Ritzy would have almost preferred dying instead of suffering the unbearable pain akin to someone pouring burning acid on his head. But the pain was so debilitating it didn’t leave him a choice. He couldn’t move at all. And the pain was so intense and piercing that it didn’t let Ritzy escape into the soothing embrace of unconsciousness or even death.

But eventually, as all things do, the pain met its end. It was so subtle that Ritzy didn’t even notice when it happened. But that could also have been because the pain was so persistent that it hung around, even after the source or cause was done.

“Ah, what the fuck. Don’t tell me I went bald after all that.”

Ritzy groaned as he struggled to sit up and regain his bearings. Fearing that whatever had happened would have lasting consequences, Ritzy burdensomely moved his hands to the top of his head to check. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a mirror with him, so all he could do was use his fingers and sense of touch.

But that was enough to confirm that he still had his hair left and that his head and scalp were somehow intact. It didn’t feel like they were even scabbed or that there was any other evidence of Ritzy tearing into the skin atop his head.

“Thank fuck.”

Since he still had his hair, Ritzy’s most pressing concern had been alleviated.

Ritzy sighed in relief at his hair being intact. But he still felt lost since he remembered what had happened before he was overcome with pain each time he touched his head.

The one thing he had managed to summon that didn’t leave, melt, or explode was a piece of hair. But it turned out that it had some spirituality, which meant it could have been subjugated if he had followed the proper procedure.

But Ritzy killed the thing, and then when he tried to reanimate it, the thing melted or something and decided to give unimaginable pain to the necromancer that summoned it.

If someone had summoned him and then killed him, Ritzy would have also wanted to exact revenge, so he couldn’t quite blame the thing. But he had lost the opportunity to subdue and put his first summoned being under his control. And he had run out of mana in the process.

“This sucks!”

Since he didn’t have any more mana, Ritzy couldn’t use the remaining summoning circles he had arranged before they lost their effect. He realized in hindsight that it wasn’t a very wise move to draw all the circles at once. But it was too late now.

He didn’t have any mana or any more Bone Chalk, so Ritzy had to give up on making any more attempts at summoning for the moment. That was unless he could recover enough mana to utter another chant before the circles lost their effects.

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Ritzy would only have enough time to gather enough mana for a single attempt. And even that would be tight.

But it wasn’t like he had anything better to do, so Ritzy sat down and focused on absorbing the mana in the air.

It was usually a slow and arduous process for necromancers without a summon to solidify their connection with the realm of magic. But it seemed like Ritzy’s past efforts in absorbing enough mana to perform a summoning ritual several times in a row and attempt a reanimation and his recent experience with using mana when chanting helped him improve his mana control.

It was quicker than he had expected, but Ritzy was still only fast enough to gather enough mana for a single attempt. And it was still a little uncertain whether it would work or not since he could tell that a large part of the mana in the bone chalk that made the summoning circle had left.

“Monarch of Darkness, bestow upon your faithful servant an aide!”

Although Ritzy had unintentionally managed to summon something different by accidentally adding his own line to the chant, the end result of that hadn’t been very promising, so he stuck to the chant he knew to be tried and tested.

The chant worked, mana seeped into the summoning circle from Ritzy, and the layer on top of the ground turned twisty and hazy before a rounded bone surface poked through.

Ritzy was already despondent since it looked like another skeleton was coming through, which probably meant that another summoning was going to fail.

Statistically speaking, summonings very rarely failed when they had come this far. But in Ritzy’s case, failure came along after the summoning was done. So, he didn’t have any hope that he would be able to summon a useful minion, despite all the trouble he had gone through.

However, his expression quickly changed when the thing rose further through the summoning circle, and it turned out that the rounded skeletal piece wasn’t a slightly weirdly shaped skull. It was the top of a shin bone, the tibia.

It was just that Ritzy didn’t recognize it at first since the bone was as large, if not larger than, his entire leg.

The same bone that was less than half his leg on himself was somehow up to his waist, and it stood upright in the middle of the summoning circle.

Ritzy wasn’t sure what to do with it since it didn’t seem to have any spirituality. He shouldn’t have been able to summon something like that with a summoning circle meant to summon a skeleton capable of moving on its own or following orders.

But Ritzy was already way past caring about what made sense and what didn’t.

After looking back and forth between the shin bone and his own leg a couple of times, Ritzy realized he should finish the summoning before the shin bone went back to the Storage of Darkness.

He tried making a contract like he had started, and forcefully completed, with the piece of hair. But the bone seemed to be in the same state as the skeleton pile that was left behind when the light in the fourth skeleton’s eyes took off.

It was an ownerless and spiritless piece of bone, so there was no need to put it under a contract.

Ritzy let the summoning circle fade, and the bone fell to the ground. He grabbed it by the base, which was barely slim enough for him to hold comfortably, and tried swinging it around a couple of times. It was a little heavy, but it would make a decent club.

After seven attempts at summoning a skeleton subordinate, Ritzy had gotten a dead, not undead, skeleton, a tuft of white hair that transformed into an unimaginable bout of pain, and an unbelievably large shin bone that he could use as a weapon since he didn’t have anyone to do the fighting for him.

“Ritzy, are you in here?! Gerhart’s in trouble!”