Turning around, Douglas starts walking up the slope. The added effort it takes to move is slightly annoying to the, once again complete, skeleton. Then a few things click into place. Douglas stops and looks around again, this time really looking at the process that is causing the red rain of rock. He holds up a hand, seeing it get caked by stone that seems to appear from thin air, which it literally does. Douglas sticks the horn in the ground next to his feet, honestly having lost interest in the very item he has been pursuing for weeks now. Instead, he studies the soft red rock growing on his bones.
His finger nearly shaking from the dawning amount of realizations he is having, he slowly carves a simplistic rune into the rock clinging to his radius. Willing a small burst of mana into the crooked drawing turns out to be wholly unneeded, as the power naturally inside his arm fills the engraved channels. With a faint blue light, the rune springs to life. Tapping his finger to the thin layers of rock, he finds them sturdy. Where it used to fall apart like dried out mud, it now resists his increasingly violent prodding with ease. He only stops with bashing his hands against the small glowing rune when he sees and feels a fragment of bone chip from his attacking arm. Douglas feels like dancing. He ignores the world as he sits down on the crumbling ground and gathers hands full of red sand and red flakes of stone.
He has found the perfect way through which he will keep his precious bones safe, and he doesn't even need to carve up his body to do so. Lugging around the extra stone will be a drag, but Douglas feels the added weight is a small price to pay for the amount of safety and security a layer of magically strengthened rock will give him. Tapping his skull to shake off the gathering stone flakes, Douglas confirms that armor-clad bone is a beautiful thing indeed.
As the skeleton sits there, hidden from all by a slowly fading cloud of red dust, he experiments. First, he wills the mana away from the crude rune on his arm. Just like he can let parts of his body fall apart by consciously stopping the small flow of maintaining mana going towards his limbs, he can prevent the rune from working after only a few failed attempts. The red stone is easily removed without its magical strengthening, and Douglas clears away the debris with ease.
Then more things click into place. His mind buzzing with possibilities, the skeleton brings up two spell shapes. Fussing around with mana as he runs his bony digits through the loose sand, the calcinate and decalcinate formations form from magical blue, one on either side of the seated skeleton. One spell to turn earth to air, one to turn air to earth. Douglas thinks that he might be wrong, but doesn't he now have the ability to become a printer? The amazingly complicated machine that Katare used to shape the lifesaving metal encasing his skull has already more than proven its usefulness. Douglas clearly remembers how the woman had explained that the apparatus turned solid matter into mist before placing each atomic particle in just the right place. Douglas slowly and methodically realizes that he can do this too, now. He has turned metal and rock into air. And he is sure that turning air into metal instead of the traditional brown earthen spike he has been creating can be done too.
Days pass as Douglas loses himself in another manic bout of tedious experimentation. Where other people would have made intuitive leaps and creative designs, Douglas brute forces his advancement into the path of the Arcanist by single mindedly trying out every single combination of everything. Instead of creating a fluid spell shape or modular spellwork, Douglas changes the way the form in which the calcinate spell shapes its projective in the dumbest way possible. Instead of changing runes and altering the desired shape, Douglas merely skips certain shaping runes that would turn the initial cube into a spike. Instead of moulding the deposited earth into a different form manually, he monotonously shifts the forming cube around by varying the mana supply to the coordinate input of the spell.
Two spell circles on either side of him, Douglas clads his feet in runed stone. He uses that partially shining decalcinate spell shape projected on one side of him to turn the red sand and rock he is sitting upon into air. He channels this air into the area he is working on, using the calcinate spell shape lighting up the other side of his bony frame to condense it into tightly packed stone. He uses the natural flow of mana through his limbs to power the runes he carves. The amount of joy he feels at discovering he doesn’t need to waste any surface area with mana channels would have been enough to make a standard human, possibly, lift a single corner of their mouth a little bit in a smile.
Slowly and surely, Douglas covers his skeleton in a thin layer of red stone, wrapped in the densest and most perfect runes of strength, toughness and hardness he can create. He ignores the sun burning down at him, the stars twinkling above, and the increasing activity of massive beasts far away. He cares not for the fact that the horn, still stuck in the sandstone not too far away, is slowly growing out its base.
[ New skill generated; Partial Casting lvl 1 ]
[ For generating an entirely new skill, +5 lvl, skill limit set to III ]
Waving away the screens, Douglas continues coating his left thigh bone in red stone.
[ Partial Casting III lvl 6 ]
Waving away the screen once more, Douglas resumes his task of slathering his pelvis with stone.
[ System boon earned; added working brain to system, calculating suitable reward… ]
Now getting annoyed at the constant interruptions, he pauses with enchanting his spine long enough to ask the boxes what they want from him. He stares at the congratulatory message for a long time, before dismissing the screen when nothing happens. He happily continues slowly shifting the block of coagulating stone along his vertebrae.
[ Congratulations, you have reached Arcane Skeleton max level ]
[ Arcane Skeleton lvl 29 reached ]
[ Arcane Skeleton lvl 30 reached ]
[ Congratulations, you have reached Arcane Skeleton max level ]
[ Your skills allow you the following options ]
[ Greater Arcane Skeleton 0/40 ]
[ Lesser Soul Skeleton 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Skeleton 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Revenant 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Zombie 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Mummy 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Death Knight 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Arcane Wraith 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Soulbound Construct 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Stone Golem 0/10 ]
[ Lesser Mana Stone Golem 0/10]
[ Lesser Spectral Wraith 0/10 ]
[ Histaff UNKNOWN Amalgamation 0/10 ]
[ Histaff UNKNOWN Reworked 0/10 ]
[ Histaff UNKNOWN Masterworked 0/10 ]
[ Histaff UNKNOWN Core 0/10 ]
[ UNKNOWN Golem 0/NAN ]
[ UNKNOWN UNKNOWN NAN/NAN ]
[ UNKNOWN DEITY of Life 0/999999999 ]
[ Congratulations, Evengi Prime discovered; calculating rewards… ]
Douglas is getting really annoyed at the continuous stream of blue nonsense, and firmly tells the intruding irritations to go away. He appreciates the helpful hints the system has been giving him but doesn’t appreciate the fact that they keep popping up in the middle of his vision all the time. The growing stream of boxes shrinks as Douglas firmly dismissed them, the information prompts retreating into the familiar blinking blue dot at the bottom of his vision. He promptly ignores the madly blinking light and goes back to add stone to his bones.
The blue boxes are not the only major development Douglas is ignoring, though. As engrossed as he is in his magical tinkering, he has failed to notice that the horn he has dug up has grown. The base initially grows a white bowl of smooth matter, before fleshy bits and pieces start appearing on its surface. The rather gory mass of bone, flesh, goopy bits and stringy hair then turns into a head slowly, the regenerating edges glowing a faint blue. Dust that comes near the still lump is turned into finer dust or absorbed in its entirety when the correct combinations of atoms is present.
Moments before the stream of messages had interrupted Douglas’s crafting and carving concentration, th
e spike stuck into the loose sandstone had come loose, and the partially regrown head had come along with it. It had then made a hundred and eighty degrees turn, landing neck down into the sand. Another moment later, the face had turned from a statue-like waxen complexion into something slightly less dead looking. Its eyes had snapped open, a faint blue fire burning deep in the dark pupils.
And now the head is staring at Douglas’s thin form with an unwavering gaze. Katare’s features are recognisable, the striking beauty of her genetically perfected elements still present. Somehow or another, the face doesn't look like the rich woman. A distinct slant to the eyes is only exacerbated by the previously nonexistent epicanthic fold. Dark eyes framed by darker hair keep staring at the silently working skeleton, an extremely complex look on its feminine face.
Chapter Seven – The Venusian Perspective
The first thing she truly sees is stars. Eons of silence, darkness, blackness, and just being there. Her barely functioning thoughts are suddenly and rudely interrupted by a shimmering field of small lights. Her senses don’t know what to do with the visual information at first. Brand new synaptic channels sputter and misfire wildly as unfamiliar patterns seek to run through channels that are not made for their flows. This is rather quickly resolved with small flashes of blue light, the inside of her skull blooming with small applications of power.
After the sprawling scene of uncountable stars resolves itself into understandable symbols and meaning, she starts to see the band of brightness. Familiar, yet feeling completely alien, the milky band of brightness in the sparkling skies looks lopsidedly cosy. It all sparks a weird form of comfort in her blurry mind.
The sound comes back, but she isn’t too sure about that at first. Occasional rustling noises are all she initially perceives. Dull thuds of objects falling into sand interspersed with the flowing rush of moving sand. Then she realizes that she has been feeling her face this entire time, it's just that there was nothing to feel. Immediately, her left earlobe starts to itch something fierce. She knew she should not have listened to her mother. She should have put those earrings in herself like a bloodthirsty brute, instead of going to that auto-scar place to get them done and healed instantly.
Then her world flips, and she feels a weird form of disconnected pain shooting up from her neck. The phantom sensations rushing through her fresh brain nearly overwhelm her after she settles into her new position in the sand. Trying to move does nothing, as she seems to not have anything to move. She somehow knows that her body stops at her neck and that the absolute stillness surrounding her is only possible because there is no heart rushing blood through her head.
And there is a skeleton touching itself just in front of her. Clean lines combined with rather nice curves, this creature is moving so slow and gentle, and she doesn’t understand anything at all.
Instead of wallowing in the immensity of the alien sensations she is going through, Evot looks at the white and red skeletal figure and doesn’t look away. She ignores the fact that her neck itches something fierce, her other earlobe joining her shortly in taunting her current arm-less state. She ignores the steady flow of information flowing back into her mind’s eye; a rather boring life largely spent inside archives ended by a few short weeks of gut-wrenching dread and panic.
Instead, she observes the skeleton playing with itself. She watches the bleached bones handle the sand, slowly covering itself in a thin film of the red stuff. She burns the shining blue runes that it carves into the stone cover into her mind, pushing away the tedium that was her job. She observes the way the starlight is reflected off the smooth facets of the metal skull, the interplay between white bone, layered stone, and shining black metal endlessly fascinating.
She also ignores the blinking blue dot at the bottom of her vision with all her might. Some blue flashes had tried interrupting her intense focus at first, but she somehow managed to order them gone. Why she does this, she is not sure at all, but just like the immensely irritating flow of heat coming from her forehead, she just ignores it. Also, she does not pay any attention to the black metal horn that seems to be hovering in the top of her vision. The horn is harder to ignore, though. Just like her nose, she sees it in her peripheral vision all the time, framing the top of her vision constantly.
She sees the sunrise, and the warm familiarity she felt at seeing the tapestry of stars and the crooked galactic band is ripped away as she sees that the sky is the wrong color. Instead of the bright blue, a sure sign that the planet is doing rather well in the General Galax Planetary Livability rankings, the sun shines down through a murky green film. Evot ignores the knowledge that green skies are sure signs of a terraforming job gone horribly wrong.
No, instead of taking note of all those things, she just watches the metal skulled skeleton play with sand. She thus becomes pretty upset that it walks away the moment it is done. The last rune still shining blue on the back of its lowest left rib, the red and black stick-thin figure strides off down the dune hill without so much as saying goodbye. She watches its bony feet sink deep into the red sand with rising panic, all of a sudden trying to move. Her face spastically goes through a wide scale of emotions, a true smorgasbord of rictus grins not helping her move a single centimetre.
Then she tries shouting, opening her jaw as panic starts gripping her mind. She loses her previously rather steady and firm position in the sand immediately. She starts rolling through the sand, the sudden lack of that infernal itching in her neck a small comfort as her vision blurs. She tries shrieking now, the single being she focusing on to keep her mind together gone. Her mind starts losing grip quickly.
She slams into the skeleton’s feet halfway down the slope, bouncing off its red plated shins, and continues tumbling through the red sand. She finally lands face down, the sudden darkness a relief to the bewildered woman. Just before she can start to truly panic, she feels hard hands lift her. She must have gotten some of her hair back, as she is unceremoniously grabbed by her locks. She briefly comes face to face with the metal skull, blue flames in perfectly machined round sockets blazing into her soul briefly.
“Katare?” The obviously synthetic voice grinds into her ears, the volume rattling her brain around inside her skull.
“No. Not Katare.”
The disappointment in the roughly shaped vocals is palpable, the sheer emptiness of emotion Evot hears in those few words cutting deep. Then she is grabbed by the horn and ignored as she is swung back and forth.
Only when the skeleton has travelled up the other side of the dune does she wake from her stupor. She catches a brief glimpse of faraway mountains, endless rows of flowing dunes, and not a single sign of civilisation.
Evot has a lot of time to think during the following trek. She does not know where they are going, and frankly, she doesn’t really care. She knows that she is somehow still alive, despite remembering dying very clearly. Those moments are chiseled in her memories, and she is sure that she will never forget seeing her own body turn to red goop. She will never forget the absolute chaos that comes when an entire planet realizes that they are all dead anyway.
She mourns for her family, her few friends, and even for her colleagues. Okay, she doesn't mourn for her colleagues. Those barbaric assholes always put their stuff back wrong on purpose, she just knows they did. She also doesn’t spare a single sad thought for the politicians that left hours before the outbreak became public news. She thinks about the rich people that left in the following hours only once, accompanied by a lot of wishing them rather unpleasant days.
The sun goes down again by the time she has slightly worked through the crushing grief she feels. Everyone she knows is dead, and likely part of a biological horror. She did a lot of research about the Histaff infection, and looking at the sky she knows that many years have passed. The thought that she might be on another planet doesn't even cross her mind, the possibility not present in her thoughts at all. She also knows that she will never be rid of the pain she feels when thinking o
f her mother, and how she tried to take care of them even when she lay dying of the Histaff rot. But at least she thinks she can do it without mentally collapsing into a silently sobbing wreck, as she did the first couple of dozen times.
By the time the sun is up again, she has processed enough of her situation to be able to look past her own situation. For the first time in over thirty hours, she looks around properly. She sees that the red skeleton is still walking through red sand, but the dunes have shrunk considerably. As if on command, they crest another red rise, and Evot sees the silhouettes of ruined buildings in the distance. The same jagged spires she recognises from the many Histaff documentaries she had slogged through. Also, the same telltale atmospheric perspective indicative of a greatly depleted atmosphere, all the materials useful to the bio-horror stripped thought massive organic processing plants.
Then the memory of her aged father dying in the looting strikes her consciousness, and she is reduced to a silently sobbing mess again. She barely registers the skeleton carrying her over several more dunes, its slow gait slowing even further. A raw sensation just above her navel shakes her from her grief-stricken condition, nerves that she did not have hours before firing what she supposes is meant to signal pain.
Looking around again, she sees the red skeleton going nowhere fast. Both his bony hands are now clasped around the stumpy piece of metal protruding from her forehead. Its faintly shining bony back is deeply curved as it tries to carry her up the slope. The fact that its feet are uselessly walking forwards, unable to move fast enough to withstand the constant sand-slide is not lost on her. “Just leave me,” escapes from her mouth.
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 8