Saintess Summons Skeletons

I need to keep the damage to a minimum, we wouldn’t want to destroy the next heart of velania by accident.

Quickly coming up with a plan in her head, Sofia spent a good ten seconds reverting the flow in her demonic mana circuits to use the melee form. She didn’t plan on using the demon spells so she might as well use the extra stats.

She landed in the nave, in one of the few spots relatively free of zombies, and put on her crown, which she had taken off before in order to sneak through the main room. Immediately, the Zombies caught fire due to [THE GLORIOUS] title.

Several singing voices rose all at once, and the tall zombie instantly took notice, pausing his violent clobbering of the Kidjikkiks to turn toward Sofia.

The singers first.

Sofia felt that she received the High priest skeleton’s speed boost spell, that was all she needed.

Flying above the zombies to reach the singer was a bit too dangerous with the hundreds of fireballs held in suspension by the solar mage’s channeled spell, so Sofia went for the more direct route. She tore herself a way through the zombies. She needed no weapon, she was the weapon, one punch or a tail swipe, and any of the lesser zombies were torn to shreds.

The zombies clumsily counter-attacked, but without their magic, they were pitifully slow to Sofia’s eyes, who could effortlessly avoid all of their attacks no matter the direction they came from.

She quickly found herself in front of one of the singers, the creature stopped singing and tried to flee, but thick walls of bone appeared to seal its path. By the time it could react, it was too late. With her left hand, Sofia grabbed the singer, and she plunged her right hand into the creature’s torso.

She just had to send a quick mana pulse to instantly feel where the singer’s mana heart was. She mercilessly ripped it out.

‘You have defeated [Voice of the candle - lv. 264]’

The tall zombie had made its way toward Sofia in the meantime, its large hands struck down. Sofia summoned herself behind the tall zombie to avoid the strike, using this opportunity to give him a quick strike with her tail before she ran off to the second singer still chanting.

The chant stopped before Sofia could reach the singer, and a column of flames burst from the ceiling.

It cost Sofia a bit more than three hundred thousand mana to negate it. She wasn’t currently using her mana to fight, so that was nothing, her mana collided with the incoming flames, and the attack simply collapsed into a thick mana fog.

After a few seconds and leaving behind a bloody trail of zombie gore, Sofia reached the second singer.

‘You have defeated [Voice of the candle - lv. 257]’

She already knew of the approximate location of one more, so finding it was easy, and she disposed of it without issue. The tall zombie threw some black lightning at her as she was doing so, but she negated that before it could even really leave the zombie’s hands.

‘You have defeated [Voice of the candle - lv. 269]’

I think there’s one more?

Sofia tried to find the last singer, but before she could do so, the solar mage skeleton ran out of mana. The hundreds of fireballs held above the swarm of zombies fell all at once. The explosion was bright and intense, a gigantic compound ball of fire engulfing the entire underground cathedral.

Sofia just let herself die. She could use the extra stats from [One with Suffering], and still had two more unlife runes up anyway.

She reappeared three seconds later, when the flames had settled. Of course, the zombies were completely unharmed by their own fire, but Bookie’s skeletons had all succumbed, even the singing choir.

Big hands came crashing down from above almost as soon as Sofia regained consciousness. Sofia blocked by raising her right arm, the dragon scale armguard absorbing a lot of the shock, but still leaving her reeling.

You’re annoying, leave me alone.

Taking the opportunity of having direct contact, Sofia blasted about one million mana points’ worth of [Aberrant sunlight] curse directly into the tall zombie’s mana veins.

The zombie’s attention immediately switched to the nearest fireball.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The only slight issue was that said fireball was flying in the direction of Sofia, but at least the tall zombie was no longer directly targeting her.

Now I can move.

Sofia ran through the zombies in a random direction, anything to take some distance from the big guy, while she also threw handfuls of bone tokens in the air, quickly switching her vision back and forth through them to try to find the remaining singer.

The bastard is hiding behind Sorrow’s statue!

Somehow the zombie had made its way to Sofia’s previous location after she left, perhaps thinking that she wouldn’t check.

Should’ve stayed hidden in the crowd.

Sofia flew up. Being instantly followed by hundreds of fireballs being thrown her way.

She negated them all. Her mana dropping below the halfway point in a second, she flew all the way to the altar and drop kicked the last singer as she landed. It died on the spot.

‘You have defeated [Voice of the candle - lv. 252]’

“There, silence reestablished.”

But the remaining zombies did not disappear, nor did their numbers stop growing at all, more and more kept coming from the side entrances, there were thousands within the nave already, and Sorrow’s statue standing in the way was the only thing currently preventing them from drowning Sofia in a rain of fireballs.

Do I really have to kill them all?!

But I need to make sure not to break the heart of Velania, and I have no idea where it is. I would assume it might be the mana heart of the tall zombie but I couldn’t feel where it was even when he was close… Without the rot or the explosive bolts, how do I clean up this mess?

The zombies slowly approached the altar, the tall one actually killing quite a few, as he greedily grabbed them with a crazed smile to eat their candles, biting off arms and heads in the process. Some zombies were starting to fall strictly due to the flames of victory’s continuous burn.

It’s subtle but I could swear the small zombies are mana-linked to the big one somehow… At least I don’t have to worry about it as long as the curse persists.

But how to deal with the rest? The flames of victory take about ten seconds to kill them, it feels like, but the range is not that big, can’t even cover a tenth of the nave.

Well… the zombies are pretty dumb. Let’s just be dumb too.

The spine of the black sun appeared atop Sofia’s scepter, its bones held together by warm light currents. Adding it to the scepter made it more than three meters tall, making it as menacing as it was unwieldy.

It’s rare that I actually use the sword form these days, huh.

Sofia added more bone thickness to her armor, making her extra bulky and hopefully a bit more resistant to the fireballs, and she jumped out from her hiding spot.

It was relatively safe to bet that the heart of Velania would be in the tall Zombie, if anywhere, so the other ones were safe to obliterate. The ‘sword’ did not even have a cutting edge but the power differential was big enough that Sofia’s strikes cut through the undead with barely any resistance, causing multiple solar flares to erupt on the battlefield.

If one strike cut through ten zombies, ten explosions would follow, engulfing a wide area in burning orange light, charring everything to a crisp and leaving black burn marks on the stone ground.

Hundreds of zombies perished every time Sofia swung her blade, but just as many fireballs would fly her way from all corners of the cathedral. At first she dispelled them one by one with [Heat Death], but she soon ran out of mana, barely sustaining her sword’s upkeep with her constant regeneration.

The tall zombie was running crazy, jumping around trying to catch the explosions, and getting continuously blasted by the flares, yet surviving just fine.

Before Sofia could clean even a third of the cathedral, she died, drowned under a constant barrage of fireballs.

Then she stood back up, and proceeded to kill another thousand undead, with solar flares of increasing intensity as her strength got buffed by [One with suffering], now each flare resembling the explosion of small angel bolts, before she died again in the exact same way.

Three seconds later, she was alive again, with no rune left. Instead of feeling unsafe, it was quite the contrary. Now, for this short time where she was surrounded by zombies, she had achieved quasi-immortality.

Sofia swung the spine of the black sun, engulfing the cathedral in countless solar flares. Having witnessed how the tall zombie survived them with no issue, she held nothing back, and let the flow of battle consume her.

[Spine of the Black Sun]: Invokes the weapon ‘Spine of the Black Sun’.

The Spine is a blunt segmented longsword that may also be used as an extendable whip.

Deals low physical damage.

Upon hitting an enemy with the Spine, creates a solar burst, damaging all enemies in a 5.00 (7.8)m (1 + skill level/50) diameter sphere around the point of impact.

The explosion’s power scales with the skill level and the strength of the hit.

Recover Health equal to 24.9% (Skill level/10) of the damage dealt by the explosion.

The spine will disappear if it leaves your hands.

Requires a 3 (1.5) seconds channeling to deploy. Costs 100 (50) mana per second to maintain.

With the [Radiance] classless, she healed for 50% of the damage dealt by the spine. This was almost never useful, as she rarely fought with the spine without her unlife runes up, so she could never use the healing; until now.

Fireballs struck one after the other.

Her health never moved.