This Lich is a Better Landlord Chapter 46

Across the wilderness, a silvery-white troop was galloping at full speed.

Both their armor and the mounts beneath them shimmered with specks of holy light.

This was the Ryan Empire's Knights of Judgment, a special unit composed of high-level paladins. Even their mounts were Celestial Warhorses, summoned through divine magic.

They had all forsaken their given names, addressing one another only by code names.

The paladin leading the unit was called Starlight. He had been riding hard with the Knights of Judgment for three days and nights, desperate to reach the City of Alchemy as quickly as possible.

This was the first time since the Knights' founding that they had the chance to face a Legendary-tier undead. Every one of them was so excited they could barely sleep, so eager they wished they could fly straight to the City of Alchemy and purify all evil in the name of the holy light.

But a vast distance separated the two nations, and the Ryan Empire's relations with other countries were far from friendly. A powerful armed force like the Knights of Judgment couldn't simply be teleported into another nation's territory.

Starlight had been forced to lead his team on many detours. Now, they only had to cross the canyon before them, and the rest of the journey would be a straight shot. However, according to their intelligence, this canyon was occupied by a large Gnoll tribe.

Gnolls were twisted, cursed creatures, innately evil and cruel. Since taking over the canyon, they had slaughtered countless humans who tried to pass through. Starlight had already prepared to cleanse the Gnoll tribe, treating it as a warm-up before facing the Legendary undead.

Though the Gnoll tribe numbered in the thousands, and though his men had been riding for days on end, Starlight was confident that his ten knights were more than enough to wipe them all out.

But just as they reached the canyon's edge, a teammate beside him spoke up. "Starlight, something's not right up ahead."

Puzzled, Starlight observed more closely and indeed noticed something was amiss.

The canyon before them was shrouded in a faint, thin mist.

"A Cloud of Death that hasn't fully dissipated?"

As the sworn enemies of the undead, Starlight was very familiar with common necromantic spells. Cloud of Death was a large-scale offensive necromantic spell. The caster could create a cloud of poisonous fog and cover a designated area with it.

Cloud of Death had another name—the City-Slaying Spell.

If multiple necromancers cast it together, they could create a Cloud of Death large enough to blanket an entire city, causing immense casualties in a short time.

But Gnolls lacked the talent to become necromancers. They certainly wouldn't cast a Cloud of Death in their own home. This meant that a necromancer had been to this canyon, and a battle had taken place.

"Activate poison protection. We're charging in to see what happened."

At Starlight's command, magical light flared up around everyone in the unit. Pale green magical runes formed the shape of shields, allowing the paladins to ignore most poisons.

Then, they spurred their Celestial Warhorses and charged into the canyon.

The poisonous cloud, already mostly gone, had no effect on them. But when they stormed into the crude encampment within the canyon, everyone instinctively held their breath.

The ground was carpeted with the corpses of Gnolls, their deaths gruesome beyond belief.

Starlight dismounted, warily inspecting the bodies.

He soon discovered that the Gnolls hadn't just been poisoned to death. Many had been pierced by weapons, their heads torn off by brute force, and others were missing large chunks of their bodies as if devoured by ghouls... These details led to one conclusion: it wasn't a single necromancer who had slaughtered the Gnolls, but a massive undead army.

"Skeletons, zombies, ghouls, death knights, abominations... so many signs of high-tier undead," Starlight said, worried by his findings.

The Gnolls hadn't been ambushed unprepared. This had been a head-on clash between two armies, and the thousand-strong Gnoll tribe had been annihilated with almost no resistance.

"Let's keep moving in. No matter how powerful this undead army is, they couldn't have left without a single skeleton casualty. This was a tribe of a thousand Gnolls. A tribe this large must have had shamans, a chieftain... They couldn't have been completely helpless."

Starlight's words were as much for his teammates as they were to reassure himself.

The scene before him was so absurd that it gave him a bad feeling.

As they advanced through the canyon, they continued to see nothing but Gnoll corpses. At most, they found bits of rotted flesh on the claws and weapons of the bodies, likely from their fight with the undead.

But they still couldn't find so much as a single bone from a skeleton warrior. They did, however, see numerous large hoofprints on the ground. This was the mark of a disciplined charge by death knights; their Nightmare mounts could ignore the rugged terrain and tear straight through the Gnoll lines.

It was clear the Gnoll shamans had been run through by the death knights' lances before they could even cast their spells, then trampled into the mud.

Further on, they finally saw the mangled corpse of a ghoul, probably left behind because it had been completely dismembered. Near its remains were a hundred times as many Gnoll bodies, along with a giant Gnoll the size of a grizzly bear lying atop the pile.

This was clearly the Gnoll chieftain. His physique alone suggested he had the strength to tear tigers and leopards apart with his bare hands. But the powerful chieftain had been hollowed out, the organs in his abdomen and chest completely gone—a typical ghoul's method of attack.

Starlight examined the scene carefully and came to a conclusion.

The Gnoll chieftain had been impaled by a death knight's lance, and his body was then thrown to the ghouls as food.

He hadn't managed to inflict any damage on his enemies in life; the massive axe in his hands was completely clean of blood.

As for the torn-apart ghoul, it was most likely the sole casualty, and it had probably happened when the ghouls fought among themselves over the food.

What shocked Starlight even more was that the Cloud of Death had been cast after the battle, likely because the victors were too lazy to clean up the battlefield.

"They weren't here to collect corpses or for loot. They were just passing through, and they seemed to be in a hurry. These Gnolls were just unlucky enough to be in their way."

When Starlight reached this conclusion, the expressions of all the paladins grew grim. They were experts in fighting the undead and understood what this battlefield signified. A large undead army had passed through here, heading towards the City of Alchemy.

This army consisted of at least several dozen death knights, thousands of skeletons, and other undead troops like ghouls. More importantly, there were quite a few necromancers among them.

The question, then, was what kind of powerful being could command such an undead legion, so powerful that they didn't even bother to take the Gnoll corpses with them?

Starlight looked toward the City of Alchemy, feeling that this mission was going to be much more difficult than he had imagined.

"Everyone, be prepared. This time, we might be facing more than one Legendary undead."

Starlight's warning tensed every paladin, but a teammate soon spoke up. "Such a massive undead army is marching on the City of Alchemy. Are they planning to attack it? If so, perhaps we can use the city's power to help us deal with them."

The suggestion made Starlight's eyes light up. That was indeed a good idea.

"Right. Let's pick up the pace. It's best if we can bypass this undead army and get to the City of Alchemy ahead of them!"

Starlight produced a magic scroll of Mass Fly. Soon after, the group of paladins shot through the sky like meteors, carefully avoiding the massive undead army marching on the ground below.

They failed to notice, however, that far higher in the sky, an enormous shadow lurked within the clouds. Only after they were a safe distance away did a massive dragon's head emerge from the clouds.

A colossal bone dragon, thirty to forty meters long, descended from the sky, landing before a massive carriage. The carriage, crafted from pure silver and pulled by sixteen hellish Nightmares, looked like a small palace, exuding an air of nobility and opulence.

The bone dragon let out a low growl towards the carriage. "Sister Rose, why didn't we take out those annoying paladins?"

A cool voice drifted from the carriage in reply. "Didn't you say that Gareth fell in love with you because you saved him in the Ryan Empire back then?

"I... want to try that too."