Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia sent some mana in the ring and she could see inside without trouble. It actually contained nothing but a big wooden barrel.

“Ugh this fucking stinks!”

What in th-

Her gaze stopped on the three words stamped on the barrel’s top: ‘Feral Death Row’.

Feral? No way, is this…

Holding her nose, Sofia opened the barrel. Inside was a mess of mangled, rotting and withered corpses.

I see. No wonder she didn’t want Agran to know. She actually gave me dead vampires. Sofia had to go puke a bit further, but a certain book got a free meal.

“Let’s see this new page…” The new page in the book was after the three Templars' one. Forty thousand mana? But that’s because there’s four of them, so I guess these Vampires are the same prices as the Templars individually. The drawing depicted four humanoid skeletons with long-ish canines, in a crouching position. They had no weapon or armor to talk of.

I can’t believe this is what they do to the Vampires who fall to the curse. A sad way to go. Well. I’ll try them out in the next fight. Steep mana price to just waste on nothing.

Since the bounty on my head is so high, I should expect to be actively hunted now. I need to get even stronger.

Well, I should be mostly safe as long as I avoid cities, right? How would anyone find me out here in the wild?

Still, I’ll rush for the second trial, but first I want to try finding this old place.

The reason why Sofia wanted to go to the coast of Skyreach was that this had been the theater of a large battle between the Templars and a powerful Necromancer. Evidently the Church’s books hadn’t always portrayed reality in a faithful way, but there was also some truth to them. After all, she had found one of the temples in the northern jungle.

If this particular story was to be trusted, a group of five Templars and fifty Paladins had gone on a crusade to get rid of a Necromancer who had been taking over the southern region of the kingdom. And while this story ended, like most others, in the glorious victory of the Church, it was also said that they never found the Necromancer’s lair. They searched the region for a while, finding nothing. Since the undead activity ceased after the man’s death, they gave up looking after a while, and that was it for this tale of the Church’s achievements.

So there was a chance that somewhere in this region was the undiscovered base of operation of a high level necromancer, one that had taken the Church a whole platoon of 55 men to take care of.

The shack where Astelia had left Sofia was only a few hundred meters from the cliffside to the sea, though these cliffs were much smaller than those of the continent’s east coast. There were actually narrow sand beaches at the bottom. Sofia summoned the archer soldier out of the book. “Go hunt birds, they have to all be the same species, fill this whole bag and come back.”

With this taken care of, she flew down to the sand banks, let Pareth out, and slept on the sand under the moonlight, lulled by the sound of the waves.

It was Pareth that woke Sofia up, pointing out the skeleton waiting atop the cliff.

“Oh, looks like we can start the real work.”

Before even going up, she saw in her kill feed that the skeleton had gathered around fifty ‘Black Turvin’ all between level one and four. She landed near the Soldier skeleton and took the bag, it was full of dead and bleeding birds. Bunch of small round black birds. They’re quite cute, too bad. I wonder if that’ll be enough to fill a page.

It wasn’t enough to fill a page, so she now had a single page costing 540 mana, featuring 54 tiny avian skeletons. Well, that’ll do the job. Soon Sofia was surrounded by her largest skeleton army yet, an adorable one. “Alright, spread out in every direction. If you find something that stands out, fly in place and wait for me.” She couldn’t see through the book’s summons’ vision, but she could still tell their approximate location like Pareth's, she would know if they stopped moving. That was her best idea for searching around, and even then she didn’t believe it to have much of a chance for success. Well, this is a test run. I want to try that with rats too, they’re better at finding buried things, but they move slower, and the book’s summons only have like two hours of lifetime…

She soon discovered that to a bird, ‘something that stands out’ was much too vague of an order, seeing as they all stopped whenever they encountered the first tree in their path. After some tweaking of the command, they started to actually point out interesting things. Cave entrances, ruins, lost objects. Sofia had to check them all one by one which took a while, and though she did not find any trace of a long dead necromancer, she did manage to find something worth looking into by the time the birds burst into puffs of mist.

[You have entered the dungeon : Thrombber Hive - Lv. 200-350]

Oh I get a level range instead of a threshold today? I'll take it, nice upgrade.

The start of the dungeon was a mine entrance in a small hillside, it looked long abandoned and seemed to go deep into the ground.

Sure, let's discover what a Thrombber is, and whether it has a skeleton. Pareth, you take the lead.

The air inside the mine was moist and stale, there wasn’t much going on, only rotting support beams, spider webs and abandoned carts. Seems like a good time to put the poison gas detection ring on. It was one of the things she had bought in Hooasow, but she rarely wore it. Like most other magical pieces of equipment, it used some of her mana to keep functioning, and that was why she had to be picky about how many such items she used. The saint set for example, while wearing all three pieces, would use almost as much mana as the passive regeneration it gave for sitting down helped recover. Even the storage ring used some of her reserves, though it thankfully gave a nice 5% regeneration boost which outweighed what it used, but by far the worst offender of this was the princess clothing set with all of its self adjusting features.

With the ring equipped, and the path lit up solely by Pareth’s halo, they kept going forward.

I wonder what they mined here, the carts are empty, and there’s nothing on the walls. Maybe they were digging for a certain type of soil? Or they left nothing behind. Or the mine was left behind because it had dried up.

Unless they left because of the hive, the mine is part of the dungeon so… I don’t think it’s the main entrance though. Whatever a Thrombber might be I would have seen traces of them by now if that was the case.

The mine kept going deeper in a straight line but Pareth suddenly stopped. What’s going on?

Pareth pointed to a tunnel that Sofia hadn’t seen on his right. She silently walked up to him and looked inside the tunnel.

Oh. Is that a Thrombber? This makes my skin crawl just looking at it!

In the smaller tunnel, which was too small for Pareth to enter standing up, the creature stood still, it was looking in the other direction. It was a big, wolf-sized, flesh-colored worm, hanging in the center of the tunnel. At first glance, it looked like the worm was hanging on a wobbly spider web. But the huge ‘threads’ making it up were actually six pairs of long, segmented and flexible white legs. The twelve legs were spread in all directions, taking support against every side of the tunnel, maintaining the worm mid-air.

The worm’s body was pulsating, throbbing, and the ripples of these pulsations ran through the whole length of the malleable legs in rhythm.

I don’t think it noticed us yet…

Probably no need to go all out, but if it’s a hive, it’s important that we don’t get swarmed… Chain it when the graveyard goes off, and I’ll go take care of it.

[Graveyard of the righteous]

[Spine of the Black Sun]

The monster detected Sofia the instant she entered the smaller tunnel, and Pareth’s chains appeared, taking a hold of its body. The legs were moving crazily and some grasped the chains, already breaking one. The graves sprouted out of the tunnel’s ground, along with the half skeletons, taking the opportunity to grab on four of the creature’s legs.

The skeletons were melting in contact with the legs. Their reflective white appearance was due to some sort of corrosive coating. I’m not getting close. Time to see what I learned from those whip lessons.

The spine whip lashed out five times, each producing a bright solar burst that charred the worm’s pulsating and fleshy body. The beast howled in clicketing shrieks as it burned. All that was left after the fifth hit was a smoking, black and shriveled worm surrounded by a bunch of noodle looking segmented legs that were slowly burning their way into the ground.

‘You have defeated [Male Thrombber - lv. 210]’

‘[Spine of the black sun] reached level 106’

‘[Graveyard of the righteous] reached level 105’

No level up for a 210? It’s getting harder to get experience… Since the notification specifies that it’s a male, the females must be very different. Enough that it warrants a different classification.

Sofia walked closer to the carbonized worm, I couldn’t see its front during the fight… The worm’s head was frightening, it was ribbed with tough flesh tendrils that all converged around a single beady yellow eye. Sofia couldn’t quite see what the creature’s mouth was, but from the burned carcass, it looked like a beard of pointy teeth. Hundreds of them, all messily stuck to the underside of the worm’s head.

There’s a whole hive of these? The corrosive liquid on their legs is quite potent.

Maybe this kingdom was always meant to be burned down to the ground after all. Let’s do some early spring cleaning.

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