Tybalt knew immediately which skill he was going to choose: Generate Undead.

  But Scrimshaw spoke more to his life experience. Close quarters fighting had been his occupation for the last three years. Being able to make weapons from bone would be a natural fit for him. It was strange to think that his role would now be as more of a commander than a front line fighter.

  Tybalt knew he was unqualified for that—lacked the educational background, experience, and knowledge of strategy that would make him good at commanding armies. His education had only been half-finished. He would need a lot of practice to be an effective leader.

  Still, he chose Generate Undead. He was a necromancer, after all.

  After he had chosen his first skill—the first skill in his life!—Tybalt finally yielded to the growling of his stomach and broke into his small quantity of rations.

  All he had with him was the small pouch of hardtack that all the soldiers carried stuffed into a pocket, plus a canteen of water. He broke the hardtack in two and tried to get a good measure of the water he had and drink only a third of it.

  It wasn’t easy to restrain himself. As he bit into the dry, cracker-like substance, he had to force himself to swallow down what felt like a mouthful of sand and only sip his water sparingly, just enough so that his mouth didn’t turn into a desert.

  Finally, the growling in his stomach subsided, though he was far from full.

  Unable to actually practice with Generate Undead, Tybalt spent the next half hour just pulling mana from within and circulating it around his body, trying to get used to the way the new energy felt. It was very noticeably different from his original mana. The power felt wild, malevolent, feral—like it might tear him apart from the inside if he didn’t master it… which he knew it would.

  With his body at its weakest state since he was a teenager, Tybalt had to take that feeling seriously. Until he got some levels, his natural healing would move at a shadow of its former rate. Any damage that his rampant energies did to his body could be extremely dangerous.

  He spent the hour after that meditating, trying to tame the currents of power he felt coursing beneath the surface.

  Then he started reading the other book he had been given. Beautifully bound in forest-green leather, it was called Invisible Enemies, and it posited a novel theory of disease. According to this textbook, the four humors that Tutor Balthus had explained to him years ago were not actually the underlying causes of health and disease. Rather, the mechanism was tiny organisms, too small for the naked eye to see, that crawled around on the ground, on anything living, and even inside of one’s own body. According to the book, the body was also made up of these tiny organisms, working together to keep each other alive.

  It seemed so incredible that Tybalt would not have believed it if he had not literally been given this book by a god.

  Even as he worked to suspend his disbelief, he was aware that if he had not been awarded two classes that would help him make himself a walking weapon of warfare, the information in this book might have enabled him to lead a medical revolution in the Kingdom.

  Ironic that I’ll be using this knowledge to take lives instead, he thought.

  With the ignorance that the Kingdom’s subjects still labored under, they would be exceptionally vulnerable to an attack through the vector of disease.

  He had thought of the pestilence mage class as a secondary class that would be underdeveloped compared to his defiant necromancer class, but the more he read of the book, the more obvious it became that the power of disease was a workhorse, not something to label as secondary.

  I’ll have to find some people I can experiment on soon.

  Tybalt achieved another first level, this time in his second class, as he started to really absorb the idea of germ theory.

  He checked his status again and was delighted to see how his power was making a rebound from the low it had hit with his initial class change.

  It seemed every level of pestilence mage granted two strength, one agility, three constitution, three fortitude, and two will. It made up for the slight strength deficit that the defiant necromancer class suffered from.

  Strength and agility are never going to be my strengths again, he thought, and I’m still weaker in every area that I was before I reverted to level zero, but I really will only need a handful of levels in either class before I’m deadlier than I ever was before. And it sure is nice to finally have a skill!

  Then he thought about the danger that his squad would pose to him if he had to fight them in his present condition and frowned.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  “You still have a lot of work to do,” he muttered.

  The more he had read of the two texts, the more convinced he was that he would absolutely be executed if he returned to civilization now.

  Which ultimately meant that he would have no choice but to deal with his squad. Permanently. It wasn’t just a matter of the shaman’s curse.

  If Commander Volusia learned that Tybalt had killed Baldwin, the Commander would naturally want to kill Tybalt.

  And since the Tower of Death was a place outside of space and time, Tybalt could not try to hide there and wait for his squad to go away. Not that he would have wanted to, anyway.

  If they went back and reported that one of their squad members had murdered a fellow soldier and gone rogue in the Salt Wastes, and that they had not found the population they were sent to locate, there would undoubtedly be a larger force sent next time. Tybalt could try to hide out in the nearby mountains, but it would be a risky proposition.

  If the whole squad disappeared, it would take the Army longer to realize that they weren’t coming back.

  So Tybalt needed to find some way of dealing with the squad.

  It was going to be impossible to hide Baldwin’s death, but as Tybalt thought about it, he arrived at the idea of pretending that someone else had ambushed them and killed Baldwin. That would rely on Commander Volusia believing him, but even with the Commander’s personal distaste for Tybalt, he would probably listen. Tybalt knew that Volusia was more worried about whoever had inhabited the abandoned village than he’d let on. Otherwise, the Commander would not have bothered sending him and Baldwin out to scout the surroundings.

  Volusia was already primed to believe the enemy action theory.

  What would happen if Tybalt told him that story?

  Either Volusia would decide that the squad needed to stay and avenge Baldwin’s death, or he would order a retreat to bring reinforcements.

  Probably the former, at least initially. Retreating immediately would make him look cowardly to his superiors.

  If things went that way, Tybalt might be able to slowly pick off members of the squad as they advanced into the Salt Wastes and the nearby mountains on this wild goose chase.

  Conversely, the Commander might order a retreat back to the larger company. Tybalt wasn’t willing to simply return if that happened. There was too much at stake. If someone with an identification skill of some sort—or an Investigator with an identification stone—happened to look Tybalt’s way, his new classes might be discovered. The army had employed a mage with an identification skill of some sort to scan all the new recruits when Tybalt joined the army, and he gathered it was standard practice. Based on that, the ability must not be too uncommon.

  If the Commander decided to march the full squad home, that circumstance would also require Tybalt to kill off the squad to cover his tracks. Doing that during the trek back through the desert would be difficult—more difficult than it would be if they were in the part of the Salt Wastes that bordered the mountains, where there was more concealment and possibility of ambushes—but it would still be absolutely necessary.

  All roads lead to mass murder, Tybalt thought.

  Above all, Tybalt needed to delay information about him getting back to the Kingdom while he acquired more bodies to control and levels in both classes. While he made himself more difficult to exterminate.

  The big issue was how he could massacre the squad when he was so weak at present. It would have been a heavy lift even when he had been a much higher level of class-less soldier.

  I could turn Baldwin into an undead and just not report back. Then we could slowly pick people off from cover or at night.

  That seemed like a solid enough strategy. The Commander would have to investigate what had happened to his two soldiers when he realized they had disappeared.

  Unlike the strategy of reporting Baldwin’s death to Volusia, Tybalt would not have the burden of pretending that he and the other man had been ambushed. He was a decent liar, but lying all the time about a detailed event—a violent confrontation with the inhabitants of this region—could grow messier and messier and spiral out of control.

  Tybalt did not even know what the local demihumans looked like, besides the ibex beastfolk that the squad had already slaughtered. And the fox girl, if she was real…

  If he pretended that more of the same types he knew about had killed Baldwin, and no further beastfolk like that materialized in this area, Tybalt would look increasingly suspicious.

  So, disappearing and dishonorable ambushes it is?

  The odds of Tybalt succeeding if he tried to kill off his squad this way were not amazing, but depending on how effective his undead were, he was optimistic that he could manage it.

  At least now I have a plan for how I can keep them here while I try to pick them off one by one.

  Hopefully this would also mean Tybalt would have the chance to steal Valmont from the squad. He didn’t like to think of his goshawk stuck in one of their little cages for the rest of its life.

  Tybalt turned his attention to his first pestilence mage skill.

  He had two choices, the same as for his first defiant necromancer skills. These were Generate Minor Ailment and Minor Pestilence Resistance.

  Naturally, he reviewed both options before making his choice.

  Generate Minor Ailment: Manifest your aura in the form of a newly generated microorganism. By concentrating your intent, create an organism that will cause an ailment with minor symptoms of your choosing once it takes hold of the target’s body. As skill level increases, this can become a more precise, deliberate skill. The creator is immune to all ailments generated. Consumes mana.

  Minor Pestilence Resistance: Increase your body’s defenses against pestilence and disease of all kinds. This skill also grants passive immunity to minor ailments. Consumes mana when the body is struggling with a more advanced ailment.

  Again, he found himself excited by the options. This choice was even more one-sided than the first one, though. There was no point in looking for defense against disease yet when he was probably the only pestilence mage in the entire world. He had to focus on offense.

  When he waged his careful warfare against his former squadmates, minor ailments could be a key element in taking them down.

  He locked in his choice and acquired Generate Minor Ailment.

  He smiled and nodded to himself as he confirmed it had appeared on his status.

  Then Tybalt spent what he estimated was the next twenty-four hours in studying his new textbooks, meditating, training his mana control, and napping.

  When he slept this time, he did not dream. He was a little disappointed about that. There were things he wanted to understand that only the fox girl could answer. Plus, she was very cute. Both the version of her that he usually saw and the older version who had been so upset.

  But perhaps it was for the best that he not dream, so he would not be distracted while he was learning the basics of his new classes. His mana training was particularly demanding of his focus.

  Mana control had been a weakness of his before he acquired his classes. As a non-mage, Tybalt had used mana very little in his daily life. When he did try applying mana, as in the Tower, it was only under specific circumstances. Class-less people like Tybalt generally took longer maneuvering mana than mages or others with classes did. That was why neither he nor Baldwin had used it during their furious and deadly scuffle outside the Tower of Death.

  Taking the time to draw it out might have allowed the other man to get the death blow or secure the Tower for himself.

  Now, Tybalt found his ability to draw his mana out improving by leaps and bounds. It wanted to separate from his body, like a quantity of water in a flimsy barrel, trying to burst free.

  Given that, controlling the flow of mana was his new challenge.

  “Ugh!”

  Tybalt dropped to the ground again, panting, sweat dripping down his forehead, mana reduced in an instant to the single digits. This was his fifth attempt at manipulating his new mana, and he had exhausted his pool. Stamina recovered based on fortitude, health based on constitution, and mana based on will.

  Given Tybalt’s balance of stats, he would have to wait two hours for the resource to replenish.

  More time that I don’t have…