The Accidental Necromancer
Exploit

The first orc to die did so with an arrow sticking out of his eye socket.

As a 21^st century human, I had qualms. I was all too aware of how people throughout history had dehumanized their enemies. But I was also aware of how easy it was for a westerner to dismiss the wisdom of the natives, and all the natives of Amaranth that I could talk to, human, troll, dryad, or slime demon, agreed that there was no reasoning with orcs on the warpath.

The orc was a scout, moving ahead of the rest, and he never knew what hit him. Fortunately he bounced, or I should say shuffled, right back up again. Now he was on our side, and the feathered shaft sticking out of his face gave him a rakish appearance.

What, you’re murdering people to create zombies now? I’m proud of you, Abby!

Nothing pricked my conscience like Enash’s approval, but it didn’t stop us from setting an ambush. The three dozen orcs were moving in three groups, one of which was apart from the others. They split into small groups to forage, because they weren’t big on being slowed down by bringing lots of supplies, and they probably didn’t realize that the squirrels that fled from their advance were our spies.

We were ready for the dozen or so that came hacking their way through the forest, following the path of the scout. Gren started us out with an arrow, taking one down. Then Valeria and Talos made themselves visible, and the orcs charged.

Vines lashed out from the trees, tripping and entangling some of them. Gren launched another arrow from cover, finding her mark. Lesseth dropped from the leaves, causing two to scream in agony as acid ate at their skin. Some orcs turned, and saw not only the slime demon but an orc shambling toward them with an arrow in its eye. Some charged back in that direction, tripping over more vines. Meanwhile, Talos and Valeria advanced to fight those who continued forward – there were only three of them that had managed to keep up the charge.

Life Drain. A beam of coruscating dark purple extended from my wand to one of the three, and restored precious mana while weakening the orc.

Axes clanked off armor, steel cut into flesh. Valeria and Talos were more than capable of taking out a couple of orcs. Other orcs tried to do something about Lesseth, but she reformed quickly when an axe managed to strike her liquid body, and one of those axes continued on through and bit into the orc beneath her, its body hissing as acid ate away at its flesh.

Meanwhile, Gren kept shooting. True to her word, whatever sickness she felt as a result of the flood of early pregnancy hormones hitting her body wasn’t slowing her down.

The whole thing was over in seconds, with three captured in vines, two dead from acid, three from arrows, three from the paladins, and one from Life Drain.

Gren had her knife out. “Kill the other three so you can make zombies from them?” she asked.

The orcs clearly understood her, because their green skin paled. But they didn’t say anything, and didn’t plead for their life.

“No, we need to find out a few things first,” I said. Killing prisoners didn’t sit well with me, although it seemed inevitable. We didn’t really have a good way to keep them around. Maybe I could give them all a giant futanari fetish, but that spell worked too slowly, as I understood it, and took too much mana.

I started raising the dead, gaining some experience as I went.

Yes! Zombie army! Finally!

I ignored him. Pretty soon, I was out of mana.

Now you drain the prisoners, and …

In a way, I was embarrassed that I already figured that out.  I recharged, leaving the remaining orcs barely alive. I noticed Valeria and Talos looking decidedly uncomfortable, but Lesseth, reformed back into her red, humanoid self, was grinning.

The orcs just stared at me, but I noticed the stares were directed at my chest. Well, I could use that.

I picked the orc with the smallest tusks. Charm Person.

“Hi there,” I said. “You’re the cute one, aren’t you? I’m going to be your friend.”

He blinked at me. “Friend?” he said. “Bah.”

“Would you like me to take my top off?” I asked.

“Uh, well, yeah.”

I did, since I was wearing a bra. “See? Friends,” I said. “I just want to know how many of you there are?”

“There’s only one me,” he told me.

Great, philosophy. “How many orcs in your warband?”

“A lot. More than I’ve counted.”

I tried a different tack. “As orc warbands go, is it one of the biggest, or on the small side, or –”

“In between, I guess. Can I touch those?”

So, hopefully, not a thousand. Five hundred? The information was better than nothing, but still wasn’t at all definite. I didn’t want him touching my boobs, but if it got us real information, I could deal with it. “If you tell me where you’re going, you can.”

He shrugged. “They don’t tell me.”

“Who would know?”

He pointed to one of the zombies. “He was our leader.”

Xyla murmured, “Another one of the groups is just north of us, maybe a half mile, but they’ll be leaving the forest soon.”

I sighed. “Alright.”

He was still staring at my chest when I finished draining him, so at least he died happy.

For using your sexual attractiveness to kill an Orc, you gain 50 experience points. You need 870 experience points to reach third level.

I blinked. He was captured, helpless, and barely alive. I got extra XP because he was staring at my tits? I knew an exploit when I saw one.

 Lesseth hopped back in my bag, and the others followed Xyla through the woods while I took care of the prisoners in privacy. I had to take my bra off to get one’s attention, but it was a small price to pay for more experience, and when I walked out of there I only had 740 to go.

I really had no way of keeping captives, and we needed the numbers. I put my clothes back on, told the zombies to follow me, and hurried after the others.

This time we weren’t able to set up quite so well. Like before, Gren took out one with an arrow from distance right away, but one of the Orcs immediately ran, seemingly to warn the other group. Several of them unstrapped bows.

Lesseth jumped out of the bag and charged, taking a few arrows for the team and harmlessly extruding them out of her body. She was a good distraction, but not nearly as useful as she would be if she was waiting from above. Covered by the guys with the bows, the other orcs charged the armored paladins, and I lost track of Gren – and she wasn’t firing her bow anymore.

“Fall back!” I yelled to the paladins, but they ignored me. The zombies were more responsive, as I told them to charge the orcs. They did, but boy did they ever move slow.

Vines lashed out from the forest, whipping the orcs in the eyes rather than trying to entangle them. That was enough to slow their charge, and even the odds for the paladins. Still, I saw Valeria take an axe in the shoulder. Her armor stopped it from being a cut, but there was no doubt she was favoring that arm. I wanted to teleport in to help, but I needed to think about how I used my mana, so I used Life Drain instead.

And then the zombies got there. They didn’t fight well, especially, but there were nearly a dozen of them, and they were a big distraction, outnumbering the meleeing orcs so that Valeria and Talos could take on orcs one at a time. At close quarters, the orcs with bows could no longer fire into the crowd effectively, and Lesseth was among them. Her acid stung more than it killed, but they couldn’t entirely ignore her.

Two of them lit torches, and Lesseth had to flee. The others joined the melee, axes cleaving into zombies.

Where was Gren?

But I had to stay busy. Zombies were falling, but so were orcs. Now that I could raise orcs at a distance, I was going to do so. The balance had shifted, thanks to the fact that I could regenerate my army.

Glorious! There’s something extra delicious about using people’s friends against them, isn’t there? One moment they are mourning the loss of their friend Gur, and the next Gur is swinging an axe at their face.

His chattering didn’t make it easier to do what needed to be done. The zombies blocked my line of sight for Life Drain, so I looked to where I’d seen Gren last, thinking she might be throwing up or something, but I didn’t see her. I ran that way, both to try to find her and to look for an angle where I could use spells, and I succeeded at finding the angle but not Gren.

“Xyla! Where is she?” I yelled, as I started sucking the life out of another orc. Not for the first time, I wished I’d been an ice mage, or something that could fight more cleanly.

Xyla didn’t answer me, although I saw her lithe green form moving in and out of the trees.

The branch of an oak tree tilted down and clotheslined a tusked green warrior. Lesseth jumped out from behind a tree and gave an orc an acid hug. Valeria parried an orcish axe and Talos pounded the orc’s head in with his mace. There were only three orcs standing, surrounded by paladins and zombies. Smart orcs would surrender. I circled around, trying to get to where I could charm or drain one when I heard a footstep behind me. I whirled, wand outstretched, ready to teleport away.

“Miss me?” asked Gren, with a smirk.

“Where the fuck were you?” I asked.

“Stop being such a protective prospective parent,” she told me. “I got the runner, of course.”

“Oh,” I said. “Um, good job.”

“I know,” she said.

There weren’t any prisoners this time. I raised some of the orcs, but I was getting low on mana. I saw Talos healing Valeria.

“Xyla?”

“Yes, my love?” Xyla said. “We need to hurry to get the other group.”

“I can drain the trees to get the mana to raise the rest,” I said. “Your call. I can take a little from several, so it shouldn’t kill them unless they are already weak.”

“Do it,” Xyla said.

Despite the fact that several of my zombies had been hacked up by the orcs, I ended up with sixteen of them. They took the brunt of the next fight, as Valeria and Talos learned to work with them and keep themselves safe. The zombies could only fight very simply, swinging away and shambling forward, and the paladins needed to learn to find the gaps they created, which probably didn’t match their images of themselves as stalwart heroes. But it worked, and kept them relatively safe. Lesseth did the same thing.

Gren and Xyla worked on cutting off any retreat, and I used Dimension Step to join them, because that way the zombies wouldn’t cut off my sight lines. We took some hits, but nothing Valeria and Talos couldn’t heal, and at the end of the day we had twenty zombies and there were thirty-seven fewer orcs.

It was a start, but even if there were as few as three hundred left, it wasn’t nearly enough. While we’d avoided letting anyone go to spread the alarm, as far as I knew, if the orcs had any sense of strategy at all they’d either come into the forest in force, or avoid it entirely, as soon as they noticed that every orc that had gone in the forest was missing.

Experience for Next Level: 520

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