Chapter 37: Undead Skeletons
"Right side," Hide yelled. "Move as fast you can."
He didn’t wait to see if Fuu was following. He turned and ran.
The right branch had fewer skeletons, so it was a better choice. As for why didn’t he take the road that went straight, it was common sense to even a fool that if there was not even one skeleton there, it was the worst possible way they could take.
The left side had twenty of them, while the only ten and he was not foolish to head straight into them without knowing anything.
The flagstones under his feet were uneven and dark. The cold air was thick in his lungs as he moved, but he was moving at the speed that was not possible for an average human to achieve. The stat upgrades really did effect his overll body.
Behind him, Fuu followed, his footsteps heavy, faster than his body could allow, but in the face of horrors it wouldn’t be surprising if he caught up to Hide.
The skeletons from the right branch adjusted their approach. They had no eyes and yet they tracked them with their empty sockets. They shifted their line without losing speed, the bones of their feet clicking rapid and hollow against the stone, fingers extended, some of them carrying blades that had been rusted to a dark grey but were still, demonstrably, blades.
Hide ran directly at the nearest one.
It raised its skeletal arm, the blade angled for a horizontal swing at his neck. Hide didn’t back away, he ducked under it and came up inside its reach and drove his right fist, fully Carapace-covered, into its ribcage.
The impact was satisfying, with the scales amplifying the strike, the force concentrated and delivered cleanly. The skeleton’s ribs shattered outward. Its spine separated. Bone fragments scattered across the flagstones in every direction. The skull bounced twice and came to rest against the base of the courtyard wall.
Hide straightened and already looked at the other one, this one was coming up without any weapon, but their skeletal fingers were like a beast’s talons.
Hide punched its face and the skull went flying, but the body still moved and tried to grasp him. He grabbed both of the skeletons hand and kicked it in the abdomen... or more accurately called the diaphragm.
The undead skeleton went flying into the others who were walking and they all fell onto the ground in a heap like dolls.
’What the hell, aren’t these things too soft, or maybe I have grown too strong.’ Hide let his thoughts wander until Fuu caught up to him, breathing as if he had ran 10 km’s.
He shook his head, he shouldn’t be focusing on such things. He jumped over the fallen skeletons and behind him, Fuu did the same. Jumping over them, if what he did could be called a jump.
"Huff... Huff..." He breathed even harder. "Wait... Hide? where are we? Why are you with me?"
Hide stopped and turned back, grounding his teeth. ’Fucking dumbass.’
He took a few steps back and hit Fuu in the head. "I told you to focus... now come on."
Hide looked behind and saw the other twenty skeletons catching up. ’If this fool keeps this up, those skeletons will catch up to us.’
Fuu came back to his senses, and his body shivered a little before he straightened himself. "I... I am sorry."
He said quite generously, but Hide was not looking at him. His attention was behind Fuu and his eyes were wide with confusion.
He was looking at the scattered bones... as they moved!
All of them shifted and moved without any visible interference, the individual pieces beginning to crawl across the stone toward each other, the ribs finding their original geometry, the spine reassembling from the base up, the skull rolling back across the flagstones toward the body with the slow certainty of something being called home.
’Jesus Christmas Christ,’ Hide thought. He just realized that he had not received even a single kill notification from the system. Which meant, he had never killed them to begin with.
He stepped back as the skeleton completed its reconstruction and stood again — fully upright, sword recovered from the ground, no indication whatsoever that it had just been taken apart and was scattered across the stone.
One by one... all of them stood back up and oriented on them. The socket-eyes tracking the humans.
"Run," Hide said, already in motion again. "Don’t let them catch you."
The other twenty from the other side had also joined in with the other ten and now thirty mad skeletons followed behind them like an army of thralls.
With each passing second, Fuu got slower and the skeletons having no issues with their stamina, reached closer to him.
Some of them reaching with their razor sharp hands to catch his cloths, one of them accidently had its finger buried in his pants and was dragged along until its arm broke from the joint, and was left wiggling behind Fuu like a tail.
Hide didn’t bother looking back, they were about to reach the entrance to the citadel... or maybe just a door, but it would be enough to keep them away from the direct contact with these skeletons.
Of course there was no guarantee that they won’t find the mysterious citadel filled with several more of these bastards.
"Damn it! Fuck!" Fuu’s curses pulled out of his thoughts and he skidded to a halt turning back.
Fuu had been, unfortunately caught up by the skeletons and was now engaged three of them. His gauntlets, that he wore in his hands were active, and he had at last activated his skill.
Mana was moving from his body towards his fists and concentrating at the edges of his knuckles, forming a deep blue effect that looked mesmerizing to look at.
He had already hit two of them — the evidence was in the scattered bone fragments around him and the two skeletons in various states of reassembly at his feet.
But soon the two broken ones stood up again and attacked him along with the other twenty eight, he was slowly being swallowed by the swarm!