Saintess Summons Skeletons

Cinthia slowly entered the abandoned mall. Despite her best efforts to be silent, the sound of her footsteps echoed around the deserted halls. She internally cursed whoever decided to design the stasis suits with hard soles.

‘Daddy Hatred donated 50 essence tokens’

[Daddy Hatred] : You’ve got this Cinthia! Kill them all!

“Thank you for the donation… Y- Yes, I will… You’re all positive they’re here, right? I don’t see anything…” Cinthia whispered to herself, walking discreetly along the walls.

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“Alright…”

Entering the abandoned shops one after the other, Cinthia checked the floor for the secret trapdoor that she was told was somewhere nearby. She also knew that special elite robots with optical cloaking technology roamed in this part of the city. She had managed to escape once, but it had not been a pleasant experience, and her viewers had been unimpressed.

Now she needed to complete ‘Daddy Hatred’s quest at all costs, too many tokens were at stake.

“Not this shop either…”

[Unclean lord] : It’s nearby, I can smell it!

Cinthia entered yet another shop, this one selling a bunch of weird metallic cylinders with pictures of food. Everything was rusty and the floor and shelves were exceptionally dirty even for the standards of the abandoned city. She looked around the entire shop, failing to find anything once again.

She entered the next shop in this aisle of the mall, it had once been a clothing shop, but now, all that was left were a bunch of creepy mannequins wearing tattered rags with faded colors. It reminded Cinthia of a certain floor or the previous trial that had almost cost her her life. Just the thought of it sent chills down her spine. She moved quickly, wanting to be done fast with this store that made her on edge. The city was uncanny enough on its own, she thought, even without the uncanny dolls.

As she turned past a row of mannequins, Cinthia saw something move, startled, she jumped back and used her fastest attack skill, [Sponsored strike]. She barely caught a glimpse of the thing that had scared her before it was shattered into bone bits by the spread shot of essence tokens she had blasted it with.

‘A bone bird?’ She thought. Before she was surprised even more by the unusual stream of new messages. Some by viewers she had never even heard of.

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[Crybaby] : Poor child…

[Daddy Hatred] : Crybaby? You? Here?!

[Twistyface] : Of course she would be here, Hatred. You’re so oblivious.

[TallBro] : Right? Hatred has no idea what Cinthia’s got coming for her right now! *Evil laughter*

[Daddy Hatred] : What?! You too?!!!

[Unclean lord] : This was no dungeon monster. Strange. I don’t get it either.

[TheJailed] : Run, Cinthia, fucking hell! Run!!!!

Cinthia was shell-shocked at the quick succession of new messages. The viewers were rarely so enthusiastic about anything. The content of the messages were worrying however. Reading the last one, which was by a viewer she had only started seeing in her chat a few months prior but who was always extremely serious, she asked no question and started running, but where to? As she picked a random direction, she also activated [Drone Shot] to try to understand why the viewers were suddenly so talkative.

Was it all just because of the undead she just killed?

Why was there an undead here in the first place? And why was there no kill notification for it in her log? The situation was indeed strange, the more she thought about it.

[Daddy Hatred] : Is someone going to fucking explain?!!!! What is going on?! Why are you all here? Leave Cinthia alone if you’re not even gonna donate, you scum!

‘Crybaby donated 1000 essence tokens’

[Crybaby] : I pray for your swift recovery.

“A thousand?!” Cinthia stopped for a second, shocked by the unexpected huge donation by an unknown viewer. “Recovery from what?!”

Cinthia heard a whistling sound, she saw a glimpse of a blurry thing entering the view of her [Drone shot]. The roof of the mall exploded, glass and steel debris flew everywhere as an uncanny mass of glowing armor stood up from the new crater in the center of the mall, clouded by a thick curtain of airborne dust created by the thing’s crash landing.

This made the viewers’ warning have much more substance. Cinthia ran, breaking through a wall, jumping as far as she could, she needed to get far from that thing, whatever it was. It was clearly evil, she could feel it in her bones!

She felt tears leave her eyes as she ran, the thing was coming for her. She cursed her rotten luck, did she trigger another hidden boss?! Why did stuff like this always happen to her?

There was no way she could outrun the bone abomination flying behind her, her [Drone shot]’s view struggled to even capture a still image of it.

Since fleeing wasn’t going to work, she resolved to stand her ground and fight. Swiftly turning around to face her enemy, she activated her two strongest defensive skills: [Behind the screen] and [SlowMode]. She prepared her next move, starting the channeling of [Ad time], a strong mental attack skill, thinking her defensive skills would buy her the time needed for it to go off.

The bone creature hit the SlowMode area of effect, its flight instantly slowing down. With a sigh of relief Cinthia hurried to complete her cast, but suddenly, the monster’s wings started shining brighter, covered in ethereal runes, and its speed recovered. In fact it flew even faster now.

With no choice left, Cinthia canceled her cast, suffering a violent backlash through her arms, but she wouldn’t have time to finish casting anyway, so she needed to protect herself some other way. She hated herself for using [Sponsored strike] so frivolously earlier, now it was on a painfully long three minutes cooldown timer. Using another skill in desperation, she braced for impact.

Her other attack skill disappeared when it made contact with the monster, as if it had never existed. Then the flying thing crashed into her [Behind the screen]’s invisible mana barrier. The screen shattered.

The flying colossus of glowing bones grabbed Cinthia by the shoulders, and as she was ready to die and spend the next two months being bored to death, as she had already experienced several times, Cinthia was pinned against the ground instead. Hope?

The bone juggernaut loomed over Cinthia, its closed helmet revealed nothing of the being behind, only letting through an otherworldly glow. She used her low cooldown attack magic several times, but the projectiles always disappeared before hitting the armor, as if it ate her magic. The creature raised a fist.

Cinthia tried to escape, all her muscles tensed and pushed back, but no matter what she did, she couldn’t move at all, the giant armor of bones overpowered her without mercy. She closed her eyes, only hoping that it would at least be a painless death, for once.

She couldn’t afford to pay attention to it, but her viewer messages were going wild.

And then, the fist came down, stopping right above Cinthia’s head.

Hesitantly, the frail-looking red-skinned orc opened her eyes. The bone gauntlet moved back a little, and a single finger flicked Cinthia’s forehead.

“You should be more careful whose’ skeletons you blow up, inner disciple,” a playful feminine voice said with a chuckle from inside the armor.

The bone helmet slowly disappeared, as if absorbed by the being underneath, revealing the stunning face of a blonde and strangely glowing human woman.

“Are you alright? I tried not to hurt you too much but I was going pretty fast,” she continued.

“W- W- Who are you?! You entered Joah’s dream?!”

Sofia stood up, it was rather impolite to speak to someone while sitting on their torso. And quite awkward. And uncomfortable. She completely dispelled her armor, showing off the stasis combination underneath. “I’m just a passing Necromancer. You can call me Vakaria,” she answered with a wink. “And how I got here should be pretty obvious, Zephir let me in.”

“Then you’re a new disciple?”

“Sort of. My class is special in a different way though.”

Cinthia had a look of disbelief as she carefully stood up and dusted herself. She started saying something when she interrupted herself, “SAINT?!”

“Told you it was special. And not just because I’m a saintess. But you never answered, did I hurt you badly? You look fine but…”

“I- I’m alright, I think, although you had me very scared. I heal fast… Why would you even attack me like this?! I thought I was dead! I’m sorry for your skeleton…”

“Don’t worry about it, sorry, I kind of overreacted too, I was a bit too eager to… Ahem, anyway, Zephir told me to join Saria fast. Would you happen to know where she is?”

“You know Saria?” Cinthia asked back, incredulous, before realizing in the same instant that she didn’t need to know her to be searching for her, “Uh, I mean… Sorry, let’s start from the beginning… I’m Cinthia, first Inner disciple of the Obsidian mountain. Welcome into our ranks, Vakaria!”

“Thanks, happy to be here. And sorry again for the strong-armed first impression.”

“No worries… I’m somewhat used to people unexpectedly appearing at weird times. Just; please be a bit less scary from now on… I don’t know where boss is right now exactly but I should be able to find her… Oh, right, you probably don’t know, we call Saria Boss, you’ll understand why soon. Why are you looking for her actually? Did leader have an urgent message for her?”

Sofia looked away. “You could say that.”