Saintess Summons Skeletons

After Sofia explained more of the skill’s quirks and downsides to Shaily and made sure the girl knew what she was getting into, Shaily led Sofia and Pareth to a deep part of the academy’s underground. The damp and dimly lit corridors looked abandoned but they were far from it, even so early in the morning, there were already a few students coming to and fro this underground labyrinth.

“You go all this way every time you need to store something?” Sofia asked as Shaily finally stopped in front of a sturdy wooden door.

“I can’t afford a storage ring so these storage units are the best I can do. At least Lola is sweet enough to lend me her ring so I can bring those here, if not I could only try to sell them before coming back…”

Her and Guerand are both not nobles, and storage items are expensive. Guerand also carried his golems in a backpack…

The iron key in Shaily’s hand turned in the lock, and after a click, the door was open.

Hueg! This stinks like a rotten zombie.

Shaily’s nose curled at the fool smell, but she rushed inside. “Crap! One of my rituals must have run out!”

Following her, Sofia entered the storage unit, in the room about the size of their classroom, only lit by one of Shaily’s red sprites, five piles of dead monsters were stacked against the walls inside of ritual circles. One of them had indeed ran out of mana and the pile of monsters was now more of a pile of rotting flesh.

“Want me to get rid of that?” Sofia offered.

The small Exidian looked at her teacher then at the pile of rotten corpses. She was hesitant. Finally, she sighed. “Please do…”

Sofia unleashed Bookie on the rotten mound. “Don’t worry, that’ll be part of the trade, I can still make skeletons out of those. Can’t do much about the smell, sadly.”

“Is- Is this book your storage item?”

“Bookie? No. It’s uh. A living book? He eats corpses to summon skeletons later.”

“Living… Does it speak?”

“No, he’s more like… A very dumb dog? The skeletons he helps me summon are much smarter.”

Sofia and Shaily stepped out to have a break from the rotten smell while Bookie was having a huge meal. After Sofia explained some more about what Bookie was, omitting to mention the Deep, she questioned the Exidian girl about the piles of dead monsters in the room. There were also a few piles of bones, which had caught Sofia’s eyes, and a few wooden barrels.

“Lola sometimes takes me to her family’s hunting grounds so we can train against real monsters. I keep all my kills to make some money. I sell the meat to the tamer students with carnivorous pets and I keep the bones to trade with necromancy and alchemy students who sometimes need them. The furs I sell in bulk to a clothing store near the academy when they aren’t too damaged…”

“You have a whole business going on. Do you do all the butchering yourself?”

“I remove the internal organs before storing them like this, and the later parts I actually have someone working in the kitchens help me with for a small cut of the profit whenever they have time.”

Woaw. At her age I was… Reading books.

Must not pay too well though.

Going back inside, Sofia got to take a better look at the remaining piles of corpses. They were mainly forest-dwelling animals and monsters like wolves, giant bats, big furry snakes, and some kind of large cats with a lot of teeth. She had Shaily go over the specifics of each monster, they were all of species that generally stayed in the level twenty to fifty range, most of them local to Exidion’s fauna.

In the end, Sofia had Bookie eat all the bones from the bone pile and she collected one of each monster type’s heads for the choir. That’s probably about sixty new skeletons, quite a few pages for bookie. I’ll check them out in detail later. She also helped Shaily refill the mana of the freezing rituals which kept the corpse piles from rotting before they left. Leaving the storage room, Sofia told Shaily to bring them to the skill visualizer, and they had a longer talk on the way.

“So it’s really not worth as much as what I’m going to teach you, even if I took all of it, but I’m not really looking for a fair trade. I just want skeletons, and you want knowledge, everybody is happy,” Sofia explained when Shaily asked why she hadn’t taken the entirety of her stash as she had expected.

“Thank you for your generosity, teacher.”

Thank you for the bones, student.

“Really it’s not like that… I’m not even sure I can teach you the skill properly in the first place, you know? It won’t be easy and you won’t even be able to create a big lightning bolt for now with your mana. I wouldn’t even have accepted if your mana multipliers weren’t so high.”

“I don’t mind! It’s fine if I learn it for later. Also I’m sure my sprites will be able to cast full skills all by themselves at some point, so I won’t have to worry about the burns,” Shaily enthusiastically answered.

“Quite the optimist, with the 2600 mana points you have now, if you can handle my newest version you can already make something strong enough to kill these monsters you hunt in one hit. But that’s all your mana gone in a few seconds.”

“I’m alright with that!”

“Good. Then, before we get there, let’s decide on what version you want to learn…”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, when told of the two options, Shaily chose the piercing bolt over the explosive one.

Technically it’s the angel’s skill… But if he didn’t want me to spread it he shouldn’t have shown me.

Sofia still made Shaily swear that she wouldn’t ever teach it to anyone else. It wasn’t really binding in any way, but the kid had an attitude that Sofia thought could be trusted. If the skill still ended up spreading far and wide later, well, it wasn’t really Sofia’s problem.

I doubt many would bother learning it in the first place. Not everyone has as much mana as I do, and not everyone has a dragon-scale arm to withstand overcharging it. Sure people above a certain level could use it more effectively than I can, but at this point I don’t think they need to copy my skills to be strong.

While Sofia thought over what it really meant to teach her skills to someone else, Shaily stopped. They were still in the academy’s underground, but much closer to the surface, in well-lit, clean and well decorated hallways. In a booth inside a wall, a kid in student uniform was sleeping, his glasses askew on his face, head resting on the counter. A plaque above the door near the booth read ‘Visualizer facility’.

“It’s here,’ Shaily announced.

“Looks like someone’s sleeping on the job.” Sofia knocked on the counter after having Pareth get back inside her storage.

The student behind the counter woke up with a jump, he almost yelped but managed to keep himself silent, the scream dying in his throat as he assessed the situation.

Sofia smiled awkwardly. “I did not mean to scare you, sorry.”

“No, no! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been asleep,” the student apologized, fixing the position of his glasses, he quickly examined the duo, “Are you here to make a reservation?”

“I had hoped to use the visualizer now,” Sofia answered.

“Hummm…” The student cleared his throat, looked through some kind of hole to his side, then opened some kind of ledger and turned a few pages before addressing Sofia again, “Sorry, the facility is in use right now, but if you come back in twenty minutes when this class leaves, the next four hours are currently free.”

“I don’t mind waiting twenty minutes. Do you have other classes this morning Shaily?”

She shook her head. “None, b- but ten minutes shoul-”

“Then I’ll take the four hours, how much is it?”

Sofia ignored the shocked, worried looks from Shaily next to her.

“Hum… Alright so, first of all I need both of your IDs, the name tag, age and level from your status window and your student passes…”

“Ah, I’m a teacher.”

The student seemed taken aback, “Ah, sorry, sorry, I should know but I still haven’t memorized the list of new teachers… Please give me a second.” Standing up from his wooden stool, the kid turned around and grabbed a new-looking leather-bound book. Quickly leafing through the pages. At one point he stopped and went back one page. “Teacher Sofia Vakaria Aphenoreth?”

Well shit. I’m not surprised they have my full name but they really went ahead and printed that in a book?! Are they brainless?

Beligenus never even mentioned the Deep, he just always called me Vakaria like Zephir wrote in the introduction letter. Well, whatever. Clearly this guy isn’t disappearing. Still, I can’t believe they approved of this.

“That’s me, yes. Just Vakria is fine next time.”

“As you wish, teacher Vakaria. So for teachers I only need the ID and room key, for your student it’s still all I mentioned before. The rate for teachers is ten gold an hour if you can provide the mana to run the machine, twenty otherwise, and ten silver per-hour per-student you bring in with you,” the student explained with a straight face.

“How much mana would that be?” I can probably do it, right?

“I’m afraid it’s a bit high. About three… Three hundred thousand for an hour of continued use…” the student worriedly indicated.

Oh, that’s it? My regen is well above a million points an hour already.

“I don’t need to pay extra, then. Here’s forty-one gold for the four hours, you can keep the change.”

The booth’s student fumbled to accept the gold all the while processing their documents and failing to understand how a level 249 teacher could possibly pay for the machine’s upkeep when none of the mage-type teachers and students of this level ever could until now.

Shaily looked just as shocked as the booth’s student, though Sofia felt that it was probably for different, more pecuniary reasons.