Parting Is a New Meeting
Tower Floor 11.
After the livestream celebrating Hyung's Ranch reaching 100,000 subscribers, Dohyeon had finally gotten around to the climb he'd been putting off.
Snort!
His opponents on the eleventh floor were four orcs.
Like the bunch on the tenth floor, each of them carried a single long blade.
Tug-tug! Laces cinched tight, Dohyeon sprinted for the exit portal without so much as a backward glance.
Taesan and Goldie charged the four orcs, exactly as they'd arranged in advance.
The tactic had been devised for a simple reason: with the orc headcount growing, the monsters now had a real chance of slipping past and striking at Dohyeon's openings.
He'd considered the textbook approach—Taesan as the tank, Goldie as the damage dealer, holding a set formation—but it had never appealed to him.
Taesan was a reassuring elephant, 400 kilograms heavy and three meters tall, but he lacked the advantages orcs and goblins took for granted, like walking upright or using tools, and that left him wanting in a head-on brawl.
To put Taesan's full power to use, he needed the momentum of a running charge.
So Dohyeon, a firm believer that the best defense is a good offense, had resolved to simply build Taesan an environment where he could cut loose.
Wham! Wham!
The result was a resounding success.
Taesan, two orcs skewered on his tusks like fish cakes on a stick, charged toward Dohyeon—and on the way, ran down the two orcs whose legs Goldie had been busy shredding.
Three orcs in all seated themselves neatly on his two-meter tusks; the last one took the jutting tip of a tusk through the chest and dropped.
Ding!
📊 Stat Points: 6
📖 Skills: [Jade Bone Crafting] [Raise Jade Bone] [Cranial Organ]
Six stat points lay dormant in his status window, but Dohyeon decided to keep putting them off.
More than enough to spare. Dumping all six into my stats wouldn't make climbing the Tower any easier anyway. What matters is recruiting new skeletons...
Four orcs, fine—he'd handled them well enough. But the fourteenth floor would throw ten orcs at him.
At ten, Goldie and Taesan wouldn't have enough hands to go around.
Dohyeon gathered up the loot and left the Tower.
Ring-ring— ring-ring—
His phone went off while Dohyeon, fresh out of the Tower, was in the middle of changing clothes.
Sister-in-law
"What business could she have calling at this hour?"
Click.
"Yes, Sister-in-law. What can I do for you?"
"Climber Cha Dohyeon. I do apologize for the evening hour. It's a situation I'd have to call urgent."
"Yes, yes, it's no trouble at all."
"Soran passed on to the Elephant Star just now. Might you be willing to take her in as well?"
"Soran, you say..."
Soran was Taesan's wife back at the Seoul Zoo.
"One moment, please!"
Dohyeon finished jamming his arm into his short-sleeved shirt and dashed for the stable.
Clack-clack?Neigh?
At the sight of Dohyeon hurrying through the stable door, the living animals and the dead ones alike tilted their heads.
"Taesan! Hey—word is your wife just left for the Elephant Star. What would you like to do?"
The soul-flame that had burned so vividly within the jade skull's eye sockets sank and went cold.
Clack!
"All right. I understand... Sister-in-law?"
"I'm listening."
"Could you get things ready so Taesan and I can head up right away?"
"A five-ton truck will arrive at the ranch in five minutes. I'll see you in Seoul."
Dohyeon, Taesan, and Goldie reached the freezer warehouse before dawn.
Vrrrrr— The five-ton truck's headlights swept across the darkened freezer warehouse.
The warehouse worker he'd met the other day and Song Seogyeong were waiting for him.
Click!
Dohyeon and Goldie hurried out of the passenger seat, and Taesan, riding in the cargo bed, hopped lightly down after them.
He looked far more like a cat than an elephant.
Grrrrnd—
"Thank you."
When Dohyeon stepped into the freezer warehouse, a familiar elephant—one he'd seen at the zoo—lay on a pallet.
Clack-clack!
Taesan, aching with grief and worry, stamped his feet in place.
"Taesan. Don't you worry. You know as well as I do—this isn't really a farewell."
Dohyeon cast his skill on Soran's body.
Two weeks later.
Dohyeon and Goldie, Taesan, and—newly added to their ranks—Soran returned to Hyung's Ranch on Jeju.
"Welcome back, Boss!"
Kang Eunhyeok, in the middle of hauling a bale of hay, greeted him warmly.
"It's been a while. Nothing out of the ordinary while I was gone?"
"Oh boy—ordinary it was not. We've taken in a huge number of new arrivals."
While Dohyeon had been staying in Seoul to bring Soran home, Hyung's Ranch had gained an entire wave of new family members.
The ranch had no reason to stop just because its owner was away, and the extra hands on site had kept everything humming along nicely.
Dohyeon did recall having instructed them to accept pretty much any animal that came, no questions asked.
"You're not short-handed, are you?"
Dohyeon worried whether the two siblings could shoulder the sudden pileup of work.
"Hmm... we're not quite at the point of needing another veterinarian, but if you're planning to take in more animals down the road, I'd say we'll want one or two more staff. Oh, and the channel could use a dedicated editor, too."
The Hyung's Ranch channel had posted only up to Snow's introduction video, then gone quiet for the duration of his absence.
"Got it for now. You did leave the spot next to Taesan open in the stable, right?"
"Of course! The new arrivals have all been settled into the newly built stables."
While Dohyeon had been away, the Management Bureau staff, at his request, had put up several stables for the growing collection of animals, plus a number of storage buildings for housing Tower byproducts.
"Wow... this place has really grown..."
He had set it all in motion himself, yet now that he stood before it with his own eyes, the scale felt strange.
To think the guy who could barely manage a single Goldie is now the owner of a ranch this size...
All manner of animals were romping across the ranch's meadows.
"I'll take tomorrow morning's feed run. About time I got properly acquainted with the kids."
After all, the whole point of running this ranch was, first and foremost, to grow his family of skeleton companions.
Back at the ranch around midday, Dohyeon exchanged greetings with all the familiar faces, slipped Volcano a sugar cube, and threw frisbee after frisbee for the people-loving dogs.
By the time the sun began to slide down the sky, the Kang siblings had clocked out and herded the great animal family into the stables.
Only then could Dohyeon finally breathe.
"Phew... what a madhouse."
Clack-clack!
Goldie, in a sulk over how few rounds of frisbee he'd gotten, clacked his teeth.
"Goldie, you're the one who gets to climb the Tower—something none of the other kids could even dream of. What have you got to sulk about?"
Clack!
Goldie, who had developed a real taste for biting orcs to pieces, clacked his teeth again.
Goldie and the elephant couple had come back as skeletons with power boiling up inside them.
And the Tower was the only place any of them could let that violence out.
"Now that Soran's joined us, shall we see how much higher we can go?"
Three skulls nodded.
Clack-clack-clack!
Tower Floor 12.
A floor featuring six orcs.
"Elephant couple—move out!"
This time Dohyeon didn't run, and the elephant couple charged straight at the orc pack.
Clack-clack!
Goldie was hiding, none too subtly, in the shadows of the two towering skeletons.
Hrrk—!
At the sight of two elephant skeletons thundering toward them side by side, the orcs nearly lost their souls on the spot.
Retreat first and size up the surroundings, like the orcs of floors ten and eleven?
Not a chance.
Taesan, elephant though he was, moved with a cat's agility and skewered two orcs on his long tusks, while Soran, the female, who had next to no tusks, reared up onto her hind legs and threw an Elephant Punch.
And wouldn't you know it?
The tuskless elephant's improvisation proved devastatingly effective.
The orcs in Soran's path were knocked cold by forelegs dropping from almost directly overhead.
Even the lucky orc that caught a blow on its shoulder inevitably took the next falling foreleg with its head.
"Huh. So that was an option? That looks like a far better strategy, honestly."
Dohyeon groaned at the sight of a combat method he'd never caught—dazzled by the spectacle of the tusk charge, and too quick to equate his elephant skeletons with ordinary elephants.
He'd assumed Taesan's tusk charge was the best answer to the thick-hided orcs. He'd been wrong.
A 400-kilogram elephant skeleton's foreleg, slamming down from that kind of height, carried more than enough force to knock an orc out in a single blow.
Then again, a rattled brain doesn't care how solid your body is.
Watching Soran rise onto two legs, Taesan apparently decided it was a fine technique: he shook his head to shed the orc corpses, then advanced on the remaining orcs upright on his hind legs.
Hnk... hrrghh...
The orcs—renowned far and wide for their belligerence—could only stagger backward, cowed by the shadows of two rearing elephants.
Wham! Wham!
Elephant punches came crashing down from a height of some seven meters.
Clack-clack!
The unconscious orcs had their napes seized by the waiting Goldie, bitten through, and died of massive blood loss.
Ding!
Tower Floor 12 Cleared!
Level Up! Distribute your stat points.
📊 Stat Points: 3
📖 Skills: [Jade Bone Crafting] [Raise Jade Bone] [Cranial Organ]
Dohyeon reviewed his status window.
Two things deserved attention: the Domination point Taesan had once occupied was gone, and he had a fresh batch of stat points.
Taesan, his heart opened completely by Dohyeon's revival of his beloved wife, had sworn his unconditional loyalty—and Soran, following her husband, had sworn hers as well.
To repay the elephant couple's devotion, Dohyeon had given them time at the Seoul Zoo to say their goodbyes to their children.
Thanks to his Jade Bone Crafting improving by leaps and bounds, it had taken one week to bring Soran back, and another week for the farewells with the children.
Why does raising animals without occupying Domination stats feel easier than I expected?
It was a pleasant misconception, born of the fact that his first skeleton had been Goldie.
The bond between him and Goldie was as deep as a bond could possibly go.
Reviving a soul without occupying Domination stats sat at a far lower difficulty than that.
Must be because the animals have their own will to live, too.
Dohyeon didn't dwell on it, but the fact that animals aren't clever enough to ponder the distant future was probably part of the answer as well.
Living things harbor breeding urges, paternal love, and maternal love precisely because they cannot live forever.
The hope of leaving behind even a child who takes after them, so that something of themselves carries on.
And that primal instinct was working in Dohyeon's favor.
Click-clack. Thud-thud.
One bone dog and two bone elephants came to Dohyeon's side.
"Mm! No orc corpses stuck on your tusks, and not a drop of blood spilled—now that's what I like to see! Well done!"
Clack-clack!
The elephant couple basked in the praise.
Dohyeon ached to throw his arms around them and ruffle them silly, but with Taesan and Soran both so lumpy and hard, that was a nonstarter.
"What am I ever going to do with you two? You can't even eat treats..."
Swallowing his regret, Dohyeon dutifully stroked whatever relatively flat skull he could reach.
"My little blessings, my little blessings."
Clack-clack-clack!
Goldie, seated at his feet, clacked his teeth in what sounded distinctly like protest.
"Goldie, you're family too. Go on, hurry up and say your thank-yous."
Receiving his owner's heart loud and clear, Goldie rubbed his head against the elephant couple's legs.
Rrrk... rrrk...
It was not a pleasant sound.