Saintess Summons Skeletons

Alith turned the lamp off right as Pareth jumped inside of the manor’s ruins. Sofia and Alith fell to the lower floor, as the upper one in the dark world had long crumbled. They were surrounded by the manor’s tethered, but that was the least of their worries.

The luminous creature in the distance was looking larger by the moment, Sofia caught a second glimpse of it as she landed, it was hard to tell from that far, but the thing seemed to have many long legs like a spider. Hurriedly, she grabbed the admin’s dagger and after checking that Pareth’s mana heart was in place, she sliced his main skull off, grabbing it along with his jacket.

“Let’s go!” she said, sheathing the dagger back and that now free hand grabbing Alith’s arm.

Her skeletal wings spread out, and she flew off away from the creature, activating the second tier of [Runeforged Overlord] for some extra speed.

She flew low to the ground, still uneasy about venturing into the complete darkness overhead, and she slowly turned, hoping that the creature would maybe just keep going forward like the strange horse thing from before.

Carried along by Sofia, Alith looked behind.

“It’s after us!” she warned, confirming Sofia’s fears, “Too fast! It’s catching up!”

Shit.

“How long?!” Sofia asked, unable to look back as she struggled to even see where she was going, as the darkness prevented her from seeing far ahead.

“Maybe twenty seconds! I’ll try to slow it down, keep going!” Alith answered, hooking the lamp to her belt. Her one free hand hastily pulled some sort of ball on a string from one of her belt’s pouches, then a sealed flash from another. Using her mouth, she unplugged a hole in the ball and unsealed the flask, hastily struggled to pour the contents of the flask inside of the ball and plugged it back up. It took her a good three seconds, but after this, she infused the ball with some mana, and her weapon was ready. Spinning the ball at the end of the rope, she threw it at the fast-approaching monstrosity of a thousand colors that kicked up a storm of moon dust as it pursued them.

Sofia couldn’t see if the ball hit, but she soon saw a flash, a brilliant white light coming from behind, accompanied by a burst of cold air that helped propel her forward even faster.

She looked behind for a short instant, witnessing at the same time a gigantic wall of ice obscuring the entire horizon, and the creature bursting through it like it was paper.

Not looking forward was a slight mistake, as Sofia crashed through a hard wall, but she was going so fast that it scarcely mattered, only barely slowing her down. She focused on the flight again.

Alith threw another roped ball, engulfing the creature in a giant ball of fire. “Not working at all… This thing is probably at least level 400,” Alith informed Sofia with a dark tone.

“Keep trying!”

Sofia was trying to save her mana. She felt that she could outpace the creature with the extra 146% speed of [Runeforged Overlord]’s third tier, but she could only sustain it for at most a minute and a half.

Sacrificing some mana, she shone some light behind her, and blanketed the moon, and hopefully the creature, with a thin layer of Erredian rot.

The rot failed to appear on the creature.

In that time, Alith had thrown a few more simpler flasks at the creature, all seemingly failing to have any effect.

The creature grew closer.

Pareth, being only a head, could not do much, but he still used his [Chains of the four seals], which broke instantly as they appeared around the four closest of the creature’s many spindly legs.

Alith screamed, her throat almost bursting, she unleashed the loudest [Maiden’s shriek] she could muster, immediately coughing up copious amounts of blood.

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It did nothing.

Sofia started to panic slightly. She had a few ideas, but be it flying up into the abysmally dark sky, or sacrificing all of her mana in a desperate hope that her signature skill’s skeletal destroyers would be able to contend with the creature from the deep, none seemed particularly good.

There was a chance that the creature would be more manageable in the light world, as injuries from one world also affected the other, but Sofia having no wings in the light world, this was an extremely risky gamble.

Every passing second, [Bone dominus] healed Pareth for more than 2% of his health, slowly making him more and more unwieldy to carry, while the creature got progressively closer. Before the thing got too close for comfort, Sofia activated the third tier of [Runeforged Overlord], and started gaining some distance back as her mana burned. Despite that, the creature continued its relentless pursuit, the shock of its long legs hitting the ground one after the other sounding like a constant rain of cannonballs.

Alith just finished healing herself, and asked the ultimate question, “Zangdar?!”

Sofia was conflicted, the escape orb was single use, and Erredis said she could only make one, so if they used it now, that was it, it would be too dangerous to come back here again before they could somehow make another or become much stronger.

“No,” Sofia answered, speeding past a ruined city in the blink of an eye, “not yet. But keep it ready.”

Then she had a sudden idea.

“Maybe it’s after the fruit! Throw the lamp!”

Alith immediately executed the order, throwing the lamp as far as she could to the side.

The creature ignored the lamp, it was really after them. Like a predator running after their prey until exhaustion, it simply chased, not once even feigning to attack, as if it already knew that Sofia was bound to run out of mana eventually.

Strange things flashed by. Whether it was monsters, buildings or tall trees, Sofia had no idea, they went by too fast in the moon’s darkness. Worse, it seemed like the ambient darkness, which had lifted a bit ever since they had encountered the first lighthouse, was starting to become denser again.

Alith tried throwing a few more things at the creature, without any success yet again.

Sofia’s mana was dwindling down, meanwhile Pareth separated his head from his body again as soon as his right hand regrew, discarding his bones and lessening the load on Sofia as much as he could. Sofia had a sliver of hope that the creature would stop for the bones, but it completely ignored them.

Sofia’s mana hit ten percent. With only seconds to spare, and no hope to escape from the thing, she had to make a hard decision.

“Alith, it’s doomed! Teleport-”

She was interrupted by a sudden and violent crash. She had been looking forward an instant before, and could swear she hadn’t seen anything to crash into, but now she was sent tumbling into the distance. She had crashed into the ground, and was sent into several uncontrollable rollovers before her momentum finally died as she hit the base of a huge tree.

Sofia spat out bark as she fell with her back on the ground. She was in the light world. There was not a sound to be heard except for the soft whispers of the wind ruffling the tree’s green leaves.

Where are the others? Sofia wondered, her mind shaken by the consecutive crashes.

She could feel neither Pareth or Alith nearby, but Bookie appeared next to her.

“Sofia!” he cried out, utterly panicked.

[You have been affected by : confusion. But your skills negated the status]

Sofia’s thoughts cleared up in an instant.

I’m fine. Give me a second.

Despite not feeling hurt, she could tell why Bookie was so panicked, she knew she looked awful, as she could feel that every single bone in her body was broken. The blessed bone constructs of [Bone Dominus] did not exist in the light world, so they were not healing her.

This was when she noticed that she still had no idea whether the undeath runes even worked in the light world.

That’s bad.

Sofia started to use [Bone Dominus] to fix her bones, but Bookie was not so patient, summoning an old man in priestly garments with a blurred face, who silently healed Sofia in an instant with a wave of his staff.

So the runes do not work…

The priest was a recognizable old man, even without a face, Sofia could never forget the gait of the high-priest she had talked to on her first day as a prisoner of the church.

It was easy to look past it when he was only a skeleton, but this is disturbing…

Healed up, Sofia thanked Bookie and the high priest, stood up, and looked around. On the bright side, there were no signs of the gigantic creature of the deep anywhere. But worryingly, Pareth and Alith were both gone, and Sofia had a very bad feeling about that.

They can’t possibly be back in Zangdar… Right?