Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia stored the book by habit and kept looking around.

One thing is clear from that; it looks like this was a nightmarish place even before the system copied it to make it a part of the spire.

If it isn’t all made up, at least. Going by everything so far, I would say that this probably exists in the real world too, and it’s likely in or under the spirit forest. This place may be from a time much older than Zerei even.

When it said ‘consumed by the encroaching’, I wonder if that’s referring to the living trees or something else.

And they were guarding these doors, I guess? Well, I came from there…

There was a single other door in the room, a regular one, wooden and half-broken, it seemed to lead to a small and tight corridor.

Pareth doesn’t fit in there.

She wasn’t about to not explore it, so she sent paladins ahead to make sure it was safe, stored Pareth, and eventually entered the corridor herself. It felt less like a part of the maze and more like a service corridor in a castle; several doors were on each side. Bedrooms for the knights, some armor, and swords are left over inside. Two beds per room, ten rooms on each side. So there were only twelve knights left out of a potential forty? The question is, did they leave, or did they ‘leave’? Either way, the ones who stayed had a bad ending…

Sofia did not stay in the bedroom section for too long, the corridor ended in a full turn to the right, and after the scouts ensured it was safe, she advanced too.

After the turn, the corridor abruptly became as large as they usually were everywhere else in the maze. That surprised Sofia, but what surprised her more was her tracking of the Paladins’ position. The two scouts and three more that had been walking ahead of her were still there in her sight. The others she felt were now what felt like several kilometers above her. And as fast as she got that weird signal, it disappeared.

Sofia turned around. The small corridor was nowhere to be seen. It was just another three by three meters maze corridor, at the end of which she saw a large and seemingly empty room where the room full of wooden knights had been.

It looks like I caught one of the maze changes. Was I teleported down is what it is? So I need to be wary of corners? Or was there another trigger that I missed?

The weird part is that the skeletons ahead are still with me, but the ones behind vanished. But I’m certain I felt their position way up above, so… Is this place like a big layered thing? And the layers melt into each other? This is the sandwich theory all over again…

So far, the general layout doesn’t change, at least, so that makes mapping easy.

On her map, near that one room, she updated the descriptions:

1- Necrotic Ooze

2- Wood knights

3- Empty room

4- ?

How many layers are there? Sofia couldn't help but speculate on ways to navigate such a place. As she had guessed earlier when trying to avoid the ooze, if she could figure out the exact rules of switching layers, it had the potential to make her exploration of the place incredibly easy.

Now that I think about it, I meant to summon the birds after putting up the immortality rune, but I got distracted by the closed room. There was no apparent reason to keep the exploration so slow, and having a bunch of birds flying around might just help her understand how the layering worked. She sent half the birds ahead into the unknown and half of them back from where she came through the large empty room.

Taking out a homemade bone chair from her storage ring, Sofia sat down right where she was and mapped out the surroundings according to the birds’ movements. So far, it seemed the corridor she was in split into a few ways, which were all dead ends of some kind. All was fine until the whole group of birds she sent back was just gone.

Again? One of the groups of paladin scouts also disappeared that way… Just what…

The birds from the other side all came back, and Sofia sent five of them to where half of the flock had just disappeared. They had orders to fly in a single file with ten meters of distance between each other.

Sofia knew the safest way to check was to send Pareth to observe them directly, but she did not want to risk seeing him disappear.

Soon, the first bird in the line disappeared, then when it crossed the same point, the second one did as well. Sofia gave them the order to stop, and nothing else happened afterward. She wanted to check the dead ends in front. Those were probably three more rooms to explore, but understanding how the maze worked as a whole took precedence. With her skeletal escort of a stone ogre, a few paladins, and about twenty birds, she walked to the spot where the birds vanished.

It was an inconspicuous spot in the maze, right before the four-way intersection she had already crossed there. Restocking the line of birds, she sent them ahead, ready to watch them disappear. Except they didn’t. Is it all random?

Sofia made another bird line to try out something and sent these two out. The first one was set out to follow the path in the ‘starting cell’ direction, while the second would go back to where Sofia came from.

At about the same time, when the backtracking birds were a bit further than the corner where half her paladins vanished, the birds on both sides started disappearing. This time only one from each disappeared since they had orders to stop if such a thing happened again.

I think I get it.

Sofia’s theory was that the skeletons disappeared not because they crossed a certain point specific to the maze but because they were too far from her. With the birds on both sides waiting still, she took a few steps toward the starting cell. As she expected, another bird from the other side vanished as she walked further from it.

“That’s all it was this whole time… Sure took me a while to figure it out…”

Then when I felt the paladin skeletons be way up… They were also too far away, so they vanished. Someone without golems or undead would never find that out. Now the question is why do they disappear when far away, and how do I use this to my advantage?

Now that she understood the process of disappearing skeletons better, she felt safer to sent Pareth to the edge of the range to observe the birds as they vanished. Once he was there, the birds started flying away again, and to Sofia’s surprise, nothing happened to them. After some more testing, she discovered that not only herself but also Pareth served as some kind of anchor that the mist skeletons couldn’t get too far from. Pareth was far out of her brown anchoring range with a group of birds when she concluded her final test to have Pareth teleport to her from there.

He appeared at her side, and the birds left behind all instantly disappeared.

The skeleton Paladins disappeared simultaneously, stunning Sofia, who looked around and panicked until she realized they had just timed out.

More than three hours since I summoned them against the master already… I’m still mana-locked from the rune, and the book’s running low on fog. Guess it’s just me, Pareth, and the remaining eight birds.

Feeling like she couldn’t learn more from her current spot, Sofia started manually exploring again. She picked a random direction since they were all unexplored in the current layer anyway. A few turns later, the birds tasked with spotting the corners warned her of the presence of an enemy.

You handle that. I need to preserve my mana.

Pareth’s halo, armor, and weapon all flared up at once, and once the sanctified grounds activated, he engaged the enemy.

What Pareth was faced with was a tall and gaunt zombie with long semicircle claws. It looked kind of dry and didn’t smell much for a walking corpse anyway. If Sofia had to guess, it did not look especially powerful despite being as tall as the current Pareth.

When Pareth’s sword failed to cut the undead’s neck, she recognized that there might be an issue.

When it struck back faster than Pareth could react, cut straight through his armor, and sliced his left arm clean into six pieces, the issue had suddenly grown out of hand.