Everything resumed.

Momo was spit back out the way she came—suddenly rocketing onto Morganium’s chipped pavement, her knees scraping against rubble. Her head spun as she regained her vision of the scene: Morganium’s tower of black, still stabilized; Jarva’s body a pile of ash before her; the crumpled bodies of hundreds of Kyros’s failed soldiers.

Still no Nia and Vivienne. That was promising, at the very least.

The intense shaking of the pavement was less promising.

The husk. Shit.

She had naively thought that leaving the box on another plane of existence would stop the husk from awakening, but it appeared that Sera’s sequence of events had already been spun into irrevocable motion. At the very least, Momo reasoned, the beast’s core was stranded in the Nether. As long as it stayed that way, and as long as the Holy Resistance didn’t have any extra cards up their sleeves, she had a fair shot of defeating it—whatever it was.

Turning her head away from the tower, she found Sumire and the rest of her apocalypse party gawking at her with utter confusion. To them, she had been gone for no longer than a minute.

“But—you—” Sumire stuttered. “What just happened?”

“No time to explain,” Momo said. The pavement was already shaking underfoot. “I think—”

With a thundering crack, the ground where the Chickenductor sat split wide open. Momo’s jaw clenched.

“Oh no.”

A giant, fleshy thumb shot out of the ground, piercing straight through the machine. The Chickenductor—Viktor’s Magnum Opus—exploded in a flash of metallic gore. Momo ducked, watching as gears and cranks flew overhead.

Viktor fell to his knees and wailed.

“No, no, no! My darling creation!”

Ignoring his outburst, Momo took Sumire’s hand and motioned towards the district walls—the tall partitions separating the innermost ring of the city from the rest. If they could get to the top of those walls, they’d be a safe distance away from whatever was simmering beneath their feet.

“Nyk,” Momo shouted, grabbing the dokkaebi’s attention. “Grab Viktor and the chicken, we’re moving!”

Viktor clung to the machine’s corpse like a widow at her husband’s grave. Nyk rolled her eyes at the state of him, then, without pretense, punched the man hard in the cheek. He slunk to the side, unresponsive.

“I said grab him,” Momo emphasized between hurried steps. “Not thwack him unconscious.”

“Please, I wasn’t about to drag his inconsolable body across Alois.” When Momo only glared at her, she followed with, “You should be thanking me. This way we don’t have to listen to him whimper.”

As the party trailed hurriedly towards the partition, another monstrous body part—this time, a raw bone—emerged from the ground, rising up in front of Momo with a burst of stone. She skirted to a stop on her heels, wings buffeting.

The bone emerged from the ground at two ends. It was laying horizontally, with one sharp end at Momo’s feet, and another one protruding from the pavement several yards away. As the bone rose further into view, Momo tried to make sense of its outline: it was mildly curved, white, and brittle. And, as she would soon discover, this odd bone was not a unique one-off, but just one in a series. Gigantic, curved bones began to rise in pairs all around her, breaking sluggishly through the pavement, thrust upwards by an invisible force.

“Oh gods, what are these things?” Grimli hiccuped. He had been following them around like a loyal dog, dutifully asking no questions—at least, until the present one. “Bones of a … a skeleton? Queen Momo, is this one of your most excellent plans in motion?”

“It’s a rib bone,” Nyk said, nonchalant. “And I suppose Morganium is now becoming a ribcage.”

“Agh!”

The pavement under Sumire’s feet gave way. She slipped into the wide maw of broken stone, her body halfway towards a plummeting death into the city’s underground tunnels by the time Momo grabbed her hand.

“Hold on!”

As the ground crumbled underfoot, Momo tossed Sumire onto one shoulder and Grimli on another, hoisting them upwards like two toddlers as she flew for the still in-tact city walls. Nyk transformed into her impish dokkaebi form and followed in hot pursuit, trailing behind until the group of them were perched like ravens on the high city walls, watching in quiet horror as Nyk’s prediction came true: ginormous, dinosaur-sized bones were slowly encircling the city’s plaza.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

An ancient skeleton, half flesh and half bone, was rising from the ashes of Morganium.

“How did we not know this thing was underground?” Momo asked, gaping. “All the bunkers—and the tunnels connecting them—wouldn’t we have noticed a mega-skeleton?”

Sumire, who had been uncharacteristically quiet before, cleared her throat.

“We did,” she said, swallowing with slight embarrassment. She separated herself from Momo, balancing on the shaky wooden beams that made up the wall’s infrastructure. “But the Head of Engineering told me that prehistoric mega-skeletons are practically buried under every great Aloisian city—and that their bone marrow strengthens the soil, or whatever. So we just built around it. Would have been too much trouble to excavate the thing anyway.”

After realizing that Sumire was, in fact, serious, Momo pulled at the skin of her face and groaned.

“I know you grew up on the sea, not on land, but that’s… That’s insane, Sumire. You seriously found a giant skeleton underlying the entirety of the capital, and you didn’t think to tell me?”

Sumire put her hands up defensively. “You weren’t exactly available, you know. If I was to tell you about every skeleton we found lying around, we’d have no time for the important stuff.”

“I think this might fall under the important stuff.”

“Are you two seriously having your first fight right now?”

Momo knew she was acting stupid when Nyk was the voice of reason.

Just as she opened her mouth to apologize, a dinging notification rang out in her ear.

Ruler System — Notice of Loss of Admin Controls: Morganium

Reason: Change of Rulership

Cause: Prolonged Absence During Crisis

Due to your absence during a {Crisis} in your settlement, Morganium, ownership has defaulted to the next-in-line organization [S3], or Sera’s Chosen Three. The three individuals now in charge of Morganium are Nia Nightsbane, Vivienne von Neculai, and Unknown Entity (Not Recognized By System).

“Oh come on,” Momo groaned, slapping at her ear as if that was a surefire way to file a customer service complaint. “I’m not absent. I’m right here!”

Wait. She froze, stilling her assault on her eardrum. That must mean… are Nia and Vivienne already here?

Ignorant to Momo’s loss of queenship, Grimli stepped forward, leaning over the hand railings with trembling fingers. “But if that’s the ribcage, then where’s the skull? And why’s it levitating like that?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Ma always told me that a skeleton is fine lying down, but the moment those old bones start to take flight, you better flee from sight.”

Nyk snorted. “Did your family have a convenient idiom for every situation?”

“Sure did. I have a book of ‘em at home. The Copperstrings Compendium of Original Thoughts for Those Who Don’t Like Thinking.”

Momo shook her head. Her thoughts were swimming like drunk fish in her skull.

God, I just need a second to think.

Nyk and Grimli’s idle banter turned to white noise in Momo’s ears as she floated upwards. She needed to get a bird’s eye view of the situation. To her right, over the partition walls, was the central plaza, which was now completely encased in bone. It looked like the empty chest cavity of a god—a husk. To her left, in the outermost rings of the capital, smaller bones were rising. Vertebrae. The underpinnings of a jaw.

The entire city sat in rubble. All the infrastructure that they had carefully built and rebuilt during Momo’s term as queen was now sliding like quicksand into the ground. The exposed tunnels underpinning the city were fat like clogged intestines, cluttered with what used to be shops and houses and merchant stalls. The city had become a decaying carcass.

“Mo. Mo. Are we good?”

Sumire was tugging at the hem of her pants. Momo bit her lip in embarrassment, and lowered herself back onto the platform. She had gotten too absorbed in the chaos—she had forgotten just how rashly she had acted minutes before.

“Of course we are. I’m sorry.” She folded her arms over her chest and receded her wings, making herself small. “I know you’ve just been trying your best. You rebuilt an entire city from the ground up while I was… getting yelled at by townspeople, or whatever I just spent the last six months doing. It’s just that—I was so close to being the queen that everyone needed. No, respected. Now I’m laying in my queendom’s carcass, literally.”

“Who cares?”

Sumire slid her braids into a ponytail and gazed out into the plaza. The enormous bones were still clicking into place, sliding between each other like gears in an elaborate machine.

“Your citizens are safe in the one place Sera can’t touch them. Underground. When I said we built around that skeleton, I meant it. It won’t be able to touch the bunkers. And if it does try and slam its bony fist into the ground, our people can just go lower. Remember how far underground Gorim’s prison cell is? The bunkers can all go that deep. Viktor actually did a pretty good job implementing some anti- magical-terrorism measures, if you could believe it.”

Momo eyed the knocked out wizard with pity and a bit of pride.

“You mean that? You think they’re okay?”

“I’m certain. Them and the chickens.”

Momo breathed a sigh of relief.

“Okay. Fine. You’re right,” she said after a moment, taking a shaky breath in. “They’re safe. I didn’t totally fail as queen. Even if I’m technically not queen anymore.”

“You are to them. They won’t forget what you did for them,” Sumire assured her. “They’re safe. I’m safe. And by the looks of it, so are you. I don’t see that mood-killer box on you anymore. No more imminent risk of a soul-chain-sucking explosion, right?”

Momo gave her a small smile. “I chucked it at Sera’s head.”

Sumire laughed and slapped her on the shoulder. “That’s my girl. I have a lot of questions on how the hell that went down, but I’ll save them for later. So, since you’re no longer queen, I’m going to try and give you an order for once—get your shit together, count to ten, and let’s blow this skeleton to pieces before it decides to do something annoying like gain sentience.”