Chapter 137

137 Bone chimera

The skeleton rose to its feet and began to look around vaguely, before its eyes fixed on Athos. He walked unsteadily until he was face to face with him, each step becoming firmer than the last. An awkward silence hung between them as the two entered into a staring contest, despite neither of them having eyes.

“Y-yo.” Athos repeated after a few minutes of silence in an attempt to break the tense atmosphere, but the skeleton continued to stare at him. Athos took a step back and the skeleton took a step forward, keeping some distance between them.

‘This thing doesn’t seem to be thinking about anything and isn’t connected to me, so I can’t mentally sort it out. Maybe you can order it verbally?’ Athos thought.

“Give me your hand.” He actually said it, treating the skeleton as if it were a dog. No reaction.

“Why can’t I control him? Is he incomplete in some way?” Athos began to wonder. He circled the skeleton as if looking at it from another angle would help him understand it better.

The common skeleton also turned around to continue facing Athos, until Athos gave up trying to circle it. “Well let’s try to remove a few more corpses for now.”

Athos began to melt the ice and remove another corpse, when a pair of bony hands began to lift the corpse and help it. The common skeleton seemed to follow him willingly.

Together they removed 5 corpses and Athos turned them into ordinary skeletons, hoping to find any patterns of behavior that would help him understand them. He needed to know if he could control them before testing anything else.

‘Hey, does anyone have any idea how to control ordinary undead? I created some for my experiments, but they are soulless undead and do nothing but follow me in silence.’ Athos spoke to all the skeletons, giving up trying to understand these skeletons.

.....

‘Boss, there are no soulless beings. If you created a new undead, a new soul formed in that undead. A newborn soul with no memory or personality. It’s useless to try to talk to something like that, because he has no idea what words are.’ Treevor replied a few seconds later.

‘You must be careful, master. I don’t know much about necromancy, but what little I do know, the undead indiscriminately attack anything they come across. That shouldn’t happen since the master is an undead too, but there’s no way to predict what they’ll do.’ Emilia also spoke.

‘So I need a way to communicate with them? But if they don’t understand my words and no mental link, how am I supposed to do that?’ Athos asked, looking at the skeletons around him. They surrounded him in a semicircle and continued to stare at him.

‘Did you create them from your own mana, perhaps to control them like you do with a spell? Try to impose your will clearly on them.’ Treevor suggested.

Athos tested Treevor’s theory and focused on one of the skeletons, trying to command him to approach. He closed his eyes and concentrated, realizing for the first time that there was a connection between them. It was very small compared to the black chain so he hadn’t noticed. It was thin as a single hair, but it definitely existed.

Athos focused on that tiny link and noticed that its core was releasing tiny pulses of corrupted mana that strengthened that link. The skeleton core did the same, although it seems more like an involuntary act than something done consciously.

When the bond was strong enough, Athos began to hear a noise in his mind that increased in intensity as his bond strengthened. Incoherent thoughts that did not belong to Athos began to infiltrate his mind, causing a slight headache.

The skeleton’s thoughts were flowing through his mind, but there was no malice in it, just genuine curiosity. They would normally be filled with hatred towards the necromancer who created them, an instinctive reaction of every undead to living creatures.

The necromancer would have to subdue the newborn undead’s will, using his mana and superior will to subdue it while it was still weak. It was the reason why so many nobles were interested in the battle of the keep, presuming that a necromancer had figured out a way to overcome this limitation.

Athos obviously didn’t have this problem. The skeleton recognized Athos as an equal, not just because he was another undead, but because they felt a kind of familiarity with him because they had the same energy signature.

The skeleton had no clue and just followed him, mimicking his every action. What Athos needed to do now was communicate in a way that the skeleton understood. Athos sent thoughts of submission and the skeleton offered no resistance, its sense of self-preservation completely non-existent.

It was a natural instinct for undead to act in groups and the strongest would always come out on top. Athos did the same with the other five skeletons, gaining full control over all of them. The sensation was strange, as the skeletons were willingly obeying him rather than being forced or corrupted, but Athos did not question the present gain.

‘Disassemble.’ Athos mentally ordered, sending a mental image of what he wanted the skeletons to do. Five of the six skeletons fell to the ground in piles of bones, before Athos took the bones from a pile and fused them into the last skeleton’s entire body.

He used death vision and watched intently as the skeleton randomly added bones to its body, the core of the bone pile began to pulse and move. The core began to slowly approach the main skeleton’s solar plexus, sending out pulses of mana to try to expel it.

The main core also sent out pulses of mana to try to push back the invader, but none of the attacks did any damage to their targets. The cores absorbed each other’s energy without resistance, forming a link between them.

The cores pulsed in sync, until a single tendril made of life force emerged from both cores and formed a bridge between them. The original core seemed to absorb some of the invader’s life force, increasing in size while the other decreased.

Athos was shocked by this, having never seen anything like it. The cores were stable and didn’t look like they were going to fuse, so Athos made some mental notes of what had happened.

Athos fused the rest of the bones together again, wanting to make sure the process was a success. The bones have fused together naturally now, without the skeletons needing to focus. Athos feared that the skeleton might be surprised by the completely misshapen body, but he didn’t seem particularly bothered by anything.

He took a few wobbly steps as if he wasn’t used to his new balance, but got used to it with surprising speed. Divided thinking didn’t seem particularly strange to them either. Their minds did not merge as Athos supposed they would, but found a balance like a hive mind.

Once he was sure there was no danger and this new form was stable, Athos decided to add the next skeleton. The core of the new skeleton began to move like the others as soon as half the bones were added. It joined the other two at the center of the skeleton and forming tendrils of mana, but merging only with the original core.

The main core absorbed part of the new core and grew again. Athos realized that it would be okay to fuse the other skeletons together and had them all fuse together at once. The undead could no longer be called a mere skeleton now, looking more like a bone abomination.

A surprising discovery that Athos made was that it was possible to change the shape of bones, rather than just fusing them together as they were. He noticed this when he tried to heal one of the skeletons who had a bent arm, probably an injury from when he was killed, and noticed that the bone looked strangely malleable.

The bone broke when Athos bent it too much, but he quickly healed it, consuming his own skin to regenerate it. With a little more testing, Athos realized he could use a mixture of corruption and darkness to shape the bones, creating his bone crafter spell.

The cores also connected to the main one, further increasing its power. It wasn’t even close to a trained mage yet, but it sure would be a threat to a mana user. If he could walk, of course.

Athos had placed the bones in random places and the Abomination had become unable to currently walk, only to crawl. He would need to change the shape of the bones for the creature to be able to even walk, or all the bone abomination could do is crush enemies with its weight. But that could wait for the creature to have a little more mass.

Athos wanted a real titan and wouldn’t stop until he got one. He began removing corpses from the black ice until he gathered a little over 40 and turned them all into skeletons, before destroying all of their minds.

It would be expensive to turn so many corpses into skeletons and fill their cores with mana, even if they are tiny cores on the same level as newly formed children. But Athos was a third level mage and incredibly powerful, as his mana body is capable of retaining much more mana than a normal mage. All it took was a small amount of your mana and it would be heavily diluted and fill the core quickly.