Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia and Ihuarah’s discussion kept going throughout the morning going into a variety of topics until they looped back to the trial itself.

Ihuarah stood up from the rock he was sitting on. “Fenrir, yes, that would be the closest of the three moons. Be on the lookout for unnatural landscapes and points of interest, such as if you were to find, let’s say a giant tree, sometimes I have found things in the middle of nowhere,” Ihuarah explained while turning his head in the tower’s direction, “but generally ‘trial events’ are near clearly visible landmarks.”

Sofia thanked him for the tip and expressed how she found it strange what was and wasn’t being censored. She had tried to bring up the paper people earlier in the conversation and found herself completely unable to do so.

“We should get going,” Ihuarah said, “you especially should not be wasting time. We will have ample time to speak again after the trial. Thank you for the meal.”

“Right. Well, see you in a year, then. It was nice to have you around for a bit. If you stay nearby after the trial I can do the swapping trick to find you again. You might have to wait for a while though.”

“A few months is nothing to someone as old as I am. I might pick up fishing again while I wait, I do wonder how much the aquatic life may have evolved while I was dead…”

Sofia took place in the shuttle’s single seat, which closed up around her lower body.

Almost immediately, a familiar countdown began in a feminine voice.

Wait, in the end he never said anything about the nymphs. I will have to wait until the end of the trial…

The shuttle took off, and Sofia did not pay attention to it, she was already bored of the process, lost in her thoughts. By the time the violent shaking of the shuttle brought her back to reality, she was already landing inside of another tower.

The first thing she noticed as she left her seat was how weak gravity was.

This is much weaker than Veliadren’s moon. Because this moon is smaller, I imagine. That’s what it was, right? I was a bit distracted when Asty explained this stuff in class…

With all the books I’ve read not a single one explained what gravity really is. Well, whatever, let’s see what this moon has to offer.

Pareth came out to be the vanguard as soon as Sofia left the small shuttle. The tower looked similar to the one on the planet, with the difference that the shuttle was directly on ground level. Sofia had to walk around touching the walls to find the exit, but she actually saw the fake wall before she touched it, thanks to her left eye’s ‘visual anomaly spotter’.

“Hmm. This function works but barely. It was the same for the paper person, it reacted to its invisibility but it wasn’t very obvious. More feedback for Richard…”

Pareth and Sofia left the tower, the environment outside was instantly less welcoming. There was no air, no mana, and the white, dusty ground was hot like a desert’s sand at noon. Sofia looked up, she could see the two other moons, no trace of the sun or the planet. The only light reaching there came from the sunlight reflecting on the other two moons’ surfaces.

It took us all the way to the hidden side of the moon?

One quick look over the horizon told Sofia that there was nothing nearby, the surface of this moon, so far, looked an awful lot like Veliadren’s moon which she had crashed onto, barren, dusty, and riddled with large craters.

If there’s important stuff here and you’re not able to survive in space you’re really done. It should probably be expected from here on out that the trials might have all kinds of hostile environments.

Sofia was ready to go out and explore but a simple question stuck in her mind, how was she supposed to find the tower again to leave?

Backtracking her way on the planet would be hard but not impossible as she could recognise the general lay of the land, on the moon, everything looked alike.

Actually… If there’s nothing here…

Sofia got one of her thousands of stored bone wings from her bone storage, and severed the tip with bone dominus. She let it fall to the ground and started walking. As soon as she felt the bit of bone leaving the 90 meters of her dominus perception range, she dropped another bit of bone to the ground.

A bit slow but I have to advance carefully anyway.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

With no obvious target in sight, Sofia kept going in a straight line until the wing she was dropping pieces of ran out and she had to bring out another one.

A bit TOO slow. And walking on air doesn’t even work here because there’s no atmosphere.

I could go with the runeforged flight but I can’t cancel the second tier by cutting my head off because of the healing restriction so… Just a bit of flight might take forever to recover from in the mana department.

Sofia turned to Pareth.

Sanctified grounds, please!

Pareth shook his head but activated the skill anyway, even crouching and holding out his hand for Sofia to step onto. He knew exactly where this was going.

Right, give me the slow fall ring.

Sofia activated the slow fall ring which she knew effectively reduced the effect of gravity on her, and Pareth stood up with her in his large hand.

Go!

Using all of his strength, Pareth threw Sofia up in the air. She flew up hundreds of meters and took her time to survey the horizon at the apex of the ‘jump’.

Found a thing!

Sofia used the zoom of her left eye to get a better view on the large gray thing she spotted in the distance, just in time to see it disappear into the ground.

Some kind of giant gray crab? This thing must have been the size of a large house and it just disappeared inside a dark hole…

She spun around, trying to see anything else, but that was it. In what she estimated to be at least a fifty kilometer radius, there was nothing to be seen except a great many craters, fissures in the ground, and whatever that thing had been. She was already falling, and despite the slow fall ring’s best efforts, her speed was gradually picked up as she neared the ground.

Should still be fine.

Pareth caught her out of the sky before she could hit the ground.

No damage. Thanks.

She threw the ring back to Pareth.

You saw it too, right? What do you say, are we going there?

Pareth nodded as he dispelled the sanctified grounds.

Let’s hunt a giant crab!

The rat Sofia had sent to check out the rift-like fissure in the ground which the monster had crawled inside of held the vision token over the hole.

It’s too dark… I would need to go there in person to see. That feels dangerous though. I know nothing about that crab monster, but if there’s one thing which has held true so far, naturally large monsters are usually pretty high level. To the point that I can confidently say the stone ogres were actually very big for their level.

I should assume the crab is at least over 250. What now…

Had the hole been anywhere else but on the moon Sofia would have been confident to check it herself since she could just fly away in case of emergency, but here her only escape tools were the runeforged third tier’s flight which would cost at least half of her total mana, or the demon form.

Sofia called the rat back while she charged a small pebble-sized lightstone, then she stuck it onto the side of the vision token with some bone, which worked out because the vision tokens were made through [Bone dominus] on small bone disks. The process of carving the tiny ritual circles onto the vision tokens was painful by hand but the fine precision bone magic made it a breeze and Sofia had mass-manufactured all kinds of bone things in preparation for the trial, including tokens.

The rat grabbed the token from Sofia’s hand and ran the few hundred meters separating it from the hole in the ground.

It's a cheap lightstone, just drop it in there, let’s see what’s in the hole.

The token fell, and Sofia’s vision with it. The token spinning through the air made the experience slightly nauseating.

That’s one deep hole…

Finally the token left the long shaft, entering what Sofia thought was some sort of big cavernous chamber, and that was when the token hit the ground.

The token was intact but the lightstone shattered, its broken fragments spread around on the cavern’s ground, giving Sofia a single second of extended vision into the underground’s darkness before their light faded and she disconnected from the token.

Well, there’s a bigger grotto inside the hole… We did not learn much.

Uh?

Sofia felt the ground rumbling below her feet. It lasted a few seconds. Pareth gave her sign that he had felt it too.

Seism on the moon? Is that a thing? Wait… The link to the vision token is broken!

Pareth took the initiative to step in between Sofia and the fissure. They waited with bated breath, but nothing came of it.

We might just be a bit too paranoid. With how the ground shook the token might have just rolled a bit and fallen deeper underground or something.

Still. Maybe it was that the crab attacked it and that shook the ground?

Summoner and skeleton looked at each other for a bit, and Sofia finally took a decision.

Let’s use the bone structures, I have a very bright idea. What’s more, if it fails, we can use it to escape. And if it works, you still get full imprints. A foolproof plan.

Sofia smirked.

I wonder if an Angel will show up this time.

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