A cloaked man whose only body part that could be seen were his skeletal hands, long white beard, and sharp red eyes below his black cloak looked into the army of Undead he led.
A bit over fifty of his Undead were quickly caught in a pitfall trap of twenty meters deep, many of them were trapped there due to being pierced by the spikes in there, while the other half was slowly attempting to crawl back, although not managing to do an excellent work as they fell back constantly.
The man had walked outside of his dungeon the moment he left the giant Hydra Undead to deal with the pesky children that invaded his domain. He had already decided this long ago, but their invasion motivated him to do what he had been planning for years, accumulating materials to make his Undead army of almost five hundred.
The ones he had left with the kids were merely "failures" or weaker undead he didn't seem to care as much, even the Hydra was merely an experiment he made which he abandoned later.
With that monster blocking the escape route of the dungeon, he was sure enough those kids would either by the Hydra's power or by being buried alive by the crumbling dungeon as the Hydra rampaged everything. Although his smile was quickly moved into an annoyed expression the moment he looked into a group of undead from his army falling into such a simplistic trap.
Although he was initially annoyed, he ignored the fallen undead and ordered the rest of the army to circle the pitfall, evading it swiftly in the process, all while he looked into the small creature running away from his sight.
"So you're the culprit, a spirit capable of manipulating soil…" He said while narrowing his red eyes. The old man pointed his staff, made from rotten black wood and with many skull and bony decorations as a blue flame emerged from within it, overflowing with death essence.
"Phantasmal Flare, die!"
A small fireball made of phantasmal fire reached the small and scurrying mouse, as the mouse quickly dug underground, hiding from the explosion.
The little mouse began digging deeper and deeper while advancing further, quickly attempting to reach his master.
"Tch, damn rat… Well, whatever." The old man sighed, looking into the distance while sitting over a throne made of bones carried by two Rotten Giants and guarded by tens of Skeleton Knights.
He noticed the large village, which had grown in size several times since the last time he could see it from here. It was now over three times the original size he remembered, and had over three times the original inhabitants, with many big buildings that never existed in here before.
From his passing memories, traumas he would rather not remember emerged one after the other. The voices of the people telling him he was a freak, a monster, and something that should exist constantly swarmed his mind, making his desire for revenge grow deeper and more monstrous.
"Y-You're a monster…!"
"It is not natural to do that… You can't simply do that!"
"We don't want to be your friends anymore…"
"You're not my son! I never had a son!"
"Please, just leave! Leave this village and never come back again!"
"We'll call the priests to apprehend you!"
His old teeth began to grit furiously, as the old man looked into this same village. Almost 90 years since his departure from there, he was finally back. Perhaps all those people that caused him suffering were gone now, but his anger and resentment was not gone. He could not rest in peace until he were to turn this entire village into ashes.
He was going to burn it all, not only for the cult he joined, but for his own personal and wicked motives.
"It is time for you to pay back… The ones that did all those things to me might not be alive anymore, but their children surely are… That'll be good enough to satiate this swelling resentment I have inside my rotten heart…" He thought. "I have forgotten my humanity and I'll embrace this pain to finally evolve into a greater being."
A large red jewel incrusted into his throne glowed with eerie and demonic red light, imbued with enormous quantities of power.
"After finally overcoming my trauma… I shall be reborn anew."
As the hunters almost reached the village, they couldn't help but talk in panic to adress the situation. Many of them were unaware of what were Undead truly aside from bedtime stories to scare them when they were children.
What they barely knew was that they were a type of monster often seen in folk tales that were undead corpses risen through strange sorcery into monsters that lacked the qualities of the living yet were alive somehow. Their endless appetite for flesh made them predate the living the most, and they were a danger to all humans.
Unlike other monsters who were territorial or simply hunted other animals or monsters to sustain themselves, much like wild beasts, undead were supernatural beings that were not part of the order of nature at all. Their very existences were a violation to that.
Undead only happened in areas with large quantities of miasma and phantasmal essence, often in old battlefields or dungeons, but this forest had always been safe of that.
"Is there really someone capable of bringing them here?"
Therefore, what everyone thought was that somebody artificially used Death Magic to bring the dead back to "life".
"None in the village that I know of…"
"Yeah, people that can control and rise the dead are rare, and often seen as evil!"
"Toying with souls and desecrating the bodies of people… How horrible…"
"There's a tale my grandma told me, about someone in the village that once was born with those powers…" Gradus said while helping the tired Joan walk back to the village. "The Tale of Reaper Child…"