfortunately, not knowing where Agrian was, I could not risk blindly firing fatal magics into the building without a sizable chance of accidentally killing him.

Fortunately, as I approached, I got a much better look of the interior. Several men were already dead. Or so I assumed, at least. It was equally possible that people had simply been carrying buckets of loose charnel and animal innards, before tripping and spilling them. With the state of their remains it was rather hard to say for sure.

My device was, though powerful, very much a prototype, and an improvised one at that. It did not survive the initial firing. I charged forwards with only my own shield and powers as the mangled aether collapsed and began to throw yet more magic missiles through the air, dense penetrators made to pierce walls and bodies both. They slit open gaps in the dust cloud and mangled the walls on the far side of the warehouse, from what glimpses I could see. Where men were caught by them, they died whether shielded or not.

But my element of surprise and shock did not last forever.

Magicians in dark robes were already overcoming the upheaval and rounding on me with hands up and mana building. Most of them were strong, though none impressed me too much. I doubted any two could have matched me for raw strength.

There were far more than two, however. My shield soon rippled with strain as magic missiles lashed out for it. I ignored the instinct driving me to run and take cover, instead letting myself remain steady and my aim true as I soaked up the shots and carefully returned a magician-killer into each enemy as fast as I could manage them.

Each one was a killing shot, and soon enough I did not have to worry about defending myself more—the enemy were melting away and halting their attacks of their own volition, just to avoid being the next in line to have a hole punched through them.

The debris was starting to clear, giving me a greater view of the interior, but I did not need to wait before I had already seen my brother. Agrian’s magic was more recogniseable to me than his face could possibly have been, and I saw it still glowing with life and stuck close to the floor.

When the view cleared physically instead of just magically, I realised he was still shackled.

My realisation came just as a new problem emerged, however. Several patches of the floor were abruptly pushed up, and undead tore their way free. These were not the workings of ancient genius I had encountered at Sakhent’s temple, but I saw by how they moved and the intensity of mana bubbling through them that each was powerful nonetheless. A skilled necromancer had made all of them, a very skilled necromancer. Perhaps not, however, one with a great deal of time.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I had very little time as they stormed towards me. What I had even less of than time, though, was witnesses. . Agrian was chained and seemed angled away from where I was standing, he could not see what was about to happen.

So I extended my power, and for the first time in long, miserable aeons I once again used necromancy in battle. I felt the mana move out of my body and mutate, warp its way into something dark and primal, older than night. A force that had set the very first of my species’ ancestors huddling together in fear. Death itself answered my summons with interest, and I sent it rolling out over the undead.

It did its work instantly.

Enemy magicians emerged expecting to see me bogged down by undead and take their chance at counter-attacking. Instead they found their own servitors turning on them, slavering undead shambling ahead and bowling unsuspecting men down before gnashing apart their skin and flesh with rotted teeth and inhuman jaw strength. It had been so long since I had enjoyed the sight of people being eaten alive by the undead, I had almost forgotten how satisfying it felt.

Sadly, I was not able to enjoy it forever this time. My enemies were far from taken care of, and Agrian’s life still hung by a thread.

That thread was thickening with each magician-killer I shot out. My accuracy was no better than ever, but my targets were all the easier to hit now that they were pinned and screaming beneath their own former minions. I claimed three more lives before another change came.

Necromantic energies washing over the room, sinking into the undead. In another instant all of them went rigid, then turned on me all over. I was so surprised to see my control broken—or rather, the initial control of whoever had summoned them reasserted—that it took me a critical moment to properly react with a wall of aether.

For a few moments the undead struck at it, cracking the substance and threatening to break through fast. I threw out my power again, now wrestling against the mana of another.

I saw who was responsible; a girl who looked no physically older than me, but was glowing with…impossible power. She was not my equal in raw strength, but the fact that she possessed such mana without my advantage of training from birth…had I just encountered someone as talented as myself?

There was no more time for me to ponder that, because she threw more power into the undead and this time they reached a breaking point.

Most of them did not seem to know what to do between the two conflicting necromantic forces acting on them. They dropped to the floor and began smashing their heads against it until skulls broke. Some, though, received more of my power than my enemy’s, and they turned on the girl’s allies while she strode forwards to focus on me.

I strode forwards, too. Eager to test this new adversary.

Her hands came up and I saw the air shimmer, then a torrent of liquid shot for me. Aether caught it, melting down into bubbling sludge. Not water, then. Acid. And it was still pooling along the floor, seeking my feet and moving slow enough that it would slip through my shield unresisted. I took to the air so that would not happen and dangled myself from the ceiling with aetheric hooks as I returned fire.

The girl did something odd. Her body seemed to shimmer and shift, blurring at the edges as she flitted between one place and another. I thought, for a second, that she was simply moving with a Demigod’s speed, but that was not it. No, she was actually teleporting herself on the scale of inches and millimetres.

An interesting technique that I very much intended to acquire, but for the time being it served to foil my attacks. Magician-killers did nothing to this defence because they simply passed right through it. She retaliated with a magic missile that arced for me and struck my shield dead-centre, then screamed out an opposing magic that weakened the aether and let her projectile pass through.

For the first time in a long time, I saw my own blood splash against the inside of my protection. The girl smirked. This smirk was an indignity too far.

I threw my arms out and dropped a rolling mass of necromantic energy upon her. She tried to use her flickering evasion, but there was no dodging this. It was a constant, perpetual death across a whole area and just overlapping it for mere milliseconds dragged away her life force all the same. She surprised me by having a lot of it, stumbling from the radius of the attack looking a shade paler and less healthy. She was just in time for my next attack, a roiling lightning assault that left the ground around her semi-molten, followed by a downwards jet of force which slammed her hard into the newly-melted magma.

She was shielded too, unfortunately. Had she not been, I would have cooked her then and there. Instead she burst back up to her feet and sent a volley of arcane arrows twisting for me, all simple things, but self-guiding and hitting with enough power that, when they abruptly tore into the stone over my head, they succeeded in dislodging my hooks and dropping me straight down.

I halted my fall by splaying both arms and propelling aether beneath me, then retaliated with another wave. This time I lifted up the falling rubble to throw like pellets from a scattergun, and the chunks smashed against my enemy’s shield before breaking through and scraping her skin raw with high-velocity dust. She cried out and stumbled back as I landed, but before I could turn my attention to finishing her, another magic missile struck me from elsewhere. Then another.

And then, mere moments later, half the necromancers seemed to have finished dispatching my commandeered undead and turned their focus onto me.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!