Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia’s boots touched the coarse soil of the mountain. Just like it used to, the base of the mountain was covered in a thick forest, while the top was nothing but snow and raw exposed stone.

Back here again… I don’t see the usual insects that used to strive here, must have not survived the monster invasion. Let’s see, the path to the slave camp should be around this side.

There was little to no indication of the flying monsters’ presence in the forest, it seemed they didn’t really ever enter it for some reason. Considering they weren’t too smart in the way of self-preservation, Sofia doubted that it was because they found it dangerous. Maybe there’s just nothing of interest to them here. I can't see any animals after all. This forest is colorful but it feels dead.

With even her own steps not producing any sound, the swarm of flying monsters was the only thing Sofia could hear. After a few minutes of searching, she found the path she was looking for, it was overgrown but the lack of large trees in a long straight line going uphill left no doubt.

Unless it’s a dried riverbed, but it’s too narrow to be one.

Sofia followed the path. It was nothing like what she remembered, but admittedly, the forest had gotten more than a decade to grow. It didn’t take long for the log wall of the camp to show itself. The camp was built in a small clearing of the forest and used to be completely walled off. The log wall was moldy and in disrepair, it still harbored the claw marks of the bear that used to try to enter it every night. Some logs had fallen, clearly, the camp had been abandoned for a long time.

Let’s see what I can find here.

Sofia walked to the entrance of the camp, it was left open. I guess they tried to escape the monsters, so they opened the gate?

The interior of the camp was overgrown. Everything was covered in moss and vines, tall grass covered the ground. Of the several tents the slavers used to live in, not a single one was still standing, and the iron cages the children used to be locked in were in bad shape.

There are bones everywhere. I can feel them. It’s likely that everyone died here.

Sofia’s first reflex was to walk to the cages. By some miracle, the tarp used to protect the cages from the rain was still almost intact. There used to be six large cages under there. Two for the younger children Sofia was a part of, three for the older ones like Saria, and one ‘punitive’ tiny cage they used to punish misbehaving slaves. This tiny cage was essentially Saria’s semi-permanent residence in the slave camp. She always found a way to piss off the slavers just enough for them to want to lock her up in there but not enough that it escalated more than that. At first they had tried to stop giving food to the disobedient kids as a punishment, but what they wanted was a group of tiny workers to dig up dwarven relics. So having limp and starving kids was counterproductive.

Out of the six cages, three of them had crumbled into piles of rusty iron, the ones left were one from each category. The most pristine one was the one Sofia used to be locked in with other kids, it was rusty but intact, and empty. The second one was the one Saria was in whenever she wasn’t being punished, the bars were pushed open, as if something too big had forced its way in or out.

There goes the foolish dream of hoping they all survived.

It’s full of broken skeletons… They all died in there. Some skulls are pierced, even the bottom of the cage has holes in it. A lot of the bones are missing. By the looks of it, a monster with a long beak had a free meal. Sofia looked inside of her storage ring, she had the skeletons from the biggest monsters of her extermination night, it was three monsters of the ‘Quetzalcoatlus’ species, huge bird-like creatures with terribly long and sharp beaks. It was one of those, no doubt.

Sofia counted the tiny skulls inside the cage, there were seven total. That’s everyone except Saria then… Sofia stored the bones and moved on to the small cage. It was rusty like the others, but empty. Instead of being broken in by the front, a bar was missing from a back corner.

So she actually managed to break out of the cage. But how would she have escaped and survived after that? I guess the quakes gave her an opportunity like they did for me.

Sofia searched the rest of the camp. She found a lot of broken bones, but very few tools or weapons, only some rust-covered broken scraps.

She probably escaped right before or while the monsters attacked, and later came back after the monsters killed everyone to loot anything useful. Now how do I find her trace? She had to have found a shelter to hide in while the monsters attacked at the start or she would have suffered the same fate as everyone else in the camp.

Considering the terrain and the violence of the quakes at the time, she couldn’t have gotten far before the mountain flew up and the monsters arrived, so where could she hide?

It was raining and the valley was about to flood, so she probably wouldn’t have tried to go downhill. At the time, the animals got frenzied and all ran away before… The animals ran away… Did she hide in the bear’s den?

Sofia’s mana senses were completely stifled by the invisibility potion, so she exited the camp and started searching uphill, where the bear was supposed to live, as it always attacked the camp from this direction. The slavers were too weak and had never tried to hunt it.

Sofia searched for a while, the remaining time on the potion was ticking down but it was hard to find anything in the forest.

That’s it! So it was a cavern in the mountain wall and not an underground den… This was hidden too well behind the wild plants, but back then it would have been easier to stumble upon. Considering how well hidden it was, I don’t think I’d find a monster nest inside. Let’s see.

The den wasn’t very deep, it was a low-ceiling L-shaped cavity with a slightly larger space at the end. There are bones inside!

The space at the end of the cave was high enough for Sofia to stop crouching, this was where the bear used to sleep. There was a pile of animal bones in a corner, likely what was left of the bear’s last meals. But these weren't the bones that Sofia was surprised about.

There was a human skeleton. To be precise, the corpse and skeleton of a tall adult male, still clothed and holding a broken weapon, in a very advanced state of decomposition. The skull had fallen and was broken on the ground. In Sofia’s memory, a single person in the slavers’ camp was that tall and wide, Hemdal, the leader of the slavers. His skeleton was pinned against a wall of the cave, held in place by a bent and rusty iron pipe. No way… The missing bar of Saria’s cage…

The iron bar had been driven straight through the sternum and spine of Hemdal, stuck inside of the stone wall.

Did Saria do this? It doesn’t look like it was moved there after it died so that means she killed him by impaling him against a cave wall. Thirteen-year-old, level 1 orphan class, ‘Blurry vision’, all brain no muscles Saria did this?

That guy had to be at least level ten… I can see an explanation, maybe. If she was chosen as a God’s Oracle and got a broken skill like Astelia’s [Moon Benediction]. She would need at least something like that to get that much strength out of nowhere.

Or she somehow got lucky and was credited for the kill of a monster, instantly got a class and several level-ups which allowed her to fight back against this guy? If so she wouldn’t have needed to take the fight to a cave.

It’s pretty clear he must have been following her after she escaped…. But I don’t think she knew, or she wouldn’t have entered a cave that was most likely to be a dead-end. The position of his body does seem to indicate he entered after her. Which means it could be a trap she laid out for him?

But why let him get out of the narrow passage and stand up before stabbing him if she was already inside? She could have struck his head before he even stood up.

Something flashed before Sofia’s eyes for the shortest instant, followed by a huge headache.

She was rolling on the floor, trying to understand what had just happened, though the cause was clear, the thing she had just seen was a system notification. I recognize this, are you trying to harm yourself again, Mr Scribe?!

The pain wasn’t nearly as bad as last time though. I guess he’s found a way around it? Are you ok?

Sofia’s remaining health tracker opened by itself showing ‘Health: 20 000/ 20 000’.

Alright, good. I’ll take this as a yes. Now then, what did you want to tell me so badly this time…

Sofia had seen the contents of the notification, it had been extremely quick but there were only three characters and she had [Fast reading], it said ‘?=9’.