Saintess Summons Skeletons

There was pitifully little to salvage as spoils of victory. The castle and surrounding island were entirely swallowed and molten down by the tide of purple goo, until most of it flowed down into the sea, and there was only a barren, debris-covered island left. At least it had also cleaned the nearby frenzied vegetation.

Pestle, Crowie and Sonia flew away from the island together, flying through the tall seaweed that had grown out of the sea and into the air. They were going on a short mission to retrieve the mithrium arrow while Sofia, Pareth and Bookie stayed behind.

Flying over the half-molten stone and plant debris and puddles of purple goo that seemed to have lost its corrosive power, the three scanned the ground for an opening.

Sofia landed after a few minutes, the others joining her.

“Find anything,” she asked.

“No, it’s all too messy,” Bookie said.

“Alright… Well, we couldn’t secure more but you still have one full page of the guys. Get them out, surely they know where the way down is if there is one.”

The Fublin they had interrogated earlier pointed down when asked where the precious things were kept, so naturally the group hoped to find a basement of some sort.

It turned out that the new page of skeleton Fublins were completely clueless, and while they seemed to also believe the good stuff was underground, they couldn’t find the entrance through the rubble. Left without a choice, Sofia did what she should have done from the beginning, summoning her rat crew again to search for the passage. That was when the others returned, Crowie triumphantly holding Sonia’s arrow in his maws.

Sofia made no comment, wondering if she should make Crowie a Mithrium chewing bone, and whether the Dragons would find that insulting.

Meanwhile, Bookie shared the current findings with Sonia.

By the time Sonia walked up to Sofia, the rats had already found the entrance.

“Found the way down,” Sofia said right away.

“Huh, and here I thought I might be able to show my treasure senses for once.”

“We’re not lacking the opportunities for that,” Sofia commented, idly taking a bite of one of the pink fruits she had harvested earlier.

Sonia looked at the fruit with a slight frown, “Do you often eat random things you find in dangerous places?”

Sofia swallowed the piece of fruit, which was fleshy, chewy, and a bit sweet. “More than you’d imagine.”

“Not even mentioning a stomachache… How are you even still alive?”

Sofia took another bite. “I don’t have a stomach to begin with. And generally I am just pretty resilient to poisons and such? I even have the Philosopher’s stone now.” Saying this, she held out another fruit, offering it to Sonia, “you should try, it’s pretty good. Just be mindful of the pit, this thing is like stone.” Sofia spat out half of a pink pebble-looking thing with teeth marks, while Sonia hesitantly grabbed the fruit she offered.

“What are your teeth even made of?” Sonia asked after she herself bit into the fruit and found that the pit was indeed cold and hard like a damned mithril nugget.

“Light.”

“Huh. Yeah. Makes sense…”

After closer inspection, the fruits’ pits, it turned out, were largely made of Orichalcum with some hard plant fibers mixed in.

To anyone who ever said that this stuff doesn’t grow on trees, they were in fact incorrect.

After the short break, the rats had fully excavated the entrance to a spiraling stone staircase going down, only the first few steps of which were molten into a bumpy slope. Bookie went down first to scout the place, but could only come back up after now even a minute had passed, shaking his skull.

“It’s all full of plants! I couldn’t go far at all and they even tried to grab my clothes when I turned back! They almost ripped my cape!” he complained.

“Alright, thanks for checking ahead,” Sofia said, giving him a few skullpats. She and Sonia then went down together to see, and faced with a literal wall of squirming vegetation, they both decided to wait until the morning to explore the castle’ ceiling. Otherwise they might just destroy the loot while cleaning out the annoying plants.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

The rest of the night was uneventful on the barren island, and when the seawater started glowing again, the absurdly overgrown plants everywhere started to violently shrink, and most of the group’s skills were restricted once more.

Before going down, Sofia harvested a few more fruits from the trees that had grown overnight out of the pits she and Sonia had spat out.

The Fublin loot would continue to be underwhelming, as the ‘precious thing’ the Fublins perceived as their most valuable possessions turned out to be a hatchery full of hairy Fublin eggs. That being said, a locked Mithril door in the lowest level of the multi-layer hatchery gave the group some hope. Pareth opened it with his key.

Beyond was a corridor made of pink bricks.

“Golden age?” Sofia asked, turning to Sonia.

“Strange to find connected to this castle’s basement… But it certainly looks that way.”

“I’ll go first then. This might be where the Evil Eyes the Fublins had in that room came from.”

Nobody had any objection, so Sofia took the lead in the narrow corridors of this underground ruin.

“It looks perfectly safe so far,” Sofia said as she walked in. She could not feel any bones nearby, and approaching the first doorway out of the corridor, it led to a fully collapsed room. She continued, took a turn, then another, and the style of the corridor abruptly changed.

It was like someone had spliced two different ruins together after cutting cleanly through either side. The pink bricks gave way to a corridor of large polished marble tiles, covered by a long rotten carpet. Small statues of unknown winged beasts decorated the sides of this new corridor.

“I’ve never seen a ruin like this…” Sonia said from behind, “neither this style nor two different ruins fused together like that.”

“It was more or less fused with the lost epoch castle too,” Sofia added, “Do we continue?”

“Be wary of traps, I don’t know anything about whatever epoch this is from,” Sonia warned with a nod.

“Alright, I should be fine. Pestle, come help.”

“Pesle is find all the trap! Very easy!”

There were actually traps further in, but Pestle did not need to find them, as they were already pretty obvious.

“That’s the twentieth Fublin skeleton in this corridor,” Sonia noted, looking at the skeleton that lay in slices in front of Sofia.

“You have to give it to whoever built this place, the traps were pretty good, they can even kill a level 250 monster,” Sofia said, as the trap responsible for this skeleton activated, and round spinning blades appeared out of the wall, colliding with Sofia’s armor.

“Is so weak,” Pestle criticized, watching the blades gradually becoming dull as they kept spinning and failed to cut into the lumian bone.

“Well, static defense like that can only do so much. It’s already something that it still works despite how long it’s gone without maintenance.”

“Don’t grow too complacent just because it’s weak this time,” Sonia said from behind, “also try giving a light punch to the wall on your left, Sofia.”

“Hmm? Here?”

Sofia gave a weak punch into the wall between two winged statues, and it easily crumbled, revealing a smaller passage behind it.

“I cannot believe I missed that… Without mana senses I really am blind…” Sofia said in disbelief, “How did you notice that?”

“The statues around it were looking in a different direction.”

“Oh.”

This time, Bookie entered first again to scout the secret passage, and confirming it was safe, everyone made it into a new room which had no other exit, and contained nothing but a tall mirror propped against the back wall.

The group had entered cautiously, Sofia’s thoughts drifting toward images of mirror mimics, but at first glance, the mirror, though made of finely sculpted crystal, seemed like a perfectly normal item.

“Probably magic in some way,” Sonia said, “let me Identify that.”

[Strange dual mirror]:

This mirror sculpted from a singular piece of crystallized Silverinide has the unusual property of reflecting the same image from both sides.

238 by 105cm

Enchanting patterns have been found inside, finely engraved with a decoupled mana burst technique, but their effects could not be deciphered.

Contrary to regular enchantments, these patterns seem carved in reverse, set to trigger only when mana is drawn out of the mirror instead of the other way around.

Exact purpose unknown.

Sofia also tried to identify the mirror but despite Mr.scribe’s best efforts, the information her homemade version gave was not even worth bringing up in comparison.

After the group moved the mirror a bit, placing it upright held up by a bone stand in the center of the room, they confirmed that the back side also showed whatever was reflected from the front side, wondering what this could possibly be used for.

Then they discussed activating the enchantments. And after discussing how to draw out the mana from the mirror in an environment as mana-saturated as this one, they eventually ended up letting Sonia draw a particularly mana-expensive ritual on the surface of the mirror. It naturally ended up pulling the necessary mana from the mirror itself when it activated.

The mirror’s enchantments activated without fanfare, turning its previously reflective surfaces mostly black, with moving patterns as if swirling mist was trapped inside.

“Pesle is still not understand what this for… Is be Klepra mirror so they not see Klepra ugly face?”