Romulus met the first of the twelve skeletons with pure force.
Even with their level advantage, the shambling reanimations were slow and robotic in their actions. It created an advantage that he and Lightsbane could exploit without issue despite his low level of [Swordsmanship]. The runeblade was wielded like a bat as much as a blade, and Romulus cleaved into the skeleton’s rusted cuirass with a clash of metal.
The moment Lightsbane punched into the undead’s ribs, it shivered in reaction and abruptly crumbled to pieces.
You have slain a Reanimated Skeleton!
You have gained 250 Experience!
Romulus blinked at the alert in his chat log and realized precisely how distracting it would be. With a curse, he backpedalled and spoke out loud quickly.
“System, suppress combat alerts outside of critical information until the end of combat, or until I request them!”
Almost instantly, a window popped up in front of him.
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SYSTEM MESSAGE
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Would you like to enable [Combat Mode] for your [Communications Window]?
Note: [Combat Mode] will suppress any non-essential alerts, and will collate your combat logs into a truncated form for viewing once no enemies are within 10 meters.
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YES
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NO
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Romulus hastily tapped the ‘YES’ button, and the window vanished. At the same time, the chat window in his HUD minimized, and a small sword icon appeared above the tab, with the words ‘Combat Mode Enabled’ in red text beside it.
“Nice,” he said in appreciation while turning back to the skeletons that were steadily advancing toward him. “Now, let’s get down to business.”
Lightsbane hummed its vicious agreement, and Romulus charged back into the fray.
The skeletons had made things surprisingly easy for him, as they had emerged in groups of three. Four different formations of the creatures—each with a sword, spear, and bow wielder apiece—filled the expansive chamber as he rushed the nearest group once more. The sword wielder was already dead, and the skeletal archers were about as threatening as drunks with how methodical and predictable their aim was.
Simply moving at a steady pace caused their shots to miss.
The archer in the first group was his next target, and Romulus sheared through the creature within moments of closing. Once again when Lightsbane impacted the skeleton, it shivered and fell apart near-instantly.
A glance down at the runeblade showed the sigils near its crossguard blazing cardinal red, and he glanced back up at the final spear wielder. A moment of mild consternation flitted through his mind, and the feeling that he was missing something percolated within his consciousness.
“Take what you’re given, I suppose,” he muttered before stepping forward and engaging the spear wielder. The skeleton showed more fighting spirit than its two peers and moved a little faster to try to avoid his blow—but not nearly with the speed required. Lightsbane struck the creature near the collarbone, and it crumbled to pieces with a shiver like the first two.
“Okay, three down, and 750 experience collected. That’ll put me at 900, which means I need 600 more,” he said while turning and jogging toward the next group of three. “Let’s get into it, then.”
Romulus charged the next group of skeletons quickly, and blinked when a trio of arrows whistled by a little closer, and a little faster. Perhaps the Archers were finally getting their act together, though that meant he needed to finish things faster. He couldn’t afford to let the skeletons find their stride.
The sword wielder was once again the forefront of the trio, and Romulus engaged the creature with the same brute force swing as he had the first skeleton he’d downed—only to be surprised by the ring of steel as the creature’s blade blocked his swing.
“Okay then!” he said with amusement and annoyance, stepping backward and then darting in again. This time he leaned into his rudimentary knowledge of sword combat and tried for a stab at the creature’s rusty-armored torso. The skeleton made as if to dodge, but was too slow. Its sword clanged loosely against Lightsbane’s blade, but the sentient weapon pierced the skeleton in its ribs.
With an identical shiver, it lost its binding and collapsed into bones.
“Two more,” he said with a grim smile and stepped immediately toward the archer.
Instead, the spear-wielding skeleton moved forward with surprising speed and interposed itself between Romulus and his target.
“Okay, you first then!” he said in response and engaged the skeleton with a vicious overhead swing. The creature side-stepped just a little faster than the sword skeleton had, and Romulus missed by a hair. The downward chop and its momentum left him momentarily off-balance, and the skeleton took that moment to jab with its spear.
A lance of pain flared through Romulus when the rusty tip bounced off the edge of his scalemail-armored ribs. He could feel the bruise already forming, but thankfully, the weapon had lacked the speed and power to penetrate his armor.
Lightsbane pulsed its anger, and Romulus felt his fury—fuelled as much by indignation as by embarrassment—rise to the fore. He pivoted off his right foot with every iota of his increased speed, shifted his grip on his runeblade, and sliced hard at the skeleton’s side in response to its attack.
The undead tried to move its spear to block, but it was bare seconds too late, and Lightsbane smashed through its barely-armored ribs and shattered its binding in a skeletal shiver of bones.
Before the creature had even finished collapsing, Romulus was already on the archer—and by sheer providence of movement dodged two whistling arrows that had been aimed precisely and with enough force to have punched into his body.
Alarm bells started ringing in his mind, but he ignored them momentarily and attacked the archer instead. He felt his posture shift subtly as his comfort with Lightsbane grew, and Romulus attached the creature with greater accuracy. He truncated his swings to maintain his relative positioning and keep moving to dodge the incoming arrows from the other skeletons. At the same time, his attacks harried the archer—which was dodging with notably more Agility than the first group’s bowman—into a more manageable position.
On the fifth strike, Romulus closed his rudimentary trap, feinting left with another slice as he had twice before, only to step forward abruptly while pressing his palm against Lightsbane’s edge and slam the other side of his blade into the skeleton’s neck like a clothesline.
A pulse of vicious approval came from the runeblade and Romulus realized simultaneously that the sword, as he had hoped, did not cut his palm. His faith in the runeblade’s magic and sentience seemed to be proven true, or perhaps his attunement to it made self-wounding impossible without active desire.
He could explore that later. All that mattered was that it worked; the skeleton collapsed with a shiver, and Romulus felt the now-welcome surge of energy that indicated a level-up. Black flames flickered across his body, and he kept himself focused on the remaining two groups of skeletons, which he noticed were now moving with even greater celerity and cohesion.
Something about their changes nagged at his mind, but the information wouldn’t come together.
Instead of dwelling on it, he charged forward again with his renewed Stamina and barked a command to the System.
“Invest all points into Agility!”
The System complied immediately, and Romulus felt his speed and the sureness of his footing increase measurably as he charged. No sooner had the effects taken place than his body’s instincts seemed to ramp up, and he dodged slightly to the left before he even registered he was doing so. A second later, two arrows punched through the space he’d occupied barely a second earlier.
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Romulus didn’t have time to marvel at the impact such a marginal increase to his Unconscious Dodge Chance created.
He was engaged with the third and second-to-last group of skeletons in moments.
The sword and spear skeletons moved to engage him this time, and Romulus found himself suddenly on the tail end of a decidedly unforgiving match-up. The sword came in from his right flank, the spear from his left, and both weapons forced him to move at the maximum speed he was capable of.
“What the hell?” he demanded, dodging left to avoid the sharp spear thrust, and lifting his blade to parry away the swinging sword. His body moved almost instinctively closer to the sword skeleton, and not even a heartbeat later, an arrow glanced off of his scalemail-armored ribs hard enough to send him staggering backward and sideways.
The blow was like the agonizing fist of revelation.
They get stronger each time I kill one of them!
It hit him at the exact moment as he reoriented himself, and Romulus almost cursed his own stupidity. He hadn’t even realized it, not with his heightened Intelligence nor with his [Perception] Skill. An unspoken curse died in his throat, he readjusted his grip on his sword, and then charged back in toward the steadily advancing melee skeletons.
The fact that both remaining groups hadn’t merged, for whatever reason, was his only advantage—and Romulus had a feeling that wouldn’t last much longer.
His sword moved like an extension of himself, and Lightsbane seemed to be guiding him as much as he was guiding it. The symbiotic bond between him and the runeblade had grown passively during the battle, and its results were showing.
The sword skeleton was sharply parried away when it came in for a sideways slash, the spear wielder received a truncated upward slash that sent its probing spearhead upward and wide, and then the sword skeleton was forced on the defensive with a pivoting stab at its midsection.
Romulus’ feet moved partially of their own accord, partially of his, and another whistling arrow flew past with a narrow miss. Breaths were counted in seconds, with steady inhales and exhales occurring with a natural three-second rhythm. The sword skeleton wasn’t given time to recover, on the backfoot as it was, before Lightsbane was slashing toward it again.
The runeblade met its rusted two-handed sword with a scream of steel-on-steel cacophany, Romulus shifted position to disadvantage both archers and the spear skeleton, and then his blade-lock ended with a sharp push of downward force that compelled the skeleton backward.
A moment later, he rushed in while it was off-balance and pierced its ribs.
The skeleton shivered and was falling apart while Romulus was already moving.
The archers fired off two more shots, notably faster than at the start of the fight, and Romulus grunted when one glanced off his scalemail, then let out a snarl of pain when one punched into his ribs in almost the same spot.
The armor just barely stopped it, but the blunt force trauma was very real.
Romulus barely managed to maintain his breath from the strike. Adrenaline, anger, and what he recognized as the feeling of [Indomitable] overriding his natural fear pushed him onward to engage the spear skeleton.
The creature shifted stance to intercept him with a clean thrust, only to barely scrape off of Romulus’ armored ribs. He reached out to grab the spear thrust as it did, planted his feet, and then slammed his sword-holding fist into the skeleton’s unarmored face. The creature creaked when its head snapped backward, only for Romulus to draw back his fist and deliver a rapid stab at the undead’s exposed lower body.
Lightsbane severed its binding, and the creature fell into a shiver of bone.
Having already learned the lesson of what came next, Romulus was already in full charge before half the bones even hit the ground. His sword arced up at maximum speed when the archer tried to retreat, and he did swear when it barely missed the skeleton.
Without missing a beat, Romulus launched himself forward in a half-charge, half-dive at the creature and extended Lightsbane out to tackle the reanimated minion outright while managing to ram the runeblade into its ribcage.
The bones shivered and lost cohesion midway through his crash to the marble floor.
Romulus knew he’d made a mistake before he was halfway to his feet.
The sound of the arrow met his ears just before it punched into the meat of his left shoulder with twice as much force as the previous direct hit.
Blood pumped from his wound, his health dropped in his HUD, and Romulus threw himself sideways to avoid the follow-up.
He barely had time to think.
The arrows were being unleashed as if from a living creature, and he suddenly remembered that these were level 25 enemies—and they were finally showing the difference in their stats.
Romulus was moving non-stop while he tried to think of what to do. The wound in his shoulder was agonizing, with the arrow shaft agitating the bone each time he moved. The only mercy was that it wasn’t his dominant limb, which wasn’t much but was also everything.
“Okay, bud, time to play for keeps,” he said to Lightsbane while reorienting himself and turning toward the final three.
The runesword pulsed a wrathful affirmation in his grip, and Romulus charged at maximum speed. His only deviation was to dodge incoming arrows, as much by sight as by the instinct borne by his increased Unconscious Dodge Chance. Projectiles whistled past his head or body by centimeters, and he barely had time to think about where the hell the skeleton was pulling them from.
Sword and spear were racing to meet him, albeit at different paces, which Romulus registered immediately.
Sword was notably clunkier and less steady on its feet than spear, who conversely seemed more nimble but lacked pure power. The spear was a weapon of precision thrusts and rapid movement, which, while it also required Strength, was more reliant on Agility due to its design. A sword, conversely, could afford to invest primarily in Strength.
Romulus felt the beginnings of a tactic entering his mind and darted to the left toward the spear skeleton.
He could go toe-to-toe with a beefier sword wielder.
He could not afford to deal with an even faster spear wielder.
A final arrow pierced the narrowing gap between both sides, and then they met.
Romulus ducked left and under a spear aimed at his throat, parried away a rapid follow-up thrust, and stepped closer into the spear skeleton’s guard. His efforts were aided inadvertently by the sword skeleton, who interfered with spear’s movements due to its own attempts to navigate around to engage with Romulus.
Spear attempted a warding thrust, and Romulus allowed it to glance off his side, hissing out against the pain and using his ruined arm to pin the weapon at his waist.
Spear tried to pull it back, and he grinned at it viciously.
Romulus stepped in closer while pulling on the weapon with his sword hand, then used that same hand for a truncated close-quarters slash at Spear’s exposed neck.
The skeleton’s lower skull shattered under the force of the blow, its bones shivered, and it fell to the ground with a diffused binding.
Two left.
Romulus dropped the spear and charged at the sword skeleton, which was already in his proximity. Lightsbane emanated pure bloodlust as they engaged, and he found himself relying more on the sword than his own capability as Lightsbane passively guided his arm. Thrusts were parried away, slices were dodged or deflected, and Romulus gritted his teeth against agony each time he was forced to block a powerful slash with both hands.
Sword bore down on him with a living fighter’s speed and fury. Still, Romulus refused to be outdone, leveraging every iota of his budding skills and invested Attributes to keep his ground. He constantly moved in a half-circle one way or the other, dodging arrows and working to find some hole or weakness in sword’s rhythm.
It was when he realized the task was impossible that he understood how completely fucked he was.
Romulus’ eyes darted to the archer, and he abruptly shifted stance to deliver a fending kick to sword’s chest.
The skeleton stumbled backward long enough for Romulus to spin and blitz the archer, taking an arrow that cut deeply into his cheek and sliced through his ear for his trouble. Pain, fury, adrenaline, and [Indomitable] pushed him onward, and he outpaced the retreating archer in a near-suicidal straight-line charge.
Another arrow slashed against his ribs, severing the scalemail links thereupon. Romulus roared in response and launched himself off his feet to smash good-shoulder-first into the archer’s skeletal body.
Both of them went down in a heap, and Romulus scrambled to roll around and wildly thrust his sword at the skeleton, impacting marble three times in the desperate scuffle before he managed to punch through its ribs.
One left.
Romulus spun at the whine of steel in the air and threw himself into a clumsy, inelegant roll across the marble. The arrow in his shoulder cracked into pieces in an echoing sound of shattering wood within the immense entrance hall, accompanying the clinking and clanging of scalemail and runeblade as he finished his roll.
Sword was already coming toward him when Romulus forced himself to his feet.
“Gotta sheath the sword,” he said while glancing at his now half-depleted health. The bleed damage alone would kill him. “Just need 150 by my math, Bane. Gotta do it.”
The sword pulsed its confusion at his words, but he had no time to explain.
Sword reached him, and the fight was on.
Romulus met the now-withering power of the undead head on and felt every iota of its level 25 prowess. Power, speed, reaction, durability—the skeleton possessed all four in spades. The only thing Romulus had going for him was that even at its highest enhancement, the skeleton wasn’t as fast as its contemporaries—and Romulus had Lightsbane.
Runic steel met rusted metal in repeated clangs and blood-chilling screeches as the pair exchanged blows, filling the chamber with cacophanous echoes of brutalist conflict. Slashes were blocked, slices parried, thrusts deflected, and Romulus felt himself flagging quickly. He had lost too much blood, he was near the end of his stamina, and he was simply outmatched by levels. He knew that.
Magic was his last resource, but trying to learn that in the middle of a fight would be absolutely brain-dead. He wasn’t some genius chosen one, waiting for the right moment to unleash his magnificent potential: he was a gamer and he was losing.
Romulus’ eyes worked to assess the speed and force of the sword’s blows, and he vaguely recognized a pattern from his repeated battles against slower versions of the same enemy. Instinct, courage, battle madness, desperation, and pure machismo pushed him to keep fighting long enough to see sword repeat the same thrust it always made after seven attacks.
This time, Romulus didn’t deflect; he shifted position and locked his jaw.
The blade brutalized its way into his right shoulder with a piercing of his scalemail.
Romulus used the opportunity to swap Lightsbane to his wounded hand, which he had avoided the entire duel, and slammed the sword into the skeleton’s ribs while his shoulders burned in joint agony.
The azure flames in the last skeleton’s skull gutted out and died with a shiver of bone, before the creature finally collapsed.
The moment it did, black flames erupted along Romulus’ body, he felt the arrow’s remnants and the rust-riddled blade forced out of him, and he laughed hysterically at the overwhelming sensation of pain bleeding into sudden relief—like a freezing shower during summer’s heat.
His HUD pinged at him, and his eyes slid to his chat log.
What he saw made him laugh even harder.