But where was the fun in that? I’d been waiting to tear my uncle’s head off his shoulders for years now, and this time I was going to make sure he didn’t escape through one of his portals again. This time he and I would fight, and there would be no quarter asked, and none given. Only one of us would walk away from the encounter alive, and I fully intended that to be me.
Feeling a surge of fresh confidence rushing through me, I jumped out of the gray tree, and before I even hit the black, glossy ground below I was back in my body, back in the real world, rushing through the air at speed, gripped by the claws of an undead harpy—and I was ready to kick some ass on an epic scale.
We were currently flying through dense clouds, which made it pointless to try out the new bone bow for the moment. As soon as the clouds began to break down into wispy rips and semi-translucent lumps, and I could see the ground again, I closed my eyes and pictured the Bone Bow I’d seen in the skill tree.
Instantly I felt a weight in my hands, and I looked down and marveled at the sight. It was a thing of magic, of course, and could materialize or dematerialize in the blink of an eye, but when it was here in physical form it felt as solid and heavy as any earthly crossbow.
The entire weapon was constructed of bones of various shapes and sizes—all of them human—and while it had the shape and dimensions of any regular crossbow, the bones gave it a very unique look. One visual touch I especially appreciated was the human skull with a wide open jaw at the front of the weapon. When the bone shards were fired off, they would pass down the rail of the crossbow and through the jaws of the skull, as if they were being spit out of the skull’s wide-open jaws.
“All right,” I said, chuckling eagerly, “let’s give this motherfucker a few test shots, shall we?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to load the Bone Bow, but, as had turned out to be the case for many of the magic skills I’d acquired since becoming the God of Death, the process was pretty much automatic; all I had to do was think about what I wanted to happen, and it would happen.
In my mind’s eye I pictured loading the weapon, and I saw a flash of white coming from the ground far below. I almost flinched, because it looked as if the projectile—which was hurtling upwards at an incredible speed, like an arrow loosed at me from a powerful war-bow on the ground—was going to impale me. But then, with a barely perceptible shudder, the bone shard loaded itself into the rail of the crossbow, and that was it. It was ready to go.
Beneath me, I saw nothing but jagged, steep mountain peaks, which didn’t look like they supported any form of life. So, I picked a particularly vividly colored rock. If I’d been shooting a regular bow, I would have had to take the angle, distance, and wind into account, but I had a feeling that this weapon would not shoot like any ordinary crossbow.
There was a crack in the skull’s cranium that served as the Bone Bow’s sights, and I used this to aim at the colored rock. When I was directly on target, I squeezed the crossbow’s trigger—and the bone shard was just gone. I didn’t see it in flight, the way I would have seen an arrow or crossbow bolt; there’s wasn’t even a blur of color or a streak in the air. Basically the moment I squeezed the trigger, a puff of dirt and stone shards simply erupted from the brightly colored rock.
I’d used plenty of bows and crossbows over the years, but none compared in power to the Bone Bow, not even the most powerful war-bow I’d ever shot. And as for aim, no bow in existence came near; there was virtually no drop in the projectile’s trajectory, at least from this distance, and wind had almost no effect on it either; all I had to do was line up the skull sights, take aim, and squeeze the trigger.
And the best thing about this crossbow, I discovered very quickly, was that it reloaded itself instantly. Before I even thought about reloading, another bone shard had jumped out of the earth far below and loaded itself into the rail of my crossbow. With this thing, I was like the equivalent of an entire division of crossbowmen and archers. My only limit was the number of skeletons in the ground from which I could extract ammunition. Since the Temple of Blood had been the site of plenty of sacrifices in days long past, I figured there’d be more than enough corpses under the ground there.
I now knew what the Bone Bow was capable of, so I closed my eyes, thought about the fact that I didn’t need it for the time being, and that was that: it vanished from my hands as quickly as it had materialized.
I was itching to test it out on an enemy, but that would come soon enough. What I had to make use of now were my old assassin skills of stealth and surprise. It was tempting, of course, to charge in there and just start shooting shit up with my Bone Bow while calling up Bone Prisons to trap enemy soldiers, but I didn’t know what kind of magic my uncle was capable of wielding now, or what kind of dangerous minions he had
