Saintess Summons Skeletons

For Sofia the easiest way to organise all the spells she knew was just chronologically. Hence why, pulling bone strings from her armor, she started drawing the rituals from Scripture’s necromancy grimoire one by one, all except the knowledge rune of Pareth’s and Sorrow’s ritual. When she was done, she presented the stack of bone disks, each a sculpted ritual circle, in front of the wooden giant.

With a glance, he made the disks fly up to his face, and observed them one by one. In the end, the disks all crumbled except for one, the ghost repelling ritual, which the giant placed back down at the foot of his chair. A singular root uncoiled from the massive knot formed around the seed, retracting into the walls.

Well shit.

“What about the others?” she asked, although she could guess the answer.

“Already know.”

Of course…

It could even be lying and I really couldn’t argue. But then again, what else did I expect from scripture’s stuff… Then let’s see, next I can try armor of bones.

“Do variations of the same spell count?” Sofia asked.

“Depend scale,” the giant answered, which Sofia understood as meaning that it would be the one to decide, like for everything else.

But there’s a chance…

Since it was a three dimensional spell that wouldn’t fit into a disc, Sofia quickly sculpted a wireframe of the basic version she got back when she was low level, then a few more that she had worked on herself, then including her wings, and the fused version of the exoskeleton, totalling eight different versions.

The giant looked with curiosity. Before Sofia even sent him the wireframes, the giant was already trying to cast the spell. Its bark cracked with thunderous noises from the failed cast, golden sap seeping out of the wounds, but it paid it no mind, and tried again several times, with different results.

Is it… Trying to alter the spell?

Seconds later a thick layer of chitinous-looking bark covered the giant like a wooden prison. It disappeared into a mana mist almost instantly, but the giant looked satisfied. Four vines untangled from around the seed.

Promising start, I guess? Only two hundred and forty five more…

The angel’s bolt, the small systemless part of [Identify], all the random rituals and classless skills she knew, enchantments, necromancy, Sofia held back nothing but Summon Blood and

the Deep-related spells. Her entire magical knowledge, she offered it all. The giant was not very demanding, even something as simple as a basic durability enchantment could count for a spell, so long as it did not already know very similar magic.

Despite that, completing the trade with the wooden giant proved to be difficult. The promising start was just a fluke, It was because a good number of the simpler spells the giant did not know about simply because they were too weak to even be of interest to it normally.

Too much! You know too much! Sofia internally struggled while gnawing on her nails, wracking her brain.

For every spell schematic that the giant accepted, it denied ten others, it could clearly see that Sofia was getting frustrated, and even started demonstrating its own versions of the spells it refused, proving it wasn’t lying to get more out of the trade. Sofia even suspected that it had started accepting some spells that it already knew out of pity after she had started stabbing herself to make a suffering crystal and boost her mental capacity.

And yet Sofia was starting to run out of steam. There were still more than forty roots left, and she had gone through so many spells that her head was starting to spin, the floor of the vast room was covered in spell schematic structures, ritual disks and shattered bone bits.

Delivering a last batch to the giant that even included all variants of her newly acquired Archangel’s bolt, Sofia fell to her knees.

I’m out…

At least, the bolts were undeniably new, and got her three vines closer to her goal, but she was still short 39 spells.

It was the ridiculous ‘Maximum memorization ability +1200000%’ line from her helmet that saved her. The buff was so immense that it had even improved her memory of past events, by trying hard enough, Sofia started to copy all the ritual schematics she had ever so much as glanced at, be it on the ground, on an item or in a book, rituals that she had never used, many she knew nothing about, not even the effects or name, if she could remember the shape she transcribed it all into bone sculpts for the trade. Some of them she might have remembered wrong, it wouldn’t matter anyway, just more spells for the reject pile.

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Whether the giant took pity on her, or actually found enough new spells in this last effort from Sofia, the last roots slowly unfurled one by one. Sofia was mentally spent, sitting on the ground holding her head, as the seed slowly floated down directly into her lap. The blinding light it emitted started to fade the moment it touched her, as if copying her blood, it started glowing with a soft golden light instead. Sofia could finally see it. The leyline seed was just about the size of a closed fist, more egg-shaped than round, it had a soft, wooden texture, and was semi-transparent like a piece of frosted glass. The source of the light was a mana vortex slowly spinning inside, swirling around what Sofia could only perceive as a minuscule black dot.

It’s almost like an egg. Is that thing inside the actual seed? I can’t even imagine how much mana is in there…

Even in this environment saturated with mana the seed was shining so strongly to her mana senses that she could feel it without using them.

… Won’t this attract every monster from the forbidden layer to us?

“Is there a way to store it safely?” Sofia asked, not remembering a better way to word her question in Draconic. The giant seemed to understand nonetheless, and did not even suggest a trade this time, it slightly waved its scepter, and wooden limbs grew out of the seed in Sofia’s hand. Bark covered the seed, and in an instant, it had disappeared from view, fully hidden within the thorax of a wooden ant the size of Sofia’s forearm. She could not feel the seed’s presence in it at all anymore.

Is it even still in there?!

The giant explained nothing, the ant slowly twitched in Sofia’s hands like an animal just waking up from a long slumber, and she felt a familiar pull at the edge of her consciousness. Pareth? Is something wrong?

But it wasn’t Pareth’s, his was where it always was, stoic, only now roused by her sudden call. Nevermind, sorry. I have the seed, if you were not already aware. Will be out shortly.

When she pulled on the new link, she felt herself connect to the ant in her hands. The feeling was awfully familiar.

She looked up at the giant.

You used Pareth’s spell schematic for this?

It was a spell she’d traded just a few hours prior and it was already using it more flexibly than she was after several years. Now connected to the ant, she could not only control it like a puppet, but she could also feel the leyline seed still safely inside, its leaking energy powering the little wooden insect. The ant crawled to her back, latching onto her like a tiny backpack.

“Thank you. I will leave now, as you wanted. I will take my teammates with me. How do I get out?”

The giant slowly stood up, its staff tapped the ground, and they both instantly appeared outside of the leyline trunk, the teleportation so seamless that Sofia barely even felt it.

“MOTHERF-” Sonia instinctively cursed seeing the giant monster appear in front of her and Pareth, cutting herself short when she noticed Sofia being there too. “Are we dead?” she asked Sofia with full seriousness, not even considering the option of survival if the giant was here for them.

“Me? Debateable. You, I think not?” Sofia answered, “I lost my bag but I got the seed,” she announced without fanfare.

As they spoke, dozens of behemoth ants rushed out of nowhere, surrounding the ground all around the trunk.

Sofia looked back at the giant with a questioning look.

Is this a joke?

“Leave where?” the giant asked in draconic, showing no hostility despite the sudden arrival of its elite troops.

“North,” Sofia answered right away, “Searching for ruins from thirty thousand years ago. Probably not far.”

“No ruin left in sea,” the giant told her, “need leave. North?”

“Yes, North.”

The giant said nothing, hovering near the leyline trunk it quietly pointed in a direction with its staff once. All the behemoth ants fired their laser simultaneously aiming at the same empty point in the air that the staff had shown. A single spell was silently cast, firing from the staff to the point where all the mana beams met. It looked like a weak pink sparkly firework.

The moment it touched the crossing beams, the darkness in the underworld sea disappeared. The mana beam that was fired north was unlike anything Sofia had ever seen before. For an instant she could swear this was the end, there was no way this attack wouldn’t cut the planet in half. The only reason she and her group even survived standing near the attack was because of a bunch of invisible spherical shields that the giant had placed over them without them realising.

It lasted for ten seconds that seemed to stretch for an eternity, a pink and blue beam cutting straight through the horizon. Then the beam died down, and the underworld sea’s darkness immediately began to creep back up from the freezing water.

To the north, the ceiling of the underworld sea was charred to a crisp. But surprisingly, the beam had not even left a dent. That attack? Just some spring cleaning. Billions of giant mosquitoes, dead.

“North clear. Good leave,” the giant announced without ceremony before teleporting away. The behemoth ants scattered, leaving the speechless group alone, stranded on a random leyline branch, watching the darkness start to obscure the sea again.

The mosquitoes had been so thoroughly annihilated that not even ash was left to remember them by.