Chapter 5: Slaughter in Bloom

Night had fallen. Raul trudged along the wilderness road with the warped skeleton at his side.

Ambrose's castle stood far from town, and there wasn't even any starlight that night. Raul could only rely on the eerie green flames burning in the skeleton's skull to light his way.

He walked slowly—not just because of the darkness, but also his own hesitation.

He didn't want to help a lich capture living people as test subjects, and especially not the townsfolk fleeing from ruin. The lord's sudden tax hike had already destroyed their lives. Raul himself was one of those refugees. How could he harm others in the same plight?

𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

But if he didn't... what would become of his sister, Isabel?

Just as he wrestled with that thought, he sensed the sound of hooves and flickering torchlight before him.

Raul immediately ducked into a roadside brush. This had to be the lord's patrol.

Sure enough, there was a knight in soft leather armor at the front of the party followed by a few armed retainers. There were ten people in all, with hunting dogs in tow.

Raul lay flat in the grass, hardly daring to breathe. One knight and nine men, and the knight had a horse. Even without heavy armor, that was far more than a refugee like him could handle. He could only pray the dogs wouldn't catch his scent.

There were plenty of smells out here in the wilderness. Maybe that would throw them off.

But Raul had no such luck. The hounds veered off the road and headed straight toward his hiding spot, their throats rumbling with low, ominous growls.

Raul knew those beasts too well. That sound meant that they'd found him. Soon they'd be on him. Unarmed, he would be caught or killed before he could even run.

Well... he wasn't really unarmed, was he?

Raul tightened his grip on the bone studded with gems and pressed the attack gem when the dogs were ten paces away.

Two green flares blinked to life in the darkness. The hounds halted at once, their hackles rising. Before their handlers could even shout, the glowing figure lunged forward. The small, malformed skeleton, like a demon carved of bone, moved with terrifying speed.

Under the flickering torchlight, Raul saw the skeleton pounce on a hound and tear it open with the twin sickles that jutted from its arms.

The handler barely had time to gasp before the skeleton came for him next, almost as fast as his own dogs. He dodged aside, but the skeleton was smarter than a beast. Once it missed, it veered instantly toward another target.

The torchlight was insufficient to keep up with its movements. Screams broke out. Its sickle-blades sliced upward from legs to chest, cutting through thin cloth and soft flesh as if it were nothing. For all its size, it possessed monstrous strength. A single stab could drive clean through a man's ribs.

And it was even cunning. It never lingered; it struck, killed, and moved on. Those it caught would feel it climbing up their bodies, digging in its blades like ice picks.

That simple motion, repeated again and again, was devastating. The moment someone stumbled, it went straight for that victim's throat.

The mounted knight tried to intervene, but his sword couldn't even reach the skeleton.

Before he could dismount, three of his men were already dead. Their dropped torches hissed out, and the darkness grew thicker still.

Two points of green fire gleamed in the dark like the gaze of Death himself. The knight lost his nerve. He spurred his horse and fled.

But the killing didn't stop. A horse could outrun the skeleton, but men on foot could not. Humans stumbled blindly in the dark; skeletons didn't. The soulfire in its skull didn't need light to see.

Within moments, the screams faded. The hunting party had been massacred.

Raul rose shakily from the grass, staring at the corpses strewn across the road, his hands trembling.

Its task now complete, the malformed skeleton returned to him with slow, steady steps. Raul flinched back in fear and almost fell over.

The creature's bones were slick with blood. Raul shuddered from head to toe.

If even one undead was this powerful... how terrifying must the lich who made it be?

What had he gotten himself into?

Regret tore at him. He should never have climbed that cursed fence. Isabel had told him not to, but he hadn't listened.

It was too late now. If he wanted his sister to live, he had to follow the lich's orders. Still, he glanced down at the corpses. The lich had said he needed bodies for experiments. These lackeys of the lord would do nicely. There would be no need to hunt down refugees, after all.

But there were only six dead before him. He would need some more.

Raul looked at the blood-drenched skeleton and whispered through clenched teeth, "Wait for me, Isabel. I'll come back for you. I swear it."

Inside the castle, Isabel stood before a workbench as she carefully brewed a batch of potions. Ambrose watched her for a while, noting with relief that she truly was a trained apprentice. She wasn't wasting his ingredients or blowing anything up. Satisfied, he turned his attention back to the recording he'd just received.

The controller Raul carried didn't just issue commands. It also functioned as a memory crystal, transmitting everything it saw directly to Ambrose's lab.

This was a real combat trial, and a successful one at that. The malformed skeleton was clearly stronger in combat than an ordinary one. True, luck had played a role: humans lacked night vision, and the knight had bolted instead of trying to crush the skeleton with his horse.

Still, a win was a win.

"Field test complete," Ambrose narrated into the crystal. "Simplifying the skeleton's bone structure drastically reduces its spiritual energy consumption while improving its combat efficiency. The reduced number of joints provides more stable performance. This model lacks the growth potential of standard skeletons, without any chance of evolving into a skeletal knight or anything of the sort, but evolution among undead is a rare miracle anyway. The key here is affordability.

"You've all seen the results. A mere low-grade soul and half the usual material cost produced a far stronger fighter. In today's inflated market for magical components, these malformed skeletons could open up a vast new frontier..."

Ambrose finished the recording, opened the Necromantic Codex, and uploaded the footage to the chat group at its very back.

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