by Pirateaba
Names didn’t matter. It was the learning that had saved Toren. He had taken the life of the undead, watched them fall to the ground, lifeless corpses once more. He had lived. But he had still been running out of mana.
So he had searched for more. Suddenly bereft of the thing that had kept him alive, Toren was now focused on it. As someone who had no oxygen would be focused on breathing. And there was magic all around him! It was in the earth, the air, the grass—
But far too little of it. Maybe a zombie could have existed on that ambient mana, but Toren was like a raging bonfire to their modest torches. Something in him was burning through magic at an incredible rate. Erin hadn’t provided Toren with much mana as someone like Ceria or Pisces could have, but it had still been enough to sustain him.
Searching, Toren had felt something deep in the earth. Something strong. A source of power. He had searched for a way to get to that spot, and remembered the dungeon. He remembered where he had fallen in and desperately made his way to that spot.
There he had had met the small, white Gnoll that used to live at the inn. Mrsha? Mrsha. She had taken one look at Toren and fled. She had gone right to the very crevasse Toren was headed to, and actually tumbled in by herself!
She was clumsy. And she’d let go when Toren went to pull her out. He hadn’t been sure if he was going to stab her or let her go in any event; he just needed her out of the way so he could get into the dungeon. But she had fallen, and that was that.
It was Toren’s descent that mattered. He had carefully climbed down a few feet into the dungeon down the sheer drop, lost his grip, and tumbled to the bottom. He hadn’t broken—but he had fractured several bones.
But then he had been in the dungeon. And oh, blessedly, there had been magic.
It filled the dark hallways of the dungeon. It practically radiated from some rooms, and Toren knew the ambient energy could fuel any number of undead, or other monsters. It was enough to actually fill him with magical energy, enough so that he could reassemble himself a few times if he needed to.
That was a relief. But Toren hadn’t done any fighting then. Suddenly free of the need to survive, the skeleton had seen the small Gnoll running away into the darkness, and heard her howling. He had seen the adventurers and the big Drake kill a score of monsters with commendable skill and bravery. He had seen them climb out of the pit.
And he hadn’t felt a thing. Toren had sat down as the battle had raged, as killing—his favorite thing to do—had been occurring in spades. He had sat and been still. Because now Toren had realized the truth. The awful truth, which held him in place. That wouldn’t go away.
Erin Solstice was dead.
And it was his fault.
The link between Toren and Erin was gone. She was no longer providing him with mana. There could only be one reason for that, Toren knew.
She was gone. He had gotten her killed.
And he hadn’t meant it.
Okay, okay. He had deliberately pulled Erin countless miles away from her inn and left her deliberately near a cave with a sleeping bear in it. And maybe Toren had thrown some rocks at a pack of wolves as he’d walked off. But that had just been a playful attempt at murder, a casual homicide attempt! He hadn’t…hadn’t ever thought it would happen.
It was strange. Toren stirred. He lay down on his left side, turning his head to stare at the rest of his body. He had tried to get Erin killed back then, full of anger for being forced to pull her about, and those stupid bells, but he hadn’t thought she’d really get killed by the bear, deep down.
And that was strange. Toren was dead. He could tell when he was having odd thoughts. Why wouldn’t he have expected Erin to die? Everyone died. Even the undead.
Toren understood death, now. He knew intimately. And killing. He liked it. Toren had learned to kill animals, monsters, and people. It was all the same. All you had to do was stab things, preferably with something sharp, like a sword. Toren was good at it. He was a front-stabber, a backstabber, a side-stabber, and when he could get away with it, an eye-stabber.
Anything could die. Toren was sure he could kill anything with a sharp enough sword. But Erin? How could she die? She was…Erin. The person who’d given him purpose, the second (and more important) person he’d ever seen. His Master. Or Mistress. He hadn’t meant for her to die.
Toren paused.
Okay, he had meant for her to die. But part of him didn’t really expect it to happen. It just seemed impossible to Toren. Still seemed impossible, really.
He remembered Erin fighting Skinner, fighting off hundreds of undead, singing…and her immortal game with the Antinium. She was…had been…at the center of the world Toren knew. He could imagine killing anyone, imagine anyone’s dead body, but hers.
He couldn’t believe she would just die like that. But she had. And it was his fault. Because he had left her. And it was his duty to protect her.
He had abandoned that duty. Left it behind. And only now did Toren regret. Erin was dead. Dead and never coming back.
It was the first time he had ever thought of death as a bad thing. Dead things didn’t bother Toren. He was dead. So what if things never moved? It hadn’t mattered. But Erin—she wouldn’t move. Ever. She was dead. She would rot. She would never speak.
She was dead.
Forever.
There was nowhere to hide in his mind. Toren couldn’t lie to himself. He was dead, and there were no comforting illusions anymore. Only the painful reality.
She was dead.
And it was his fault.
After a while—after a bit of dust had gathered on his body, Toren moved. He stood up. Not because he felt better; Toren never forgot. Memory never faded for him; it was as fresh as the moment he had experienced things. But he felt like he had to do something. Sitting was not working.
Toren leaned against a wall, like he’d seen Erin do when she was upset. It didn’t make him feel better. Maybe it was the wrong wall?
He tried the same thing on the opposite wall. No luck. Toren thumped his skull against the stones. That didn’t help either. He looked around for his sword and remembered he’d dropped it, and everything else in his haste to get here.
So. He was weaponless, trapped in a dungeon full of horrible monsters, and Erin was dead. Toren stared at a wall. Aside from that last bit, things were fine.
Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine. For a second, Toren debated walking out into the corridor and finding a monster to destroy his body a few times. Or maybe he should climb out of the dungeon and lie in the snow until he finally ran out of mana.
To Toren, the notion of oblivion held its own certain charm. But there was a part of him that was afraid of the blank look in the eyes of the dead. After all, they had a second chance, to come back as undead like Toren. But if he died, what then?
If Erin became a zombie, or a Ghoul, would there be anything of her in there? Toren paused. He didn’t want to see a dead Erin. And he didn’t want to die. There was a strong part of him that shouted that.
Yes. Death wasn’t an option for Toren. Despite it all, he wanted to live. And so Toren did. He dusted himself off, looked around, and began to think.
He was alive. Good. That was a good start. Now…what? He was in a dungeon, because he was on his own now. Because he had no mana—
No, scratch that. Because he used too much mana! In theory, he could live like an ordinary skeleton out on the surface. But it was rapidly becoming more apparent that Toren was no ordinary skeleton.
Obviously, because he could level. And think. And he had a name. But there was something else.
Toren felt at his body. His skeletal fingers encountered only yellow-white bone. Was there something off about him?
He carefully pulled a rib out and studied it. Nope. Just a normal rib. His rib. Toren threw it over his shoulder and waited.
After a second or two, the rib rose off the ground and flew back towards his body. It snapped back into place. Toren stared at his rea
ttached rib.
Now that. That wasn’t normal. No other skeleton Toren had met—undead or otherwise—did that. But why did it happen?
Toren thought for a second, and then cast around. He didn’t look with any visual senses, but rather, with that strange ability he’d used out of desperation not long ago. He reached out and searched for the magic with his mind.
There. Toren regarded himself in his head. He could…sense the magic in him. There was a good bit of it, but it wasn’t uniform. There was a flow to it. It occupied his bones. In fact, his bones were the place where the mana was stored. Toren could see how it ran through the bones, absorbed by the spell that animated him from the dungeon. But there were also points where it concentrated, where his body used more mana.
Specific bones, in fact. Toren counted four of them.
Bone one? Second-lowest left rib. Bone two was his right shinbone. The tibia, not the fibula. Bone three was his clavicle. The left one. And the last bone…fourth rib from the top on the right side.
Why were they different? To Toren’s fingers, they were no different from—wait a second. He felt suspiciously at the ends of the rib. The two ‘special’ ones were slightly shorter than the others! And here—his tibia was shorter than the ones on his right side! He was unbalanced!
That indignation lasted only a second. Toren plucked at the bones, removing the ribs to look at them. Why were these bones different? Why did they use more mana, and why didn’t they match the rest of his body? Toren could only assume it was because he wasn’t one skeleton.
He was multiple skeletons.
The [Skeleton Knight] thought about this. Then he fainted.
—-
It wasn’t really fainting, honestly. Toren just swooned over and lay on the ground, like he’d seen Lyonette do once or twice when he’d dropped a bunch of Corusdeer intestines on her head. He got up after a while, but the shock was still there, making his hands tremble.
He was multiple skeletons. Toren felt betrayed by the knowledge. Why hadn’t anyone told him?
Then again…it made sense. Toren was far too intelligent and powerful to be a single skeleton. He nodded to himself, satisfied with that explanation. Then he frowned, or rather, thought about frowning.
He had the ability to sense mana. Not just ambient mana, but to look at something and tell where the mana was concentrated. It was useful, but also a mystery. Because Toren had never learned the [Mana Sense] Skill, if that even was a Skill. So that meant…Toren took several minutes to figure this one out. When he had it he slapped his head off his body in surprise.
You could have a skill which was not a Skill.
It was a mind-blowing revelation. And it immediately made Toren question everything he thought he had known. If you could be good at something without a Skill—like sword fighting, why not learn as much as you could instead of trying to level up and gain Skills?
Maybe…maybe because other people weren’t as good at learning as Toren? He was great at learning. He’d learned that you couldn’t bring dead fish into the inn (unless they were carefully dried off and not in pieces), how to light fires, how to carry plates without breaking them, how to bother Erin so she’d let him go outside…
But it occurred to Toren that there were things he could do that he didn’t know he could do. His mana sensing abilities, for one. That was odd. Could all skeletons do that? Could all living people?
No. Surely not. But if Toren could do that, what else could he make his body do?
He wasn’t sure. It was another thing to explore, but right now Toren was more concerned with survival. Because he would survive. He would live. He didn’t know how to die. He must have forgotten how.
Plus, it stood to reason that Toren was better at living than at dying. He lived all the time, and he’d only died once (as far as he knew). He must not have been very good at it, to have only died once.
So live. And part of living was exploring, finding his whereabouts. Toren looked around.
It was dark. That didn’t bother Toren. But in the darkness, there wasn’t much to see. The corridor was long, wide, tall, and filled with other unhelpful adjectives. Toren had been here before and knew the corridor just led to other intersections and passageways of the same.
This place was a labyrinth. And unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you looked at it, it was filled with monsters. Toren had seen them the first time he’d fallen down here and run away from an enchanted suit of armor.
He’d run around, found a huge staircase going up, run through several rooms, one filled with fire, another with some kind of spell trap he’d dashed through, and then found himself in a room with a bunch of statues and a hole in the wall. He’d dashed out of that and met a bunch of Goblins, who’d been very helpful and helped him kill that blasted suit of armor out on the surface.
So in short, Toren had no idea where he was. He only knew there were trapped rooms ‘above’, a labyrinth ‘here’ filled with monsters, and presumably a lot more dungeon he hadn’t explored. But there was a way out.
For now, Toren dismissed the idea of trying to find a way out of the dungeon. That, ironically, was the most dangerous option for him, lacking a mana source as he was. To go above he’d need a mana potion, or a way of generating more magic to survive off of. So he’d have to stay here.
With the monsters.
Toren patted his side and remembered he’d left his sword somewhere. He looked for it.
There. Toren picked up a somewhat dulled longsword and inspected it critically. It was iron, the cross guard cracked, and covered with dried blood on a few spots. Not ideal for cutting, but it would do.
Sword? Check. Toren needed armor, a shield, and maybe a safe place to run to if he found trouble. He went searching.
The first thing Toren found was a bloodstain. It was yellow. He stared at it, and then noticed the burst sack of flesh next to it. It looked squished. Toren inspected the remains for anything interesting.
Nope. Something had been killed, and by a particularly heavy blow. That was all.
The skeleton went on. The next thing he found was the killer. It was a huge, bear-like creature, all fur and claw, but it had been holding a maul. It was dead. It had one of its hands grasping a short stinger in its side; practically a scratch. But Toren stared at the creature’s bared teeth and twisted expression of pain and knew it had died from poison.
Odd. The bear-thing sort of resembled a Gnoll. Toren propped it up against a wall so he could investigate it better. It was fur-chested, and had no garments except for a loincloth which hid…Toren peeled it away…more of the beast. That was disappointing. Toren had always wondered what clothing hid, but it just turned out to be more of the same. He poked dismissively at a dangling bit of the creature and then inspected its face.
There were definitely Gnoll characteristics here, but this creature had a far broader back, and Gnolls were already pretty big. The teeth were bigger, the head was squatter and actually seemed a bit smaller, and this not-Gnoll had claws that were long and dangerous, not like a Gnoll’s paws at all.
Was it some kind of relative of the Gnolls? Toren shook his head. He eyed the maul and decided it wasn’t for him either. Too heavy.
It was a shame to just leave the dead not-Gnoll here, though. Toren thought it would have made an excellent zombie; practically impossible to kill. But he couldn’t raise the dead, just command them. So he left it there and went on.
Down the corridor, past glowing runes on the walls. Toren stared at a couple of them as they lit up, sensing his presence. He didn’t think much of them until he passed by a cluster of them. They turned bright green, flared up, and an explosion blew the skeleton to bits.
In the time it took for Toren to reassemble, he concluded that the labyrinth was probably full of such traps. He could sense the magic clustering around them. Toren got up, dropped his sword, went back for the maul next to the dead not-Gnoll and ran back. He began furiously smashing the heavy weapon into the runes
on the wall, but didn’t make a dent, even when the maul’s head snapped off the sturdy wooden shaft.
Okay, the runes were there to stay. Toren just had to avoid them. He could do that. He stomped past the runes, skirting them by sticking to the other side of the corridor. He made it ten more steps, and then fell into a pit trap.
That hadn’t been his fault! True, after he’d angrily hauled himself out Toren could see the upraised plate of stone that had opened the ground soon after to send him falling into a short pit full of sharp, stone spikes and bones. But how he supposed to know it had been there?
Toren walked off, looking closely at the ground and walls and ceiling. He spotted five more traps down this corridor, avoided them all, and then noticed the dead spider at the end of the corridor. It was quite dead; something had burnt it to a crisp. Quite recently too, because it was still a bit hot.
Another monster. Well, well. Toren found he was at a T-intersection and headed left. He frowned as he noticed bits of shell, or some other black fragments on the ground. Then he noticed the webbing and slowed down. When he got to the open doorway at the end, Toren cautiously poked his head through the entryway and looked up.
Oh my. That was the skeleton’s thought. Toren’s gaze showed him a huge circular column room, far taller vertically than it was horizontally. And stretching the entire height of the room, sitting in webs, tending to huge cocoons of their young hanging from the walls, the ceiling, bunched together like grapes were skittering, shadows, creeping shapes.
Shield Spiders.
Toren eyed them. None of the spiders had picked up he was here, so he carefully tiptoed backwards. He wasn’t afraid of spiders, but some of them were big. Was that how big Shield Spiders got? A few of the ones near the top were bigger than Rock Crabs.
The [Tactician] in Toren’s head told him that going into that room and fighting like he normally did was sheer suicide. The rest of Toren agreed. But looking wouldn’t hurt. He poked his head back around and saw something that made him go suddenly still.
