Some faint dots of blue light started to appear close to the ground around Sofia after she chose not to summon anyone for help. They were blue flowers, opening one by one, revealing their luminescent petals. Like a wave spreading from Sofia’s position, the flowers opened up, lighting up the cavernous underground place with their blue hue. Thousands of tombstones were messily planted everywhere in the uneven dirt ground, and the glowing blue flowers were everywhere. The perfectly flat brick ceiling above that grand underground graveyard and the many pillars holding it up gave the place some order amidst the chaos.
Maybe about a kilometer across. Is that an exit all the way out there?
Sofia’s senses were no longer blocked by the darkness, and she could now feel the rich ambient mana, and the many bones hidden beneath the soil.
In the distance, a small pile of bones floated up and assembled, building the short skeleton of a dwarf with a vivid blurry green gem inlaid in his skull, holding a stout black shovel covered in glowing blue flowers.
I see. His mana heart is right there for everyone to see, but I have to be careful not to break it.
So what do you have for me, Gravelord Skantar? Shovel martial arts, or some tasteful Necromancy?!
Skantar raised his shovel, and a much too familiar scene of skeletons digging out of the ground played out under Sofia’s gaze, who did nothing to stop them.
Very little mana for so many skeletons, Sofia first observed, slightly impressed.
The skeletons seemed to be mostly human but there were many other humanoid races mixed in. She analyzed the skeletons more, feeling a bit disappointed by what she was seeing.
They get their mana from him… No core and no fake soul… Those aren’t real skeletons.
“This isn’t even necromancy, it’s just playing with skeleton-shaped puppets…” she said out loud.
There was no reaction from the dwarf or from his skeletons, the skeletons simply came out of the ground and started to form a wide circle around Sofia, none of them attacking yet.
“I got excited for nothing.”
Sighing, Sofia started to walk in Skantar’s direction.
The skeletons decided to attack when she got closer. As simple magic-fuelled bone puppets, they perhaps had the physical stats of someone around Sofia’s level, but they had no skill or magical attacks, and simply came at Sofia bare-handed.
The instant a skeleton got inside of the [Bone dominus] range, a bone tendril shot out of Sofia’s armor, latching onto the skeleton’s skull by looping inside its empty eye cavities. The skeleton turned around. Its arms became bone swords, and it began to slice up the other skeletons it could reach. With actual weapons and Sofia’s direct control, the skeleton flawlessly executed its previous allies one after the other.
More skeletons fell under Sofia’s control in a similar fashion, and she leisurely walked through the underground flowery graveyard with her stolen skeletons clearing the path for her. If an uncontrolled skeleton somehow made it past her sword-armed guards, another bone tendril would shoot out at it, and forcefully transform it into a bone cube.
Skantar’s magic tried to resist Sofia’s whenever she wrestled for the control of his skeletons, but she had a lot more mana, and could simply overwhelm his magic.
“Come on, you gotta have something else? Right? Surely this isn’t all you’re capable of?” Sofia asked as she was about halfway through the distance separating her from the dwarf.
After Sofia took a few more steps, Skantar raised his shovel for the second time, and new skeletons jumped out of the ground. They were tall, armored skeletons, covered head to toe with some dark steel, and wielding a variety of weapons, a lot of them even coated in mithril. Some in the distance were drawing the string of longbows.
Sofia kept walking slowly.
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The tall armored skeletons charged at her. With their armor and weapons, the bone tendrils wouldn’t reach them. They easily cut down Sofia’s bones before she could touch them and take control.
She let go of that strategy and summoned a graveyard of her own. She let the tombs fully appear which she rarely did anymore, dirt tombstones appeared out of the ground everywhere in between the stone ones, uprooting many of the glowing flowers. The armored skeletons all started to sink back into the dirt, skeletal hands holding their ankles and pulling them down.
Skantar’s armored skeletons, to their credit, were strong enough to fight back and destroy Sofia’s graveyard skeletons. But she had so much more mana. For every armored skeleton fighting to stay afloat, four graveyard skeletons were pulling it back down to where it belonged.
Arrows flew, mithril-tipped projectiles breaking the sound barrier as they departed, disturbing the battle’s joyful clanking of bones. Sofia kept taking one step slowly after the other. The attacks were too weak, as if magnets pushed away by Sofia, they curved around her at the last second and kept flying, eventually hitting one skeleton or another.
She looked at her mana, it was still full. Regenerating faster than this masquerade could make her spend it.
Finally, Sofia felt some challenge when Skantar raised his shovel for the third time, and four flying skeletal mages appeared around the dwarf as she was about two hundred meters away, walking between Skantar’s half-buried armored skeletons desperately trying to stay above ground. They gathered the mana in the air to attack her.
Aura mage skeletons?
At least on principle, you’ve got my attention.
Sofia let the attacks come. Each of the skeleton mages attack with something different. One shot some kind of ice beam, another one lightning, one pure mana attacks, and the last one some kind of wind blades, utterly decimating the scenery in their path.
Not one attack reached Sofia as she negated them with [Heat Death] one by one.
Her mana went down and up, down and up, the barrage of elemental attacks she received slowly whittling away her reserves. When she got close enough, she used the ring of Zar.
The four skeletal mages fell to the ground like the lifeless puppets they were.
Skantar raised his shovel once more.
“I think I’ve seen enough.”
Sofia instantly crossed the last fifty meters with [Summon self].
Skantar hastily canceled his magic, striking Sofia with his shovel. The attack was charged with mana and actually pierced her armor hitting her in the ribs.
“I respect the attempt.”
She grabbed the shovel with her left hand and pulled. She let go of her scepter and reached out to grab the skeleton’s skull with her dragon-scale claws. It turned out there was a magical shield protecting Gravelord Skantar, one which Sofia could follow the traces of. It was being fueled by several of the pillars in the graveyard.
Sofia reached into her chest and pulled out her dagger. She sliced a hole through the dwarf’s magical shield and while still holding the dagger, her extended claws reached the dwarf’s mana heart on his skull. The skeleton grabbed Sofia’s arm and tried to fight back. It was too weak to stop her. She delicately extracted the gem, and the dwarf’s skeleton stopped struggling, falling apart in unison with his thousands of skeleton puppets.
‘You have pacified [Skantar Ironbrow - Encroaching Echo]’
[Lively mana stone]: Once a perfectly normal mana-heart, it took on a spark of make-believe life of its own as it tried to compensate for the slow degradation of its host’s body and mind as it desperately clung to a fading life.
Eventually, only echoes remained.
Even now, this mana stone is producing a bit of mana, and it will do so for a few years to come, until the last traces of its echoes completely fade away.
As expected, an inscription in ancient human can be found engraved on the inside, reading: ‘Heart of Velania’.
“Is this kind of saying that what I was fighting was this mana stone and not Skantar himself? Just an echo… Cling to life too much when you die, become an undead. Then look at Richard. Cling to life too much when you’re alive, become an undead… It’s a bit funny that the best way to stay alive is being dead… Well now…”
Sofia grabbed the black shovel and stored the dwarf’s skeleton in a corner of her storage ring. Then she turned around and stored the skeletons of the four flying mages.
“Boys, bring them back out,” she ordered the graveyard skeletons, who had already received her order before she even spoke. The armored skeletons were brought out of the dirt and dragged toward Sofia. “Don’t forget the archers, try to gather all the arrows too.”
After she stored everything, with the skeletons all nicely separated in piles for bookie to eat later, Sofia made her way to the underground graveyard’s exit, picking up glowing flowers as she went. The flowers’ glow faded once she picked them, but they were pretty nonetheless, she gathered a nice bouquet and put one in her helmet like someone would put it in their hair.
Right before she left the room, Sofia stopped. She stored the flowers and brought Skantar’s mana stone out, turning it around in her hand.
“Your shift is over now. I’ll take care of these old bones for you.”
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