I became a legion lich

217 Mind web

Ogres didn’t use weapons, as they would become too small after using gigantization, so they were busy transforming mostly the weapons of the skeletons in the hydra camp.

The skeletons had fought the last battle with their common weapons, but luckily, the trolls couldn’t break through the barriers and didn’t have to waste their weapons.

“A few days, huh...” Athos muttered while scratching his chin. He wanted to resume the march in a few hours at most to minimize the chances of being discovered, but it was better to be prepared.

“I have a question. How are we going to communicate with the skeletons we’ve left behind? There’s a very limited range for the mind link and we don’t have communication cubes. Also, I’d like to take some dwarves with me, to find entrances to the hidden villages.” Ruy asked, unsure of how he should communicate with Athos after they separated.

“I don’t mind if you take some dwarves with you. The problem is how we’re going to communicate over distance. We don’t know how to create communication cubes and the few we could get our hands on were destroyed during the battle, so we couldn’t get our hands on them.” Athos muttered sadly.

The humans had recorded all the battles against Athos, but the first communication cube was destroyed by a minotaur and the second was crushed by the hecatonchires. The communication cube in Malti’s possession had also been destroyed by Malti in a fit of rage.

“We could use letters and skeleton birds could deliver them. There would be a delay in communication, but we would still be able to communicate. Our darkness leaves a trail of dead earth where we pass, so it’s impossible for them to get lost.” Treevor suggested it and the generals agreed with him, but Athos had a different idea.

“Your plan isn’t bad, but I have another idea. Why don’t we use skeletons to form a communication web? We can bury them deep in the ground to prevent them from being discovered by the monsters on the surface.” Athos explained how he used this method to invade the city of Faltra and coordinate his movements with the army.

The undead could relay their thoughts to other skeletons or via the general link, so they would be an excellent form of communication and hard detectable to other creatures. There would still be a communication delay, but it would be much less than using carrier pigeons.

.....

“That might work. We can use skeletons useless to us like the fire ants or the few small animals that survived the battles. We usually send the strongest skeletons into the fight to avoid losing skeletons unnecessarily, so many of them have survived so far.” Emília agreed with his idea.

“The mindlink range limit is just over 2 kilometers, so we can cover a lot of ground with a single skeleton and at the rate we’re developing, we can cover the small losses easily.” Athos began to drum his fingers as he thought.

‘The communication issue can be resolved easily, so there’s not much else we need to discuss. We just need to wait for the dwarves to finish corrupting the weapons. I think I’ll spend these days hunting and practicing magic.’ Athos thought.

‘I can get the energy needed to complete the fifth layer and create spells that would be impossible to create with my previous power. I’ve been using the same spells forever and I need to update my arsenal.’ Athos had advanced through the layers too quickly and his spells were still all simple, as if he was a first-layer mage.

With the creation of new layers, his understanding and sensitivity to magic increased, as did the amount of world energy that Athos could control with mana body. Athos could now create spells that would have been impossible before and he couldn’t wait to start practicing.

Two days wouldn’t be enough to create a complex spell, but it would be enough for him to understand his new limits.

***********

Athos spent the next two days between hunting and practicing magic, gathering the life force needed to form the fifth layer. It took less than 100 undead to get the necessary energy, showing how little was left to complete.

He also practiced magic seriously, realizing how smoothly he could control magic now. Athos had ignored his magical training with everything that happened in the last few months and see the difference in power shocked him to the core.

Athos could now cast the Meteor Spear spell in a quarter of the original time and with much more power. The spear could be up to 30 meters long, but its power would become scattered and difficult to control, so Athos standardized the spell to use it at a maximum of 10 meters.

‘Now I understand why most high ranking skeletons don’t use spells with such a large area of effect, except when they are going to decimate groups of weak soldiers. Increasing the area of effect too much decreases not only the spell’s power, but also its speed and increases the difficulty of controlling them.’ It was the conclusion that Athos reached while practicing.

He felt that in a few more layers he could cast spells over a hundred meters, but it would be almost impossible to control such a spell and useless against powerful enemies.

Unlike his magic, his magic organ didn’t undergo such drastic changes this time. His body was already complete, so there was no change in his appearance. The amount of energy it could contain increased and the quality matched its core.

The magic organ’s ability to hold spells or skills cast was also increased and Athos could now cast incomplete spells or skills that the magic organ would finish casting, saving time and energy.

Athos could feel that something else had changed in his body, but he couldn’t say what it was. He went to Treevor to see if he could get any leads, but the only change Treevor was able to notice was in Athos’ soul instead of his body.

His soul had changed again, the gray mask covering his entire body now. The face still didn’t have any special features, just holes where the eyes and mouth should have been.

Treevor felt goosebumps at the sight of this and after briefly describing it to Athos, stopped talking about it. Knowing this didn’t help matters and with no means of investigating his body, Athos was forced to drop the matter.

Ruy, Astrus and the basilisk took 30,000 skeletons with them towards the mountains, burying small skeletons of rats and rabbits as they went. They mostly took monsters with them, but they still took with them 100 wizards and a few thousand goblins and kobolds.

Every time they buried a skeleton, one of the generals would send a test message to Athos to confirm the method’s functionality. Communication worked perfectly, but the farther away they were, the longer it took for the messages to travel.

Athos came to the conclusion that this method would not be viable in the long term and needed to find a way to replicate the communication cubes or create a similar technology. It was another item on her long to-do list for the future.

In the meantime, the wyverns and hive hawks were sent to investigate the manticore territories and used the same method to communicate with the army, but used birds in the sky to maintain communication.

It was a more dangerous method, as it ran the risk of a flying monster appearing and attacking a skeleton while it was alone, but skeleton flying monsters were ordered to flee as soon as they saw monsters and wait for them to leave before returning to their position.

The orders worked and a single blade-winged bird was destroyed in the process, lucky for them. The wyverns managed to reach the territory in less than a day, but all they found was an abandoned camp.

There were no signs of battle, so the manticores were not forced out, but left their territory of their own accord. Malic followed the tracks left by the marching demihumans and found them a few dozen kilometers into the desert.

They were not injured and marched steadily. Malic thought for a moment whether to attack them, but their numbers were too great and the manticores were capable of flight, so she could be in danger if she was careless.

His mission was only to investigate the manticores, and he didn’t need to take unnecessary risks.

Athos received the news less than 5 minutes after Malic came back within range of the mind web and reported it, clicking his tongue in annoyance. Just as they expected, the smartest rulers kept their closest neighbors under surveillance and noticed the undead, presumably when the undead spread out to hunt.

It was a surprise that the manticores decided to flee rather than try to attack him or make a united front against the undead. It was a problem for the undead that the manticore decided to flee rather than fight since Athos hoped to add them to his undead.

Athos ordered the dwarves to finish the repairs and corruption quickly before resuming the march once more. He also ordered the wyverns to advance as far as possible without losing communication to investigate other territories.