Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia and Alith looked at each other.

“Sounds about right,” Alith finally whispered with a chuckle.

“Yeah, same as usual, but at least we got a warning this time,” Sofia agreed, giving a sign for Pareth to proceed.

Pareth shrunk his size as much as possible to be a bit less visible, and ventured out, carefully avoiding to bump into anything or to step on the piles of moon sand. He carefully made his way out of the ruins of the building that the hall was once a part of, and stepped onto the main street, some thirty meters ahead. Suddenly he stopped and turned around.

Crap, that’s already the limit? Alright, come back.

Pareth teleported back to Sofia, but he appeared next to her upside down, crashing skull-first into the floor.

Alith reflexively slammed the doors shut, worried that the noise would attract the deep creatures, while Sofia went to go help Pareth stand back up.

“Looks like teleportation is unstable even if we’re still in range… It’s likely that [Summon Self] might bring about similar results… You can relax though, the things outside haven’t moved at all,” Sofia told Alith.

“Good… I’ll be honest, I’m not extremely thrilled to be meeting more of those things, that ‘student’ was freaky enough.”

“They’re not all that bad, the snail things I found when I went to the Deep weren’t aggressive or dangerous. The student was helpful also. It’s really just the parasites and the envoy in the sun station that were…”

“And the whale?” Alith asked.

“It was scary but I’ll hold judgement on this one since it was friendly to Shaily, it seems…”

“I have a feeling the things here won’t be friendly at all… And yeah since space magic is disturbed, let me quickly check my ghost form,” Alith said, quickly turning a bit translucent and back to normal. “That’s not too bad I suppose… I can switch but it’s really unstable too. Feels like I might get forced back to the physical at any time, which could be dangerous if I’m inside a wall or something… I assume your graveyard will be the same.”

“Seems likely, but no matter, I can do without. Let’s all go out now, we won’t get anywhere just staying here any longer, and the things in the dust haven’t reacted to anything yet, so we should be pretty safe for the time being.”

“We could dig one out and see what they’re made of,” Alith suggested as Sofia reopened the door.

“I thought about it too, but you know what the Dragons say?”

“No?”

“Don’t poke the sleeping Kleptra.”

Alith drew her sword and stepped outside first, “Won’t argue with that, I just hope we don’t do a repeat of our first time with the Phageid.”

Sofia followed, her scepter in one hand and her bone shield in the other, her wings folded over her back. There was more than enough mana to fly if she wanted, but she had her reservations about it, and the other two could not easily follow. Pareth closed the march, closing the doors behind him.

Sofia dismissed all the system popups and took the lead. “I’m the easiest to resurrect so I should go first,” she explained.

“You’ll be the first to know if anything happens anyway, so no objection.”

The small group thus formed a line and advanced through the desolate main street, where not a single building was still standing, rare were those which even still had more than two walls. The very thin layer of moon dust covering the pavement made it slightly slippery, and resulted in the group going even slower than they wanted to.

“Wait,” Alith said after about a minute of slow progression, bending down. She picked up some kind of ash-like flake that crumbled when she touched it. Frowning, she then pressed a finger against the pavement before bringing it to the tip of her tongue.

“Wh- What are you doing?” Sofia whispered.

“Sofia…” Alith answered, before spitting out a few times, a disgusted expression on her face, “this is no ‘moon dust’... This is people dust.”

“Ash?”

“No… [Refined palate] says it’s basically 100% human skin…”

“What the fuck,” Sofia reacted in a low whisper.

She looked around, in the corners of the ruins where the ‘dust’ accumulated, some piles of it were almost as tall as she was, everything everywhere was covered in the dark-gray dust. How could there possibly be so much dead skin?! ɌÀɴǒΒĚṨ

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

After this disturbing discovery, the group was even more focused on watching out for anything strange, but they failed at finding much. Even when it came to understanding the city itself, not much could be said as so little remained of anything. The crumbling stone walls were devoid of decoration, and any furniture or other such things had long rotten away.

Further along, they found some kind of a city square, or so they guessed due to the lack of crumbling buildings in that area. It was Pareth who noticed something different, a brown thing half buried under the dust near a wall.

“What is that?” Alith asked, unable to see well from where she was, as the group stood about ten meters away from the thing, unwilling to come too close to the walls.

“Looks like… It could be a rusty horseshoe?” Sofia guessed, “There are some of the deep creatures right on the other side of the wall… Buried in the dust…”

“I can’t believe they’re all around us and we still haven’t really seen a single one… Think it’s dangerous to go retrieve that thing?”

“Might be… Let’s try to grab it from her with a bone pole.”

Sofia promptly started pulling a bone strand out of her armor to make a foldable pole with a hook at the end. She used it to grab the thing from a distance and pull it back without coming any closer and while monitoring the deep creatures.

“They haven’t moved at all,” she said as Alith grabbed the thing Sofia had just fished up.

“Good to know. And this is definitely not a horseshoe… It’s all rusty and faded but… That looks like a signboard with a boot, doesn’t it? Cobbler shop?”

“Seems so,” Sofia agreed, “the grooves underneath might have been the shop’s name. Can’t read it…”

“Those don’t look like any letters I know…” Alith commented.

“Must be language from the lost epoch,” Sofia guessed, “I’ve never seen it either but it would make sense humans spoke another language thirty thousand years ago. The common language is only as old as the system so…”

“There was already ‘ancient human’ so this would be ‘lost human’? In my world we just had a different language for each kingdom basically. Though to be fair it was more like regional languages even…”

“In your world people can’t fly or teleport around so it’s not so surprising languages were more local. But considering the circumstances here, this might not be ‘lost human’ and more like ‘moon human’? I do wonder what happened to them, though, no signs of skeletons anywhere…”

“Isn’t that normal?” Alith asked, “If it’s been thirty thousand years, everything would have decayed by now.”

“I’m not so sure… Anything would take a while to decay here. It’s pretty dry, and there are no signs of animal or plant life. Just deep creatures and skin dust. If there’s skin I’d expect to also find bones, or at least teeth… Teeth are the last thing to wither away normally. But here there’s just nothing.”

“Maybe the deep monsters ate them,” Alith suggested, placing the fully-rusted crumbling signboard back on the ground.

“Hopefully not,” Sofia answered, starting to walk again. She decided to keep going in the same direction, as it would at least make it easy to find their way back to the hall if they needed to.

A few hundreds of meters further, it was Sofia who found something, the tip of a root coming from underground that had pierced the pavement and spilled onto the street.

So there are plants here after all?

The small visible segment of root the size of an arm was darker than the moon dust, and its exterior was like gnarly twisted bark and looked humid, as if covered in a thin coat of lustrous transparent mucus.

[Identify]ing without a connection to the system was basically like simply asking Mr.Scribe for his opinion, so Sofia was not surprised when she did not get any results.

“Doesn’t look like anything I know,” Alith said before Sofia could ask anything.

“I don’t feel any mana from it, but let’s not touch things we don’t need to…”

“Agreed, let’s press on.”

The trio advanced through the silent ruined city, not much changed, the deep creatures hiding in the dust did not move nor react to their presence at all, and the only thing of note was that they noticed a few more of the roots coming out of the ground here and there, with no sign of a single tree anywhere.

Until Sofia suddenly froze.

A giant hole had appeared out of nowhere in her mana senses, just about a kilometer ahead, and it was rapidly approaching in a straight line.

She quickly looked in every direction to assess her best option, shushed Alith with the palm of her hand when she was about to ask what was wrong, grabbed Alith by the wrist and dashed out of the main street and into the crumbling ruins. She ran through the debris, avoiding the walls and piles of dust as best she could, and only stopped when she had led the entire group into another street.

“Fuck. That was bad,” Sofia finally said when she stopped.

“What was it? You felt something?”

“Felt? More than just that! I saw it!” Sofia explained frantically, “A tall creature like some sort of giant elongated horse, galloping down the main street straight toward the city square. I only caught a glimpse of it when we were already running, but it was huge and fast. If not for my mana sense expanding so far I wouldn’t even have felt it coming before it reached us!”

The short scene incessantly replayed in Sofia’s mind, she couldn’t forget the haunting image of the strange creature moving with an unnatural fluidity, its massive form gliding over the piles of dust.

“I didn’t even hear a thing,” Alith admitted.

“Because it didn’t make a noise, but it did not look friendly in the least, trust me.”

“Was it all shimmering like the parasites?”

Sofia shook her head, “No. It was that color,” she answered, pointing at the piles of ‘moon’ dust everywhere.

Alith gulped loudly.

Sofia’s expression was ugly underneath her helmet, but she had to verbalize her thoughts, no matter how wrong they felt, “I think there’s a non-zero chance… It was ‘human’.”