Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia and the group tracked the discovery of the birds after almost half an hour of exploration. The crows led them to a region of the desert that was even hotter, where it was starting to become a bit unbearable. While the skeletons weren’t normally too cognisant of heat, it was getting so bad there that the surface of the desert almost looked like it was melting, sand glistening, while the ambient air warped from the heat. It was still not dangerous for anyone involved, but it was certainly uncomfortable.

“This could be the actual source of heat of the desert,” Sofia said, “It’s not like it gets it from sunshine.”

“We follow the heat,” Sonia decided.

As the group flew in, it was not long before the heat started to become unbearable to Sonia. She had protection, but it couldn’t compare to the enchantment of Sofia’s helmet and her experience handling the heat of the angel bolts.

“Pareth, since you have a weakness to fire now, stay with Sonia, Pestle with me, Bookie split.”

“Understood!” Bookie answered while Pestle moved to sit on top of Sofia’s helmet. Bookie’s ‘skeleton’ would stay with Pareth and Sonia while Sofia kept his actual book body with her.

Ready for anything, Sofia flew deeper into the hot zone. A few kilometers further into it, the heat went up drastically again, not only that, ambient mana also seemed to slowly climb up, pressing down on her like an anvil. Past a certain point the sand of the desert abruptly turned into a sea of molten goo that became more and more liquid the farther she went. The air itself was starting to feel electric, shining from the heat.

It’s almost like I’m back on the sun station.

Sofia pushed through, this level of heat was still nowhere near what her strongest bolts could produce. Pestle was silent on her helmet, but Sofia could tell she was starting to struggle, and had started to absorb some of her mana to maintain herself.

A minute later, Sofia was flying through a cloud of plasma, she truly started to feel like she had departed from the desert, and was plunging straight into the sun. She could barely see ahead, using VPPV’s light alteration feature to dim and filter the light that reached her eyes like magical sunglasses.

The heat kept getting worse, slowing her down, and eventually reached the threshold where Sofia’s armor and health points were starting to melt. Her regeneration entered a sustained battle with the heat.

How much further still?!

She decided that if she could not find anything soon, she would have to turn back. The heat kept climbing, until it reached the point of equilibrium where it hurt Sofia as fast as she could heal herself.

Shit…

Just a bit more.

This can’t be infinite!

As a ball of fire slicing through a sea of plasma, Sofia continued, until she finally made a breakthrough. She hit a wall, literally, losing a good third of her remaining health in the process.

Something! The source must be near! Walking on roiling magma and surrounded by plasma, Sofia could not see anything, so she relied on touch. Running along the wall with her hand on it, feeling the shape of the large bricks, she was searching for an opening as her health ticked down by the second.

Too slow!

The wooden graveyard nymphs likely would not fare too well in this environment, so Sofia turned to her other method of walking through walls. With a punch, she opened a hole. Plasma roared as it flowed into the hole, and Sofia hurried in. She turned around and sealed the hole with bone pulled from her armor.

Won’t hold long, but better than nothing.

Finally she could breathe and look around. She had entered some kind of ruin, the air inside was extremely thin and dusty, but at least not on fire, while the entire structure, walls and pillars, was glowing red. The heat was even worse than outside, but the lack of ambient plasma let Sofia’s health slowly climb back up.

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Looking around, Sofia was at a loss. She was in a closed room, with no obvious way out, there was no furniture or doors, just four brick walls supported by two undecorated pillars.

Is that it?

She was almost relieved not to see an exit to the desert, because there was probably no way Sonia could come here alive. Even Pestle had decided to unsummon herself because it was too much.

After waiting for her health to be back to full, she burst through the opposite brick wall.

So it does continue.

She made it into a second dead space, and the heat intensified again.

Going in the right direction still… Is there an actual sun caged in here?

Just as she wondered that, she heard a faint sound from above. While her helmet was designed with her demon form in mind, not hindering her 360° vision in the slightest, right above and right under her were still small blind spots. She jumped back just in time to see pressurised jets of molten matter cut through the air in front of her. [Heat Death] had reacted, so it was at least a partly magical attack, and one that would have actually hurt her.

The culprits were fat worm-like larvae wriggling around stuck to the ceiling. They were glowing red just like the ceiling’s bricks, making them hard to distinguish from one another. Their heads turning, they spewed another shower of magma at Sofia.

It turned out, the room behind was not safe. There were larvae there too, camouflaged along the seams of the brick walls, almost impossible to see when they were immobile. Woken up by the attacks of their kin, they attacked Sofia from behind.

Surrounded, Sofia targeted her bone armor with the [Blessing of permanent Frame] as an emergency measure. Some magma jets had time to pierce the armor, searing holes through her flesh, but most were stopped by the armor once the blessing activated.

These insects are no joke!

With a thought, she had a page tear itself off of the book at her waist.

Oven! A large skeletal bird appeared in the room in front of her, taking almost the entire space available. That was Oven, the poor firebird from the third trial that she now almost exclusively used as a source of heat to cook food. As a skeleton with a mane of fire, it was naturally immune to heat. It needed no commands, seeing the fat worms glowing like spicy treats, it pecked at them until there was none left on the side of the room. They were higher level than it was, it seemed, their tiny mandibles easily gnawing through the firebird’s bones, but with their magic completely useless, they fell one by one to the skeleton’s beak, their tiny mana stones crushed one after the other. Sofia lifted her blessing to move behind Oven now that one room was clear, letting him enter the other and finish the cleanup.

Even a fucking larva can be level 350? The forbidden layer is truly something else.

Oven made quick work of the remaining monsters, and Sofia wasted no time to break through another wall. She expected more larva, but made it to a large hall instead. She had broken in through the side wall, from here she could see both the close entrance gate and a brightly glowing ornate door on the opposite side after a long flight of stairs.

I bet the source is behind that.

After carefully looking at the walls and ceiling to make sure there were no more larvae here, Sofia walked up to the door. Putting a hand on it, she recognised the texture even through her dragon scale armguard.

Asterite…

Unwilling to deal with that, and with no obvious way to open the door in sight, Sofia punched the wall next to it.

I’ll never get people’s obsession with strong doors… She thought as she walked through the dust and rubble, the increasing heat starting to gnaw at her health again.

Is that…

Taking a step into the room, Sofia glanced at Oven who followed behind her.

She silently looked at her skeleton for a second, then back at the center of the room, then at her skeleton again.

Listen… I won’t blame you if you feel inadequate.

Thankfully the firebird was a bit too simpleminded to understand Sofia’s thoughts.

The source of the heat was immobile in the center of the room, on a gigantic square altar that occupied most of the space. A giant dead bird, only bones and fiery feathers remaining, pinned on the altar by an ominous black claymore piercing right through its skull, body still engulfed in bright white flames.

Sofia was ready to bet her entire fortune that she had found the namesake of Alith’s blessing.

Phoenix.

She had to gulp down her saliva not to drool on herself. Already she could feel her fingers itching, slowly caressing Bookie’s spine.