Chapter 2: Saving Nation

Before leaving, Nolan nudged the scattered bones of the Skeleton Overseer with his foot. There was no pleasant “ding” of equipment drops, no faint glimmer of items—only a heap of broken iron armor and a heavy blade unfit for human use.

“Is it because I count as half an NPC, or did my rotten luck from twenty years carry over too?” Nolan let out a self-mocking sigh. He bent down, ignored the fragments, and picked up the Overseer’s skull. Its weight was solid in his hand, the only proof that he had soloed this elite undead. In this world, real to the point of cruelty, that skull spoke louder than any words. He hooked it neatly at his waist and walked out of the lifeless town of Shire.

The undead did not care for money. Their raids were aimed at harvesting quality corpses, and that always meant large-scale death. The skeletons and Overseers left behind in the town were there to collect the bodies after the battle.

The houses lining the street, built in the typical southern Elfin style, should have stirred a sense of homesickness in Nolan. Instead, the stench of blood in the air only made him uneasy. The townspeople who had failed to escape lay in the mud, their faces still frozen in the terror of their final moments.

His gaze caught on the body of a woman by the roadside. She was still in an embracing posture, but her arms held nothing. Not far away, a mud-stained cloth tiger toy lay discarded.

Nolan’s steps faltered.

In the game, these had only been NPCs meant to set the atmosphere, data and background scenery. But now that he stood here in reality, the weight of lives trampled so casually made it hard for him to breathe. The suffocating feeling was strikingly similar to the helplessness he had felt when the kingdom fell.

He was no priest who could pray for the dead. All he could do was grip his sword and turn that unwillingness into resolve. To keep the dead from being enslaved by the undead, Nolan burned the bodies and left the town.

The road to Rosenberg was worse than he remembered. It had just rained, and the dirt path was thick with mud. Each step sank unevenly, and his boots were soon caked in filth.

Veli Province, where Shire Town was located, formed the southernmost barrier of the kingdom. Yet years of undead incursions, along with its current duke, had turned it into the poorest and most backward of the three southern provinces. That duke, described charitably as an art-loving “good man,” was in blunt terms nothing more than weak and incompetent. In his previous life, it was precisely this weakness that allowed vast swaths of the southern kingdom to become a breeding ground of flesh for the undead army.

Nolan’s gaze swept across the ground. Among the chaotic footprints, several unusual traces made him stop. Some prints had a stride longer than a child’s but were shallower than an adult’s. The steps were uniform and aligned, nothing like the disorder of fleeing refugees.

Drawing on twenty years of adventuring experience, he quickly read the signs. They were the marching traces of skeleton warriors. Mixed among them was a dragging mark. A corpse mage. A low-level one that needed to stand still to cast, its robe trailing along the ground as it moved.

So it was a skeleton squad led by a low-level corpse mage.

Nolan immediately quickened his pace. Along the way, the scenes of tragedy grew denser; the fleeing townspeople had not outrun death after all.

In less than a quarter hour, he stopped before a corpse dressed in a militia uniform. The insignia on the shoulder marked him as the militia captain who had fled Shire Town. Though he had deserted, Nolan could not bring himself to blame him. Against the undead, fear was the norm for ordinary people, and they were often powerless.

He sighed, bent down, removed the captain’s badge, and tucked it into his chest. “I’ll find the courage you lost.”

He pressed on. At last, beneath a slope, he found the undead squad. At a glance, there were about twenty skeleton warriors clustered around a hunched figure in black robes, moving silently toward Rosenberg.

That was it.

Corpse mages were transformed from the living. The fire of their souls burned brighter than that of skeleton warriors, carrying a trace of human cunning.

“A corpse mage scout, just as I thought.” Nolan held his breath, keeping the scent of the living from giving him away.

The undead’s finest scouts were third-tier skeleton cavalry, as fast as elven stag knights and without stamina limits. Using a valuable spellcaster to lead a group of short-legged skeletons as scouts—this style ... It could only be the lich lord known as “Gangrene.” A notorious border warlord and a specialist in mass-producing corpse mages, he commanded many human defectors. He had so many low-tier caster units that he could afford to use them as expendables. Corpse mage scouts were deceptive and had strong endurance, a tactic unique to him.

Nolan did not reveal himself at once. He circled to higher ground, concealed himself in the shade, and calmly locked onto his prey. In the past, enemies at this level would have collapsed from a single sneeze. But now, if he were entangled by those twenty skeletons, the low-level corpse mage could keep repairing and reviving them from behind. No matter how skilled he was, he would be worn down to death in this level ten body.