The wolves actually exchanged glances at the sudden appearance of animals that looked like walking deads. For a brief moment, they hesitated, their heads tilting, their ears flattening against their skulls. They had never seen anything like this before, creatures that should be rotting but were standing, creatures that didn’t smell like prey or predator. Then they growled sharply, a low, guttural sound that rolled through the trees.

Then they attacked.

They lunged forward, their movements fast and coordinated, the kind of synchronized assault that had brought down deer and travelers and anything else that wandered into their territory.

They probably done this before, maybe a couple of times, attacking lone travelers who wandered too far from the main roads, or deer that strayed too close to the pack’s hunting grounds. That was how wolves survived.

They found weak prey, isolated prey, and they struck together. If an enemy wandered into their territory, they just came together and attacked. It was instinct, pure and simple. Darion and what was with him was no different. To the wolves, they were just another group of intruders, two humans and some strange creatures that smelled wrong. They didn’t know they were attacking a Necromancer and his undead. They didn’t know they were already dead.

For Darion, unlike before when his undeads fought for him, he didn’t panic even to the slightest.

He had been in enough fights now to know when to worry and when to just watch. Of course he usually didn’t panic before, but then he had watched with some sort of relaxed anxiety, hoping the undead he summoned came out on top. He had been nervous, unsure, always half-expecting something to go wrong. But now, he was very relaxed. The fight unfolding in front of him was not a threat, it was a demonstration.

His original undead wolf might even take on all of the wolves at once. The creature was massive, easily twice the size of the largest living wolf in the pack, and it moved with the kind of brutal efficiency that came from being strong.

Darion wasn’t sure if it would come out on top comfortably, but it would certainly make them pay for every inch they took. But with five undeads by its side, this should be a quick one.

They fought. The undeads moved with a terrifying grace, their movements precise and unthinking. The Rops were low to the ground, using their speed and their wide mouths to strike at the wolves’ legs and bellies. The undead wolves were bigger, stronger, their bites crushing bone and tearing flesh.

Seren wanted to shoot an arrow to assist, her bow already raised, an arrow nocked and ready. But Darion stopped her with a raised hand.

"Wait," he said. "This an easy one. The undeads will take care of it. Save your arrow for a tougher one."

Seren brought down her aim slowly, her eyes still tracking the fight.

Now they watched the fight. The original undead wolf was terrifying. It moved through the pack like a force of nature, its jaws snapping, its claws tearing. It bit into the thigh of a wolf, a bite so deep that when it was done, the wolf had no legs anymore. Then it aimed for the neck and ripped a very large portion apart. The wolf collapsed, its body twitching once before going still.

If it continued this way, when the fight was over, there would be no edible something left of the wolves. It would just be wolf meat, divided into pieces by the mouth of Darion’s large undead. The creature didn’t just kill, it destroyed. It chewed, and tore, and broke things apart. And Darion had a sudden, chilling realization: there would be nothing left to raise.

Could Darion turn something like that into an undead? No. For him to create an undead, the key bone structures of the creature or animal had to be intact. The skeleton had to be mostly complete, the joints still connected, the skull still in one piece. If the wolf destroyed the bones, there would be nothing left to bring back. It would just be scattered fragments, useless for necromancy.

And the way his wolf was moving, there might be nothing left. Not even bones.

So Darion immediately unsummoned his large undead wolf. The massive creature vanished mid-lunge, green light flickering briefly before it disappeared. It was too brutal and powerful for a battle like this, and Darion was glad it had only killed just one wolf. He could still salvage that one if he was quick enough.

Let the remaining five undeads handle the remaining five. They were strong enough. They were fast enough. And they wouldn’t destroy the bodies.

In no time, after a minute, all the wolves had been brutally killed. The surviving undeads stood over the corpses, their green eyes glowing, their maws dripping with blood. The pack was gone. The forest was quiet again.

Darion looked at the corpses. His undead wolves and Rops had done the job, bite them and they died. Not chew their bones. Not destroy their bodies. They had killed cleanly, efficiently, the way he needed them to.

He remembered back when he was hunting for a Pachian snake, how when he had taken the venom he needed and commanded the wolf to kill the creature, the wolf had chewed it, literally! It had bitten down so hard that the snake was barely recognizable.

Darion and Seren exchanged glances now. The fight was over so quickly that neither of them had really processed it. One moment the wolves were circling, growling, preparing to attack. The next moment, they were dead on the ground, their bodies scattered across the forest floor. It had been almost too easy.

"That was a fast one," she said, lowering her bow completely now.

Darion nodded in the affirmative. "Yes, very fast."

Truly it was an anticlimactic fight. One that he could summarize quick enough: they met a bunch of wild powerful looking wolves, Darion summoned his undeads to handle it, and they finished the job in under a minute. There was no drama, no tension and no moment where it felt like things might go wrong. Just a quick burst of violence and then silence.