Saintess Summons Skeletons

I’m free to move again. Did he leave? Didn’t even see him.

Oh right, I better put the black glasses back on. Really can’t see much with these on…

It’s a bit harder to move here. I feel heavy.

Sofia used the graveyard skeletons to phase through the door. Now she could use it with or without the graves popping up without much effort, and the channeling was fast enough that she could use it to almost seamlessly activate it and walk through walls anytime. The teleportation room was at the very end of a corridor with three doors on each side. Sofia tried to analyze the contents of the closed rooms with her mana senses as she passed by, to no avail as there was no mana around. She figured this floor was probably some kind of living quarters of some sort.

I’ll come back to this later.

Since it wasn’t moving, Sofia kept going, the skeletons grabbed her through the door at the other end of the corridor. This one’s thicker.

The other side was a small empty circular room with only some vents on the side and another thick door. What’s the point of this room even?

Going through yet another door, Sofia finally understood why the glasses the oracle had given her were so dark. This door had led outside, after climbing a short ladder up, there was no more roof or anything, this looked to be the highest floor of the elven temple, in space. The glasses were basically black, yet Sofia still had a hard time seeing anything through the light and glare. I don’t know why I’m surprised. The sun is really bright. The temperature on the outside is really bad too… I’m sweating already. I can survive this but it’s quite bad. Also no air. Plenty of light though, so I’m not going to have any issue.

Actually can’t I survive off of just my mana now? I might not even need light to breathe anymore. Of course no ambient mana around here but I knew that already.

Sofia deactivated her armor and wings. The wings were useless here and the armor just made the heat worse.

If something gets a surprise attack on me I have the runes.

Ugh. I feel a bit bloated, strange.

She looked around, this top floor of the orbital temple was like an observation deck, mostly flat, with guardrails along the side, stairs going down, and weird metallic poles sticking out of the ground. To her left, Sofia spotted Aphenoreth. He was leaning on the guardrail, staring directly at the sun, motionless, his brown suit and small flat hat still the same as ever. She walked up to him, standing on his left, she looked at the sun like he did. The station was speeding forward, like gliding along the surface of the massive ball of fire.

This is incredible.

Sofia tried to talk but she couldn’t. In fact, she just now realized that everything was silent too. She couldn't hear anything except her own heartbeat. The great ball of fire and explosions that was the sun should be really loud, she had thought, but she just didn’t hear anything.

A system window appeared out of nowhere, characters filling it one by one.

[Observe]

Reading the message, she looked at Aphenoreth, he was looking up, so Sofia also looked up.

Oh shit. Is that the planet?

It’s not as big as the sun usually is in the sky. I guess the sun is just much bigger.

Even from afar, the planet was quite colorful, mostly covered in the white of clouds and the blue of oceans. It looks a bit like… A big catalyst I could put on my staff.

Hey I can see the moons too!

Wait, the moons? Two of them?

At first Sofia wondered if she was looking at the wrong planet, but she couldn’t see any other ones, although it could have been hidden by the giant ball of fire blocking half her vision. Looking at the moons again, it seemed a smaller moon was ‘hiding’ behind the larger one, moving in tandem around the planet.

If it stays like that all the time… We would never see the small moon. Crazy. How many more secrets is the planet hiding like that? I definitely want to go explore the moon and the hidden moon now.

I’m really glad that VPPV is helping my eyesight or I would barely be able to see anything. It says it helps in low light but it really made my eyes better overall.

Once again, Sofia tried to speak in vain, and instead resorted to ‘thinking loudly’ knowing that there was a good chance Aphenoreth could read her mind anyway.

Thank you for saving me last time. And I also heard that it was you who brought Alith here from her world. Thank you for that as well. And for the name. I’m really grateful.

Can we see Alith’s planet from here?

Aphenoreth’s head slowly moved, he no longer looked at the sun or the planet but at Sofia. His blank expression and black eyes didn’t convey much, but the subtle shaking of his head was the answer. He then turned again to look at the sun.

No, uh? Is it because it’s too far away… How far could it be?

Are all the stars small shining suns in the distance?

How big is all that?

Looking at it from here… It feels ridiculous. Life, death, the system, gods, everything.

Well, I’m still a part of it all anyway. And I have a mission to work on. If I understand correctly, it’s the Deep that attacked this place. I suppose this is why you’re here. Why did you attack this in the first place?

[Regulator]

So it was Ormoncleth’s doing. If the name is anything to go by, it intervened to enforce regulations of some sort? Wouldn’t I be a bother if I interfere now, then? Could I even do anything about it anyway? What should I do?

[Quest]

A tremor went through the station, the source of the shock seemed to come from behind, Sofia turned around, but she couldn’t see anything out of place, when she looked back, Aphenoreth had disappeared. He had left behind something on the large guardrails, a midenicite tablet.

He brought it back? Sofia thought as she grabbed the familiar piece of blue crystal. It seemed to be the same one he had previously taken from her, but the carving depicting a cold looking Aphenoreth with elf ears was no longer. In its stead was a stylised carving of Sofia and himself, in front of the sun, looking at the planet.

… I’ll keep this precious gift. Thanks again… This was significantly less scary than the previous times.

Alright. To the quest then, I have as clear a permission as I can get. I need to find the monsters of Ormoncleth and get rid of them, I guess, if the quest objective is anything to go by.

Seems like a tall order. Not the finding part but…

What would Ormoncleth even do to a place like this?

Sofia looked around the whole top floor, she could make out that the main body of the station was a big upside down pyramid, like an upside down Herzal. There were three smaller upside down pyramids linked to it by very weak-looking bridge corridors on three of its four sides. It was a wonder that they all held, Sofia thought, until she realized there was a fourth such bridge, broken in the middle. Nevermind then. Let’s hope there wasn’t anything important in that part because it’s gone for good. This doesn’t make me very impatient to explore the side pyramids… If one of these breaks off while I’m on it, I’m gone for good. It was a good call to train the piercing bolts before coming because the explosive bolts are a big no go here.

Before anything else, Sofia returned to the interior of that level, she checked every room one by once, phasing through the doors. She had been wrong in her first assumptions that it was a living space of some kind; each room was full of nothing but cables and mostly dysfunctional machinery. It seemed the energy distribution panel was in the teleportation room because all the modules it deserved were right next to it.

All safe.

With that taken care of, she returned to the roof and took the stairs down to the level below. Sofia looked left and right, not sensing any danger so far, she walked along the guardrails. This level was built like a giant balcony, going all the way around a central block of more indoors stuff with exactly one door leading into it from each side of the station. Only by doing an almost full loop around the level did she find the stairs going down to the lower level. Since it was an inverse pyramid, each level was slightly smaller than the one above. Every level looked like it followed the same pattern of an external walkway going around a square walled-off section. Sofia was debating whether to keep going down and explore the entirety of the walkway or to go back up to the second highest level and explore its interior.

As she was contemplating her options, sitting on the first step of the stairs, something on the other end of the walkway slowly showed itself as it walked the turn. It looked like an elf, but its skin was gray, it looked dead but it slowly shambled forward, gradually revealing itself.

An elf zombie? There’s something wrong with its head…

There was something inside of the dead elf, behind its cracked face, spilling out of its burst cranium. Something large and iridescent, contracting and dilating, breathing.

This isn’t a zombie at all!

It made Sofia’s hair stand on end. Shuddering, she ran back up the stairs.