No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

A land of frost and dusk stretched to the edge of the world, where the sky hung low and the ground never thawed. In the center of that dead horizon stood a figure cloaked in layered robes of bone-threaded silk, a tall staff planted firmly into the glacier beneath his feet.

He stood alone.

But he did not feel lonely.

His name was Valec.

Not a king. Not a conqueror. A scholar.

He had taken the Necromantic Core not for glory, nor for vengeance, but for knowledge. The understanding of endings. The study of transition. He had wandered tombs unmarked by time, spoken with beings too ancient to remember their names, and wept beside dying stars.

His desire was not domination, but clarity and understanding.

Damien felt Valec's trial through the Core.

He had not fought it.

He had understood it.

Rather than wrestle against the flood of death, he listened. He learned its currents. Let the Core show him all its faces, sorrow, rot, silence, renewal. And when it tried to strip away his self, Valec offered it something instead.

Not resistance.

But purpose.

And the Core, ravenous and divine, accepted.

Damien watched as Valec's body transformed, not with fire, not with light, but with stillness. Every cell of his being harmonized with death energy. His bones no longer decayed. His breath no longer fogged.

He became a living axis of entropy, wherever he walked, death became still, obedient.

No longer predator.

No longer prey.

Just sovereign.

At his peak, Valec was said to have calmed plagues with a gesture, quelled riots of spirits with a glance. He did not raise the dead.

They followed him.

Not out of control.

But out of reverence.

Damien's heart thudded as the vision faded, leaving behind one final whisper from the Core.

"Death… Requires an offering…"

First, the Core had integrated with him. Then it had awakened—fully formed, pulsing at the center of his being. And now, it had begun to spin. Not aimlessly, but with purpose. With momentum. It was heading toward something.

A full activation.

What that would look like, Damien still had no idea.

But the bigger and more important question was… would Damien survive the Necromantic Core's activation, whatever form that is?

Or would he die like the first two visions in his mind?

"Death… Requires an offering…"

"That's right… The first memory, Erivai, offered nothing. And she was devoured. The second, the Warlord, tried to seize control. He too was consumed. But the third… Valec… he offered stillness. And in that stillness, the Core responded. It moved through him. It manifested."

Damien's mind lit up like a storm breaking across a midnight sky.

The message was clear.

The Core demanded not control.

But alignment.

An offering.

Not of power, but of perspective.

And Damien had one.

He stepped forward. Slowly. Calmly. His voice steady as the grave.

"Death," he whispered. "My old friend… walk with me. Let's bring them all home."

He opened his hand. Let the energy rise from his soul.

"My offering… is Homecoming."

The moment the words left his lips, the world buckled.

Damien's knees gave way as a tidal wave of energy surged through him. His vision fractured, splintering into obsidian shards and veins of bone-white light. Reality peeled back like old bark, revealing the hidden skeleton of all things.

His death energy responded.

No longer a chaotic swarm of hungry shadows, it began to shape itself. Patterns emerged, precise and inevitable. A crystalline architecture unfolded in his mind's eye: spiraling lattices of runes, intersecting circles of decay and rebirth, theorems etched in stillness and entropy.

It was a cathedral of unbeing. A labyrinth of annihilation.

And at its center pulsed the Core, beating like a heart carved from midnight, rimmed in ash, blooming with cold light.

The Lotus had refined it all.

What had once been a blunt-force storm, a scythe crashing through souls, was now a symphony. His magic hummed with surgical exactness. He could feel the individual threads of death in the air, the soft unwinding of a cypress root three paces to his left. The micro-collapse of cells in a drowning fly. The thousand tiny farewells whispered by every dying thing.

But beneath the calculus, beneath the precision and the elegance, something deeper stirred.

Something his.

A new Intent was rising from within him. Not to destroy. Not to conquer.

But to call them back.

Back from suffering. Back from madness. Back from being lost.

Back home to death's embrace.

His death energy no longer craved endings.

It sought returns.

Every strand of his magic now pulled toward a singular, unbreakable truth:

Death is not exile. It is reunion.

It is homecoming.

And Damien Bloodbane was its herald.

The second pulse struck as Damien staggered upright.

It began as pressure, a tectonic ache in his marrow which then blossomed into understanding. The Core had not merely evolved. It had also provided Damien with a way to express his Death Intent - Homecoming.

[Death Intent formed – Homecoming]

[Necromantic Core activation at 50%]

[New Skill Unlocked – Soul Flicker]

[Bring home lost souls and unleash their strength at will]

Soul Flicker.

The words etched themselves into Damien's soul like ancient scripture burned across a frozen lake. The knowledge didn't arrive gently. It came as splinters, cold, sharp and merciless.

He felt it before he understood it.

A soldier's final lunge, every tendon screaming, eyes wide with the knowledge of imminent death… became a trail of light, suspended in memory.

A mother's last breath, not a surrender, but a curse, her hatred fossilized in her final heartbeat lingered like iron in the air.

The death-rattle of a burning forest, oak trunks splitting open as their life boiled into smoke, left behind a howl Damien could now taste.

These weren't memories.

They weren't ghosts.

They were imprints, echoes left in the quantum tremor between life and unlife. Death was not silence. Death was saturated with voices. Moments. Shards of will.

Damien had never lacked the power.

He had simply lacked the intent.

And now, with the Core spinning at half its full strength and his Death Intent crystallized as Homecoming, that intent burned like a second sun inside his chest.

Homecoming wasn't mercy. It wasn't grace. It was recognition.

A hand reaching into the abyss and saying, "I know you. Come home."

Even the unwilling. Even the forgotten. Even the damned.

The battlefield was no longer just a slaughterground. It was a cathedral of voices waiting to return.

Soul Flicker was the first true manifestation of Damien's Death Intent—Homecoming.

It didn't raise the dead. It didn't bind spirits or summon ghosts.

Instead, it let Damien reach into the liminal instant of death—that split-second where soul, body, and will severed, and extract the dying soul's final action, emotion, or intent.

Not the person. Not their mind.

Just the purest echo of who they were in their final heartbeat.

A dying swordsman's last, perfect strike… Frozen in the air.

A betrayed general's scream of vengeance.

A beast's final, frenzied pounce.

A mother's final curse, cast with every ounce of her being.

These weren't memories. They were combat truths, compressed moments of absolute will, sharpened into usable weapons.

Damien could capture these flickers from any death within range, friend or enemy, human or beast, so long as the soul was still flickering between planes.

And once harvested, he could store them.

He could unleash them.

He could chain them together, releasing a barrage of soul echoes one after another, each one carrying the full force of that moment's truth.

And they responded to him not out of servitude, but recognition.

They came because he brought them home.

A laugh cracked from Damien's lips, raw, half-sane and edged with awe.

How many times had he stood knee-deep in corpses, wondering why the dead offered nothing but silence?

Now he understood.

They had always been speaking.

He simply hadn't had the ears to hear.

Now he did.