"Heh! I really didn't give this guy any chance to take these out."
Eren chuckled to himself as he looked at Goro's chopped hand. He knew exactly what Goro had in his storage through his memories.
Eren had separated Goro's hand from his body before absorbing him so that he could access the dead necromancer's belongings. It took Eren some time to wipe out an Expert ranker's mana signature from his ID stone. But he managed to do so eventually.
Swoosh!
Eren took out the corpses of three rankers from Goro's storage. They were dead a long time ago but looked like they had just died, with no visible injury on their bodies. There was a C-Rank undead in the group, while the other two looked to be in the last stages of D-Rank.
Contracted Undead!
This was Goro's class-specific spell that he could use with the bodies of the dead rankers he had already pre-processed. The contracted undead would have better access to their memories and spells. They would lack souls. But they would be able to move like they were alive due to their retained memories.
The Army of the Dead was Goro's mob summoning spell. It would allow him to summon random undead related to a place or item depending on how he used the spell. The summoned undead would belong to C-Rank or lower depending upon the shells created from the residual mana signatures as well as the amount of death-element mana Goro cared to inject into them.
Goro's undead summoned by the Army of the Dead spell was akin to mindless corpses that knew how to move and pay attention to Goro's basic instructions. The undead's limited access to spells from when they were alive didn't give them the edge they needed.
However, Contract Undead addressed this problem and allowed Goro to collect the corpses of capable rankers. Under the influence of the reanimation array, the preprocessed corpses of these entities could be reanimated. The process ensured that the reanimated corpses of these rankers would serve as his loyal subordinates and not betray him after developing the pseudo-consciousness they were reanimated with.
The only downside of using the contract undead was the fact that it could not be used on the spot for random rankers at the scene. It needed a preprocessed body of the ranker along with the death-element contract array on it. The spell induces pseudo-consciousness with this reanimation array, which also serves as a master-servant contract between the reanimator and the reanimated.
This pseudo-consciousness was created based on the dead ranker's remaining intact memories. The reanimation array in conjunction with the death element powered the pseudo-consciousness of the undead as well as their spells. The preprocess ensured the reanimation didn't rebel against the necromancer.
Eren felt like he had dodged a bullet by not allowing Goro to depend on an incoming backup. He just needed a few minutes of alone time to reanimate the corpses in his storage. The butcher would have had to face a lot of trouble if the necromancer had managed to breathe fake life into his human dolls.
The butcher also realized why Goro mistook Alephee's identity. While looking at Goro's contracted undead bodies, he spoke up.
"I can now understand why Goro thought you were a necromancer. He had kinda the same spell as your Corpse Dance, achieving the same effect differently."
The homunculus was swinging her legs in the air while writing something in her grimoire. Upon hearing Eren's words, she stopped her work and disappeared from her place.
She appeared beside the butcher before commenting.
"Hmm. We would have had to fight in unison had Goro managed to summon these corpses for himself and activate the fake consciousnesses residing within them. I'll go ahead and add that he had a soul-related injury. Possibly due to conducting a necromancing experiment? Only you know better.
That's why he was hesitating to use these corpses from the start.
Goro needed Nico Chains or Rehaal's support to activate these human dolls in peace. Unfortunately for him, that backup never arrived."
Eren nodded at Alephee's prediction right away. Goro was indeed conducting a lot of experiments related to the death element as well as necromancy. That's why he had the soul-strengthening potion with him, which he had used on himself after knowing Eren had an awakened soul sense.
Goro had progressed a lot in his ranking journey and needed experiments like these to enhance his elemental attainments. Without elemental attainment, his ranking status would have been basically stagnant.
Still, Eren had come to realize that the knowledge Goro contained regarding the death element wasn't complete. It was missing something very significant.
Goro felt like he wasn't making full use of his class and his affinity for the death element. The knowledge he had access to was never enough. And he had no set guidelines. Still, he recognized that there was a piece of the puzzle he was missing.
When Goro reached the rank of C, he realized this. Yet, the necromancer couldn't really put a finger on it. Eren didn't want to have the same bottleneck as Goro after acquiring his knowledge. Therefore, he asked Alephee right away.
"Alephee, how would you describe the death element?"
Alephee was looking at the dead bodies of Goro's contracted undead. She destroyed them right away using her time-element spells, breaking the contract and letting them rot to nothingness.
She pondered a bit before answering Eren's question.
"Um... It is difficult to describe Death within the framework of Anfang, Eren. Mostly because the rankers here are not used to imbuing their will or intent into their attacks and mana.
There is an unrepressed intent in death-element mana. An intent to corrode, rot, decay, and become inertia. Unlike other regular elements, it can't be controlled with sufficient finesse by rankers. This is because they don't know how to deal with the intent infused in the mana of the death element.
Every elemental mana contains some form of intent for that matter. Fire-element mana, for example, has the basic intent of incinerating anything it comes into contact with. Take out the ranker's control of the fire-element mana and it would still behave as per its basic intent.
The same is true for other elements as well. It's just that it is more obvious for the life and death element mana. That's because any World's Will makes sure that the intent of life and death element mana remains unsuppressed for steady functioning of its lifeforms.
The wielders of the death element need to add their own will or intent to their spells to make them pack a serious punch. Otherwise, they'll be limited by the peculiarities of their own element."
