[Omen of the Witchblade] Chapter 129 – Rook, I Choose You

Mel kept watch on the terrace after dragging the bodies into the alley and out of sight. The locals had returned after the danger had passed. Not a single guard was poking around.

Yeah, I’m going to like it here, Mel thought to herself. She glanced back deeper into the gloom of the alley.

Class Skill: [Necromancy]

Charlie brushed off her dark purple and green robes.

Two new, freshly made skeletons stood there, waiting to be of service. Skeletons created from the corpses of their enemies, cleaned of blood and viscera. They even wore some of their equipment they had in life, though most of it had been broken and useless.

Mel had to admit, it was quite convenient. Charlie worked efficiently. No bodies–none recognizable at any rate–were left behind. Mel looked at Wrug, tucked away in the alcove in the alley. “You good with this, bud?”

Wrug looked uncomfortable, but nodded all the same. “Lady Charlie save little Jinxie. Wrug no judge.”

During the process of necromancy, there were curious byproducts left behind. Not a basic pile of guts or anything so mundane, but multiple [Dim Humanity Blood Vials], [Lesser Sin Extracts], [Decay Powders], and a single [Selfish Yellow Solution].

“Sin, but no virtue?” Charlie muttered to herself. “I suppose it’s hardly surprising, if it reflects who they were in life.”

Mel wriggled her fingers looking at the vials of blood. “Don’t mind if I do.” She uncorked the bottles of blood and summoned her [Sanguine Coat] to her shoulders. “Ah. So much better.”

Charlie watched this with great interest.

She looked at Charlie. “What? It’s not like they were using it.”

Charlie smirked darkly, tearing her smoldering gaze away from Mel.

We have a surprising synergy, Mel thought to herself.

The only material Charlie strictly needed to reanimate the dead was their bones.

The exact thing Mel left behind when practicing ritual magic with [Blood Tax].

Mel flipped the collar of her [Sanguine Coat] up while she watched Charlie work with greater interest. What better way to heal a rift between our two camps than to have Charlie and I work together?

The Magi seemed to accept Mel. At least they weren’t quite so standoffish as before, but there was still an unspoken tension she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Plus, Mel’s group needed a healer. Ideally, they needed a tank too, but with a good enough healer and properly skilled heavy hitters they might be able to get away without one.

Even among the Magi, those were the two rarest class types.

Energy and vitality returned to Charlie as she wove her hands in spellcasting. She breathed in vivid, hazy strands of blue, green, and red from the bodies. The weary exhaustion faded from her features.

“The leftover vital resources of humanity,” Charlie explained to a questioning look from Mel.

Mel jerked her chin to the skeletons. “I like them a lot better this way. Less chatty.” She studied Charlie. “So what sort of limitations do you have with that skill? I imagine you can’t just waltz over to a graveyard and go all ‘heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to corpse army I go’ right?”

“There’s only so many undead I can sustain and summon under my control at once,” she explained, then took a steadying breath. “I refuse to turn them into feral undead.”

“...But you could?”

Mel wasn’t squeamish around the undead, but she didn’t like them. They didn’t feel pain. Most could sense life rendering her [Hidden Mist] useless, and you often had to destroy them twice.

Charlie looked down, eyes shadowed by her slanted witch hat. “I won’t try here. I don’t particularly want to. It’s gotten out of control in the past, and I feel that was more than enough to stain my heart sufficiently black. Even if there were no innocents hurt.”

“Let’s keep it that way, yeah? Sounds like the sort of thing the Shard would come down on you like the hammer of god and smite you for.” Mel said. “Then again, the Covenants exist. So maybe there are things outside of the Shard’s purview.”

“It was not a good place,” she admitted.

Mel bundled up the items she looted from the bodies in Green Cloak’s [Cloak of the Hunter]. Something she also looted from the corpse.

It tickled her pink that she was making one of the corpses of her would-be killer hold his own loot for her. “I don’t know how you aren’t just constantly followed by an entourage of these calcium cretins.”

The skeletons marched up to Charlie obediently, moving in synchronized tempo like a group of trained soldiers. “The durability of their bones isn’t terrible. The wear on my Defenders has pushed them too far.” She studied the minions, then popped an arm correctly into place. “To answer your question, Mel, I’ve been wary of how the people of Seabrim Crater will react. The Holy See was already a little too interested in me. And I’ve tried not to be too…threatening around you. I could summon more, if you want.”

Mel shrugged. “The undead don’t bother me. Where do you store them?”

Charlie fluttered her fingers that were covered in various silversteel and bone rings. “My storage rings.”

Aspect Skill: [Summon Undead]

More skeletons materialized all around them, serving as a guard. They were armed with shields, spears, and maces. A lone skeleton looked rather pathetic and clumsy, but together, they appeared a lot more menacing.

The skeletons looked around with green necromantic fire for eyes, then went eerily still. Dark, shadowy mana formed the magical replacement for their joints, allowing them to move freely without any of that gross squelching that usually accompanied the undead.

Mel looked them up and down with a critical eye. “You’ll need to invest in cloaks and padding if you want to pass them off as people. You ever thought about putting masks on them? A simple wicker mask to hide their features would make it very hard to tell if they were undead or just golems.”

“The clothing I’ve thought of. Not so much the mask, though the idea is cool. It wasn’t much of a concern during the trial. People often thought they were normal monsters interfering when they were trying to kill or take me.” Charlie offered a few cloaks to the skeletons, who put them on themselves. “It was funny when the skeletons fell to pieces. Competitors thought they defeated them, despite the obvious lack of Shardscript.”

Charlie hardly had to do any work to clothe them.

The most she had to do was assert control over one of the new ones that struggled to put a simple cloak on properly. She clicked her tongue at it in disapproval. The cloak was twisted all around. It took three of the skeletons working together to fix it.

“Bitch, you used my short ass like a crutch when you could have been carried by an entourage of bony boys!”

Charlie bit her lower lip. “Yeah, well…Can you really blame me?”

Mel stared. “Yes!”

She laughed quietly. “I honestly…didn’t have the mana. I sacrificed my health and stamina for the mondoceroses. But I still would have done the same just to be near you.”

Mel threw up her arms and stalked out of the alley into the terrace now that the dirty work was done. Nobody was going to find these two.

Assuming somebody was looking for them, that is.

Mel stepped up to the ideal location Wrug marked out. It was set between a potion shop and a bookshop. One of the limitations of the Rook was that it couldn’t be set down just anywhere.

It needed buildings on either side of it.

The potion shop had some real old-world charm. It occupied a corner lot with a large, shaded bench under an old tree just outside the shop. The edge of the terrace overlooked the rest of the Seabrim Crater below.

Setting the [Rook Card] down, Mel directed the ritual spell to take the space between the two shops. Not before trying to take the corner lot anyway, just for kicks.

She already knew it wouldn’t work, but she needed to test it for sure. Besides, it only took an extra minute or two. Could you blame a girl for trying?

Charlie, Wrug, and the skeletons kept watch while Mel was busy.

Like most old-world buildings, they shared a wall. You couldn’t even slide the card between the bricks of one shop and the other. Mel had tried.

The card rose up in the air, turned end-over-end, and then did the impossible. It slipped between the bookshop and the potion shop.

Between one blink and the next, the Rook sprang into being. The terrace now had a new building, but it was hard to tell that anything had changed. Nothing was cracked, damaged, or even flaking.

Sandwiched between the two shops was Mel’s own place. It was rather plain and boring with a single wide window and a red-painted door, but it was all hers.

It rose three stories like the surrounding buildings and looked just like them, warts and all.

“Wrug impressed,” said the mondoceros. “Will check on alley.” He shuffled off to the nearest alley entrance. Mel was certain that there was another entrance to the shop from the alley just like all the others.

“It really blends in,” Charlie said admiringly, adjusting the brim of her witch hat.

Mel stepped to the side and looked at the potion shop. “Pete’s Potions, huh?” Mel said, reading the faded lettering on the sign. “Let’s go meet our new neighbor.” She looked back at Charlie’s skeletons. “Probably want to leave your friends out here.”

“Sure.” Charlie stepped out of the wall of shields and weapons, then glanced back at the undead. “If you want, in the future, just order them around. They’re like automatons running in the back of my mind.” She paused, then added more to herself. “Of course, something like a mana link dial would be better.”

Mel paused on her way to the shop’s steps. “What’s a mana link dial?”

“It’s an entangled device that communicates pulses of mana between the two interconnected dials. Usually there’s a three-dimensional compass on it that can be manipulated to send directions. Easy to communicate code too, if the holders aren’t dimwits.”

That was a new thing to Mel, but then again, Charlie literally came from a different universe. Maybe summoners were more common there. She had a hard enough time managing her own life. Taking charge of another creature’s?

Hell no.

Hush picked that exact moment to slither out from beneath her [Sanguine Coat] and look up adoringly at her with his ruby red eyes.

Okay, maybe one is fine, Mel thought to herself as she stroked the glassy scales on his head.

“He’s especially cute for a serpent,” Charlie said softly.

Together, Mel and Charlie walked into the potion shop, ready to greet their new neighbor.

The harsh, acrid smells of alchemy hit them both like a physical wall as soon as they entered.

Above them, the ceiling was stained a thousand different colors. Some patches were still dripping, others smoldering, and a few changed shape and position before their eyes.

If the owner cared about their shop at all, it sure as hell didn’t look it. Bits and pieces of junk were strewn about the place. The only thing that showed they cared about anything, was locking up every little thing that might be valuable.

Instead of a potions shop, it looked like a prison for wilting ingredients and dust-caked bottles of dimly glowing liquid.

The moment Mel saw the man with his feet kicked up on the counter and a trashy romance novel in his hands, she hated his guts.