Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-One - Please Be Quiet in the Library

I was feeling pretty useless.

Not super-useless, but like... like watching someone doing something and wishing you could help, but then you learn that they’re way better at it than you. Like wanting to help someone with their homework, but they turn out to be the top of the class. That kind of useless.

Carrot was bouncing around, smacking down any stray skeleton with whoops of joy, punctuated by rocky explosions whenever she hit the earth and used it as a weapon to destroy even more skeletons. When a few ghosts came around, I thought that was my chance to be useful, but then Carrot just blasted them with balls of glowing earth.

If I had pockets, I would have shoved my hands in them.

Fortunately, I was saved by an inquisitive Bastion. “Can you tell us about this boss?” he asked.

“It’s not the main dungeon boss, obviously,” Peter said. “Not sure if you’d actually call it a boss under normal circumstances, but we’ve been calling it that for a while.”

“So a challenge fight, then?” Amaryllis asked.

Peter scratched his chin. “Something like that. The creature is called the Bone Lord. About level twelve? He’s this skeleton in a tweed jacket who summons more skeletons and undead. He’ll never fight you head on, which is what makes the fight tricky.”

“Does he drop anything good?” Amaryllis asked. “Can you get a level from him?”

“Sometimes he’ll drop a book, or a jacket. It’s nothing too special.”

I nodded along. “So, what’s the strategy then?”

“I run in, kill the miniboss, then we clean up the few monsters he had time to summon,” Peter said.

My shoulders and ears slumped. “Oh,” I said.

Momma noticed, and I know she noticed because she had a little smile. “How about we let the children take care of it?”

Peter eyed her. “You sure?”

“We’re there if it gets too dangerous, but they’re all at about the right level, and as young as they are, it’ll teach them a lot. If we need to rely on them later, this little bit of added strength might come in handy,” Momma said.

Peter considered it, then nodded.

“So, if we are going to take this Bone Lord on, what are good strategies?” Amaryllis asked.

“Hardly fair to tell you if it’s meant to be some sort of test,” Peter said.

“She never said it was a test,” was Amaryllis’ quick reply.

Momma chuckled. “You’re right, I didn’t.” She cleared her throat. “Consider it a test.”

Amaryllis didn’t look amused, so I rubbed her back a little to make her feel better. “C’mon, it’ll be fun. This way we get to keep all the fun loot too.” She huffed, but it wasn’t a disagreeing kind of huff.

The door leading into the next floor was missing. In its place was a large root passing through a wooden gate and forcing it ajar. The more we moved in, the uglier the roots got, this one included. It was covered in nasty thorns and I had the impression that it was pulsing whenever I wasn’t looking right at it.

“These things are a bigger blight than I had imagined,” Momma said as she approached the root. “Perhaps coming here so soon was for the best.”

Amaryllis tugged on her goggles, the same ones she’d gotten in that glass dungeon a while ago. “They’re magical. Or if they’re not magical, then they’re filled with magic, which I suppose is merely a semantic difference.”

“Interesting,” Momma said. “Let’s move on. Carrot, are you coming?”

We crossed the doorway and into the next floor.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The first floor had been a city road, the second more city with a graveyard. Now we stood before a large building surrounded by an open courtyard where dying trees were being weighed down by climbing vines.

The one building was big and imposing, with gargoyles at the corners and a grand, peaked roof. I thought it was a cathedral at first, but it lacked the belltower and the religious stuff.

Then again, maybe it was a cathedral of a sort I wasn’t familiar with.

“Watch the bones,” Buster said. He gestured to the ground where, upon a cursory inspection, I could make out bones sticking out from between patches of dying grass. The few bushes dotting the courtyard had piles tucked under them, the occasional skull watching us from the shadows.

I expected it to stink, but instead the air smelled like very old compost and upturned dirt with a faint, musty odour, like rotting paper.

“Where does the Bone Lord hide?” I asked.

“Inside the building, of course,” Peter said.

I could probably have guessed that. “We should get ready here, then, before we actually start fighting or anything.”

“A plan wouldn’t be amiss,” Bastion said.

I agreed. “Alright, so the plan is, I approach the nice Bone Lord, and try to make friends. And if that fails, we all fight him.”

“Perhaps not having a plan could be a nice change of pace,” Bastion said.

“You’ll learn to get used to it,” Amaryllis muttered. “How about we allow you to go to the front. Bastion, you’re fast and decent with that sword. You can intercept. Awen, your job is to snipe the Bone Lord when Broccoli inevitably fails to soothe it. After Broccoli, I’ve got the magic best suited for taking out large numbers of skeletons. I’ll try to buy you time to face the Bone Lord and take it down.”

“Him. It’s a Bone Lord. Not a Bone.... uh, what’s the gender neutral for a lord or lady?”

Amaryllis smacked me with a wing, which was very rude. I was just getting the undead lord’s pronouns right. “Stop being an idiot. A large part of this will rely on you. Your Cleaning magic is the closest we have to Holy. So you need to work hard to take the Bone Lord down, understood.”

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“I’ll do my best,” I said.

We formed up in a diamond. Bastion took the lead, with Awen behind me and Amaryllis to my left.

Momma and the other buns cheered us on--well, Carrot did at any rate--as we stepped into the cathedral.

The interior of the grand building was as Peter had said, a huge library with towering shelves to the sides and a great big opening in the middle with benches and desks. It would have been a majestic place where the books on the shelves were not moldy husks, if there weren’t roots sliding around the columns decorating the room, and if there weren’t dozens of corpses strewn all across the floor in big bony piles.

“Oh, yuck,” I said as the smell hit. Mold and dust and rotting meat. I began to let my Cleaning magic out as an aura to keep the worst of it at bay. It helped a little. It also made my friends bunch up a little closer, though that might have been the poor lighting.

There was some light, of course. The walls had big stained-glass windows on them, and the wide-open doors behind us let in light and wind. Better yet, the ceiling had some pretty rough looking holes in it that let columns of dusty light pour down from above.

“There,” Amaryllis whispered as she pointed ahead.

At the far end of the room, sitting at a rather ordinary desk, was a skeleton in a brown jacket with shoulder patches. He had a dried up husk of a book set before him, and his head was tilted down as if he’d passed away while in the act of reading.

He looked... lonesome, and quiet.

“Insight,” I muttered.

The Herald of Newbining, Bone Lord, level 12, Quiet

What did ‘quiet’ mean?

Swallowing, I slowed my pace down a little as I reached the middle of the room. There were more bones around, and the floor, once marble and inlaid with complex patterns, was cracked and broken, roots occasionally bulging out from beneath it.

I gestured for my friends to stay back, then with a series of dainty little hops, moved closer still to the Bone Lord.

When I was some meters away, I calmed my racing heart and cleared my throat. “Hello,” I said.

The Bone Lord raised his head, slowly, like a heavy crypt door coming open. He turned, and I noticed that part of his face was missing as a tangle of greenish roots had taken hold of his visage.

“My name is Broccoli,” I said. “Broccoli Bunch. I’ve been a friend to skeletons before, and I’d love to be friends with you too.”

I waited, but Friendmaking didn’t do anything.

“Do you want to be a friend?” I asked. Maybe I had to be a little more specific?

Still nothing.

The undead rose to his feet, roots, thin and still green, snapped behind him as creaky bones worked to bring him to his full, unimpressive height. “Um, can you understand me?” I asked. “Amaryllis, I don’t think he understood me.”

“I did,” she said.

I put two and two together and came to a number that was expected but not wanted. “Oh, shoot.” If Amaryllis could understand, then I wasn’t speaking skeleton.

The Bone Lord spun around and started to hobble away. He would have been faster, but a bunch of roots were tangled through his hip and legs, turning his run into an ungainly hop.

“Wait!” I called as I rushed after him.

The skeleton swiped a hand through the air, and I stopped, breaking so hard my shoes squeaked on the marble. I was expecting some magical attack, and had my Cleaning magic ready to try and counter it, but nothing happened. Nothing obvious, at least.

“Awa!” Awen awa’d loudly.

A glance back revealed that the skeletons around her were beginning to rise, clicking and clacking as they stood up and came together from the bones strewn around. There were only a dozen of them, but there were enough bones on the ground to have ten times as many attacking us.

“Broccoli, focus on the boss!” Amaryllis called. She punctuated that with the zap-bang of a lightning spell that tore a skeleton asunder.

“Right!” I said before bolting after the Bone Lord.

The skeleton gestured ahead of him, and three of the bodies before us rose and jumped out towards me.

I ducked next to the first and smacked it with my spade, the next two I hit with a pair of cleaning balls that sent them stumbling back. Only one of them collapsed, the other, while clean, wasn’t taken out entirely.

That wasn’t a good sign.

A smack from my spade in passing sent its head flying across the room. Behind me, the skeletons I’d hit started to melt away.

The Bone Lord bounced around a corner, and I charged right after him.

I squeaked when a small skeleton ambushed me the moment I came around the corner. It was wearing a checkered dress, and it clamped right onto my legs like a limpet. I blasted it with enough cleaning magic to wash away the dust on the shelf behind it, then wiggled my leg to untangle it.

The Bone Lord was getting away.

I growled and flung a trio of cleaning balls after him. He ducked under the first two, but the third splashed against his back and sent him careening into a shelf. That wasn’t enough to take the mini-boss out. He continued running, off into a little room set to the back of the library.

I charged after him, then discovered that the room only had a spiral staircase within. Bouncing up the steps, I could hear the clatter of bony feet on stone just ahead of me. I was catching up.

The stairs ended, and I found myself on a long wooden walkway that ran around the edge of the main room of the library. There were more shelves here, and a glance to the side showed my friends forming a triangle and smacking down more and more skeletons with magic, hammer and sword.

The Bone Lord was facing me, and next to him was an abomination.

I tightened my grip on my warspade and got ready to fight.

***