Logan’s body was overcome by a feeling of strength that he didn’t even know was possible. His muscles twitched as they bulged in size, and a layer of golden fire covered his skin like a protective shroud. All of this resulted in him freezing as a sword plunged towards his heart.

The blade slashed across his hands with tremendous force. He expected to see them get lopped off and fly in different directions, but nothing of the sort happened. Logan stumbled back and looked down in shock. His palms were stinging, but all he found were two deep cuts, the tendons visible under his bloody flesh.

In the few seconds that he stood there, both of the wounds disappeared. They didn’t even bleed more than a drop of blood before they were healed. Logan just stared, the blood leeching back into the skin of his hands as it was reabsorbed.

It didn’t hurt after that, and neither did the flames. Logan wanted to investigate what was happening, but he had no time to react let alone think. Bracing himself, the skeleton moved to attack again. He should’ve been scared. And he was, but only for a split second before he realised that after ten days of being a prisoner, he was finally free.

Logan charged forward with manic glee, even going so far as to parry the sword with his arm. The weapon bit into his skin before it bounced off the bone. The vibration made his arm tingle, but that was all it did. His skin healed within seconds, and his bones were so tough that they were undamaged in the first place.

Logan stepped forward and punched the skeleton. He had never been in a fight before, meaning there was no technique involved in his strike. He might’ve broken his hand if it wasn’t for the power of the egg. That would’ve been the logical thing to happen, but it didn’t.

Instead, Logan’s hand went straight through the steel chestplate before shattering the skeleton’s rib cage. A weight pressed down on his arm as the skeleton lost its ability to stand. Taking advantage of that opportunity, he used his other hand to grab its arm and squeeze. The gauntlet began to groan, the metal warping from the sheer force of his grip. With a quick squeeze, its wrist bones jolted as they broke apart, allowing him to rip the skeleton’s sword away.

From there, Logan pulled his arm out and allowed the skeleton to fall to the ground. It bounced off the ground and quickly recovered, crawling over and trying to attack him again. It clawed at his leg, but the fingers on its gauntlets were rounded, meaning they did nothing as they brushed over his empowered skin.

Logan stomped on its helmet, the metal gaining a foot-shaped imprint as its skull was crunched into shards. The skeleton stopped moving once its head was shattered into pieces. Logan smiled, turning back to the lone knight protecting its Lord. The rest of the squad was halfway over the bridge now, but they wouldn’t be fast enough to do anything.

He would make sure of it.

Logan pounced, a single step launching him into the knight. The steel armour weighed less than a quarter of his weight, so the skeleton bounced off of him and slid across the stone floor like a rag doll. It almost fell off the pillar as it grabbed onto a rough outcropping. The skeleton dangled for a moment before it dropped its sword and tried to pull itself up with both hands.

Turning to the helpless skeleton Lord, Logan flinched as the diamond on its forehead erupted into white flames. An attack slammed into his mind. It was far more potent than before, making him realise that the previous attack was of a different type. The skeleton Lord had initially tried to seize control of him, but now it was trying to wipe out his mind or soul or whatever it was.

Logan wasn’t sure exactly how the mental attacks worked, but he was confident that it was useless. The power washed over him like a gentle breeze. Before his mind was enhanced, it might’ve killed him immediately. Now, the attack was so negligible he could ignore it completely. What he experienced was no worse than a mild headache, which was annoying but didn’t ultimately do anything.

Logan took a step and ripped the circlet off the Skeleton Lord’s head, the mental attack ceasing almost instantly. The monster stumbled and fell over from being shoved. Logan raised his leg above, but less than a second before his foot could turn its skull into shards of bone, a ghostly apparition rose out of its body.

Logan’s eyes widened in shock. He didn’t want to touch the ghost, but they were both too fast. His foot stomped down on the apparition’s chest as it rose from the skeleton. He thought it would try to dive into his body and possess him, but it actually dived away as the flames washed over its torso.

Over half of its ghostly form disappeared in an instant. The phantom screeched in pain, the golden flames sticking to its body as it flew down the stairs. It moved so fast that Logan blinked and missed half of its escape. He wanted to kill it, but there was no way he could’ve possibly done so. It was too fast to even touch if it returned.

A knight tackled Logan from behind, pulling him out of his shock. It wrapped its arm around his neck and tried to put him in a chokehold. Logan felt some pressure on his throat, but it was no different than a friendly gesture to the current him.

With one hand, he reached back and grabbed the scruff of the knight’s collar before pulling it over his head and slamming it onto the ground. The stone splintered from the impact, but the shards did nothing to his shins.

He stomped on the knight’s head and killed it.

With everything on the pillar deader than they were before, Logan stepped back and got his bearings. Thanks to the passive healing from the egg, there were no wounds marring his flesh. In fact, he felt better than ever. There was even a new kind of energy flowing into his pores. It felt warm and strangely familiar, but it wasn’t until it sunk into his spine that he realised it was life force.

Two separate waves arrived at once. They were obviously from the knights he had just killed, but Logan didn’t understand why this was happening. The solid cord of life energies within his spine grew thicker from the infusions.

Otherwise, there were no obvious changes that he could pick up.

Was it extending his lifespan? Making him physically stronger? Logan stopped thinking about it as one of the skeletons crossed the rope bridge and stepped onto the stone pillar. With more test subjects running over, he would soon have all the answers he needed.

The platoon of knights was nearly over the bridge. Eighteen knights were about to charge onto the stone pillar, but due to space limitations, they were in a single file line. Seeing the first step onto even ground made Logan unable to hold back his smile.

If all of them worked together, he would be doomed. Group tactics and traps would easily be his undoing. However, now that they were in a straight line and forced to attack him one at a time, he felt no threat at all.

Charging at the closest skeleton knight, Logan proved just that. He hacked away with his sword and caved its skull in without much trouble before moving on to the next. He did the same for all of them until he arrived at the other end of the bridge. Once he was done, standing on cold stone and panting for air, he took stock of his injuries.

One cut on his thigh, one on his left shoulder, and two across his torso.

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Logan gathered himself and waited a second for the wounds to heal. While he was doing that, a constant stream of life force was being infused into his spine. It thickened up a little bit. Perhaps a few percent, becoming even brighter and more condensed in his mind’s eye, but that was about it. Other than feeling a little healthier overall, there was nothing out of the ordinary with his body.

Once the cuts were gone, Logan walked over to the nearest corpse. The body was charred and lifeless, but he didn’t care. He immediately pulled out a revival potion he had grabbed from the pouches of the skeleton knights. As he tilted the bottle to pour it into the corpse’s mouth, however, Logan paused.

The magical blood could revive the dead, but wasn’t it also the reason they had all been burned to death in the first place? Logan kneeled there for a moment and soon noticed a strange feeling coming from the egg. Listening to its desire, he drank the potion himself and allowed the energy to fuse into the egg. Logan didn’t understand what was happening until golden drops were pushed out of its shell.

The drops of gold were tinged with emerald. They were obviously some kind of life force, Logan holding his finger above the mouth of the corpse and allowing it to drip down their throat. When the drops were swallowed, the corpse took a deep breath as its heart thundered awake. Skin began to heal as blackened flakes fell away, and cracked skin fused back together in the next few seconds.

Seconds later, James was alive and peacefully sleeping.

Logan moved on and did the same to the others. All nine of them were saved, making him smile. He stopped drawing on the warm energy of the egg now that it was unneeded. The flames shrouding his body died out, and the feeling of strength faded away. A few stray thoughts popped into his mind, but they disappeared as the egg began to drink.

It sapped the life force in his spine away by the second, a sudden wave of weakness overcoming Logan’s entire body. He panicked. Even with the life force he had gained from killing all of those skeletons, he knew that there wasn’t enough to pay back his ‘debt’. Logan had borrowed that flaming energy from the egg, and now he had to pay, even if it cost his life.

Logan wracked his brain for a solution when he remembered the robed skeleton and the leather skeleton. They both had to be somewhere, meaning he could kill them and steal their life force before the egg drained him completely.

Logan spun around until he found a small doorway on the other side of the cavern. Leaving everyone to sleep, he charged in and found a hallway. On either side were countless rooms. The doors were made of stone and had no locks, allowing him to barge into the closest one without a problem.

He immediately found the robed skeleton. It stood in the middle of a room with stone boxes lining the wall. Logan stared at it for a second before the thing turned around, stumbling as it did so.

With no one commanding it, the skeleton had almost no control over its body. The circlet in Logan’s hand was some kind of mind treasure that could attack and control people. Now that their Lord was without its circlet, it could no longer issue new commands. The skeleton knights were only so strong because it had commanded them to come and help before he had taken the circlet.

The robed skeleton pounced at Logan. Despite his body weakening from being drained by the egg, the walking corpse moved so slowly that he had no problem beheading it. Once its skull was on the floor, the body tumbling to the ground, he simply smashed it with the pommel of the sword and crushed its head.

A slight infusion of life force rushed into his body. It thickened the cord of life in his spine a touch before getting sucked away by the egg in less than a second. Moving on to the next room, Logan found the leather skeleton and immediately ended its unlife.

It put up about the same fight as the robed skeleton did. So almost none at all, which was helpful since he was running out of time. Rushing to the next room, Logan sighed in relief when he found another skeleton. It looked like they were all stored in individual rooms.

This one was also a knight, but the skeleton Lord hadn’t commanded it for some reason. Maybe it was limited in how many could be controlled at once? After killing the skeleton knight, Logan found twenty empty rooms and another five knights, all of which fell under his sword.

After that, the rooms ended. There were stairs at the end of the hall, but his life force was getting dangerously low. Logan had used a lot of power from the egg, and now it was responding with a corresponding price. He didn’t have the time to hunt for more enemies by going upstairs. Not to mention that he was terrified of finding one of the monsters from the pit.

A dinosaur might still be able to kill him even if he had the power of the egg to bolster and revive himself. After all, the power he could borrow would eventually run out, leaving him helpless before a real monster.

Biting his lip, Logan wracked his brain for a solution. That was when he remembered the revival potions he had gathered. Nine had been used to revive his nine companions, leaving only twelve.

He drank one without a second thought. The power immediately disappeared inside the egg, causing its hunger to fade away to nothing. He would’ve had to kill around a hundred or more skeletons to get the same effect.

Of course, no drops of life force were released either. Logan realised he could summon them at will if he paid the price. The revival potions were basically a resource the egg was trading him for. By giving it a potion, he could exchange it for drops of revival fluid or a golden flame energy that provided him great strength. So, while he could use the revival potions to pay off his debt, it also felt like a bit of a waste when it could be used to revive the dead.

Then again, wasn’t it better to stop people from dying in the first place by using the flames? It was more like cutting out a mole rather than having to use a six-month course of chemotherapy. They both achieved the same result, but one cost far more than the other.

Logan sat down and breathed a sigh of relief before remembering the nude forms around him. Hoping that no one woke up before he could find clothes, he ran back down the hallway and searched around until he found a crate full of white robes. After draping them over the bodies, he put one around his own naked body and huddled up near the entrance where it was warmest.

He also wanted to keep watch in case the ghost returned.

From there, he mentally reviewed everything that had happened. First, Skeleton Lord had fed the prisoners revival potions to drain away their life force. The energised potion, which Logan now assumed was blood extracted from the egg, was then extracted by bleeding the prisoners in strategic locations around the cavern. This was used to power some kind of ritual that infused life force into the dead egg to perhaps revive it.

From there, the Skeleton Lord attempted to take over Logan’s mind, draw the egg into his body, and then carve a secondary ritual into his flesh. That tearing pain made him think that it was trying to rip something out of him, but Logan wasn’t sure what.

Perhaps his life force?

Either way, the process had gone wrong. Now Logan had a partially revived egg trapped within his spirit, soul, or whatever the space was. Logan couldn’t tell what was going on, but he could sense the egg beneath his navel in some kind of extra-dimensional space.

Still, it was better than the alternative. Either Logan was going to be made an eternal slave or sacrificed to revive the egg, which were both much worse than his current situation.

The egg was inert for now. There was no sign it was alive besides a slight heartbeat and the ability for Logan to draw on its power. If he was willing to pay the price, of course. Eleven vials of revival potion remained, and he was planning to save them all for emergencies. After they were gone, the cost would be all on him to shoulder.

He slowly began to wonder about the limitations of reviving people. Could he save someone who had been dead for a month? What about a year or, if he pushed it, ten? It sounded ridiculous, but Logan couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The egg could revive the dead.

Inevitably, he began to daydream about the past; about reviving the man he dreamed about seeing just one more time.