[NR] Planning For The Next Night - Chapter 671

On top of the town wall, Jason is running around. His current job is simple enough, keep the ranged fighters that use ammunition topped up. Whether that was arrows, sling bullets, or other strange things. Because while he didn’t have other things to do right now and the ranged fighters were taking their time to make each shot count, that wouldn’t last.

This was the undead setting up the board in the same way that the miasma overhead was another form of preparation. While thinking undead might tend towards following impulses and instincts. They are still long lived beings and likely to make plans which extend well past the present moment. A fact that is especially true for any specimens that are formed from necromancers and similar who turn to undeath to extend their life.

And the rest of the night shows that whatever is behind this undead attack isn’t thinking short term for this siege. Mainly because after the skeleton archers prove ineffective, every following wave was simply more and more zombies until the “spawn” area was saturated.

If, at the start of the night, it looked like one of those zombie movies with the undead crawling out of individual graves. At the end, any illusion of what was happening fell away as no space was left between the surfacing undead. If the zombies had actually spawned underground and needed to dig their way out, it would have left a massive crater. The effect was clearly just something inherent to how the undead were being moved around.

Though early the next morning, after the undead stopped spawning, the town archivists discovered one detail.

Siegfried sighed, “Are there any other similar plots around the town?”

The archivist shakes their head, “The area where the undead rise is the only burial ground of any recency. Even then, that was more of a mass grave set up to hold those who fell before the wall could be completed. Before any of us were even here and we could transition to a safer method.”

Siegfried turns to the town’s head cleric, “And I assume going out there and consecrating the graveyard isn’t going to help?”

Said cleric shakes their head, “If it has been reported to us in the past, we could have done something. Not that it would have stopped this from happening, mind you. The undead simply would have had to actually walk here instead of grave walking.”

Siegfried shook his head, “Why do people even use graveyards? I’ve been a guard most of my life and I’ve never heard of anything good coming out of the practice.”

The cleric shrugs, “It works most of the time. A consecrated burial ground keeps the dead, dead and you don’t need any fancy magic. Normal fire, especially at the temperatures a farming town has access to, won’t do the job.

“You almost need magical fire to properly cut any connection a necromancer might use. Even ashes can be raised if you aren’t careful, and so it is actually beneficial if you leave a body complete. After all, while it might be difficult to put down a zombie and worse to handle a skeleton, a cloud of ashes? No farming town is going to handle that, especially when those sorts of undead tend to have fire magic.”

Siegfried, “Well, I guess that is one reason for regular graveyards.”

The cleric shrugs, “Not like a small farming town is making decisions based on stuff like that. Our culture, for good or ill, has body burial in a consecrated graveyard as the proper way to do things. It would take a traumatic kingdom wide necromancy event to change that.”

Siegfried sighed, “And undoubtedly whatever change was made would make us vulnerable in some other manner or lose potency with time. You can’t expect a farmer to read up on why burials are done a certain way. Not even the local clergy may stay on top of such things. They have their own problems to handle.”

The cleric smiles, “Ah, you seem to have come to the answer on your own. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must prepare my people for the coming darkness.”

Siegfried glances up, “Yeah, the waves won’t always be stopping with the coming of dawn.”

While that is happening, the regular townsfolk have their own things going on. Ammo is being counted and discoveries are made. For instance, they weren’t going to be able to recover any used arrows or similar. The desecration rotted and wore away at any ammo left within it over the night. Nevermind the taint of necromancy that the ammo picked up, no matter how minor.

And so the town’s woodcutters have all raced to the forest. Trees being felled one after another as only those with the skills and stats can manage. Not caring about carefully preserving the magic within the wood allows them to speed through an entire grove of wood that can be used to make more arrows.

Then various magic users quick dry the wood, even faster than what Courtney did back in the clearing. Though it is with this that Jason and Courtney find out about the downside of using such methods. Everything in a tree contains its magic and that includes the water.

If you properly dry out a log, the magic within the water will stay embedded within the wood. To strip the water out with magic? Well, that strips out the magic within the water as well.

Not that you can’t use magic to help along the process of drying the wood. You just have to be careful to not move the water with magic, especially if you’re aiming for the heartwood. Even trying to move the liquid into a specific part of the log to concentrate the magic doesn’t work. The tree is limited in how much power it can hold, so packing it tighter just removes the power from elsewhere and then the excess dissipates, anyway.

For more magical wood, the only answer is to grow it to be more magical. A long-term task that doesn’t always end up working. Which, of course doesn’t stop large organizations and is the only reason the larger seas have any sort of boat presence.