Chapter 488: Skelems

Chapter 488: Skelems

“Gah! Almost there!” Sofia cried out as the skeleton she was working on fell back to its original state as a pile of golden bones. “What is it that failed this time?” she asked the Engineer skeleton. He was honestly doing more than half of the work while Sofia mostly supplied the materials, ideas and mana.

Climbing on the vertical ladder sticking out of the ground near the ritual site, the Engineer pointed at the twelfth bone-drawn ritual circle held up above the lifeless pile of bones. Since Sofia’s new bones were great mana conductors, she was able to shape them directly into ritual circles now. Currently there were about twenty of these circles stacked one above another, as it was easier to compound them like this than to fit them all inside of one huge ritual circle drawn on the ground.

“So it’s the core engraving part again... Golem necromancy is trickier than I thought... Keep an eye on it and tell me where exactly it fails, I’m launching it again, just give me a second to fix the core...”

I get that stuffing the fake soul inside of a golem core isn’t how you do it but on paper it should work...

A while later, while Sofia was working on inserting yet another new ritual circle inside the stack to hopefully get the fake soul to better fit where it should, something rolled on Sofia’s cleavage before dropping on the floor with a thud.

Sofia looked down, “Oh! A pearl already?! So my current rate is about every thirty days? Quite the upgrade from two a year.”

She stored the pearl and focused her attention back on the ritual circles.

“Damn, it’s been thirty days already... What the hell are you doing Alith...?”

“It’s working! PARETH! IT’S WORKING!”

Pareth appeared near Sofia, his hands full of orange mushrooms and bone gardening tools, he watched as the ‘human’ skeleton Sofia had made herself started to self-assemble around a bone golem core that hundreds of small mana bursts were engraving from the inside out while the artificial soul was getting stuffed inside.

Sofia was full of glee to see her hard work finally pay off until she noticed something wrong. “Wait, shi- Ah... Whatever...” The femur and humerus got mixed up somehow... It’ll still work...

It took about three minutes before the skeleton golem was fully assembled and a ghostly light started to shine within its eye sockets.

“Come here,” Sofia ordered, and the skeleton walked forward with stiff movements just like a golem would. She did not feel much of a connection to the skeleton, but if she did everything right, it should only ever listen to her commands.

“Now do a flip!”

It was clunky, but the skeleton performed a successful backflip.

“Now fly!”

There was no reaction.

“What is two plus two?”

Again, no reaction from the skeleton.

“Everything is working as expected so far...” Sofia said to herself as she walked up to the skeleton and put her hand on its golem core which floated safely behind its ribs.

There were a few reasons why Sofia had gone for a weird golem-skeleton combination, but the main one was simply that they were the perfect minions to take care of Zangdar.

Basic Skeletons with a fake soul had the disadvantage of eventually returning to a useless pile of bone after being away from the necromancer for too long, while golems had the big disadvantage of needing to be either pre-programmed through the core before their activation or controlled directly. With the mashup of the two, the skeleton golem could be given live orders like a regular skeleton, while also benefiting from the large ‘order memory’ stored in the golem core, and without risk of ever disappearing. It would only stop functioning when its mana ran dry, until it received mana again.

Additionally, the skeleton being a skeleton was in itself a big plus in Sofia’s eyes.

“I dub thee, Skelem the first!” She jokingly said while filling up the golem core to the brim. “The core can take about 300 000... Not terrible. Probably enough for the Skelems to function for a few months? The drain seems pretty slow, but maybe it’s because it’s doing nothing.”

Sofia brought a broom out of her storage and passed that to the Skelem, “There’s a lot of midenicite dust around the castle, sweep it all up into one big pile. And take care of the broom, we don’t have a replacement. Report to me when you’re done.”

Without a word, the Skelem took the broom and walked toward the castle.

Lesser Victories:

Siren Queen +2%

Zhǎng Lú+2%

Cardinal, Puppet of Scripture+2%

Twin-Headed Sunless Amalgam+2%

Chimera+2%

Valiant Victories:

Ignatius Everbright +5%

Mutated Evranarheimlein+5%

Image of Orvod Maurya Ovohen+5%

Tarren+5%

Sunless Waves+5%

Glorious Victories:

Incarnation of Victory+15%

Saria Aphenoreth+15%

Kidjikkik Destroyer+15%

Item level : 199.

Grade : Flawless.

Restriction : wearer must be Sofia Aphenoreth. Soulbound. System item.

Wait, the Destroyer is a Glorious victory but the two Sunless armies plus the Nightbringer only count as one Valiant?

Fine... Tarren being a Valiant is about what I expected, and the three lesser are all a bit of a stretch, so I suppose overall it’s fine. I’m shocked I even got anything for the Chimera considering I stayed very safe the entire time. So I got a 31% boost since the last time I checked. Pretty nice!

Next in the waiting list should be the quest for my sub-class.

Scrolling up through her logs, Sofia found the old alert message.

[A new class quest is available]

Focusing on it opened the quest.