While Gerhart was absorbed in his own thoughts and dilemmas, Ritzy finished gathering enough pol.
“You ready, kiddo?”
Ritzy looked at Mognog and nodded.
“As ready as I can be. I can’t make any more mana stay in my body, no matter how hard I try.”
Mognog hummed thoughtfully.
“You’ve hit the limit for your rank, then. It would be great if you could break through to iron rank. But I don’t think it’s possible to do so in such a short time, so let’s put that aside.”
Ritzy and Gerhart looked at Mognog in confusion.
“Iron rank?”
Mognog’s eyes flickered as he looked back and forth between Ritzy and Gerhart.
“Yeah. Iron rank. The rank after stone rank. You know, the ranks of mana mastery? How did either of you learn mana and become stones without even knowing about the ranks?”
Ritzy and Gerhart exchanged glances and decided without talking that Gerhart would be the one to explain.
“Um, where did you say you were from again, Mognog?”
“I already said I was a great warrior of Mognog. It’s literally my name now? I know you said you lived in the countryside, but you must have heard of the great Mognog Empire, right?”
“I see.”
Gerhart cleared his throat before continuing.
“Ehm, we have never heard of the Mognog Empire. Like, at all. The two empires we have heard of are the Holy Empire of Katmandar and the Immortal Empire, Drychness.”
“Huh. That’s weird. But I guess it does explain why I don’t recognize any of the places you mentioned. You guys must be from another continent or something. Wait, when I said I was a great warrior of Mognog, what did you think I meant?”
Ritzy and Gerhart looked awkwardly at each other before Gerhart answered.
“...that it was a tribe of some kind. Either of goblins, hobgoblins, or humans. Well, since Ritzy used goblin corpses to summon you, we kind of assumed that you were a goblin warrior of some kind.”
“What the shit! That’s fucking rude!”
“Sorry, Mognog, but we didn’t know.”
“Ah, no, it’s fine, I guess. I understand you’re situation.”
Mognog sighed as the light in his eyes dimmed, and the flames didn’t flicker as intensely as before.
“Kiddo, you look like you want to say something?”
Ritzy didn’t even look embarrassed at having his thoughts read.
“Well… What are you, then? Are you a goblin or a human?”
Mognog didn’t answer immediately. But since he didn’t have a face, it was difficult for the other two to tell what he was thinking.
“I guess it’s not entirely wrong to say I’m a goblin. But only in the same way that you guys are monkeys. Primates might be a better word, actually.”
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Ritzy and Gerhart didn’t quite understand what Mognog meant.
“So you’re saying you are not a goblin.”
“I’m saying I am not far from what you guys consider goblins. The Mognog are their own people. But we could be considered distant relatives of ordinary green goblins. It’s just that most kinds of goblins could never compare to the Mognog. That’s why there is a Mognog Empire and no Goblin Empires.”
“O-okay.”
“More importantly, we don’t have time for all this. We need to get going if you guys don’t mind joining me in the world of the dead.”
Ritzy and Gerhart looked at each other again.
“We’re good.”
“Get moving then, you punks.”
Ritzy and Gerhart followed Mognog’s order and stood up to get ready.
Mognog had planned on asking Ritzy if he could use Deathbed on multiple targets at once, but it turned out to be an unnecessary concern. Maya’s skeleton was still resting on her bed when Ritzy looked at Talia’s body and closed his eyes to concentrate on his mana.
Ritzy focused on his mana and Talia’s body as he saw it in his mind before he closed his eyes.
Then, once again following the instructions in the spellbook that he had done his best to memorize, Ritzy guided his mana through his body to accumulate the ethereal power that was the spell before sending it out of his body and toward Talia’s body.
Just like with Maya, the mana enveloped Talia’s body.
However, unlike when he did it with Maya’s skeleton, Ritzy’s hair moved, despite the air being still within the dead goblin village. Ritzy wouldn’t have noticed or thought about it if it didn’t feel like someone was pulling on or ruffling his hair.
But he couldn’t afford to be distracted, so he pushed that out of his mind and focused on casting Deathbed until a bed of bone similar to the one carrying Maya appeared beneath Talia’s body when it jumped into the air.
Ritzy sighed.
It was nice knowing there was some consistency in Deathbed, unlike when he tried summoning skeletons. When he performed his summoning rituals, Ritzy never knew what would pop out, so he had been a little worried it would be similar to the Deathbed. Fortunately, nothing unexpected happened, and a bed that he could control, just like Maya’s, appeared.
Ritzy used a large part, almost all, of his mana to create two tethers to the two beds. He would have wanted a little more in case something happened, but he knew they didn’t have time for him to sit down and gather more when they had already wasted so much on unnecessary nonsense.
Ritzy grabbed his Bone Chalk and the spellbook before looking at Gerhart and Mognog.
“I’m ready.”
The two Deathbeds hovered in the air behind him.
“Me too.”
“Punks. I can’t walk on my own.”
“Right.”
Gerhart looked at Ritzy and showed off the bags of stuff he was carrying as he shrugged.
“Rejoice, Mognog. You have the honor of being carried by me, the future greatest necromancer in history.”
“You know, Ritzy, saying future kind of cancels out the history part.”
“Thanks, kiddo. Now then, let’s go.”
Mognog looked at Gerhart from where he rested in front of Ritzy stomach in his hands.
Gerhart looked at Ritzy, and Ritzy looked at the back of Mognog.
Gerhart was the first to speak.
“I think we have a problem.”
“What?”
Ritzy raised Mognog until he could look the skull in its green eyes of flame.
“How do we leave the dungeon?”
Ritzy didn’t even have time to wait before his surroundings and Gerhart disappeared around him like a painting melting in water. But after only a moment and a nauseous feeling of vertigo, similar to the one he experienced when they entered the dungeon, he reappeared next to the dungeon entrance. The shining gelatinous orb-like thing looked the same as when they first arrived at the dungeon entrance.
Even the raindrops passing right through the dungeon entrance were the same.
After looking around and confirming that he had left the dungeon, Ritzy looked at Mognog and the green wisps of flame swaying back and forth in what looked like nausea.
“Hey, Mognog, are you alright?”
“...y-yeah. I’m good. I’ve just never been good with that kind of dimensional travel. And it seems like it got worse after I died.”
“I see.”
“Well, we got out at least.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“You thought about leaving, you said it out loud, and you cleared the dungeon. That works in most dungeons.”
“What about Gerhart? What if he gets stuck?”
“It should be–”
Mognog was interrupted by Gerhart’s sudden arrival right next to them.
“..fine.”