Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia threw the cursed sword in a corner before her dagger could start a rebellion and strip away her title for touching another blade too much, and bent over to grab the flaming book on the altar.

“Honestly I am almost surprised you managed to eat that. Are those white flames going to stop or are you just a burning book forever now?”

Bookie summoned himself, his short skeleton also surrounded by quiet white flames. He looked a bit different, his bones closer to Sofia’s Lumian bones than his usual.

“Hehe, I’m not sure…” Bookie answered awkwardly with extended arms, observing the fire envelopping his hands.

The flames slowly died down, and only the light in his eyesockets still burned with lazy phoenix fire.

“Looks like it’s over. So, anything special aside from that?”

Bookie nodded, “The page is a bit special! And Mr.Phoenix is very very confused.”

“Special?”

Raising an eyebrow, Sofia opened the book in her hands and flipped through the pages. She hadn’t given any instructions on the page to delete this time, so she checked for that first. Bookie had decided to get rid of the old fire salamanders, which Sofia thought was a very solid choice. Then she had to go to the very end to find the new page, depicting the fiery skeleton with a hole in its skull.

1000% Charisma? Sofia read at the bottom of the page, giving Bookie a side glance. No wonder. Is stacking charisma the secret to immortality? I wonder what Richard thinks about that… Before losing herself in idle thoughts, Sofia looked up at the skeleton’s cost.

“What does 100MM mean?” she directly asked Bookie.

“A hundred million per minute!”

“That’s… A price, alright. Much better than not being able to summon it for multiple filters…” Sofia said, before doing some quick mental maths. Compared to the other skeletons that last for five hours… 300 minutes. 30 Billion? This oversized Oven is three times the price of the actual god of Pain?

Lords…

“Can you also do that for the other pages?” she asked.

“No! It’s only for Mr.Phoenix because he’s not really dead!”

“Then could you do the same for Pestle?”

Bookie scratched his skull, “But, Pestle can already stay out forever…”

“Forget it. The Phoenix is confused, you say, not angry?”

“I don’t think so?”

“Let’s try summoning it, then, I just need to regenerate a bit…”

Sofia sat down, breathing in as much mana as she could trying to speed up her regeneration, although that did not help very much anymore ever since she had formed her mana heart. She wanted to be quick as her avatar form would end soon leaving her with doubled mana costs for an hour. In under a minute she had recovered a hundred million mana, and pulled out the Phoenix’s page right before her avatar form ended. She wasn’t too worried about the Phoenix trying to kill her anyway, she still had her runes, and Bookie would be able to unsummon it if needed.

She felt a bit dizzy as mana left her in droves to form a large shimmering golden cloud that quickly consolidated itself into a huge skeletal bird, blazing in the same heat and brilliance it had been when it was alive.

Yet the phoenix skeleton had nothing majestic at the moment, it looked lost and in disbelief, if anything, its fiery feathers drooping down, white sparks dripping down on the altar. It reminded Sofia of a wet pigeon, just a big and dangerous one.

It looked at Sofia and Bookie, seeming to ask something like ‘you did this?!’, then, it noticed the cursed blade thrown on the ground and recoiled with an angry squawk.

Before Sofia could even react, the Phoenix unleashed a deadly torrent of flames. Sofia had half a mind to stop it, but decided to let the poor creature have its way. The torrential flames did not stop until the skeleton ran out of lifetime some forty seconds later. There was a huge hole where there used to be a wall before, the cursed blade floating half molten at the surface of a roiling lake of magma.

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A bit of a loss but I can’t really blame it for that…

Bookie was speechless, wondering if he had made a mistake not unsummoning the phoenix, but he relaxed seeing that Sofia seemed not to mind. She walked on the air above the lake of magma, grabbing what remained of the cursed sword before it could sink down.

Now that the phoenix’s fire was gone, the sword had quickly cooled down in the magma, and was fully solid again. The handle was slightly warped, but the blade itself was not recognizable as a blade anymore, if anything it looked more like an ugly club carved by a blind ogre out of a black rock.

“Well… At least it’s not a sword anymore…” Sofia mumbled, pulling out her dagger, “No complaints, right?”

She walked back to the altar, to gather her things that had dropped on the ground when the Phoenix attacked her before, and identified the ‘blade’ again. She could not even hear the strange whispers anymore, so she doubted that much of anything worthwhile remained in there aside from the materials themselves.

[Phoenix Ire]:

Attributes unknown.

A blade accidentally reforged into a blunt weapon by the righteous fury of a deeply wronged Phoenix, it has lost most of its previous properties, but it seems the curses inside have been changed into something different under the effects of the fire. The Phoenix’s flames still linger in the cold metal.

Applies unknown composite curse on contact.

Applies [Devouring fire] on hit.

So devouring fire truly is a Phoenix thing, huh. Sun really knew what she was doing with Alith’s blessing.

Curse on contact, still… So if we want to bring that thing out I’ll have to carry it myself?

The weapon had shrunk a fair bit as it became a wider stick of metal rather than a blade, now being just about as tall as Sofia. Still, weighing several tons and having a warped handle, it was quite unwieldy.

Selling it to Mornn is no longer an option but surely Valeure would still pay a good price for it.

Thinking this, Sofia waved to Pareth and Sonia who had just entered the altar room through the gigantic hole the Phoenix had made. With the source of heat gone, they could approach without an issue now, in fact, the temperature was quickly dropping, even here where the pool of magma started to solidify.

“New weapon? Was that the source?” Sonia asked as she landed on the altar.

“That was a cursed sword used to seal a ‘dead’ phoenix,” Sofia explained, “Now I have a skeleton phoenix, and it didn’t like the sword so… It got an express and uncontrolled reforging.”

Sonia blinked a few times.

“Alright… Phoenix. That certainly does explain the heat... Just so we’re clear, you stole the skeleton of an immortal bird said to carry a grudge even through the afterlife?”

“I didn’t know they had that reputation but… Well, Bookie ate it now, so that is that. It doesn’t seem too mad about it either. Aside from what it did to the sword that is. Ah, it’s still cursed, by the way, so best not to touch it.”

“I have protections against curses,” Sonia pointed out, “not too eager to carry that thing, though. Looks heavy.”

“It is. It really really is… My shoulder is getting sore just holding it like that.”

“Can’t Pareth carry it?” Sonia asked.

Sofia looked at Pareth, “Did you end up using that curse resistance potion after showing it to Alith?”

Pareth answered with a nod.

“Want to try holding it, then? I have no idea what the curses are, so be careful, resistance is not immunity.”

Pareth grabbed the cursed weapon, actually looking quite eager to get his bony fingers on it. Sofia had struggled to even hold it up but Pareth waved it around like a weightless stick.

Even with the crown and all my bonuses, the difference in strength is just…

After a few swings, Pareth rested the club against his shoulder like Sofia did before, nodding to himself with satisfaction.

“I guess the curse isn’t too bad,” Sonia commented.

“Guess so. That’s one more thing to sell when we get out,” Sofia added.

“You don’t want to keep it?” Sonia asked Pareth.

Pareth lightly shook his skull, though the novelty of a new weapon was nice, why carry an encumbering cursed club when he could summon his own clubs whenever? He just liked trying new things.

With a thought, Sofia shared both the old and the new description of the sword to the whole group. “This is what I could get out of it with my homemade identify. How much do you think it’s worth?” she asked Sonia.

“Hard to say when we don’t even know what the curse is, but it’s probably a few stones just for the alloy. Adamian steel is not excessively expensive but it’s not cheap either, and Black gold is quite rare because of how annoying it is to make.”

“I have no idea what black gold is, honestly.”

“I don’t know the details, but it’s gold treated with some sort of hard to grow black flower and a lot of rare non-magical minerals, from what I remember. I have some on me actually,” Sonia said, pulling out a tiny snake-shaped charm from an inner pocket of her armor. It was fully black with a golden luster. “Poison-protection charm,” she explained.

After showing this, Sonia asked if she could see the Phoenix, but Sofia could only show Bookie’s page as she was still feeling a bit nauseous from the avatar form penalty. And as the conversation quickly returned to the more serious topic of the exit to the desert still being an enigma, the temperature was starting to drop alarmingly fast. Before they even left the altar, the spot that used to be the hottest place in the desert was starting to get overtaken by a thin layer of frost.