Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia ordered the scouts to take some distance and only engage in battle if they were followed. Whatever they had found didn’t pursue them. From that bit of information alone, Sofia could guess that the enemy either hadn’t detected the skeletons or didn’t go out of its way to attack. So it was probably safe enough to approach. For extra precautions, she had Pareth go to the front guard a bit further so she could see the enemy through him a bit earlier than if she had to go herself.

After two turns through the maze, she caught sight of the three scouts and the opening a bit further. It looked like the tight corridors of the maze opened up in a larger room. Is this going to make me wish I’d committed to letting Pareth stay in the Alpha?

Sofia could see something moving in there, but despite her good vision and being able to see in the dark, she couldn’t make much sense of it. It looked like… Something massive and writhing? As she walked closer and closer, a putrid stench assaulted her nose. It was awfully similar to the smell produced by the ritual Zerei had taught her to get clean skeletons. These characteristics together reminded her of something she had read.

The closer she got, the more confident she was in her first hypothesis. This was a monster she had read about in Alith’s ‘Slimes illustrated’ book that she had gotten from the gachapon boxes after her first trial. The book was very thorough in describing the habits, strengths, and weaknesses of the many types of slimes. Some were quite cute, some fascinating, some intimidating. And some… Straight up disgusting.

What Sofia was looking at right now was, in her opinion, the flagship of that last category.

Necrotic ooze…

Oozes, in general, were already the messier sub-category of slimes. For regular slimes, their survival relied on the integrity of their outer layer; that was why they simply died after a few pointy stick pokes back at the church when Sofia had to get her first level-ups. For oozes, they had no outer layer. Their gooey insides were allowed to freely roam and squirm around as long as they were connected to their solid core. Killing an ooze, in theory, was very straightforward; one only had to break or remove the core.

The smell was too strong, Sofia had stopped breathing and pinched her nose, but it still got to her somehow. She had to take some steps back. From afar, she observed the monster.

The corridor was about three meters tall and wide, and the ooze, which seemed to be in a larger room, looked like it was much larger than that. It was exactly as the book had depicted it, a disgusting mound of writhing rotting flesh. It was both rotting and regenerating at an accelerated pace, like a flower of death, perpetually blooming and wilting. As if that spectacle wasn’t enough, it was secreting splashes and squirts of blood and pus that Sofia knew from the book were very corrosive.

It’s also pretty much immune to the attrition tactics recommended against the other oozes, and it has multiple fake cores… And that’s not mentioning the necrosis aura. I’m not going against that right now.

There was a very real possibility she could one-hit kill it with a charged enough bolt, but if that failed, she didn’t want to have that behemoth of rot and death pursuing her through the unexplored corridors. This was a maze, after all, and there could be a way to get to the other side of that room the ooze was in by walking around. Unless she was out of options, Sofia had no reason to fight the thing, so she turned around and left.

Sofia sat in the middle of a four-way intersection. Behind her was the path to the starting cell; in front was the ooze’s path. She sent the scouts to the right. They got quite far, took a few turns, and eventually, all died.

There was no warning sign. They hadn’t been moving irregularly and hadn’t tried to flee. One second, they were advancing, and the next, they were gone.

Alright then.

Reusing the flat bone plate she had used to map the maze during the first phase, Sofia started making a map of this new one. She could already mark two paths as very unsafe.

Next, she selected three paladins out of her protective circle and designated them to be the next scouting team. She sent them straight into the left corridor. They advanced and disappeared behind a corner. Sofia kept track of their position. She didn’t want to miss anything if they suddenly disappeared as well. This group did not go as far from Sofia as the previous one. It reported an enemy’s presence.

From the three Paladin skeletons’ subsequent movements, Sofia understood they were engaged in a fight. It did not last long. One after the other, in quick succession, the three skeletons died. What kills them in a single hit can likely do the same to me… Not left either, then. I suppose it’s time to explore the other way from the cell.

Sofia could have gone to check out what precisely the dangers in the left and right paths were, but that felt much too risky to do without having at least one [False immortality] rune as a safety net. And she didn’t want to use it before her mana was fully back up, which was currently still only at forty-two out of ninety-four thousand.

With only nineteen Paladins left, Sofia stood up and started walking back to the location of the starting cell. She noticed no new path on the way, but something caught her eye among the debris that had escaped her when she first walked through that corridor, a worn-out book.

Sofia grabbed the old leather-bound book. In line with everything else in the maze, it was in an advanced state of decomposition. The pages inside were browned and crumbly. Any ink that might have been on it had long disappeared, and [Identify] refused to work on anything that came from the maze.

The only information Sofia got from the book was the title on the leather cover. Interestingly, it seemed to be written in Ancient Human, not in the Common Language. It was close enough that Sofia could still read it; the Common Language was supposedly strongly based on Ancient Human. In that case, the letters looked weird, and some seemed to be misplaced, but Sofia was confident in her interpretation of it: 'The Great Hollow’. On the back of the cover, kind of like Scipture’s necromancy grimoire had Sorrow’s ritual, there was a half-erased ritual circle.

Could that be related to another Recessed? Or even Sorrow? After all, the ritual I performed was called the ‘Sabbath of the hollow heart’, so there could be a link. Hmm, that half of a ritual circle doesn’t look anything like Sorrow’s ritual, though. Or should I say, like Sorrow’s divine rune? Because that's probably what it really was, now that I think about it.

Hmm. I would keep this, but it’s sure to be a mana construct like everything else. I’ll copy the half-erased ritual on a bone slate, just in case. I’m sure Zerei would be interested in studying it.

Even though it would probably end up disappearing when she left the trial, she still shoved the book in her ring and started walking toward the starting cell again.

It was taking a while to get there.

Was this corridor always that long? The cells should be right around there, no?

Sofia looked as far as she could, but it did not seem like there was anything like a cell door in the walls of this corridor. Did I take a wrong turn? Or are the walls actually moving again? It’s weird, though, even if the walls move. The layout seemed to be generally the same, except the cells have disappeared.

To ensure she hadn’t taken a wrong turn, Sofia decided to return to the four-way intersection and try again. It was then that she noticed something very wrong.

She had been paying more attention to the debris around her ever since she found the book. It had all changed. No wonder she had ‘missed’ the book on her first go; it likely wasn’t there. She kept going, sending yet another group of three paladins ahead as scouts, and did reach the intersection. It was exactly where she remembered it was, but there, again, it did not look the same. She had spent enough time sitting there that she knew very well how the broken crates and barrels were arranged in there. It had all changed. There had also been a big patch of mushrooms and strange grass there that she had spent a while observing before. It was nowhere to be seen.

So I followed the same route and ended up at a different place…