Saintess Summons Skeletons

As the thing turned around abruptly, Alith appeared right in front of it, and started running away, in the opposite direction from Sofia and Pareth.

The squirming creature wasted no time chasing after Alith, floating a few centimeters above the ground as if held up by the tether linking it to the sky, and Sofia soon lost sight of them both.

“Lords…” Alith whispered, reappearing next to Sofia, “It’s good that my reaction time’s improved this much, because I did NOT want to see that thing from up close.”

Sofia nodded, her mana senses following the [Lady Double] and its pursuer from afar. “And good to learn that this thing isn’t particularly clever nor fast, we could easily outrun that. Also weren’t your doubles supposed to appear where you are?”

“I’ve had plenty of time to alter the skill, it’s quite versatile now. But these things… Should we try killing one?” Alith suggested.

“I’d rather not unless we have no other choice, I’m a bit worried about whatever it is that these things are connected to.”

Alith nodded and stood up, “Then let’s move. After you.”

Sofia opened Bookie to summon a Guardian Kidjikkik, and started making her way through the ruins, staying as far as possible from the newly named ‘Tethered’, and using the Kidjikkik as bait to drive them away when there was no other option. The Kidjikkik could easily slither through the ruins and lose his pursuers, crawling through window holes being an especially good tactic as the tethered would try to follow through and get entangled. The tethers were not particularly flexible, it seemed, which in turn made any of the rare ruins with a still-standing upper floor or roof completely safe from them, giving the group some breathing room, despite the increasing number of Tethered as they advanced into the city.

After several hours, the guardian Kidjikkik expired and was unsummoned just as Sofia stepped into a church through a hole in the walls. “Let’s stop here, my head hurts,” she told the others, keeping her voice low as the church was almost completely surrounded by more than twenty tethered that they had just bypassed.

“You’ve been forcing on your mana sense all this time, no wonder it’s starting to hit you,” Alith commented, “Good time for a break anyway, we finally have something new to explore,” she continued, pointing at something on the ground.

Sofia had been so focused on the tethered that she had not even looked that deeply into the church after finding it devoid of Deep creatures, but there was indeed something to explore, a trapdoor on the floor where the church’s altar should have probably been, half buried under a pile of stone debris. Besides that, there was not much else left in the church, the engravings and paintings on the walls were all lost to time, and the furniture had long turned to dust. “The stone is thick so I can’t sense very far, but there are multiple underground levels, I think, at least two,” she told Alith before completely cutting off her mana senses for a bit, hoping that the headache would quickly go away.

“Hopefully we find something more exciting down there,” Alith said, walking up to the pile of debris, “I wonder, though, who did they worship here?”

Sofia observed the walls, trying to see if any decipherable inscriptions remained anywhere, but the ruins were just too old and eroded, the stone ceiling of the church itself seemed to be on the brink of collapse. “I can’t even begin to guess,” she finally answered, “but maybe it’s not actually a church. Sure it kind of looks like one, but this is from ages ago, who knows what their actual churches might have looked like if they had any.”

“Huh, I didn’t even consider that, but that might be it. This could just have well been some kind of city hall or an indoor market…”

“Feels like a bit too grandiose of a building to be a simple indoor market, but I guess we will never know.”

Everyone quickly got to work to clear up the debris from the rusty hatch as quietly as possible, which only took a few minutes, then Sofia sliced off the hatch’s lock and hinges with the admin dagger, allowing Pareth to remove the entire thing without a sound, revealing a hole with a broken ladder leading to an underground floor.

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Sofia reached out to Bookie of her hip, grabbed the first page and tore it off, summoning the skeleton rat.

You go first, explore this floor and report.

The rat jumped down and scurried off into the undeground floor, coming back about thirty seconds later, his tail was relaxed which meant he hadn’t seen anything weird. ŖαΝọ฿Èŝ

“This floor should be safe,” Sofia told the others before jumping in, landing on air with [Dodge Me] to cancel the noise. Alith jumped behind, her mithril boots barely making a sound as they hit the ground, and Pareth was last, shrinking as much as he could and slowly lowering himself in, getting helped down by Sofia catching his pelvis.

“You- You need to lose some weight,” she joked with a strained voice, struggling to soften Pareth’s landing.

“Do you even know how heavy he is anymore?” Alith asked.

“A hundred and twenty six tonnes,” she proudly said after letting go of Pareth once he touched ground, her arms still shaking from the strain, “but there’s clearly some magic shenanigans happening with his weight somewhere somehow, because I’m pretty sure he would do more than just crack wooden floors if not, and I don’t think I’d be able to support him like this at all.”

“With our strength it should be hard to even interact with normal things and people without destroying them by accident yet that doesn’t really happen,” Alith said with a shrug, “I’ve decided to just accept that it works out somehow. And this place is just as empty as the ground floor, huh.”

Lead the way, Sofia telepathically told the rat, before answering Alith, “There are lower floors, maybe it’s not all empty, at least there’s no moon dust here, for a change.”

“You know, Sof, considering the things we’ve met until now, I’d almost be relieved if it was all empty.”

“It’s not that bad so far.”

“So far…”

They followed the rat through three completely empty underground floors, going deeper and deeper underground, until they found a closed and barricaded door at the very end.

“This thing’s clearly enchanted,” Alith said after a single glance.

“I’m not too surprised that the humans back then also knew how to enchant stuff, but this looks nothing like our modern enchantments.”

“It looks like their runes are the same they use to write regular text, that’s similar to that sign we found earlier.”

Sofia nodded, “I noticed that too, but I’m more worried about the fact that this thing is still powered up.”

“Can’t it be using mana from the environment?” Alith asked.

“It’s not like it’s impossible to do that, but there are issues with it, and not only would it never last for thirty thousand years, you really wouldn’t want that on a door unless it’s to have it open by itself…”

“Well. How do we get in? Usually I’d just ghost through the walls…”

“I’ll handle it, just step back, both of you,” Sofia ordered, grabbing the admin dagger from within her armor.

She then stabbed the door.

The enchantment included some kind of retaliatory magic protection, it seemed, but Sofia cancelled that with [Heat Death] before it could even begin to materialize properly. The dagger easily sliced through whatever other protections the door might have had, and after Sofia cut a wide circle into the door, she kicked it in. “Easy,” she commented, looking into the hole, “I don’t even know what kind of protection a door could have that would possibly stop me at this point. The key is just too sharp.”

“You sure use it a lot. See anything in there?”

“Remember the strange root we found earlier?” Sofia asked.

“The dark and wet one coming out of the ground? Yeah?”

“There’s a lot of those. Just look for yourself,” Sofia answered, going inside through the hole.

The underground tunnel beyond the enchanted door was so overrun by the dark roots that it almost looked like it had been carved inside of a tree.

Despite the root tunnel being slightly unsettling, the trio marched on, finding a few more enchanted doors leading to the other underground parts of the city, most of which had long caved-in and were obstructed by tons of debris. Hoping to find something else, they continued to follow the root tunnel, eventually finding something new in the form of a round fruit growing from the roots.

The fruit looked like a black wrinkled orb, growing directly on a very thick root like a big wart, it lacked the wet-looking shine of the rest of the roots.

After some deliberation, Sofia decided to harvest it for Alith, the fruit easily coming off with a gentle pull. As soon as it was disconnected from the root, it started glowing intensely. The fruit bathed the tunnel in the colorful shimmering light of the Deep.