Chapter 6: Chapter 6: The Skeleton Crew

It took a few minutes of struggling before Sallia and I got to the top of our chosen roof. Or, more accurately, Sallia reached the roof in twenty seconds flat while I struggled along for another two minutes. After that, we spent some time investigating my chosen roof, before we came to the conclusion that the tiles on this roof weren’t loose enough to pry up and use as ammunition. They seemed to be welded together by some sort of unfamiliar substance - it was somewhat similar to cement, but seemed much lighter and smoother than cement at the same time. Neither of us recognized it, but we couldn’t get rid of it.

Luckily, it wasn’t too hard to jump to a couple nearby roofs, since the buildings in this area were of similar heights. We found an ancient-looking clay and brick building with more useful tiles within a few roof hops, then carried our newfound ammunition back to the original building. Once we had a good supply of ammunition, we got ready to fight. Sallia and I both did a final check, to make sure we were ready, before we attracted the attention of the skeletons.

Whunk!

Two heavy tiles sailed into the air before crashing onto the streets. It was time to test just how dumb these things really were.

True to the behavior of the previous skeleton, the three skeletons immediately started jogging out of the building. They looked around the street for a moment, the hungry light in their skulls scanning their surroundings for several seconds before they found us. The moment the first one noticed us, the other two immediately found us as well, and began running towards the building we were standing on. 

And apart from the original three skeletons, six more skeletons assembled themselves out of the pile of bones inside of the shop. The moment each skeleton finished assembling itself, a weapon appeared in their hands, materializing from thin air.

To my relief, all nine of them held melee weapons. Even though all nine skeletons had locked onto our position and started moving towards us, it didn’t seem like the skeletons had any way to actually reach us.

And then, a tenth skeleton assembled itself out of the pile of bones.

Unlike the other nine, this one had a bow. I felt a sudden sense of danger.

“Archer,” I said, eying the skeleton. 

“I see it,” said Sallia.

“Aim for it and hope we hit?”

“Best idea I have,” she said.

The two of us grabbed more bricks and took aim. I tried my best to keep my nerves steady, closely watching the bow-wielding skeleton and praying it didn’t snipe one of us from afar. We released our bricks at nearly the same time, and our bricks sailed through the air towards the bow-wielding skeleton.

And both of us failed to hit the skeleton’s skull. I managed to clip the shoulder, knocking it to the ground. Sallia’s throw hit its knee afterwards, shattering it and disabling its movement, but failing to totally take it out of the fight.

The skeleton climbed back to its remaining foot, hopping angrily as it glared at me. Apparently, breaking one leg didn’t render it quite as immobile as I had expected.

It took an angry hop towards us. Then, with unpracticed motions, it reached its bony fingers into the air. A bolt of light appeared between its fingers, before solidifying into a purple-green arrow. It looked at me, drew the string back, and fired.

A sense of danger tore through the haze I felt. An arrow swished towards me as I started dropping to the ground. I quickly realized it was too late, and I was about to get shot by an arrow.

Or at least, I would have been shot if the skeleton could aim. The arrow was way off target - it was a solid meter or two to the left.

I took a nervous glance to my left, before I rose back to my feet. I peeked over the lip of the building again. The archer was holding its hand out again, and light was pouring out of its fingers. It would be ready to shoot again soon. Panicking, I grabbed another brick and threw it at the skeleton.

This time I didn’t miss. The heavy tile smashed into the archer’s skull. With a crunch, the skeleton dropped to the ground, its skill seriously cracked. Luckily, it didn’t get up this time.

However, no notification appeared. Was it still alive?

Before I had time to think more about it, Sallia yelled.

“They can climb now!”

I stood back up and looked at where Sallia stood. She was looking down the side of the building, at the street where I had expected the nine skeletons to be stuck. I ran to where she stood, and looked over the edge of the roof.

There, the three skeletons we had first seen were fluidly climbing up the side of the building. The six fresh skeletons were also trying to climb up. However, they were as stupid as the skeleton who had chased us earlier, and kept falling down.

I took another brick and dropped it over the side of the roof. Gravity would do a good enough job at aiming, and we needed to get these things away from us before they killed us. My brick caught one in the chest and knocked it back to the ground. Sallia’s brick smacked another climber in the elbow, also knocking it away. The third climber reached the roof, giving us a chilling grin as it readied its warhammer to shatter our heads like watermelons.

Sallia picked up her sword, adjusted her grip, and then fluidly slashed at the skeleton’s neck.

The skeleton’s skull flew away from its body. The skeleton’s body stopped moving as Sallia dodged away, clearly wary of a counterattack. The skeleton’s body, however, had stopped moving completely, and Sallia suddenly gained a strange, distracted look as she stared into thin air. Shivering, Sallia seemed to lose track of her surroundings for a moment before she snapped out of it, then quickly kicked the skeleton’s body off the roof. The skeleton flew off the side of the building, smashing back into the two other climbers and knocking them to the ground again.

I grabbed another brick and threw it at one of the two injured climbers, managing to clip its skull and kill it. Sallia finished off the third climber. I still didn’t get any new notifications.

From there, the rest of the fight became very simple. The frantic desperation of keeping the archer from killing us and keeping the three climbers from getting near us was gone. The other six skeletons had no way to reach us, so we simply rained bricks on them until we managed to kill them. 

After the tenth skeleton was destroyed, I felt another surge of euphoria as I got another notification from the Market. 

You have slain four invading low-level troops in one battle. As defined in article two of the emergency city defense fund act, Eluxia distributes your rightful rewards.

(Error – Entity ‘Eluxia’ cannot be found.) Achievement distribution failed. For further information, please contact the administrator of  your current city.

Slaughter: Kill a skeletal foot soldier for the fifth time Slaughter: Assist a fellow transmigrator in killing a skeletal foot soldier for the first time. Assist a fellow Transmigrator in killing a skeletal foot soldier for the fifth time. Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.

Achievement +(ERROR), Achievement +60, Achievement +2, Achievement +5, Achievement +0.01

Another sensation of joy, of happiness, flooded through my mind. I was more prepared for it this time, but I still couldn’t help but stiffen for a moment as euphoria overloaded my senses.

I gritted my teeth, suppressing the feeling. Within a few moments, it faded away, just like the previous time. However, the sensation had been much greater than before.

It took me half of a minute to get myself back under control, and I could finally process what I was reading.

First, I started looking through the numbers presented on the notification box, before I finally realized something. Including the archer I had killed at the beginning of the fight, I managed to kill a total of four skeletons, and Sallia killed the other six. However, I had been very confused throughout the fight as I hadn’t gotten any new notifications for kills. However, it seemed the Market didn’t give us a reward for EACH skeleton killed. Instead, it seemed to give us a reward for reaching certain milestones in how many skeletons we had killed. Our first and fifth kill and assist were each reward, but the second, third, and fourth kills had given me absolutely nothing as far as Achievement went.

Second, I had realized that the sense of euphoria and drug-induced joy was dependent on the amount of Achievement gained at once.

This was… a problem. Had all of the previous people in this city felt like this every time they earned Achievement? I suddenly had a better idea why the former residents of this city seemed so insistent on getting more and more Achievement.

I turned back to towards Sallia, and saw that she had also gained control of herself. If anything, she had been a bit faster than me at doing so. 

“Does the amount of Achievement each skeleton is worth decrease with every kill?” I asked, looking at the notifications floating in the air in front of me and trying to take my mind off of the surging desire to acquire more Acheivement.

“I guess,” said Sallia as she squinted at her own notifications. “I obtained 20 Achievement for my first kill, then gained no more achievement until my fifth kill. Upon the fifth kill, I got another 60 Achievement. That seems to mean that the first skeleton was worth 20 Achievement, and the next four were worth 15 each? I did not get anything for the sixth skeleton kill yet. I suppose we only get Achievement at certain breakpoints? First kill, fifth kill… I wonder what comes next? Tenth kill, perhaps? Fifteenth kill?” Sallia shrugged. “It’s hard to guess before we see it for ourselves.”

I nodded, since my thoughts were similar to Sallia’s. Then, I began to think back over the other details of the fight. Unlike the first skeleton, in this group, four of the skeletons had plausible methods of harming or killing us. Three had been able to climb, and one of the newly assembled skeletons had wielded a bow. Even if it’s aim wasn’t great, it had still had a decent chance of hitting and killing me if the skeleton had been a bit better of a shot. The reason I hadn’t lost a life was purely due to luck that time.

In that case, trying to live off of fighting skeletons would be really difficult, even if we kept abusing the skeleton’s low intelligence. The skeletons weren’t as uniform as I had hoped they were. There were some differences between each skeleton, and even if some of them were incredibly stupid, older ones might be stronger or more intelligent. If one of the original three skeletons had been an archer, both Sallia and I would have probably lost a life.

I felt my thoughts starting to sink into a spiral of worry. Fighting the skeletons meant we would run out of lives and die sooner or later, because even if the roof tactic had worked so far some skeletons could counter it. But failing to fight meant we would run out of Achievement and die. Either way, it felt like we were balancing on a tightrope. A single misstep, or even just a little bad luck, could send us spiraling into the abyss.

“Hey, focus!” said Sallia, waving her hand in front of my face.

“Huh?” I was jolted out of my thoughts, and stared at Sallia’s hand.

“You looked like you were worried. Now is not the time to think. We do not know very much right now. Save your planning and preparation for when we know more. Right now, we should stick to our original objective, which is learning more about our situation,” said Sallia. She gave me a slight grin, and her eyes sparkled with energy. “Let’s take this one step at a time. The previous inhabitants of this city clearly managed somehow, and even if it’s overrun by skeletons that doesn’t mean our situation is hopeless.”

I felt a small smile tug at my lips as I shook off the cloud of uncertainty and thoughts that had started to settle over my mind. “Yeah. You’re right. Let’s get moving.”

The two of us threw a few more bricks at the street, trying to see if any other skeletons would be lured over by the noise. After we were sure nothing else was in the area, we f climbed back down the building.

Sallia took a moment to grab a smaller sword from one of the skeleton’s bodies, swapping out her two-handed weapon for a smaller and more flexible one. After that, she handed me a warhammer from one of the skeletons.

“Take this warhammer for now. It should be useful even if you have no clue what you’re doing, and blunt weapons seem most useful against these things. Of course, we should still consider melee combat to be a last resort.”

I took the warhammer, hefting it and feeling its weight. It didn’t feel quite right in my grip, but it was better than nothing. 

I noticed that unlike the bracelet, I didn’t have any option to equip it to an item slot. Was there something fundamentally different about the two things? I didn’t know, but right now there was nothing I could do about it. I sighed, looked at my four remaining item slots, and shrugged before we stepped into the shop.

It was time to see our spoils of war.

You are reading story Markets and Multiverses at novel35.com

Inside of the ruined shop were various things that looked familiar to me. The shop walls were lined with shelves, most of which were stripped bare. Several of them were also broken, some having collapsed completely and some simply having cracked in various places. The floor was made of white tiles, and there were modern-looking lights installed in the ceiling. If it weren’t for the glowing metal cubes and scorch marks, it would have been easy for me to believe we had stepped into a modern convenience store. 

I approached the glowing metal cubes while Sallia went to investigate the shelves and displays. As I approached the cubes, I felt a strange hungry feeling well up from the depths of my soul. There was something here that I wanted on an instinctive level, although I wasn’t sure what it was.

Inside of each metal cube was an inlay of glowing runes. And, at the bottom of each cube, there were also some slivers of light. Each sliver of light was distinct, like a small, glowing orb about the size of my thumb, and lay flat against the bottom of the cube. As far as I could tell, the light slivers were physical objects, or at least acted like they were. 

Each cube seemed to have a random amount of light slivers. A few of them had no light slivers at all, and a few of them had up to four or five.

I reached out my hand towards one of the slivers of light as the feeling of hunger and desire grew stronger.

Would you like to create a Tier 1 Fragment of Agility?

Each soul fragment will cost 50 Achievement to make. This container can only create tier 1 soul fragments. Since your Agility is below 20, you can still use Tier 1 soul fragments.

Unconsciously, I thought of my desire for the metal cubes I had felt the moment I had laid eyes on them.

I wanted them.

I also had no clue what a soul fragment of Agility was. I had a guess, based on the name, but I needed to try experimenting in order to confirm it. I had about 95 Achievement right now, which was a little over three months of food if I didn’t spend it. In other words, I could spend fifty Achievement to confirm my guess. And increased dexterity would make it much easier to flee if we were chased by a skeleton again, and would make it easier to aim any bricks if I needed to throw them in the future.

With a thought, fifty Achievement flowed out of my body and into the container.

And then, a small sliver of light appeared at the bottom of the container.

You have discovered a tier 1 soul fragment! Fragment of Agility is attuned to ????????? (You). (Since you don’t currently have a name, please assign yourself a name in the legal documents of the Market whenever you can).

As your Agility is below 20, you are able to absorb tier 1 soul fragment of [Agility]. Would you like to absorb this one?

I absorbed the Soul Fragment.

My Status Screen suddenly popped up in front of my eyes, before my Attributes changed for the first time since I had arrived in the Market.

Name: ????????

 

Physical	Mental	Essence
Strength: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)	Intelligence: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)	Devouring: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)
Agility: 1(+100) (Grade 5)	Willpower: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)	Manifestation: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)
Fortitude: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)	Perception: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)	Binding: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)
		Alteration: 0 (+100) (Grade 5)

I could feel my arms and legs getting ever so slightly more flexible and agile, and I could also tell that it was a bit easier to run and move around than before. However, the effect was small. If I wasn’t paying attention, I wouldn’t have noticed a change at all. 

I chuckled as I finally realized something.

It was no wonder I didn’t get any stronger from jogging around and physically exerting myself. It was becoming increasingly obvious that I wasn’t really attached to my physical body anymore. Ultimately, I was a soul inhabiting a container. Exercising might increase the strength of my muscles, but it wouldn’t improve my soul. To make my soul stronger, I apparently needed to use these special containers to turn my Achievement into stat points. Which meant I could only improve myself in specific locations in the Market.

I gave the warhammer an experimental swing, and found it ever so slightly easier to control my movements while handling it now. My stance while I was standing felt ever so slightly firmer. Even if the thing still felt too heavy, I felt like I could swing it a little bit faster and with a bit more precision than before. 

Even though the change was tiny, I could tell that I was a little bit better now.

“Sallia! Come over here! Check this out!” I said, grinning.

Sallia walked over to me, holding on to a few different bracelets. All of them looked awfully familiar…

“Are those friendship bracelets?” I asked, looking at them.

“I found like twenty on one of the shelves,” said Sallia. “They seem to have originally required purchase for 40 Achievement each. However, since there is no one to collect payment, I just grabbed them. Do you want one? They come in different colors. I don’t fully understand the item description, but it seems like we’ll probably need them sooner or later.”

“Ah… I already have one equipped,” I said. “Here, put one on and think of equipping it. After that, let’s see if we can figure out how to ‘add’ each other to our friends list. We’ll figure out the other functions when we know more. I also have some guesses about what they do, but…” I shrugged. “We just don’t have a way to confirm anything yet, so I figured speculating about the subject wasn’t too useful. Anyway, put it on!”

Luckily, the ‘friendship’ function of the bracelets was easy to figure out. After a few minutes of fiddling with the bracelets, we managed to get the bracelets linked to each other. Now, we had a certain … sense for each other. It was very weak, but I could feel that the bracelet on my wrist was connected to something else. However, I couldn’t use it to figure out Sallia’s location, or any other useful information. I could only tell that there was another person somewhere else linked to the bracelet. Still, it would hopefully come in handy later.

With that done, I redirected Sallia’s attention back to the soul fragment containers. 

“Touch the side of the cube.” I said, motioning towards the Agility soul fragment cube.

Sallia did so, before she slowly nodded her head. “Ah, hmm. Interesting…” Sallia frowned as she stared into the air in front of her, likely reading a System notification. “How odd. So I suppose hard work, exercising, and so on is worthless here. That still doesn’t explain why my magic doesn’t work, though. I wonder…” Eventually she shook her head. “Let’s finish looting the shop first, then come back here. I may wish to buy some stats in a few minutes.”