Chapter 1007: The Necromancer Everyone Feared

Marcus Skeiner had already pieced together the truth about Ethan and Xandria’s relationship.

"Heh, you dumbass. What did you think? You seriously believed we captured that fortress with our own strength? You should be thanking us. If we’d attacked you from both sides, the Blade Syndicate wouldn’t even exist anymore."

Xandria’s blunt answer confirmed everything Marcus had suspected.

"I knew it," he muttered with a resigned sigh.

Ethan smiled, about to say something in response, when a sudden commotion interrupted him. He turned toward the source of the disturbance.

A headless warhorse with flaming hooves was galloping across the sky, every stride leaving blazing footprints suspended in midair. A trail of fire stretched behind it, lingering for a few moments before slowly fading away.

"It’s Meatball!" Leo rushed to Ethan’s side, his face instantly growing serious as he pulled out his iron staff and prepared for battle.

Marcus, Xandria, the other guild leaders, and even the Renegade Alliance members who had been cleaning up the battlefield all stopped what they were doing. Within moments, everyone had regrouped with their units, weapons drawn and eyes fixed on the figure in the sky.

The tension in the air was almost unbelievable. They hadn’t looked this nervous even while facing an army of nine million enemies.

"Boss, what do we do?" Victor asked as he hurried over. "Yeah... why is he showing up now?" Marcus said quietly, his hand tightening around the grip of his shield.

Ethan glanced around at everyone’s expressions before looking back at the approaching rider. "You’re all this scared of him? I thought he joined the Blade Syndicate. Marcus, why do you look just as tense?"

Unlike everyone else, Ethan remained perfectly calm. Xandria didn’t seem bothered either.

Only one person in the Renegade Alliance seemed even less concerned than they were. Off to one side, Markham hadn’t even looked up. He remained crouched over the battlefield, casually searching corpses for loot as if nothing unusual was happening.

"He did join them," Marcus explained, "but it didn’t last long. He had a falling out with someone from the Steele Consortium. Next thing we knew, he’d raised an army of skeletons and nearly wiped out our fortress. After that, he went completely rogue in the Northern Frontier Region. He’s a freelancer. Doesn’t matter whether it’s players or monsters, if it moves, he’ll kill it. He’s clashed with your people dozens of times. Pretty sure these two have both died to him more than once."

Marcus pointed toward Leo and Victor. Ethan looked at them, and the two exchanged awkward glances before silently nodding.

"After you two split up, Meatball started targeting us whenever he got the chance," Victor said with a bitter smile. "He stole world bosses from us over and over again, and that undead army of his is a nightmare. Every time we fought him, we took heavy losses. Now he shows up right after a battle with millions of corpses lying around... I’m worried he might..."

Before Victor could finish, Meatball stopped high above the battlefield. A deafening explosion boomed across the heavens, and dark clouds spread outward like black ink across a white canvas, swallowing the sky in seconds. Gray flakes, like lifeless ash, drifted slowly downward while a thin layer of ashen frost crept across the battlefield, the air growing heavy with the unmistakable stench of death.

"Boss, let me stop him!" Victor immediately summoned his adorable little owl mount and stepped forward, but before he could move another inch, Ethan caught him by the arm.

"Forbidden... Undead Cataclysm... Rebirth." The words drifted down from above. A deep WHUUUM shuddered through the air.

Every corpse scattered across the battlefield, now blanketed in gray ash, suddenly twitched. Crack... crack... crack... The sound of grinding bones echoed across the deathly silence.

Bodies slowly pushed themselves upright. As they rose, strips of rotten flesh peeled away from their bones in thick chunks, disintegrating into dust the instant they touched the ground, as though the corpses had been decaying for thousands of years. One after another, skeletons emerged from the remains.

Victor looked back at Ethan in confusion, only then realizing Ethan was still holding his arm. It wasn’t because Ethan wanted to stop him; it was because it was already far too late.

That terrifying lunatic had just raised more than three million skeletons in a single spell. Every fallen coalition soldier on the battlefield had become one of his undead servants.

They hadn’t backed down against nine million living enemies. But three million undead skeletons were somehow even worse.

Part of it was their appearance. Endless rows of rattling bones advancing together were enough to make anyone’s skin crawl. The other reason was far more practical: skeletons didn’t feel fear, they didn’t feel pain, and they wouldn’t stop fighting until every last bone had been smashed to pieces.

Even if you knocked off a skull, it would continue snapping its jaws across the ground, trying to bite anyone within reach while the headless body kept swinging its weapon as if nothing had happened. The sight alone was enough to make most players sick.

And that wasn’t even the worst part. After you somehow managed to grind every skeleton into scattered bones, the necromancer floating above still had one final trick. He could gather every shattered bone back together into a single colossal undead monstrosity. The larger his undead army, the larger that monster became.

With three million skeletons, if he actually used that final spell, the resulting creature would tower over the battlefield, possibly even dwarfing the Demonic Siege Engine.

Everyone stood frozen, waiting for the inevitable attack. Instead, the skeleton army marched straight through the Renegade Alliance’s ranks.

Several players nearly attacked out of instinct, only stopping themselves at the last second, but the skeletons paid them no attention whatsoever. They simply continued walking past everyone before assembling some distance away into a massive formation. Then something completely absurd happened.

The skeletons began shuffling around, bumping into one another as they awkwardly tried to recreate the exact blade formation Ethan’s army had used earlier. Unfortunately, mindless skeletons weren’t exactly tactical geniuses; the moment the formation was almost complete, skeletons started tripping over one another and collapsing into messy piles of bones.

Silence fell across the battlefield. Everyone could only stare.

"...Quit screwing around, idiot. Get down here already!" Markham’s voice suddenly rang out from below. Victor and the others blinked in confusion.

"Hehehe." The cloaked figure atop the headless flaming warhorse let out a rough, grating laugh before turning his mount and descending toward Ethan. Marcus watched in complete disbelief as the infamous necromancer landed beside him.

"Boss! Hehehe! So? How was my entrance?"

This... this was the same terrifying monster everyone had been talking about? The man eagerly pulled back his hood, and instead of the fearsome villain they had imagined, they found a chubby, pale-faced young man wearing an almost embarrassingly eager grin, looking more like someone desperate for praise than a legendary necromancer.

"Mmm. Not bad," Ethan said with a small nod. "But I thought I told you to quietly deal with the Blade Syndicate. How did you end up becoming a rogue player instead?"

Marcus visibly flinched. ’So... Ethan had been the one giving him orders all along?’

Meatball scratched his head sheepishly. "I was planning to wreck their guild headquarters. But then you disappeared without a word, and that jerk from the Steele Consortium started acting like he owned me, ordering me around. So I thought... destroying the Blade Syndicate would be way too easy."

He grinned, clearly pleased with himself. "If I wiped them out, he’d just throw money at the problem and build another guild. Guys like him always have enough cash to start over. So instead, I figured I’d leave the Blade Syndicate stuck to him like dead weight. Let them keep dragging each other down until everything blew up in his face. Watching him take the blame for their failures sounded way more satisfying."

He shrugged. "Besides, the Blade Syndicate isn’t a real threat to us in the Northern Frontier Region anyway. We can crush them whenever we feel like it."

"So I kept following your original plan. I made sure everyone thought the Renegade Alliance and I were enemies, then spent my time making life miserable for the Blade Syndicate and the Nocturne Order. Honestly, it was hilarious."

His grin widened even further. "I’ve been waiting forever for the day you finally called me again. You have no idea how excited I was this morning."

Then he glanced toward the endless sea of skeletons and frowned slightly. "Only three million, though? You told me there’d be more than nine million enemies. Don’t tell me the rest haven’t arrived yet. Ah, whatever. I’ll just use these three million to soften them up first. Hehehe."

The words poured out of his mouth so quickly they barely paused for breath.

By the time Meatball finally stopped talking, Marcus felt like his brain had completely stopped working just trying to keep up with everything he’d heard.