Six skeletons faced them, graying flesh sloughing off of blackened bone. It wasn’t rot but imitation. Their movements were unnatural, not muscle pulling on bone but condensed shadows phasing through space in the forms they believed made sense.
That was what Archmund thought, at least.
Mercy smirked. “This’ll be easy.”
As the skeletons staggered towards Mercy, drawn by the shock and awe of his lightning, the shadows pooled denser in their hands, as if shrouded in dark clouds of black mist. And from the darkness they formed daggers made of gleaming pink crystal.
The Topaz floated in front of Mercy.
A lightning bolt, direct and efficient, struck the nearest Monster. Electricity, bright and lethal, surged through it, making it look like one of those cartoon effects of people getting struck by lightning, mainly because they already didn’t have flesh.
The Monster fell to its knees. And then, though it tried to maintain the semblance of human form, it dissolved into ephemeral black mist that dissipated into nothing. Only its dagger remained, dropping to the ground with the sound of tinkling glass.
That’s it? Archmund thought to himself. Those are Monsters?
They had been provoked. They lumbered towards Mercy, just a hair faster than before. Those knives would hurt, but… they had to reach their targets first.
They wouldn’t get the chance.
Mercy’s smirk had only grown wider. He jumped atop the dining table, chortling with battle-lust, kicking plates and goblets onto the floor. The Topaz gleamed, shining like a beacon, before it lashed out with lethal lightning at all the remaining monsters.
And were the shadows darker than before. Was that because of the brilliance of the light?
Mercy’s lightning danced across the five remaining skeletons, not lingering too long on each one.
He was toying with them.
The shadows beneath the dining table had grown deep.
Something felt wrong.
Mercy directed the lightning into concussive blast. With the sound of thunder, one skeleton was thrown back violently into a wall, its bones shattering into mist as it hit, dropping its crystal dagger.
The shadows beneath the dining table grew dense as well. Archmund’s Ruby grew hot before him.
Mercy twisted his hand. His power turned from electric to magnetic. Two of the skeletons were thrown into each other, false bone against false bone, before being wrenched apart. Then again, and again, until they fell apart into bone piles without distinction. And then mist, and then nothing at all.
The shadows grew harsh, and a skeletal hand clenched the table right next to Mercy’s foot.
Mercy didn’t notice. He drew his power into the Topaz, gathering it for one final blast against the two skeletons he remaining before him.
That unnoticed skeleton drew itself to its full height — easily eight feet tall. No dagger graced its hands, but a gleaming Gemstone Greatsword.
And still Mercy did not notice. He was too busy gleefully toying with the two lesser skeletons, convinced they were the only “threat”, as they lumbered towards him.
And Archmund moved faster than thought.
A surge of magic from that place beyond his senses; his Ruby thrummed, and it spun before him, like a drill bit going a thousand times a second.
And the grand skeleton drew its sword back, aiming for Mercy’s neck.
And it swung.
And Mercy unleashed the lightning in a blast of drums and ozone.
And Archmund pushed forward, his magic channeling through his Ruby, into a single glowing beam, as orange as the sun — not the sun seen from Earth, but through telescopes in outer space, fierce and roiling with nuclear fusion.
Mercy’s lightning struck the two lesser skeletons. They turned into dark mist instantly, leaving behind only their Gemstone daggers.
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Archmund’s laser struck the grand skeleton in the head. The shadows melted in the heat. Where the laser touched, false flesh and blackened bone became fleeting, dispersing mist.
The heat was radiating more than he’d expected — he’d put more power into it than he’d ever practiced with, and his control was less precise in the heat of battle. It had been invisible when he’d practiced last night, not this orange-red like the sun. And it had always been precise.
But now the heat radiated outwards, dissolving not just the skull but the shoulders, the ribcage, the arms, until the grand skeleton was nothing more than a pair of collapsing leg bones. And did that even make sense, he wondered, for infrared light to transmit heat around itself instead of to whatever it hit, but that didn’t really matter, since it had worked.
The Gemstone sword flew past Mercy to smash into the wall, its wielder vaporized.
The laser hit the chain of the chandelier, melting it. It fell straight onto Mercy’s head. Crystal and metal splintered everywhere, but Mercy barely moved.
Though it finally got his attention.
Mercy turned around. “Huh.”
All of that, in under three seconds.
Archmund’s blood was pulsing through his veins he felt his skin would burst rather than hold it. Suddenly he felt as if in shock and very cold. He remembered, distantly, an odd fact: in his old life, he’d never believed he’d had stage fright, yet whenever he took the stage, his socks ended up stinking to high heaven with all the sweat and must he’d shed. How odd.
Mercy, face blank, walked up to Archmund.
“Milord—” said Zankto, his voice uncertain, but Mercy waved him off.
Perhaps this was the end of it all. Despite his best intentions, he’d dropped a chandelier on a scion of House Omnio. And no matter how distant the relation, House Omnio took care of its own. Archmund didn’t know what the penalty for attacking a distant imperial relation was, but he was glad that he knew that death was not the end.
Then Mercy clasped him on the shoulder. “Not bad at all. Does that move have a name?”
“What?”
“I assume this was why you were so tired this morning,” Mercy said. “Practicing this technique. Since if you had something so impressive, you would have shown me instead of telling me how you’d never seen someone do real magic before.”
Archmund chuckled nervously.
“Are you telling me that you named those techniques you showed me ‘shield’ and ‘sphere’? Very straightforward.”
Mercy huffed. Was he pouting? “I was five when I named them, thank you.”
“A true prodigy.”
“I am indeed.”
Archmund was starting to calm down, and now the idea of naming his attacks felt rather silly. “Do I have to?”
“You should. My teachers always told me that if you give your Skill a name it becomes far more consistent and much more easy to use.”
He said Skill like it was a proper noun. Another game-like element to this world. Wonderful.
“Why?”
“No one knows.”
Archmund frowned. This felt oddly reminiscent. “And there isn’t a spirit dwelling in each Gem that’ll speak to me and tell me what the names of all my skills are?”
“What? No. Where would you get an idea like that?” Mercy said with a giggle.
He vaguely remembered a show or comic about that sort of thing, except it was swords and not Gems, and there was also something about self-actualization?
“I’ll call it ‘Infrared Lance’,” he decided.
“Below-red? Interesting.”
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Mercy nodded to the soldiers. “Check the exits. I think we’re clear, but make sure before we start looting.”
The men fanned out in pairs — Zantko with Wrest, Vurl with Yald.
“So,” Archmund said, watching as they checked each door for further shadows. “Those were Monsters.”
“First time seeing them? What’d you think?”
Truthfully? He was a bit underwhelmed.
“I wasn’t expecting them to be… I mean, skeletons?”
“They are the restless spirits of the dead,” Mercy said. He picked up a goblet from the floor, which had been knocked off during the battle. “Uncl—the Grand Commander thinks that the weakest of them cling to their humanity as hard as they can. So they try to keep their human form, but they can’t. Something’s missing, so they end up as ghosts or skeletons or animated corpses. And if they end up really weak, they end up taking the shapes of animals.”
There was something vaguely Buddhist about that, but Archmund didn’t remember enough about Buddhism to know for sure.
Mercy sniffed the goblet and recoiled at whatever it had contained. “That’s why upper Tier 1 looks so much like the outside world — another attempt by the pitiful dead to cling to life, in a way that makes sense to them. It’s close to the surface, so it’s cellars.”
“What about the big skeleton?” Archmund asked. “What was that? You’re not going to tell me that giants used to walk this world, are you?”
He meant it as a joke, but Mercy shrugged. “Who knows? I wouldn’t rule it out. But no, this one was probably just a spirit that’s stronger than the others. Had more power than you’d think, so it mimicked a legendary Monster it remembered from life.”
A soldier walked up to them; they had finished securing the area and so had collected the spoils of war. “Your spoils, milord.”
He presented to Mercy six Gemstone daggers, three smooth spheres each the size of a marble, and the Gemstone sword.
“Each one of you gets a dagger as payment for being advance guards. The sword’s his by right of conquest,” Mercy said, gesturing to Archmund.
“Wow. Wow. I can’t use this,” Archmund said.
“Then strap it to your back.”
Privately, there was something he thought was much more valuable.
When he’d started his magical training, he hadn’t been aware of Attunement. Gems became Attuned to their users, but users also became Attuned to their Gems. If he had to describe it, it was like an addiction. Physiological. Psychological. It didn’t matter. He could feel how his magic had worn a rut into the idea of “only being used to produce light”, and how only a tremendous amount of strain and a great deal of psychological self-trickery had managed to turn that into focused heat.
And that shaping had been caused in part by the way his Ruby had been cut.
He needed one of those smooth, unshaped Gems. Something he could pour his power into without following an existing path. He heavily suspected there was a the potential for great power there.
“How about I trade you?” he said. “This for one of those marbles.”
“Absolutely not,” Mercy said, his earlier warmth gone. That only confirmed Archmund’s suspicions.
“Sorry. I mean… wow, you really are a bumpkin,” Mercy said, pulling back. “It’s just… these are mine. If you want unshaped Gems of your own, you’ll have to win them through the right of conquest.”