Chapter 5 - The Bone King's Shadow
Deep within the Sun-Gilded Grove, the silence was unnatural.
Normally, the forest hummed with the calls of wind-hawks and the rustling of silver-horned stags through the brush. But for the past two hours, as Sarah and Kale moved through the ancient timber, not a single bird sang.
Sarah moved with chilling efficiency.
She did not wander aimlessly. In her previous life, she had studied the geographical charts of the Grove during the long, bitter years of the war, when the imperial territory had been turned into trenches. She knew exactly where the high-yield beasts nested.
“Left,” she commanded softly.
Kale pivoted without a sound.
Ahead, in a sun-dappled clearing choked with giant ferns, a C-rank Thunder-Boar was rooting through the loam. Its tusks were wrapped in arcs of crackling yellow lightning, its hide as thick as boiled iron.
The boar smelled them. It swung its massive head around, letting out a deafening, metallic squeal, its hooves tearing up the moss as it charged directly at Sarah, a living battering ram of lightning and bone.
Sarah didn't even draw her dagger.
“Kale.”
A single shadow flickered.
Kale did not use breath. He did not dodge. He simply lowered his head and met the charge head-on.
*CRUNCH.*
The boar struck Kale’s obsidian chest scales. It was like a wooden cart slamming into a mountain of solid granite. The boar’s tusks shattered instantly into powdery splinters. Before the beast could even register the pain, Kale’s right talon came down like an executioner’s axe, severing its thick neck with a single, contemptuous swipe.
The lightning dissipated with a faint hiss.
Kale stepped over the twitching carcass, slicing the chest cavity open with the tip of his claw and flipping the C-rank lightning core into the air. Sarah caught it cleanly in her leather sack, which was already clinking heavily with forty other monster cores.
“Boring,” Kale rumbled telepathically, flicking a drop of blood from his claws. “These are not beasts. They are overgrown pigs.”
“They are points,” Sarah replied, securing the sack. “Vivien will have targeted the Iron-Hide Bear at the northern peak. With Lucien’s breath weapon, she will harvest approximately six thousand points by sunset. We are currently at seven thousand.”
“Then we have won. Can we leave? The smell of this damp moss is offensive.”
Sarah paused.
She tilted her head, her eyes narrowing as she looked north.
The wind had shifted. It no longer smelled of pine and damp earth. It smelled of cold ash, dried marrow, and grave-dirt.
A high-pitched, desperate screech echoed across the canopy from the direction of the northern crags.
It was a dragon’s cry—panicked, shrill, and unmistakable.
“Lucien,” Sarah murmured.
Kale’s golden eyes snapped toward the north, his nostrils flaring. “That is not the cry of a beast hunting. That is the cry of a beast being butchered. And there is something else... something foul in the air.”
Sarah’s blood ran cold.
*The timeline,* she realized with a jolt of horror. *The Undead Empire’s infiltration... it didn't start at the western fortresses. It started here.*
In her previous life, an A-rank Skeleton King had mysteriously breached the border provinces three months after the trial. But if Vivien’s mother, Marianne, had already been communicating with the enemy, if the wards of the grove had been sabotaged to allow an elite vanguard to test the capital’s defenses...
“Run,” Sarah said, her voice dropping all pretense of calm.
She vaulted onto Kale’s back, her hands gripping the ridge of his neck.
“Are we fleeing?” Kale asked, his muscles bunching as he prepared to leap.
“No,” Sarah snarled, her eyes burning with pure, lethal focus. “We are going to kill it.”
Kale let out a deep, wicked laugh that shook the trees around them. “Now *that* is the speech of an empress!”
With a thunderous explosion of earth, Kale unleashed his wings.
The starlit black membranes snapped wide, catching the forest air with impossible force. They did not merely fly; they tore through the canopy, shattering ancient branches into matchwood as they surged toward the northern crags at the speed of a falling meteor.
Within ninety seconds, they cleared the tree line.
The northern clearing, a rocky plateau beneath the granite cliffs, was a scene of absolute slaughter.
Three imperial proctors lay dead near the boundary stones, their bodies drained of blood and twisted into unnatural angles. Several other royal youths were huddled against the cliff face, screaming in terror as their low-rank summons were systematically torn apart by a horde of armored wights.
And in the center of the plateau, Lucien was pinned to the ground.
The silver dragon’s magnificent scales were covered in filth and gouged with deep, blackened wounds. His left wing was pinned beneath the massive, iron-shod boot of a seven-foot-tall monstrosity.
An A-rank Skeleton King.
The creature was draped in the rusted, ancient plate armor of a forgotten dynasty. Its skull was crowned with jagged iron, and two burning points of baleful emerald fire burned in its eye sockets. In its right hand, it held a massive, notched executioner’s blade dripping with necrotic sludge.
Vivien was cowering against a boulder ten paces away, her pristine white leather suit shredded, her face streaked with tears and dirt.
“Lucien! Get up!” she shrieked hysterically. “Breathe fire! Burn it! I spent three thousand crowns on your collar! *Burn it!*”
Lucien opened his jaws, his chest glowing with a weak, sputtering silver light.
*FZZZT.*
A pathetic cough of smoke and sparks escaped his mouth. The opals on his collar had shattered. Terrified out of his wits, the silver dragon began to weep—actual, pathetic tears leaking from his slit eyes as he clawed desperately at the dirt.
“I can’t!” Lucien wailed in agony. “It’s too cold! It hurts! Vivien, save me! Use your amulets!”
“I don’t have any more!” Vivien screamed, pulling her knees to her chest. “Father! Somebody help me!”
The Skeleton King raised its massive executioner’s blade. The emerald fire in its eyes flared with cruel, mindless amusement. It prepared to sever the silver dragon’s head from its neck.
*SHRRRRRRK.*
The sound was not a roar.
It was the sound of the atmosphere being ripped in half.
From the gray sky above, a bolt of pure, pitch-black lightning slammed directly into the Skeleton King’s chest.
*BOOM!*
The seven-foot undead titan was hurled backward thirty yards, its rusted armor caving inward like tin, its heavy boots plowing two deep trenches through solid bedrock before it crashed into the granite cliff, causing tons of loose shale to bury it to its waist.
The plateau fell deathly silent.
Lucien gasped for air, his trembling head lifting from the dirt. Vivien froze, her mouth agape, her eyes wide with disbelieving shock.
From the swirling cloud of dust and pulverized stone, Kale descended.
He did not land clumsily. He touched the earth with the weightless perfection of a shadow, his massive wings flaring once before tucking tightly against his flanks. Sarah sat astride his back, her hand resting calmly on the hilt of her silver dagger, looking down at her weeping sister and the broken silver dragon with eyes as cold as the void.
“S-Sarah...?” Vivien stammered, her voice cracking. “You... you survived?”
Lucien stared at Kale, his silver crest trembling in absolute, humiliating awe. “What... what kind of power was that...?”
Before anyone could answer, the cliff wall exploded.
The Skeleton King roared—a dry, unnatural shriek that rattled the teeth in Sarah’s skull. The emerald fire in its eyes turned into roaring torches of hatred. It tore itself free from the rock, dragging its massive blade through the shale, its bones creaking as it gathered the surrounding necrotic miasma into a swirling vortex of black-green rot.
An A-rank undead commander. A creature capable of slaughtering an entire battalion of regular troops.
Kale took one step forward.
The Proctor's gray rank-collar around his neck could no longer contain the pressure. With a sharp *SNAP*, the imperial device shattered into a dozen useless pieces, revealing the smooth, unblemished scales beneath.
“Sarah,” Kale spoke into her mind, his voice vibrating with predatory joy. “May I take the skull?”
Sarah slipped down from his back, stepping onto the rocky plateau.
“Take the whole thing,” she said.
Kale lunged.
The Skeleton King swung its executioner’s blade with enough force to cleave an elephant in two.
Kale didn't even attempt to parry.
He opened his jaws.
A sphere of absolute, light-devouring blackness manifested between his obsidian teeth—a singular point of pure Void gravity. When the Skeleton King’s enchanted steel blade struck that sphere, the metal did not clang.
The blade simply *dissolved*.
The steel disintegrated into atomic dust, pulled into the gravitational vortex like water down a drain. The Skeleton King’s strike hit nothing. Off-balance, the undead monster stumbled forward.
Kale’s jaws snapped shut.
With a movement so fast the human eye couldn't track it, Kale’s left talon drove through the center of the Skeleton King’s rusted breastplate, pinning its ribcage to the cliff wall. His right jaws clamped down around the monster's crowned skull.
*CRACK-CRUNCH.*
The ancient iron crown buckled. The bone shattered. The emerald flames in the eye sockets flared once in frantic, agonized panic—and were instantly sucked into Kale’s throat, devoured like a late-night snack.
The headless skeleton collapsed into a pile of lifeless, rattling bones.
From the smoking heap of armor, Kale plucked an orb the size of a human head—a brilliant, radiant violet crystal pulsing with the concentrated mana of an A-rank supreme undead.
He turned around, trotting back over to Sarah like a hunting dog returning with a pheasant, and dropped the massive, priceless core at her feet.
Sarah picked it up, rolling the heavy, pristine crystal in her hands before casually dropping it into her leather sack.
She turned toward Vivien and Lucien.
The silver dragon was trembling so violently that his scales were rattling against one another like dry autumn leaves. He stared at Kale with the absolute, submissive terror of a cur that had just realized it had barked at a king.
Vivien was pale as a corpse, her hands clutching her torn skirts, her gaze darting between the shattered bones of the A-rank monster and her sister’s unblemished face.
Sarah took three slow steps forward, stopping right in front of Vivien.
She looked down at her younger sister.
“I told you to bring a tissue, Vivien,” Sarah said softly.
May you like
Then, she turned her back, mounted Kale once more, and took to the sky, leaving the weeping princess and her trembling dragon to crawl through the dirt alone.
***
