Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia struggled to carve through a good forty centimeters of rocks before she finally hit something softer.

“I hit something,” Sofia said, “It’s weaker than the stone, actually.”

“Probably a mithril vein,” Sonia guessed.

Another move of the knife later, another piece of stone fell at Sofia’s feet, revealing a clean chunk of pure bright green metal.

“At this point shouldn’t we just bring the stone back up instead of the mithril?”

“It’s just regular rocks if you bring them out,” Sonia answered with a smirk, “In fact the bits you carved out have probably already turned brittle.”

Sofia focused back on the wall, her dagger shaving off curved bits of mithril from the wall one after another.

“We can bring all of that back, you still have space, right?” Sonia asked.

“Plenty. I’m not short on Mithril but getting more cannot hurt. Though I’ll admit I was hoping we would find some more exciting exotic stuff.”

“There’s definitely some of that to be found, be between two seas, a forest and a desert, we really didn’t go through the right zones for that. Though now that the cube mimic thing is dead there’s a good chance we might find more in that tunnel with the life-sapping crystals.”

Sofia continued digging, while Bookie helped stuff the mithril shards she extracted into her bone backpack. The only other person with some space left was Pareth, but he was already carrying the heavy and encumbering dead corpse of the dark epoch robot as well as the [Phoenix Ire],so they didn’t want to weigh him down further with mithril. Even Crowie was already carrying luggage full of stuff the others had collected over the months, and the team would really become bloated if Sofia needed to summon more skeletons to carry extra ore.

“Sofia, your bag is full,” Bookie notified her as she kept digging.

“Still haven’t found the mithrium though, am I even digging in the correct direction?”

Sonia nodded, “Shouldn’t be very far now. Hopefully it’s a big chunk.”

“What was the biggest you found?” Bookie asked curiously.

“A big chunk the size of two thumbs. Almost seven hundred grams. That was a really good day. Speaking of which,” Sonia said, turning to Sofia, “How much is there in your helmet? It’s pretty big, must have cost you a lot.”

“There’s only two kilograms, actually. The outside mithrium layer is really thin.”

“Only two kilograms she says… My three arrows together aren’t even half that.”

“Your equipment in general looks very basic aside from the bow and arrows,” Sofia commented as she kept digging.

“Things don’t have to look good to be practical.”

“True, true… Which reminds me, what did you do with the evil eyes on my staff?”

“Buried ‘em. Since you were out, your aura was unstable and they were digging through the bone. It was better to get rid of that.”

“Got it– Oh, I hit something even softer. Must be it.”

With a few careful dagger strokes, Sofia extracted a nice marble of mithrium from the mithril vein. Sonia weighed it in her palm, estimating it to be around four hundred grams, which was already considered a huge find. That tiny marble was worth around four stones while Sofia’s full backpack, that was so heavy it made her flinch when she put it on her back, was at most around two tons, so only worth half of that mithrium marble.

That done, despite there being still plenty of mithril left in the vein, the group left, and entered the phoenix’ desert. With both of its previous inhabitants gone, the place had changed a lot.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

It was no longer hot nor cold, just dead, a huge expanse of mushy wet sand. The ice created by the strange paper snake had gotten time to melt, leaving the area like this.

A bit curious, Pestle dug deep into the wet sand, but unlike before, nothing happened, she just found more hard stone at the bottom of the cavern, and that was all.

“Very water, then rock,” she told everyone as her head popped out of the sand, wet blue hair sticking to her face.

Sonia nodded. “As I thought. Let’s just go straight for the exit.”

“Do you have a way to find our path back through the underworld sea?” Sofia asked as the group flew over the wet desert.

Sonia simply pulled out a crooked orichalcum loop from a pouch at her side, “Divination skill [Retrace Steps], it’s single use but I have three of them. Should be enough.”

“Sounds quite practical. I could probably use a few of those myself.”

“Not for sale,” Sonia said, flying ahead, “But if you really want some you can always join our group full time,” she added jokingly.

“Thanks but I have enough on my plate as is. I’ll focus on fixing my arm first.”

“I know, I know, my offer to take you to that dead god in the Carthene plains still stands, by the way. Just let me know when.”

“How do we even contact you after all this?”

“Ah, I was gonna get a house in your city, might not be there often, but you can just leave me a letter there.”

Returning to the dark fog of the underground sea, Sonia used her divination item, and [Retrace Steps] actually created a long thread of glimmering lights that led the group straight to the leyline tree. There were a few behemoth ants patrolling around, but they ignored the group, and the fungus hermit did not show up again. After flying down to the roots of the leyline, the trail of lights started again, bringing them to the exit. This time they already knew the ins and outs of this area, so instead of taking it slow and safe with a raft, they flew as fast as they could to make it before night and avoid the mosquito swarm.

Just as the swarms started waking up, they made it to the hole in the ceiling that led them up to the cube mimic’s area and the entrance to the life-stealing crystals tunnels. Rather than dealing with the mosquitos, Sofia made a big bone alcove against a wall for the group to spend the night. They spent most of the night discussing divination magic, and departed again as soon as the mosquitos left.

As they rushed through the crystal tunnel, Sonia stopped them again. It was still in the zone they had uncontrollably fallen through before, attracted by the mimic cube’s gravity. While previously it had felt like a fall straight down because of the altered gravity, it was actually a completely level tunnel.

“Ah, you’re in luck Sofia!”

“Hmm?”

“You wanted different exotic stuff? My aura just reacted to something and I have no idea what it is.”

“Oh? Alright I’m in. Where do I dig? Is it in the crystals?”

Sonia shook her head, she landed and took a few hesitant steps until stopping on a precise spot, ”Right her below me, I think. Not even that deep. Never felt something like that, though, so it could be dangerous.”

“When has that ever stopped me?”

As it turned out, she almost did not have to dig at all, as soon as the dagger pierced through the ground, before the blade was even halfway in, it hit something hard and stopped.

“Huh. It’s harder than the stone. Adamian ore?”

Sonia shook her head lightly, “I would have recognized that, maybe an Asterite variant.”

It took Sofia about five minutes to dig out a hard geode the size of Bookie’s skull. It was not her first time seeing a geode although she had never held one before. She shook it around a bit, but did not hear anything inside.

Sonia grabbed it to see how heavy it was, and still could not guess what was inside.

“We’re going to need to crack it open.”

“Should we do that on the surface?” Sofia asked.

“Better to do it here, if there’s something bad in there we don’t want the Kleptras to be the ones to discover we brought that up.”

“Right. Never done this…”

Sofia tried her best but with all of her strength she barely managed to slightly wedge the tip of her dagger into the stone, far from cracking it open.

After some deliberation, the group continued on until they found an area of the tunnel relatively free of the life-stealing crystals that grew everywhere, and they worked together to break the thing open. Under Sonia’s guidance, Sofia painfully scored the geode with her dagger then wedged it back in the dent before placing it snuggly in a bone holder while Pareth relentlessly hammered it with the Phoenix Ire.

Pareth was starting to show signs of mental fatigue, his strikes not as clean as they were a few hours prior, when the shockingly sturdy rock cluster finally snapped. Everyone gathered around to watch Sofia open up the bone support and pull the two halves apart. Inside, there was a dense cluster of solid orange bubbles with a greasy luster, like frozen grapes of honey.

No one present had even the slightest bit of knowledge about these strange gemstones, not even Bookie’s miner Kidjikkiks or the golden dwarf.