Close the Door and Beat the Dog

"Truly stupid skeletons!"

The thugs whistled as they pursued the skeletons retreating into Kurd City District.

When they noticed the skeletons hadn't even closed the city gates, only running deeper inside the walls, their laughter grew even more brazen.

Empty-headed skeletons—utterly devoid of intelligence, indeed.

With the walls blocking them, attacking would have been difficult.

Now the skeletons had left the gates open, inviting them in—like lambs to the slaughter.

"So there's a castle inside!"

"Haha, you think this can stop us?"

The thugs chased into Kurd City District and spotted the Armory District at its center.

Another ring of walls stood there, but compared to the towering Wall District, the ten-meter-high Armory District walls were far easier to breach.

"Shut the door and beat the dog!"

The thugs thought the skeletons had forgotten to close the gates, but Medivh had deliberately lured them in to fight.

Better for all enemies to die—he had no intention of letting a single thug escape.

Drawing the thugs into Kurd City District was like catching turtles in a jar.

The thugs never noticed the gates closing behind them; their eyes were fixed solely on the central castle.

As long as they captured the central castle, this town would be theirs—along with all its food and wealth.

"Loose arrows!"

Once the thugs entered range, at Medivh's command, the Skeleton Hunters and Skeleton Rangers drew their bows and fired. Bone arrows flew from the walls in droves.

There were plenty of archers on the Armory District walls—over two hundred Skeleton Hunters and Skeleton Rangers combined.

They fired simultaneously, forming a rain of arrows.

"Pain..."

The thugs, mostly lacking quality armor, let out bloodcurdling screams under the arrow volley.

Among them, the high-year Green Bone Rangers—equivalent to senior apprentice knights—could pierce even fine leather armor with their arrows.

These thugs were roving bandits; mobility was key, so hardly any wore heavy armor.

"Don't get cocky!"

This group of thugs had the strength to hunt down Winter Fortress's troops, after all.

Seeing their men fall in droves under the arrow rain, the knight-level thug leaders roared and charged forward.

They erupted with Battle Qi, scaling the walls in two or three steps.

"Flame Slash!"

Kurd's supernatural skeletons weren't wooden statues—they wouldn't tolerate such insolence.

Before the thugs could even reach the Armory District walls, they were intercepted by Flame Skeleton Knights, Bone Spirit Warriors, and Spirit Rune Warriors.

"How can there be so many supernatural skeletons here? Is some high-rank Necromancer living in this place?"

Surrounded and beaten by dozens of supernatural skeletons, the once-arrogant thug knights now wore expressions of terror.

Necromancers were indeed a gutter profession, but a gutter profession that reached high rank was still formidable.

The Hospice Blessing only reduced the number of corpses a Necromancer could use and lowered the quality of casting materials—it didn't suppress the Necromancer himself.

A supernatural Necromancer's strength was largely unaffected, worthy of serious caution.

"Lord Mage, we're willing to pledge our loyalty to you—please spare our lives!"

After the supernatural skeletons struck, ordinary skeletons surrounded the area from all directions, cleaning up the common thugs.

Every ordinary skeleton fought with ferocious valor, and the bloodthirsty thugs fell like wheat before a scythe.

Such abnormal ordinary skeletons only reinforced their belief that a high-rank Necromancer dwelled in this town.

Medivh didn't respond to their pleas. From the moment they set foot in Kurd City District, their death sentence had already been signed.

Medivh commanded loyal supernatural skeletons; these treacherous thug knights were utterly useless to him.

Male or female, fair or foul—every thug who charged into Kurd City District fell beneath the skeletons' merciless blades.

Atop the central tower of Kurd City District, Medivh watched with calm, unruffled eyes as the skeletons cleaned up the battlefield.

Over two thousand thugs had attacked this time, and all died within Kurd City District.

Killing over two thousand thugs felt no different from slaughtering two thousand pigs—it left no impact on Medivh's state of mind.

Medivh possessed a maturity far beyond his years. He understood clearly that this was a cruel world of the strong preying on the weak, and when ruthlessness was required, there was no room for pity.

Audrey shared his iron nerve, boasting about her own battle achievements beside him.

This noble girl, full of strange fantasies, was nothing like the affected ladies of Loran City.

Suixiang and the other foreign maids had grown up in the Odyssey Region, accustomed to bloodshed, and felt no psychological discomfort either.

The bodies in the Kurd City District were quickly packed and taken away.

After several processing steps, those corpses would be buried in the Graveyard District, left to settle into history.

The Kurd City District soon resumed its quiet, efficient state of operation, as if that gang of thugs had never come and never affected its functioning.

That gang of thugs—they were all the thugs who had advanced eastward.

After wiping out that gang, the Kurd City District seemed to be forgotten once again.

The bloody turmoil of the Odyssey Region stood in stark contrast to the calm stillness of the Kurd City District.

In that calm stillness, another month passed.

During this month, Medivh learned the earth-type combat skill Savage Stone Charge and directed the excavation of several Residential District ruins.

During this month, Medivh refined a total of two hundred and twelve Grey Bones, one hundred and ninety-six White Bones, and eighty-four Green Bone Skeletons.

These nearly five hundred skeletons were all ordinary skeletons, not a single one a Transcendent Skeleton.

This showed that to obtain Transcendent skeletal materials, one still needed to excavate ancient battlefields.

In ordinary Residential District ruins, Transcendent remains were basically nowhere to be found.

During this month, no skeleton naturally awakened Bone Spirit Power.

The Kurd City District gained two first-rank low-level Bone Spirit Rangers, cultivated using the blood of Big-Horned Ox Magic Beasts.

Currently, the Kurd Region had a total of 1,918 ordinary skeletons—Grey Bones, White Bones, and Green Bones—along with 38 Transcendent Green Bone Skeletons.

With so many skeletons, construction efficiency was very high. The skeletons took only one month to finish building the city wall outside the Kurd East Reservoir District.

At present, the skeletons were excavating and constructing the wall foundations for the southeastern Livestock District and the southern Graveyard District.

Medivh, called a Pioneer but in truth an exile, had no team at all and no time to prepare for pioneering.

When he arrived in the Odyssey Region, he only brought some dry rations, with no seeds for planting.

As for domesticable herbivores, the skeletons had caught quite a few when the Bloodthirsty Mosquito swarm was raging.

That was why Medivh's first supply district built was the Livestock District, not the Farmland District.

The Graveyard District was Medivh's future source of skeletal materials. Now that more and more corpses were being buried there, it needed protection from outside intruders.

"Fishies, swim, swim!"

In a square pond of the East Reservoir, Audrey and the cat-girls were releasing fish that the skeletons had caught from other waters.

Fisheries were also a solid logistics industry—once the Reservoir District developed, it could continuously supply fish to Kurd.

"Tonight we're eating fish!"

Seeing Suihua lying by the bank, staring blankly at a big fish that hadn't swum away yet, Medivh grabbed her and laughed heartily.

These cat-girls seemed to like fish, but before they ate, he wanted to savor a certain white fish first.