I fell, dragging the skeleton down with me.
No more kicks to the midsection, I thought, using Corpse Fire to burn off the screaming nerve endings so I could move again.
Dead Reckoning pinged above me. The green-stoned skeleton.
Rolling up to a kneel, I threw a shield-reinforced elbow. Whip blades clanked off Death Metal, throwing sparks that smelled like ozone, but the shot staggered the skeleton.
I twisted back around as the purple skeleton brought its head up. Its forehead gem glinted, directly in Death Metal’s path of destruction.
The purple skeleton wrapped a wing around its skull before my shield landed. The shot wasn’t a heavy one because of my angle, but the hollow wing bones crunched under my shield.
Past the purple skeleton’s elaborately carved skull, I saw a massive flaming punch of Warcry’s send a skeleton tumbling backward through a dark doorway.
Immediately, Dead Reckoning popped up with a dozen more skeletons in the next room. Their solid life points swarmed like they’d been waiting for something to trigger them.
Maybe they really were motion-activated.
“More skeletons incoming,” I yelled at Warcry. “Three o’clock.”
“Eyes on your own fight, grav,” he snapped. “You’re about to lose!”
The green skeleton’s urumi sliced toward the calf of my good leg, while the purple skeleton took a shot at the back of my skull. I shielded the back of my neck from the purple’s attack and burst out of my crouch, pouring on the Ki-speed as I barreled toward the green skeleton.
It wasn’t as fast as its buddy. The protective wing was still descending to protect the gem in its forehead when Death Metal connected. The glowing green stone shattered with a sound like breaking glass, and the skeleton crumbled to bone dust.
I whirled around, throwing another elbow at where the purple skeleton should’ve been, but Death Metal cut through an identical rain of bone dust. The whip sword dropped, and the unbroken purple gemstone hit the floor and bounced.
“They’re connected somehow,” I yelled. “Take out one skeleton, it takes out the other!”
“Easy, then, ain’t it?” Warcry snarled sarcastically as he backpedaled away from the doorway leading into the other room.
Skeleton buddies poured out of the darkness in pairs, holding hands and packing ancient weapons.
Skelebuddies
WE SPENT THE NEXT FOUR hours wading through skelebuddies. We fought whip swords, kukri, spears, and even chained-together kamas, learning how to deal with each new kind of weapon by trial and error.
Ranged weapons were the worst, because neither of us had a ranged attack we could use on the wielders. Dead Man’s Hand wouldn’t rip those strange, solid life points out, and none of my Spirit attacks seemed to bother the skeletons. Even Death Metal, I realized, only stopped their mundane weapons because they didn’t have Spirit of their own, and it only crushed their gemstones when my elbow shattered that glowing stone. The scythe was a no-go, too. Its blade was too huge to control enough to hit such a tiny target with, and the skeletons tangled themselves around the handle and blade, hanging me up.
Even Warcry admitted by the end of the first couple skelebuddy swarms that he could’ve used some kind of weapon to extend his reach. His prosthetic smashed skull stones like a baseball bat through a plate glass window, but getting close enough to target them opened us up to all sorts of potentially debilitating wounds that the script tattoos took longer to heal. He tried picking up one of the spears, but the second he touched it, the whole thing crumbled to dust like its skeleton wielder. We both tried a bunch of the dropped weapons after that, but they all fell apart in our hands.
As we progressed into the inner rooms of the temple, the support columns and walls blocked the outside light, and we had to fight by HUD lights and the light from Warcry’s flames. That probably would’ve looked cool if it was on a movie, but it was a pain in the butt in real life. Without Dead Reckoning keeping track of everything, I would’ve been in serious trouble.
Late in the game, Warcry and I realized that if we kept the fight contained to one room, we didn’t trigger any skelebuddies in the other rooms. But if anything crossed the threshold—one of us, a skeleton, a dropped weapon, a tooth bouncing across the floor—then a new batch of triggered skeletons flooded out like hornets from a kicked nest.
It had to be something with physical mass, though. I could send Miasma into the room and nothing would happen. Skelebuddies didn’t seem to have any Spirit of their own or see my Spirit attacks coming at them. They reacted to my shields and Warcry’s flaming punches and kicks because there was a fist or elbow behind them, but they ignored Three Corpse Sickness and didn’t even flinch at the ghost hands coming up out of the floor when I tried Death Grip. Or maybe they could see it but didn’t care. None of it had an effect on them, anyway.
The flow of skeletons finally cut off when we cleared a small central room with a wide stone staircase.
When no more swarmed us, Warcry looked at me to see if we were clear.
I nodded.
He let out a whoosh of breath and slumped in a heap across the bottom stairs.
I dropped in the middle of the uneven floor, sucking wind. A little puff of bone dust flew up around my face, making the air taste like dirt. It was gross, but I was too wiped out to do more than turn my head.
We’d been fighting for a solid hour this last push. The script tattoo was burning like a bonfire, working overtime to repair
