Last Warning... Book 1 Spoilers Below.

It’s Bones here and I’m gonna give you a highlight reel of my achievements up to this point. It’s been a while so some of y’all might have forgotten my greatness. Let’s see… how to begin. Do I mention my summoner struggling in the desert alone… no that’s a bit dry. Even the part where he almost dies is drab. The guy couldn’t even handle a bunch of insects. He blames it on his memory loss. On the plus side, almost dying surrounded by dead beasts allowed him to bind his soul to death mana. That’s important.

Still, it takes him days of doing nothing in the forest his life is almost as dreadful as it was in the sands, there’s just a few more trees. And some water. My summoner has a weird thing about water. I don’t want to call it a kink but… Anyway, while he is doing nothing in the river, he gets the great idea to summon me.

Well, he didn’t know he was summoning, the guy was clueless in his attempts at anything involving death mana. When he finally does summon me all he can come up with for a name is Bones. Bones. That’s it. Like in a pile of bones, which there was a plethora of because of his many failed attempts.

I’m not saying I’m ungrateful. It seems most minions don’t even get a name. So at least there’s that. So now I’m alive… sorta and well, I’m not putting up with the mediocre survival bull shite my summoner is content to spend his days on. Right away I find us more food, not that I need to eat, and shelter. And pretty much everything good in his life is because of me, his minion.

That’s until a bear comes along and eats my summoner. It was a gruesome affair. Lots of bones, not mine, and blood. It turns out my man is not dead, which is good, because I kind of need him to live. But he is back in the desert with nothing but his skivs, which is not ideal. So, he tries to trek out of the desert and immediately gets destroyed by a scorpion. So weak, right?

Here’s the thing, Sandy the monster scorpion is a spiteful devil that barely survived a fight with my man when he almost died the first time. Now he’s bigger and stronger and hungry for power, like the bear but different. Fortunately, my summoner doesn’t die again and is cycled back in the desert. He mopes for a few paragraphs and then decides it is time to hunt a sand demon.

Sand demon is killed. He tries to kill the bear, who is now much stronger, next and dies again, and then again, and again and again, plus a few more times. Bear is now super strong, and summoner is super frustrated. He takes his anger out on more sand demons and learns to raise the dead. With an army of giant scorpions, he returns to the forest once more to bring an end to the bear's tyranny.

There’s an exchange of words and then swords. In the end, the bear dies, and my summoner gets a little bit stronger. After the bear fight, we decided we both need to get stronger, and he vows to help me gain a core so that I can have my own progression. It’s a sweet moment.

I continue to impress him with my bottomless pit of skills, so he promotes me to be the boss. Really, he’s just lazy but I don’t care. I’m a bit power-hungry myself. As boss things really start to turn around. Living is a breeze with me in charge. We even start making a difference in our world. Monsters are slain, and we find a huge pack of spiders. Thousands of them. And I’m just punching spider after spider. We don’t survive that encounter.

The spider queen, Nette, has got some mind skills and she also wants to get stronger. More than that, she wants her spiders to get stronger. So, she is trying to convince spiders to eat my summoner, but they won’t because they have this worship obsession, and do not dare eat the food of their ‘god’. Funny thing is, Nette doesn’t even want to be their god. Things get crazy and there’s a spider rebellion. Nette was driven out/leaves and some spiders finally try to eat my summoner. They don’t eat him because I’m a boss and I kill him before they can.

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Back in the desert, the summoner struggles with his soul. Ever since he cycled in the desert the first time, he felt like he should be much stronger than he is. He isn’t wrong. Something was wrong with his body essence. After being tempered by poison and pain and dying several times, he takes a chance to fix his essence while he’s being rebuilt. Of course, he fails, and I have to kill him like four more times before he finally gets it right. When he does get it right, he’s stronger than ever.

We rush back home worried about the spider infestation growing out of control without their queen around. It’s out of control and we spend the next day killing spiders. Well, my summoner does most of the killing. He was good before, but now he’s like super good. After we finish a good old fashion forest cleanse, we meet this wolf ghost person named Gene.

Gene’s cool but also dramatic, with good reason, and she’s like: “Hey, come on this secret quest to save my people and I’ll give you a huge reward.” I agree to the quest at once and send my summoner to complete it the very next day, while I keep the spiders in check.

I do a great job keeping the forest spider free. None dare to cross paths with me. Except for the spider queen who returns a few days later. She looks super ragged and is like, “Yo, let me make a deal with y’all and we will be friends.” Great another friend. The only problem is she doesn’t accept my authority and wants to talk to my summoner who is on a pilgrimage to save the lycan race.

T’am, the newly named summoner journeys through a dark cave and binds a layer of his soul to darkness, which is super cool. On top of that, he learns from Gene that she has a dungeon core, and she needs help completing the ritual to save her people who are all inside the core waiting to be released.

Dungeons are a thing. Gene did a lot of study on them in an effort to preserve her people from being irradicated. T’am agrees and suggests that we try using his boss, me, as the means to complete the ritual. Gene agrees, so she sends for her totem, Fury, a super awesome dragon, and T’am sends for me, a super awesome skeleton.

Together we try to complete the ritual but can't. We need one more. We choose the spider queen Nette. Fury and T’am travel back to our cave home to gather the spider queen who is being attacked by the horde, who have been trying to get to Gene and her people for a hundred years. The rescue mission is successful and the three of them return to the shadow cave and we complete the ritual.

Becoming a dungeon is a process and Fury, Nette, and I get sucked into the dungeon core, which now resides inside T’am, to sort things out. It’s a bit complicated, but also not at the same time.

Now the rest of T’am’s story, I’m not sure about because I’m sucked up in a dungeon core but apparently, he traveled to the shadow realm to help Gene bind her ghostly form with a shape-shifting demon. On his quest, he gets in a fight with demons and meets this really cool guy that sort of helps him with his quest. When he returns to the normal realm Gene is super excited about her chance to return to life in a body.

T’am is given a couple of cool items, Gloom, a battle robe with pockets of holding. Bo, a weapon that transforms into a staff, or a bow and can be enhanced by shadow. Oh, and our boy T’am morphs his dark energy into shadow energy so that he can enter the shadow realm to sorta save Gene. In return, he gains access to his own personal shadow realm, and Gene becomes his very own totem/warlock-bound spirit. There’s a little bit of a training montage with Gene and T’am and then the two split ways. Gene is binding to the shape-shifting beast and completing the warlock bond, while T’am is trying to stay alive.

T’am foolishly challenges the horde on his own and is successful in destroying their stronghold by inciting inner fighting. There is a lot of death. Too much death. In the end, T’am is a little more broken, his soul is progressed further by death energy, and he even learns to harness the excess power to bind a part of his soul to pure energy. While he’s doing that, he also learns a new technique that allows him to split his focus three ways. It’s cool but at the same time, death is being a real prick.

In the end, he is left badly beaten by his conflict with death mana. Gene completes her bonding process by killing and taking the shape-shifter’s body and the two get a nice break on the beach eating some of the food they earned by destroying the horde’s stronghold. T’am, now named Liam, vows to get revenge or something on death, which is added to his list of things to do, like burn down the desert, maybe recover his memories, help me become a cultivator, protect the dungeon, and protect Nette’s spiders.

And that is probably more than you wanted to know, what can I say, I like my story, even if I’m not featured in most of it. Things are getting heated up and there's plenty of conflicts to come as our dungeon core tries to survive in a world obsessed with consuming power for power.