I needed somebody to save me.

"Good boy, Lambert." The elder patted my head once I collapsed on the ground. I spent every day the same. She'd drag me out of my confinement early in the morning and set me to work on the church's lands. It was huge though, tens of thousands of acres, all sown with grain, months too late. And if anybody still doubted her being a necromancer, the fields were cultivated by undead workers, only listening to her commands. "All right, it's time for you to rest."

Now she simply dragged me back into the basement of the manor house, and I had to meditate to regain my power by tomorrow morning. If I were to fall asleep and fail to do so, she would start the next day with torture, and I'd have to work regardless. The only other living being that would occasionally show up here was her new right-hand man.

"Finally I understand your spell too. I'm surprised you came up with something like this by yourself." She praised me while walking me on a chain like a dog. I saw her power yet again, there was no way to fight this woman. The best I could do is obey. "I scoured the church library and found nothing. When the Princess and Catherine returned here without you I thought you died. It would have been a shame, you are useful, Lambert. Even if I could finally use the same spell."

Regardless of all the praise, she unceremoniously kicked into my back when we arrived, and locked me up in the empty basement. My food was already prepared, I guess she couldn't have me starve and lose my strength after all, no matter how the rest of my treatment was.

"By the end of the week, the field will be ready for the harvest. My plan will work out, after all, you've done a great job." She talked through the closed door. "And you are not doing this for me, no. About half of Sanctuary would starve to death over the winter without this food, so keep doing your best. You can hate me all you want though."

I could barely hear the last sentence, she walked too far by that point, and after that, everything was quiet. The sun started to set too, each day getting shorter and shorter as the fall was soon to give its place to winter. I couldn't help but wonder, what she would do to me after the harvest ended. She wasn't here all day, just when she dragged me out to work, and let me back inside, but I still couldn't run away.

It was either Stern watching over me, or a bunch of zombies smelling of rot. Still, it was the undead, that was the best company I could get. They wouldn't talk nonsense without ever giving me any valuable information, and they didn't enjoy torturing me either.

"I cannot fathom why the Princess left you behind," I remembered the Captain of the Royal Company saying one day. "When they showed up without you, I thought, that Lambert dude must have kicked the bucket. But they left you with the monsters?"

At least he did tell me something I wanted to know, even if he probably didn't even realize it. At the end of my first week here, he slipped up and inadvertently told me about how things went down when the girls returned to Sanctuary. Back in Nateaser, we could only guess what happened to them since the first time we heard about the humans was when the village got attacked. They did make it back here.

"I was looking for them, but only found you. If that Goddess does exist, and is such a big deal, why didn't they go back to you as well? They simply disappeared, what a pain." He complained, which told me, Cath and the Princess were still alive and out there somewhere. They didn't even try to get any information out of me though. They only needed me to speed up the growth of the grain, and while I have to admit, I did not dare to oppose them, to begin with, I didn't want the humans to starve either. I was willing to let the Elder learn my method through observation, which meant she could toss me aside at any moment.

"If you become too useful, the sooner she will get rid of you," I told myself, once they left me alone. "But if you show her that you are just useful enough so that she's better off keeping you around…"

I had no illusions about that but I wanted to survive, nothing else. I could have been weak and useless, but for the first time in my life, it seemed like the orcs and beastmen of Nateaser did appreciate me. I had a feeling they were looking for me right about now too. I just needed to live long enough for them to find me. Maybe I was delusional, but this kept me sane in the past weeks, and while I was worked to the bone every day until I nearly passed out, I felt like my power only kept increasing. This could have been the way to improve myself after all.

"Practice makes it perfect, I guess," I mumbled in the dark. "After all, if you never do anything, you'll never improve either."

If I worked past beyond my limits like my life depended on it day in and day out, I would start to get stronger. I simply had to or I would die. I also felt I could recharge faster thanks to my meditation. Nowadays, I would even have some time for a little sleep before I was dragged out in the morning. I can't say I got used to it, but surviving now didn’t seem impossible.

"There is no way the Elder would be willing to go through this," I told myself. "As long as she sees how much pain I have to go through, she won't be going to kill me, even if she could do this herself."

However shameful, I was content with that. But with all that self-doubt, it was hard to get rid of my intrusive thoughts. Be it positive or not, I still needed to meditate, especially how I was doing it. It was way more aggressive, greedy, and reckless than how they taught it back in the Academy. If anything, they'd be scoffing at my barbaric ways.

Normally, a wizard would simply allow the flow of the mana to filter through their bodies and collect as much of it as possible. More powerful casters could influence the flow to make it faster and more efficient, but I needed more.

"I want all the mana, not just the breeze." I justified my actions. I could never simply filter out enough from the natural flow, to force all those seeds to sprout and grow, I needed more than five times as much.

And then I needed some time so I could get rid of the crippling fatigue too. I practically drained my surroundings until it was dry of magicules. There was no other way of doing it.

While some would have considered this a dark art on its own, I didn't have much choice. A necromancer tried to work me to death every day, and it was not like there was anyone else nearby, than her reanimanted corpses. This method was quite disruptive for all of my surroundings, but they couldn't become any more dead than this.

"I'm sure she drains a lot more, she drained people's life forces too and uses others all the same," I mumbled while suppressing my doubts.

In the grand scheme of things, I could barely disrupt the balance. The tiny wound I created would heal in an hour after I finished my meditation. If I tried to remove a bucket's worth of water from the ocean, the hole I'd create would immediately fill back up.

During the day, I spent all that mana speeding up plant growth anyway, all those magicules were recycled. That's how I tried to soothe my conscience at the very least, but there wasn't any other way.

I fell asleep with that thought and hoped I wouldn't see the usual nightmares again. The scenes on the main square of Nateaser would play out in my head, from the moment Nati left for a potion until the gargoyle struck down all of us, there were barely five seconds. In ten more, the entire courtyard was wiped out.

Nobody could resist her, neither me nor the chieftain. And Nati would walk right out of the embassy, and into the scene. The Elder wouldn't show mercy, she carved out the heart of that huge orc like it was nothing. My dream would usually loop back at this point, but now I saw the rest too. The moment when Nati wounded her out of the blue, and I managed to disrupt the Elder's attack.

Charlotte shot her in the back, and she had no other choice than to retreat. I did my part, even if Hana was beyond saving, and I was taken away. Nati was saved thanks to me, and the rest might have been saved thanks to her. With all the lives I saved thanks to my healing magic, or expertise in agriculture, deflecting that spell from Nati possibly saved a lot more. Nobody expected that much from me, from Lambert, the coward.

"Lambert, you here?" I heard Nati's familiar voice. I thought it was just a strange continuation of my dream, and barely even noticed it at first.

But some strange light shone into my face, and I squirmed in my sleep. The dream would quickly fall apart, and I was on the cold ground of the basement again. What was that light? The moon wasn't out, and I doubted the undead would carry torches around.

"Lambert, I can feel your presence, you know." It was certainly Nati's voice, but she didn't talk like that. Well, she would rarely speak to me in the first place. She probably couldn't forgive my attempt to banish her the first time we met. She was even willing to stay near me on that day.

She was a human in her previous life and didn't want the knights to perish, just like me. She was shocked to see that much blood and the dead soldiers, but she remained the whole time, trying her best to save them. If the Elder didn't show up, we could have been friends. Still, I didn't expect her to come for me.

"Human boy, damn it, answer us." I heard a different voice this time, this one had no place in my dreams. It was Omerta, who declared me her rival in the village. Oh boy, I haven't even thought of that. If she was mad at me for not saving her brother, she might have come to kill me instead of a rescue. "Should I break down this door?"

"Go ahead, I don't see guards nearby." I heard the other voice, and sure enough, the door exploded with a loud bang. I could no longer convince myself that it was a dream. I opened my eyes and saw the two standing over me. I was wrong though. The voice did not belong to Nati at all, it was the Goddess, looking straight at me.

"Look, he was sleeping like a baby," Omerta noted, grinning.

"I told you, you can't leave the village, Lambert. What are you even doing here?" Alexandra asked, crossing her arms. "Time to go home."