Steel Wolves of Craedia (Realm of Arkon, Book 3) by G. Akella

forty sets of plate and mail armor in the 140 to 175 level range, slightly more of leather and cloth sets that I had set aside to be sold off, and a whole separate rack filled with uncommon quality weapons. Of rare quality pieces we had exactly thirty, though, sadly, none that we could use since I wasn't planning on outfitting my demons in cloth or leather. As for the old bones—the quest items that needed to be turned in to Xantarra's quartermaster—we had slightly over twelve thousand of them. I sincerely hoped that the quest was of the repeatable kind, since otherwise we'd be hauling all this viscera with us for naught. When all was said and done, we still needed to buy three carts from the elder to carry all the stuff that didn't fit in the treasury. And then I led my clanmates, glowing like polished brass coins with a sense of their own importance, into the next zone for their first mounted training.
    The horses received from the elder varied in color from dirty gray to dark brown. For a moment I even regretted never learning about horse coat colors in my past life. My scant knowledge on the matter enabled me to recognize only three types: black, dun and chestnut. Out of those, the only mount in our party that fit the black categorization was my own razorback. Speaking of Gloom, after carefully inspecting the new arrivals—and grunting loudly as the animals whinnied and recoiled in fear—the boar seemed generally satisfied. The horses were all in the 130 to 145 level range, with stats nearly identical to my Lucy. The biggest difference was that their maximum gallop speed was thirty miles per hour to Lucy's twenty eight.
    The lightly armored mounts I assigned to the archers and Hagedia, their dedicated healer. Their chainmail armor boosted armor class to fifteen hundred, while reducing maximum gallop speed by only two mph. Everyone else, including the mage, would prance around on mounts in full plate, bringing their armor class to around three thousand and their maximum gallop to twenty four mph, which was still good enough for Iam and Surat to deal upwards of 160k damage with their lances. Tanks' damage output was some fifty percent less, but considering the fact that even plate-wearing undead rarely boasted more than forty percent physical damage absorption, even they should be able to one-shot practically any opponent of equal level when galloping at full speed. From the start I split my demons into two even groups, and briefly relayed to Salta the few combat tricks of mounted archers that I'd picked up from military history books. Iam didn't require any additional instructions, as everything was clear enough already: the strike force of tanks and melee fighters went in the front, healers and Reece went in the back.
    I watched from the side for a while as Salta's squad kited a pack of undead, picking them off from a safe distance, and decided to give every archer a lance of their own. This added a fair bit of oomph to the action: as soon as the the numbers of undead matched the archers', the demons turned around and finished off the fight in one fell swoop. Though the archers' physical damage output was some thirty-forty percent higher than that of melee fighters, their lance multiplier was only half as much—still, that was more than enough to dispatch any plate-wearing skeleton to kingdom come. There were some issues with debuffs—oftentimes Hagedia struggled to keep up with dispelling them—but the party was never in any real danger, so I wasn't particularly worried.
    A couple of hours later I brought the groups back together to continue their training. Boredom set in almost immediately, as packs of undead around level 170 were put down literally within seconds. The ram attack took out a third of the pack right off the bat, and the archers then picked off the rest from both flanks. I kept them running drills for another hour or so, and signaled a return to Ballan when the sun started to set.
    The night sky