Chapter 33) The Gatehouse. Or. Knock knock.

Despite being an Elite, the armored skeleton standing in front of the blasted away broken gates didn't react as I stepped out into the plaza in front of the entrance to the upper city.

In fact, they didn't do anything at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that something was magically holding their bones together and keeping them upright I would have suspected they were some kind of scarecrow.

Walking up to them I looked around and from this side of the plaza, I could see that there were several more of the Guards standing out of view beside the four that were in plain sight. The ones in hiding had chucks of their skulls missing or were down an arm.

All of them still had weapons. The ones with two arms had some kind of heavy spear with an ax head below the small spear tip and a long spike on the opposite side from the ax part, the ones with only one working arm had big knives like the swords back in my dungeon.

After trying to take the remains of an old woven basket from one skeleton I knew better than to try to take their weapons away.

Heading past the gate, which had been covered in a sheet of metal worked into the shape of the three headed monster before it got blown off its hinges by something that had cracked and blackened it, I found a group of skeletons in hiding.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

These ones were missing one or more legs and had piles of egg sized rocks in little stacks by them, as if ready for throwing.

All except for one with a broken sword with what had been a longer blade strapped to the remains of its damaged leg and a nicely carved bow in its hand that was standing in a doorway up on the wall out of sight of anyone heading for the gate to the upper city.

Walking past the broken door to the tower of the gatehouse and up the stairs I could see that the bow didn't show any sign of having been exposed to time and the weather, not even its string.

"That's a good bow, but I don't imagine you'd be willing to let me have? No? Well, what about your arrows?"

Unlike the bow, the arrows looked aged with tattered fetching, but as I slowly reached out and nabbed one by the notch, the skeleton showed no reaction to me slowly pulling it out of its dry rotted quiver.

Or the next one, or any of the rest of them.

After hiding the arrows in the fireplace at the bottom of the tower, I started kicking away the piles of stones before I headed back to rejoin the boys and reported in.

- Four guys you saw, seven injured ones hiding on the left, six on the right, five hiding behind the gates that would have thrown rocks, and an archer up top that I took all his arrow. BUT I may have missed some -

The two Trainees finished reading the wall of what may have been some kind of fast food place as there were smoke stained fire boxes built into a long counter with pictures of a cow, a pig, and a chicken in front of three of them.

Matt rubbed at his chin. “So either they’re smart, which I doubt since they didn’t react to you, or someone set them up in place. Drew asked “The Liche?” and Matt nodded but looked doubtful. “That seems a little micro managing for someone who took the whole city. I think someone set them up to put up a good fight and then left them to it.”

Then he looked at me, "But if they keep reacting to you like the others, I think we can take them."