“It’s much harder to capture people alive than to kill them. Killing is easy, just got to stab them in the right spot and done. Keeping someone alive but unable to resist is far harder in comparison, doubly so if you want them uninjured. Granted, if you don’t necessarily need the captives in one piece, it becomes a relatively easier proposition.” - Dieter Traubenfeld, former constable from Knallgant.

“By Pesca’s beard, what manner of aberrations are these!?” yelled Angron, one of the dwarven guards employed by the convoy in surprise when he saw Eilonwy’s bone constructs descend – literally, in some cases, as the lightweight constructs were capable of running along the tunnel walls – upon the pack of bandits they had been fighting for the past while.

Compared to how they looked during the trip Eilonwy took with Aideen and Kino to the northern region of Ur-Teros years ago, Eilonwy’s bone constructs had changed quite a lot in appearance. The eleven constructs each had distinct looks of their own, with some even having extra limbs or entirely different construction, though Eilonwy asked her mother to keep them with a humanoid upper torso since that was how she was used to controlling them in a fight, and the advantage of being able to use weapons was a big one.

Only the one construct that Eilonwy made her Death Knight early on remained humanlike, though, with its figure one that could be mistaken for a human being wearing a plate of bone-white armor. The others had far greater variance in shapes. One had four arms, while yet another had a horse-like lower body that allowed it to run at great speeds.

Yet another had a spider-like lower which allowed the construct to even climb onto the tunnel’s ceiling and drop down from above her opponents. There was also another construct that had a serpentine lower body, slithering low to the ground and striking low where most people failed to pay enough attention. Probably the weirdest-looking one was the one that had its lower body resemble the tentacles of a kraken while it possessed five fanged maws on prehensile necks instead of a normal head.

“Whatever they are, they’re not trying to kill us!” yelled Ivar, the head of the convoy’s guard contingent over the din of the now chaotic battle. The sudden appearance of the fearsome-looking undead constructs – easy enough to recognize since a couple of them still had a skeletal appearance – immediately gave his guards some relief as they fell upon the bandits.

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It was also obvious that they weren’t about to hurt the convoy’s guards. One of the constructs that could have passed for a dwarf wearing bone armor except for how it had six arms blocked a couple attacks aimed at the guards using its shields. At the same time, it also presented its back towards them, before counterattacking the bandits with the weapons it held in its other hands.

“Heard from Bertrand and his boys that there were apparently some lasses from the Lichdom in town and headed our way when we were drinking yesterday,” said another of the convoy’s guards. The Bertrand he mentioned was a fellow dwarf in the same line of work based on the border cavern that led to land above and had recently arrived with a convoy just the day before. “Might be that they happened to see our predicament and lent a bone?”

“Not funny, Uri, and not the right time to be joking anyway. Drinks are on you when we get out of this!” replied Ivar with a frown as he pushed away one of the bandits using his shield, at which point the undead construct with a horselike lower body just rammed into the dwarven bandit from the side. The impact clearly affected the bandit more as his right arm was bent at an awkward angle.

As for the undead construct, it just reeled for a moment before it took off once more and harried the now panicking bandits with its long lance. The construct was clearly lightweight for its size, if very solidly built. Otherwise there was no way it would have survived a clash that had enough force to break a dwarf’s arm in twain like that.

Ivar also had to suppress a wince when another of the undead constructs bodily raised a dwarf by the arm and then slammed the dwarf – armor and all – against the ground hard with one hand. Despite the undead’s normal looks compared to the rest, it was clearly a mighty creature, the sort that Ivar thought could likely take on his entire team on its own.

The construct slammed the dwarven bandit a few times against the ground to its left and right before it used the clearly dazed and bleeding bandit as a makeshift flail to smash another two to the ground. The wicked-looking polearm the construct held in its other hand had not even shown any sign of use, as clearly whoever controlled the creature felt no need to use the weapon.

By that point he also noticed the running figures who were moving at a rather leisurely pace towards them in the distance, likely the people Uri mentioned he heard about from Bertrand. Given how the situation developed – some of the bandits already routed and his guards worked with the undead to deal with the remaining ones – he could understand why.

It had not even taken five minutes from when the undead constructs first showed up to the bandits being routed, with a good couple dozen of them incapacitated to various degrees and the rest fleeing for their lives. Ivar quickly ordered his guards to round up the bandits that had been incapacitated to bring them back to the cavern city they came from.

Normally a convoy that ran into a bandit attack would continue their journey and report the incident in the next cavern over. Since they were still very close to the cavern they departed from, however, it was just more practical to hand over the bandits to the authorities there and make the report at the same time. It saved them the hassle of having to care for the captives along the journey.