Saintess Summons Skeletons

With Sonia and Pareth’s return, the entire group sat around the campfire in the small cavern. Pareth was actually using a different skeleton from before, but Sofia couldn’t really get into the subject, as she had been quickly swept away by Sonia’s relentless questions and comments, who was now observing her missing arm through the spiritual realm with the help of the graveyard nymphs.

“Huh, you’re right, it’s still all there. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.”

“Did you ever see erased blueprints at all?” Sofia asked.

“Not really but I’ve heard of such injuries. Some ‘people’ have a nasty tendency to favor this kind of attack, even if I’ve never had to face that myself.”

“And so? Do you think I’ll get my arm back?”

“What’s erased is erased, you should already understand that,” Sonia answered, “But– While my understanding’s a bit limited there, I am pretty sure you can do a remodel. After all, for example, your original blueprint got warped to include your horns and wings, and even a bit of a tail for your Apostle status. So rebuilding an arm… I don’t know how to do it but it should be possible, right? Just that you’ll have to make the rest of your blueprint that much thinner overall, because that ‘matter’ doesn’t come out of nowhere.”

“No clues on supplementing it?”

“I don’t think you can add or recreate more, no. Otherwise all the ascended would just do it and learn infinity spells instead of just refining a strict selection, wouldn’t they? What you could also do is get a fake arm to replace all or part of the missing blueprint, got its advantages and inconveniences.”

“Yeah I can imagine already,” Sofia said with a nod, “A fake arm means I can’t really adjust the mana circuits in there, and it won’t be able to heal… Not too fond of the idea, honestly.”

“It might not be all that bad, I feel like, if you just have the right craftsman and materials for it. What would you need healing for if it doesn’t get damaged? I don’t know. Either way, you’ve already lost the skill slots, but everything else I think can be fixed.”

“That’s already more optimistic than I dared to be,” Sofia admitted.

“There are thirty thousand years of recorded history of people getting injured and finding ways to heal, there’s hardly anything that can’t be fixed these days. And if you really can’t find a satisfying way to repair the thing, you can always ask the Kleptra.”

“The Kleptra, why them?”

“They get into the most fights, naturally they’re the best at body reconstruction.”

“Ah. When you put it like this… Well, enough about that, I can deal with my arm when we’re out of here. How close are we to getting the artifact?”

Sonia scratched her head. “This… Slow progress. The issue is, it’s in the rustfucks’ throneroom, and their king, I believe, is likely above level 400. So until now we’ve been working hard at eroding their numbers without getting caught. And eventually I hope to get him distracted and have Pestle steal the damn thing.”

“Think we could kill it if we got rid of all the weaker ones first?” Sofia asked.

“Not a chance. If it was a dumb monster maybe, but while they’re always hostile and refuse to communicate at all, the rustfucks are clearly not stupid. They caught on to what we were doing and stopped moving alone. At first they were in small groups, but now they only move in patrols of eight to ten of them, and they’re always on their guard, so it’s made it really hard to continue culling their numbers.”

“Any read on their actual numbers?”

Sonia paused to think for a second. “They were probably around five to six hundred at first, now it’s maybe about half that.”

“Hmm… That might be enough for us to cause a big mess and force the king out. Now that I’m here I’m more or less doubling the number of skeletons Bookie has mana for. We can summon a sizable army out of nowhere. Probably won’t kill many of the robot monsters but they don’t need to to make a loud commotion.”

“Worth a shot but we’ll have to discuss the plan in detail. You should lie down for now, you look really pale.”

“I do? I feel fine but… Alright…”

Sofia laid back down, glancing at the big skeleton next to the fire who also glanced at her. She smiled at him, and watched as Mr.Scribe slowly updated his status sheet in real time.

Pareth, watching his own status page through her eyes, quietly activated his skills to prop up the numbers.

Hmmhmm. This is still a good bit of a lighter skeleton than Richard’s hellspawn abomination but it’s a LOT better than the old human one. Those are some seriously nice numbers.

Name : Pareth

Age :6

Class : [Holy Eclipse Skeleton]

Mana heart : SSS rank

Level : 300

Base Health : 5 270 120

Base Stamina : 736 220

Current Health : 3 055 515 240

Current Stamina : 14 707 492

Current Mana : 4 393 660 (Regeneration: 0.32% = 14060/s)

Secondary Specialization : [Ophanim Corona]

Signature Skill (SSS)

[Chimeric armaments]

Soul slots:

Weapons (Spirit of a Lancer Sparrow; Throwing armaments)

Armor (Spirit of a Soguva; Airwalk boots)

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Shields (Turgescent Soul Ochiaran’s turgescent soul; Turgescent shields)

Mana Heart Abilities (5)

[Sunless Pulse] SSS Rank

[Relocate Core] SSS Rank

[Arclight] SSS Rank

[Slashing Resistance]

[Blunt Resistance]

Active Skills (6)

[Sanctified grounds]

[Flying shields of light]

[Chains of the four seals]

[Gravity well]

[Purification]

[Greater Heal]

Passive Skills (5)

[Shapeless weapon of light]

[Shapeless armor of light]

[Higher magical damage negation]

[Space magic resilience]

[Displacement skills immunity]

Special skills (5+1)

[Bone Density Up +200%]

[Silent Bones +200%]

[Teleport to Sofia]

[Negate hits of less than 10% Max Health]

[Quadruple Damage Against Undead]

__________________________________

[Draconic Shapeshifting] Lv.1

Racial Skills (3)

[Giant’s blood]

[Winds of Niflheim]

[Melting Spirit]

Summoner’s skills (5)

[Blessing of the Deep]

[Soul link]

[Shared senses]

[Runeforged Overlord Aura]

[Exalted Exoskeleton]

Classless Skills (5 / 5)

[Humanoid Ghost and Skeleton QOL patch v2.06 (placeholder name)] ♢

[Elite Skeleton] - Level 4

[Bone-Headed]

[Mana Anchoring]

[Supreme commander]

Enchantments (0/3)

[Generosity of Sun (NOT ENGRAVED)]

[Avian magic : Fighting sense (NOT ENGRAVED)]

[Avian magic : Air steps (NOT ENGRAVED)]

[Curse Resistance]

[Higher Blessing of bloating]

[Mark of Aphenoreth]

[Best Skeleton ♡]

Heheh, we really need to work on your signature skill slots. Surely we can find better than that?

“Can the ‘rustfucks’ actually hurt Pareth at all?” Sofia asked out loud.

It was Sonia who answered, “Not unless they get him by surprise without the light field. The issue is more with preventing them from escaping. We can’t afford to have the rust king finding out our location ever.”

“Hmm… Where did you get that new skeleton, by the way?”

Bookie stood up to explain, “It was in one of the underground ruins! All dead against a wall with spears between all its ribs! It even had a big sword but it was all broken so we didn’t take it.”

“Any idea what it is?” Sofia asked next, looking at Pareth. The skeleton was mostly human-looking, but it was much bulkier. The skull itself was what had the most differences, with short and pointy skeletal ears, which was a very rare feature, and two whole rows of pointy teeth inside the jaw.

Sonia shrugged. “Hard to tell. Its actual size is close to five meters. Too short to be a giant, too big to be most other things. My best guess is it might be an ancient race of Trolls, but I wouldn’t bet a single coin on it.”

“Right, trolls, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”

“Probably better that way. They’re truly nasty, irredeemable things. The world would be better off without them,” Sonia described, disgust oozing from her words.

“Ah. That’s funny, I vaguely remember a book describing necromancers that way.”

“Even dumb people can write books,” Bookie said with a snort out of nowhere.

Sofia laughed. “It was a book from the church.”

“Even Klepra is can write,” Pestle added with a chuckle, before completely changing the subject, “When is we get tartefact?”

“If Sofia feels well enough and we have a good plan by then, we can probably go tonight,” Sonia estimated.

“Do we already have an escape plan?”

“This I have already planned, yes. We have two options…”

In the zone above the now dried sea, under a dark sky with no stars, large fields of unknown tall crops stood still like stalagmites. There was not the slightest hint of wind here, the air felt stale and smelled metallic. Sofia stood alone in between the branches of a very tall tree overlooking a small portion of this vast cavern. In the distance, a small wooden fortress stood tall, surrounded by log walls, pitfalls and spikes, and lit by numerous torches and bonfires.

Sofia zoomed in, observing the creatures patrolling along the walls. They were like Bookie had described them, piles of rusty metal, like L-shaped slugs with four legs and two arms. They all had the same general shape but were all different, mixes of junk, springs and cogs, held together by magic and nothing else. If not for the group’s explanations, she would have guessed they were some sort of golems.

Most of them have mithril and orichalcum parts… Like walking piles of money.

Then Sofia turned her attention to the place’s biggest and tallest building, trying to look inside through its stained glass windows that were like patchworks of colored glass without any apparent meaning.

Oh woah! I can actually see it.

The artefact was perfectly in view from where she stood, placed at the top of a tall thing she couldn’t quite see from her angle. It looked a bit like a strange helmet with a large shiny gem sitting between two curved ‘horns’ that almost touched at the tip above the gem.

It felt a bit crazy to think this puny-looking thing could potentially help against the incoming disaster, but then again, a small sturdy coin was supposedly what could unlock level 550 and beyond so appearances was a bad metric for ancient relics.

The more she looked at the artefact, the more she felt that it ending up there made perfect sense.

Honestly I get it, I would have also used that as a decoration.

While she was lost in thoughts, a glimmer of light shone onto the tree from a distance,directly shining into her eyes.

Here’s the signal from Crowie. Everything is in place then.

Too bad I need to save the runes and can’t kill myself a few times to summon more…

Sofia whispered to herself as her mana cratered. “Go and give everyone a good show, Ulmtrëk, calamity of Blood…”