Saintess Summons Skeletons

Every skeleton in place. Bring out the dummies.

The graveyard skeletons had spread around, they were in every wall of the room, with half of them in the ceiling. On Sofia’s signal, they extended their arms, not exposing themselves but instead bringing fake skeletons into the room. These dummy skeletons, had empty bones and skulls, filled to the brim with shade and blood dust. The creature attacked, crushing them all to bits like it did every time. These were all physical attacks, so whatever appendage they used to strike would be completely coated, and the dust would burst all over the room.

Sofia had no way to see what was actually happening, but she trusted that it would work. If not, she had more things in store. As the skeletons did their job, she killed herself. Crushing her own head after stabbing herself once to prevent the one-hit protection to activate was quick and efficient. Three seconds later, she was brought back by her first rune. So she did it again.

In a fight where she needed to be able to dodge multiple attacks all at once, and not get touched once, she couldn’t afford not going all out. By dying twice, she stacked [One with Suffering] to 200%, while still keeping a rune active for safety.

The lengths I need to go to….

[One with Suffering] ♢ : For each % of Health lost during a singular battle, gain a 1% increase to all stats except Mana and Health until the end of combat, lose 1% for each % of Health healed.

She had done some testing, and the definition of ‘a singular battle’ was very lenient as long as she didn’t heal, which the rune bypassed without any issue.

Time left on the demon form: 4m38s. Depending on the situation, this could be four minutes too long, or much, much too short a timer. In both cases, it meant the battle wouldn’t be easy.

Sofia took five extra seconds to breathe and clear her mind after her two deaths while the graveyard skeletons all gathered near her. They would all enter the room at the same time, reducing her chances to be targeted outright. She clenched her staff, took a lower stance, looked over her current stats, and gave the order.

The seconds it took to phase through the floor felt like they lasted forever.

The skeletons did their best to eject her out of the ceiling as fast as they could.

As she was cannonballed into the room, she could finally see the monster that she had been preparing so hard to face.

Her preparations felt futile. This was nothing like she had imagined. The cubic room, the battlefield she had envisioned, expected to be inside of, was nowhere to be seen. Around her, she could see her graveyard skeletons emerging out of ethereal walls of nothingness, tearing through the fabric of this dark void’s space.

She could see faint forms in the horizon, colors that did not exist, shapes that would not connect to themselves. It was abhorrent yet familiar. She had been there once, in a dream.

Ormoncleth’s realm.

The Deep.

There was no time to contemplate the scenery much more. The graveyard skeletons were being slaughtered.

Sofia’s eyes trailed along an obsidian spire, emerging from the very heart of a lightless chasm. A monolithic pillar defying all logic, a stab wound unto reality itself. Its surface was etched with pulsating symbols, runes that would shift and writhe in an hypnotizing dance.

From the apex of the spire, a miasma of iridescent shadows unfurled, covered in the blackest of powders, the influence of its presence like a thick oil seeping into the atmosphere. There, amidst a sea of tendrils emerged the emissary of Ormoncleth, a form unsettling and incomprehensible. Its body resembled that of an urchin, Sofia thought, that was all her mind could come up with to frame this mockery of common sense into a tangible reality. Jagged spines extended out of its core, fusing and splitting, spiraling outward in patterns defying geometrical coherence.

The spines struck out as a synchronous whole, shattering the skeletons they hit into a trillion pieces.

Sofia activated the third tier of [Runeforged Overlord] and moved away. Yet she couldn’t flee, soon her back hit a wall. She felt her glove, Aphenoreth’s present, resonating with the space she was in. It changed her view of the world.

She could see them both now. This realm and her own, interlocking with one another. She was in the room and in the Deep. Both places at once. In the physical plane, the situation was similar. As if stabbed by a large mechanical pillar, the round form of the Deep’s being lashed out at the skeletons with its spines, the two realms’ forms layering perfectly onto one another.

One of the spines’ next target was Sofia herself. It pulled her out of the trance the being’s appearance had put her in. She clearly saw the spine coming, her current stats several times what they were ordinarily. She moved out of the way, dodging to the left. The spine altered its trajectory, it aimed for her head but still missed by a fist’s width. Her claws did not miss. The creature’s tendril was severed.

It was not immortal, not incorporeal, she was in its plane of existence and it was in hers. It could be harmed. It could be felled!

Sofia emptied her bone storage. Filling the space with countless bone pieces. Plates, balls, curves, grids. The last graveyard skeleton died. All the tendrils were on her. As if teleporting short distances, leveraging her omnidirectional flight and insane speed, she outran them all, leading them all around the battlefield and narrowly avoiding their omnidirectional assault. There was no counterattack from her, she had seen the tendril she severed regrow. She needed a more permanent solution.

Evading the flurry of blows, she leveraged her authority over bones, assembling the pieces one by one. The attacks were all drawn to herself, leaving her creation unharmed. She sealed the cubic room from the inside. The creature and herself were encapsulated in a shell of bones.

For the briefest of seconds, she turned on the lights. Holy light filled the room, like a divine intervention, and just as fast as it had appeared, it died down, leaving the creature covered in rot. she began her true offensive.

Sofia had escaped the innumerable roots of an Alphageid. She had avoided the tentacles of Victory Itself. Like a sewing needle in expert hands, swerving around the tendrils’ weave, she took every opportunity to strike. Her scepter could deflect them, her claws could sever them.

The rot gnawed at the beast and its mass of flailing tendrils, it consumed the creature but failed to outpace its eternal rebirths. No matter how much it ate, the same iridescent flesh was born anew from the monster’s entrails.

The spines surrounded her. She cut them and cut them, her mind an impervious wall of focus and resolve. They regrew without end, but with every dodge, every slash, she inched toward her goal, coming closer and closer to the creature’s core. The tip of a spinal cord had grown atop her scepter, the [Spine of the Black Sun].

The creature must have understood her aim, its tendrils retracted and rearranged, when they extended again, their form had changed, they were like infinite tree branches, splitting ends diverging in countless directions. They covered all the surface they could, threatening to envelop and smother Sofia in clouds of their thin threads.

Sofia controlled the bones of her armor, she used ‘spines’ of her own – spikes of bones used like forks to pin away the iridescent fabric of nightmares as she still had to avoid the few remaining regular tendrils that were unrelentingly pursuing her, bending in untold ways to catch her off-guard.

If not for the demon form’s spherical vision and the thinking speed bonuses of [Evasion] and [Way of the fool], she would have been long dead.

She knew Pareth was waiting for an opportunity to strike, but his form was too imposing. He could never avoid the tendrils, and his fate if he was hit was uncertain. He would sacrifice himself if needed, but Sofia still hadn’t been touched once.

Her mana, however, was falling at an alarming rate, no matter the insane speeds at which the battle took place, every second of fighting was another second closer to her reserves being depleted by her passive skill, and she still needed to use the rot.

After evading the innumerable strikes, she was finally in reach of her goal. Bone dominus was too slow, it had to be a direct, physical hit, using all the momentum she could muster.

She only had one shot.

The creature had taken her precious skeleton dog away, and it would pay the price.

The tendrils engulfed her as she stabbed forward with her scepter, aiming at an opening in the creature’s defenses, a tiny space in between three of its jagged tendrils.

Sofia felt her body decompose into its smallest components under the influence of the tendrils, her very existence stripped bare as she delivered her final attack. Yet her soul held true.

She had Aphenoreth’s mark. Her essence was whole, unblemished, unbreakable. The creatures’ best efforts could not leave a dent.

The sword form of the spine of the black sun struck true, avoiding all three tendrils in its way, and lodging itself deep inside the core of the mad beast. From within, the creature erupted in a bright flash of light, the spine’s solar burst. Sofia’s rune was about to go off, in her last moment of awareness, she activated her rot with the remnants of her mana, leaving her completely empty.

DIE!

The rot permeated the emissary of the Deep from within. Eaten from the inside, it could outgrow the all-consuming black plague no longer. The thing gave a last effort, unleashing a pulse of ethereal matter, a concentrated essence of raw concepts and rules, like a wave resonating with the laws of the universe itself. Yet it did nothing as it washed over Sofia, and like the other parasite before it, the creature of the Deep exploded, showering the room in its shining, iridescent blood, and revealing the being it had been trying to destroy for millennia.

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