Undead Scourge: I Am Death

At eighteen everyone goes through the class awakening ceremony and takes whatever class it hands them. That is the arrangement humanity has run on since the Abyssal Rift opened five hundred years ago and the monsters started coming through. Ian Yancey's turn produces a hidden class, Eternal Necro-Lord, the only one of its kind, and a talent system binds to him during the same ceremony and enlarges what each of his skills does. The class gives him skeleton warriors he can summon, and a corpse detonation skill to use with them. He takes the beginner dungeon and then the catacombs of the dead with the two of them together, and his level climbs fast. Three other awakeners end up in his party, one of them epic class and prickly with him. The national assessment for awakeners comes after that, and he goes through it round by round. The Abyssal Lord comes down on the venue partway through the rounds.