Chapter 90: Chapter 90: Bone Storm

Nay, stealthed and frozen against a wall, gripped Thorn and ice scythe as a horde of skeletons flooded into the ante-chamber and attacked the party.

Ilyawraith twirled her bo staff, Hoarfrost, above her head and then slammed one end into the ground. Caltrops of ice shot out of the floor in a circle around them all. The jagged ice spokes extended, shattering ribcages and skulls, quelling the numbers of this skeletal wave.

“No!” Fluxwell said. “Let the cunts come!” He squatted and then jumped. His mechano legs carried him over the barrier of caltrops and he landed like a cannonball in the midst of skeletons.

Nay feared the crazed bastard had just committed suicide.

But then skeletons popped into the air, their pulverized bodies flying back and ragdolling to the ground, shattered and broken.

Fluxwell’s head appeared and he was swinging his rocket mace, laughing maniacally. The artificer’s weapon swung in a circle like a wrecking ball, propelled by vigor spirit. “You spindly-limbed soil fuckers! Have you come to dance with a maugrim? Taste the curvature of my ball!”

Nay thought she heard Nom laughing.

Lain pulled one of her hoops from her back and tossed it into the air. It hovered, glowing red. A beam of red vigor energy lasered out. It swept into the horde, cutting down the skeletons. They fell apart at its touch.

Tuk-Tuk had shifted into his polar bear form and was swiping at the skeletons trying to climb over the ice caltrops. He sent a mirror image of himself into the midst of skeletons. Many turned to attack the bear but discovered they were attacking the thin air.

As they looked around, confused, Quincy’s axes swung through the air, a horizontal pendulum, taking their heads off.

Nay saw Nom twirling through the air, a serpentine projectile spinning through the atmosphere, drilling into a cluster of skeletons. He landed, leaving a wake of bones behind him. The skeletons next to him tried to grab him, but they touched nothing but air.

The displaced image of his actual self tricked them. Then he blasted them with his Disintegration Ray.

That’s when Nay noticed a portion of the wall that the skeletons had been hitting with their pickaxe crumbled away. She saw blue light come through the aperture. She glanced at her mini-map and saw that it led into the central chamber of the necropolis.

So she stealthed her way over, dodging several skeletons and made her way to the opening. She gasped at what she saw.

There was the trunk of a huge, ancient tree. Easily wider than the sequoias she had seen on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California. Its giant and gnarled root system made up the floor in the chamber. Blue light shined through the cracks in the bark.

It was the remnant of the Ygdar Tree. Only its trunk remained. Everything above the ceiling here had either been severed or it had fallen. Nay didn’t know what calamity befell the special tree.

Next to it, Nay saw the silhouette of a tall form, easily at least twelve feet tall, swinging a massive club at another horde of skeletons. They were scrambling in through the entrances and from the wall on the other end.

The thing had only one arm, which it was wielding the club with it. The weapon was so big it could have been a small tree itself.

On Nay’s mini-map, she saw the green glow of the Delicacy. Was that tall one-armed thing with the giant club the monster with the Delicacy? Was it the Bjorbane?

Nay had to check her mini-map again. Because according to it, the Delicacy was located somewhere on the trunk of the Ygdar and not on the creature or person with the club.

She was tempted to remain in stealth and go investigate further, but then resisted the urge. Probably not the best idea to wander off from the group. She backed out of the aperture to lend her blades against the skeleton horde.

And she quickly learned that a dagger was not an ideal weapon against skeletons. When she reentered the chamber, she popped out of stealth to attack a skeleton. She went to stab it with Thorn but the blade glanced off the clavicle bone. Where the hell was one supposed to stab a skeleton?

So she opted for using the skullcrusher. She retracted the blade and then used a back-handed overhead motion to ram the skullcrusher into the skull. Now that worked. It punched a hole in the top of the skeleton’s skull and cracks spread through the plates of bone. When she ripped the weapon out, the skull crumbled.

Reanimation vigor fled the bones, and the rest of the body collapsed to the ground.

Ice scythe was a much better weapon for slicing through bone. She discovered that with one well-placed sweep, she could sever the spines of two or three of the skeletons, taking them out of the fight.

But as good and as satisfying as that felt, to scythe the things down like chaff from wheat, she had a feeling that a weapon that caused blunt force trauma was much more effective. Anything that could pulverize and shatter. Like a mace or a warhammer.

Nay activated Shred. She used the skullcrusher to power-tap the heads of six skeletons in less than a second. They collapsed into six pile of bones around her feet. As the next wave came out of one of the tunnels on the far end of the antechamber, she tested out Blade Rush.

Upon activation, she felt like she was picked up in a rush of wind. She ran, at twice her normal speed, zipping across the chamber to land two blade strikes on the skeletons she targeted.

The damage she inflicted with the two strikes also spread to the nearby enemies close to the targets. She came out of the dash, practically pulled towards the targets, and found her hand planting the skullcrusher end of Thorn into a yellowed skull. And she swiped ice scythe, shattering the ribcage of a skeleton, cutting it in half.

The skeletons to the side of the freshly unanimated targets also took the damage. They fell apart.

“Wow,” Nay said.

Then she used Shred again, puncturing the skulls of the remaining skeletons here.

When she looked around, the antechamber floor was full of bone piles and fragments. Her party had defeated the onslaught of skeletons.

“I love the smell of the undead in the morning,” Fluxwell said, looking for more. “Is that it? That all they got?”

“These were weak undead,” Ilyawraith said. “Mere grunts.”

“But grunts for whom?” Quincy said. “Skeleton minions are usually the sign of a monster with necromantic abilities.”

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“The Bjorbane perhaps?” Lain said.

“I was just getting started,” Fluxwell said. “I didn’t even have any ale in me. There’s nothing like a good brew to stimulate the ‘ol battle fury.”

“I can remedy that,” Nom said. He was about to conjure the table when Nay stopped him.

“Hold on,” Nay said. She pointed towards the wall, where part had crumbled away to reveal an opening into the central chamber of the necropolis. Where the Ygdar tree had planted its roots. “There’s more skeletons in there.”

Fluxwell immediately started to head for the aperture. “From your lips to Voreheim’s ears! Let’s crush more bones into powder!”

“Something else is with them,” Nay said. That made Fluxwell pause.

Quincy produced his spyglass and peered in. “Nether hells. It’s the Ygdar Tree. Or what’s left of it.”

“What is that thing with the skeletons?” Tuk-Tuk said.

Quincy spent another moment squinting through the spyglass. “It’s a one-armed ogre.”

“An ogre, you say?” Fluxwell said. “What’s an ogre doing all the way up here? Maybe my monster lore is spotty, but they prefer warmer climates, don’t they?”

Quincy nodded. “It’s strange indeed.”

They entered the central chamber and as Nay shifted into stealth, there was a flash and her world turned to dust. An explosion of bone went off, coming from the ground and root structure at their feet. A blast nova rippled out. Turning the air into a cyclone of bone shrapnel.

Nay felt a fluttering of pain across her face and arms. She realized she had fallen down. She blinked and the air was full of dust.

The others, save for Quincy, Ilyawraith and Fluxwell, were on the ground.

Nay saw that Lain was bleeding. There were fragments of bone stuck in her face. Tuk-Tuk also had similar wounds.

A tall man with bright red hair appeared out of the dust.

Nay couldn’t be sure, as her vision was still clearing. But it looked like she could see his rib-bones. As if they were on the outside of his tunic. But as he came into focus she saw it was armor. His armor was made of bones.

His breastplate was fused ivory. The pauldrons on his shoulders were spiked skulls. A sickle blade hovered over one of his shoulders. It gleamed white. The blade was polished bone and the shaft was sheathed on his back.

His facial features were sharp with high cheek bones. There was a glint in his eyes. Chipped sapphires that held aged wisdom and dark knowledge. And a spiderweb of blue veins visible underneath his skin.

Two hulking figures also emerged out of the dust, flanking him. They were close to ten feet tall. Noxious green clouds surrounded them. The creatures looked like suits of battle armor come to life, except the armor was made of plates of darkened bone stained with blood. The red and pink of exposed muscle and flesh could be seen between the joints. Nay could smell their rot.

“Who are you?” Ilyawraith said. “Name yourself!”

The red-haired man of rot and ruin smiled as he circled them. He studied Ilyawraith as if she were an oddity. “It’s not important. But I am very curious as to who you might be. You are from Yseros, are you not? I can see it in your hair and your eyes. The island dwellers always have the most curious features. As if they’re borne from the sea.”

Ilyawraith narrowed her eyes. She didn’t betray anything about whether he was right or not. Not even a subtle flicker or darkening of her face. She just stared at him with a frost-clad glare. “You presume much.”

“On the contrary, I am quite certain. The flesh does not lie.”

“What’s a Marrow Eater necromancer doing so far away from home?” Quincy said.

The man’s eyes never left Ilyawraith. “Now, he presumes much.” Finally, he looked at Quincy. “I live a nomadic life and go wherever the beyond leads me. But we’re both here for the same thing. The Delicacy.”

“Enough!” Quincy said and he charged the man with his axe.

But one of the behemoths stepped in front of the man and caught the axe blade with both of its hands. Quincy looked at the blade held between the two palms with shock. He tried to push it into the thing’s chest, but it held his axe firm.

Gertrude, his axe, began to glow, releasing Quincy’s blight. Normally, this would infect a creature and cause them to succumb to a rupturing of boils and pus. But it had no infect the bone giant.

The red-haired man reacted with genuine interest. “Now, that is interesting. You can release a blight. Except here’s the thing, my new friend. My Decay Golems are immune to the nox.”

As if to accentuate the point, the Decay Golem shoved Quincy back and ripped his weapon out of his hands and threw it over its shoulder.

Quincy, Nay and the rest of the party were surprised by the display of power.

“I still maintain that my identity isn’t important,” the red-haired man said. “But if you must know, I have made a name for myself in the necromantic arts. They call me Gideon the Audacious.”

He performed a little bow and then directly looked at Ilyawraith. He was utterly calm. His pulse seemingly below zero.

“Your fighting style will reveal your identity to me,” Gideon said to her. His hand reached up and drew the bone scythe off his back. “Shall we begin?”

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