Summoner (3)

Fwing!!

An arrow without a scrap of mana laced into it streaked through the trees. Its target was a goblin standing right out in the open — so oblivious it hadn't sensed a thing.

Thud!

"Gueh…!"

The yellow-glowing arrow punched clean through the temple of a goblin that had been scraping at tree roots with a stone dagger, wearing the dumbest expression imaginable.

Thump.

The impact flung it backward like its chin had caught on empty air. It twitched a few times, then went limp.

Dead.

"Kyaek?"

"Krrrk. Kek!"

The fall had been loud enough that the other goblins nearby — also busy gnawing on roots — all jerked their heads up at once.

They never got the chance to climb out of their hollow and find their comrade's corpse.

Creak, fwing! Fwing!!

A rapid volley of arrows put them in the exact same state as the one already sprawled on the ground.

"Click-clack!"

Having dropped every goblin in the area, Keres clicked her teeth and dropped down from the tree.

She looked like a stiff breeze would knock her over, yet she stuck the landing with the balance of a competitive gymnast. I let out a sigh.

"Good. Glad that worked out."

"Click!"

Every worry and doubt I'd had turned out to be baseless — Keres had become a better archer than me.

More precisely, I'd fed her every scrap of trial-and-error experience I'd built up as raw information, then made her repeat it until she could use it. That was why she'd gotten so good at the act of shooting so fast.

At first, no matter how many times she loosed an arrow, the damn things wouldn't even fly. I'd genuinely started wondering if her Luck of zero was the problem.

But that was a racial trait. Completely outside my control.

Every undead, without exception, is a being that rejected the natural order and clawed its way back to un-life — so their Luck is locked at zero.

They're already dead. What luck is there to talk about? Bad luck is the only kind that applies. The fact it doesn't go into the negatives is something to be grateful for.

If she kept evolving and changing, she might raise Luck again someday. For now, impossible.

Just make her do it. Kill or feed — something will come of it.

With that mindset I had her repeat the motion hundreds of times, and the arrows started traveling farther. After thousands of repetitions, she could at least get an arrow to the target — even if it only scraped and left a scratch. By the tens of thousands, she could shoot like the bow belonged to her.

Being undead, she didn't tire. Even if she did, the only damage was worn finger bones from plucking the string, and a bit of mana restored those good as new.

After that I stopped counting. Just repeat, repeat, and keep repeating.

The result was standing in front of me now.

I'd wondered at first how a body with no muscle could generate that much force — then remembered that a walking skeleton already threw science out the window, and stopped thinking about it.

If you wanted a half-assed explanation based on relative strength, "because the bones are strong" would cover it well enough.

In other words, dig too deep and you're the only one who looks like an idiot.

I already couldn't fully wrap my head around the fact that physical stats could be calculated as exact numbers. A muscle-less skeleton loosing arrows like a machine didn't change much. It was just one more incomprehensible thing on the pile. It worked. That was enough.

"Still, the finish was a little sloppy."

I walked over to the fallen goblins. Two had clean headshots. One had taken the arrow through the chest and was still alive.

It had punched through the lung rather than the skull, so blood was bubbling back up its throat in wet gurgles. Lucky for us it couldn't even scream — but it was still breathing.

A life already on its way out, yet it glared up at me with pure murder in its eyes.

If this had been a person instead of a goblin, things ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wouldn't have ended here.

From their side, this was an assassination. Some would thrash around in panic. Others would play dead, stay calm, and try to patch themselves up enough to turn the tables.

If one of those types had been waiting, the moment I stepped close something nasty would have come flying my way.

I could take a serious injury. Worse, the noise could draw others and create secondary casualties.

The second you choose assassination as your method, failing to kill the target in one shot is basically a failure.

I finished the goblin by driving a spike of shadow through its skull and crushing it. No grudge. It was going to die anyway, and I could have had Keres do it — I just killed it myself.

Reason? I didn't like the way it was looking at me. Got a problem? Reincarnate as a human and try me.

"Next time, finish the job properly."

"…Click."

She rattled her jaw once and nodded.

Damage is… about average, I guess.

Skilled or not, she was still at the level of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠an ordinary person. An arrow with no mana and no skill modifiers couldn't even reliably kill a single goblin.

Still stronger than the me who'd cracked these things' skulls one by one with a steel pipe — but then, the quality of the weapon itself was completely different, so of course.

"That's enough archery for now. Next up — skill testing."

"Click-clack!"

Keres had three skills, in order: No Life, Death's Beckon, and Bound Soul.

No Life meant exactly what it said.

It took the paradoxical state of something that clearly moved and acted yet possessed no life, and crystallized it into a skill. The effect was brutally simple: nullify every effect related to vitality.

That skill was why she could wear the Wasteland Bowstring without dying. The condition "living being" was identical to "contains vitality."

Ah — and the "vitality" I'm talking about here is similar to life force, but not the same.

Life force can be depleted and restored. Vitality is tied directly to the existence of a life itself — once it drops, it doesn't come back.

Intuitively: if life force is HP, vitality is maximum HP.

No matter how many healing tools you have, if your max HP is so low that you melt before the heal even lands, a healer might as well not exist.

The real value of this skill was that debuffs which would put a normal human's life in genuine danger barely scratched her.

Damage still came through fine — but a body that was already dead felt none of the pain, numbness, cold, heat, or any other sensation tied to a living creature's five senses.

Separately, simply repairing and maintaining her dead body seemed to build skill proficiency, which made it a perfect fit for someone as obsessed with skill growth as me.

The second skill, Death's Beckon, was essentially an attack skill.

"Use it."

"Click!!"

At my command Keres made a loud bone-rattle, and black currents began to writhe around her finger bones.

The energy soaked into the bow and arrow until both of them shimmered with the same dark flow.

"No problems so far… Can you maintain it?"

Hoyo-yooo~

The blue flames in her skull flickered in acknowledgment.

"Then shoot."

Creeeak! Twang!

Keres nocked and loosed without a single tremor in her form. The arrow flew true and buried itself in a tree with a solid thunk.

Crrrack!

Black energy erupted outward from the impact point, and the bark around it was suddenly covered in deep, claw-like gouges that made a sickening sound as they formed.

The effect of Death's Beckon was additional damage delivered through a curse.

You could think of the skill itself as the undead's characteristic obsession with life, given concrete form.

When an attack empowered by this skill successfully hit a living target, spectral undead hands manifested as a curse and raked the victim without fail.

On top of that, successfully finishing an enemy with the attack absorbed a portion of their vitality and empowered the next strike.

Intuitively: a stacking enhancement skill that charges on last hits.

Right now it still demanded concentration every time she used it, so outside of an opening shot it was basically unusable in a real fight. Get more familiar with it, though, and she'd be spamming it mid-combat soon enough.

In party play someone else would be tanking up front anyway, so time pressure wasn't a huge concern — but she still needed to handle it solo before I could call her a full combatant, right?

The skill's only real drawback was that it didn't trigger on targets that were already dead, like her.

Made sense, given it was built from the undead's hunger for life.

Otherwise it felt like a solid, reliable skill. Use it in the right situations and it would pay off.

And who knew? After another evolution it might mutate into something that worked on living and non-living targets alike.

The last skill, Bound Soul, was the blue flame burning inside that skull.

Its effects were far more complex than No Life. Put as simply as possible: it was a lantern that drew souls.

More precisely, soul fragments — something closer to residual thoughts.

In novels and games, people on the brink of death often see their life flash before their eyes, right? In this insane world, where research into the soul was an actual field of study, even that phenomenon had been explained.

What they called the "life-flash" was a kind of memory readout.

When a person falls asleep, the brain sorts memories and produces dreams. The moment the brain registers impending death, it treats the state as something similar to sleep.

But the person isn't actually sleeping.

With full clarity, the brain reorganizes its memories, so everything the person has experienced rises up in sequence — like film reels or a panorama flipping past in a rush.

It lasts only an instant, but in that brief span the dying feel an entire lifetime.

A brain that should be processing every scrap of sensory input from the whole body suddenly has nothing to do the moment it accepts death. For that single moment, its efficiency spikes past 150% of normal. Even a 30% boost can make the world feel completely frozen — at 150%, replaying a lifetime's worth of memory in a fraction of a second is trivial.

The only reason it stops is that the person dies and can't continue. In reality, a severed human head keeps functioning for ten to twenty seconds — thirty if you're lucky.

Scholars in this world concluded that thirty seconds of remaining soul-connection was more than enough to experience the life-flash and then regret everything that came after.

How do they know all that in such detail without being the ones dying? Underestimate how unhinged this world is at your own peril.

There was an actual madman who asked a Sword Saint to cleanly sever his neck — with killing intent, no hesitation — just so he could experience the life-flash for himself.

They reattached it immediately with top-tier holy magic before it fully came off, but it was effectively dying and coming back.

In that brief window the scholar genuinely saw his life flash by. He recorded in his own paper how long those few seconds had felt, and even claimed he'd rediscovered the original passion that drove him into academia.

The price of satisfying his curiosity was a remaining lifespan of less than ten years. He was reportedly delighted — called it a perfect opportunity to study how much efficiency you could wring out of limited time.

The papers and experimental data he left behind advanced soul research by nearly two hundred years.

The risks were so extreme that everything beyond the basic concepts was classified as Level-2 confidential — but he did get his name into the textbooks, so he's probably smiling down in Hell right now.

From my perspective, the guy was just a different flavor of lunatic.

That's why I said Hell, not Heaven. Because of his papers, the entire exam scope for the university course I was studying got rewritten overnight. I'm sure plenty of other grad students were screaming blood tears right alongside me.

Even I, who'd only half-heartedly taken the subject out of curiosity, was grinding my teeth. For the ones who were serious about it, the damage must have been so much worse.

I owed him a debt when I was just starting Project Exile, and I'll grant his contributions to humanity — but he also dumped poison into the world for his own satisfaction. He can smile all the way down to Hell.

Who the hell burns their own life for a research paper? That level of obsession is pure madness.

…I got sidetracked.

The point is this: the most intense impression left behind in that life-flash remains in place even after the person dies.

People commonly call these residual thoughts. The ability type known as "psychometry" specializes in finding, receiving, and reading them.

Residual thoughts also register as magical reactions, so left alone they eventually fade. But if they don't fade — they become curses.

Thoughts of the mind, and at the same time thoughts of the dead.

If a powerful will to live and twisted desires are strongly embedded in them, that alone is enough to form the framework of a hex. That is a curse.

And here we get to the actual point.

I started explaining a skeleton's skills and somehow ended up rambling about research papers. All of that was buildup for this.

Curses.

The dictionary definition: a kind of spellcraft that prays for disaster or misfortune to befall another person.

In my previous life it was folk-religion occult nonsense. This world is different.

This is a world where mana — that broken substance that can become anything given a firm image and will — is woven into the fabric of nature itself.

So does that influence reach residual thoughts that are merely lingering?

The answer is yes.

Curses have a fundamental property of attraction. Like water droplets sitting close together eventually merging into one, they combine.

In that process, the stronger curse survives and remains. Mana then adds concrete flesh to the strengthened curse.

There's no deeper reason. That's just the nature of mana.

Wish hard enough, desire hard enough. Even if the target is the residual thought of someone already dead, the magical framework is established.

All that remains is manifestation as a phenomenon.

The ideal form of that manifestation is the curse that served as its foundation.

That is the academic baseline for understanding "naturally occurring curses."

The damage they cause is no joke, which is why priests regularly go on pilgrimages to purify the curses and residual thoughts drifting through the world.

The problem is the ones that don't get purified in time.

A manifested, strengthened curse tangles with other curses, and if it eventually settles into an object, you get a cursed item.

The reverse also happens — curses continuously gathering into an item that already carried a curse from the start.

A passing dark mage or hexer might find it and use it as a fetish. Or church agents dispatched after the disturbance might purify it.

If it survives even that and accumulates enough curse energy, it can become a ghost-type undead like a ghost or specter — or a monster like living armor or a living weapon.

In other words, undead are curses in living form.

Which means they also possess the curse's property of mutual attraction. Their ultimate purpose is self-empowerment, after all.

And the skill that manifests that property is Bound Soul.

Like insects swarming a lantern lit on a mountain at night, residual thoughts and curses flock toward the light of the dead like moths to flame.

Then the blue fire inside that skull devours them and strengthens itself. The stronger the soul it eats, the faster it grows.

A being that already defies the laws of life was never going to grow the normal way.

Because of this skill, undead can develop a sense of self simply by surviving long enough. Undead with a self grow rapidly. Looking at it that way, the fact that most high-ranking undead possess self-awareness starts to feel almost inevitable.

The gods probably had that in mind when they designed the skill.

And the higher they climb, the more they value the certainty of their own existence over their obsession with life. So top-tier undead — unless they're complete lunatics — don't automatically act hostile toward humanity.

Sometimes they research. Sometimes they love. Sometimes they even try to teach.

They just tend to view the world more pessimistically, thanks to the peculiarity of being "the dead."

At the highest ranks their appearance barely differs from a living person's, so you don't even wrinkle your nose at the look of them.

The Church of the Radiant Sun, which preaches equality of first opportunity for all, acknowledges this peculiarity as well. Of course a handful of fanatics still froth at the mouth about purifying undead and returning them to the god's embrace — but they're a tiny minority.

It was always bleak, how a tiny fringe could ruin the image of the overwhelming majority wherever you went.

"Lucky you, then."

"Click-clack?"

Playing dumb, you little shit. I smacked the pale skull that was tilting its head in fake innocence.

Mid-skill-use and suddenly getting hit, Keres rattled out a series of clicks thick with indignation. I didn't care.

What are you going to do about it? Should've been the summoner yourself if you didn't like it.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

You're my summon. Read your master's mood and act on it already.

She'd been forged directly from my soul and mana, so her sense of self was solid from the start. She knew better than anyone how much of a blessing that was for an undead.

So behave. Don't go picking up weird residual thoughts later and doing something stupid.

I jerked my chin to order the use of her final skill, and received a thoroughly cold look from the skeleton whose spine I'd just bent with that slap.

Nothing but bone — no eyeballs to speak of — but I felt it through the summon link. I glared right back, refusing to lose.

"…Click."

She clicked her jaw once like a sigh, and the blue flame standing in for her eyes flared violently.

Hoyo-yoooooh…!

I'd wondered for a while why a burning fire made a sound like someone playing a flute or ocarina. Turns out it was the wind rushing through the bones to feed the flames.

…Does that count as a kind of ghostly wail too?

She had a face that looked like it'd given physical laws the finger, yet here she was demonstrating hard scientific realism in the weirdest places. Absurd.

Right — how does a fire burn without oxygen? You crazy bastard of a god.

I don't know about anything else, but the god who made this world was clearly a humanities major who skimmed the sciences. No other explanation produces results like this.

While I was still grumbling, tiny firefly-like lights drifted up from the goblin corpses and floated toward Keres's flame.

They hovered at first, testing the air — then Keres cracked her jaw wide and swallowed all three lights in a single gulp.

Fwoosh! Fwoooosh!!

Hyoyo-yoyoyo!!!

That alone sent the flames surging so high they burst out of the skull. Keres herself arched backward like a burning skeleton, hanging limp as a puppet with its strings cut.

Tasting the memories inside those residual thoughts, most likely. The difference was that Keres consumed and absorbed them, while a psychometrist found and read them — but both ended up acquiring information.

If anything, Keres's method of experiencing the memories firsthand might be superior as an ability.

Of course, that only worked because her sense of self was already firm enough.

Try reading memory-laden residual thoughts in a half-formed state and the self either shatters under the load or gets invaded in reverse.

But Keres was half-bound and subordinated to me. Even if her self collapsed and she "died," she could be reborn.

Reverse invasion worked the same way.

Follow the chain of Keres to its end and you found me. Even if something tried to take her over, there was no risk of her being stolen. I'd just step in and help absorb the memory myself.

A normal undead would worry about wasting everything they'd built and carefully refine lower-quality feed for safety. My summon could attempt it infinitely with no such fear.

If you're going to do it, do it completely.

Once you declare you're going to eat something, chew it up and swallow it.

I'll help you until you're capable of that.

Even now, if I wanted, I could pour mana into her and give her a boost. I didn't.

I was impatient in the moment, sure — but if you asked whether I was out of time, the answer was no. The more urgent things get, the more you take the long way around. This power was going to be critical for Keres's future growth.

If I held her hand through every step, she'd become a useless thing that leaned on me forever. I had no interest in raising something incompetent.

Struggle desperately. Work yourself to death. If you still fail after all that — then I'll help. Not out of charity or pity.

This was a form of recognition.

Recognition that your effort wasn't wasted. That you were someone who could do it.

"…Click!"

At some point she snapped her gaping jaw shut. The blazing skull-brazier had finally awakened as a proper undead.

As if to prove it, the system messages appeared one after another.

Keres had safely fed on the goblin souls and grown.

"Well do—"

I was about to offer straightforward praise when Keres started moving on her own before I could finish.

Like a toddler eager to show a parent what she'd just learned, she began thrashing her body around.

I shut my mouth and watched the spectacle in silence.

"Click?"

After flailing at empty air for a while, she tilted her head as if something felt off.

Then she approached the goblin corpses, spotted the stone daggers lying beside them, picked one up, and started swinging it around with the same motions.

That was when I understood what the bizarre performance was.

That was a goblin. More precisely — goblin behavior itself. The problem was that a skeleton with a full-grown human frame looked extremely awkward trying to copy it.

"Click-clack?"

The jaw-rattle sounded to me like, Still not working? She tilted her head again and walked over to a tree root.

Then, just like the goblins earlier, she slowly scraped the root down to a chewable size, transferred it into her empty mouth, and started working her jaw.

It looked exactly like someone chewing gum.

Then she stood up again with a that should do it energy and started moving once more — at which point I couldn't take it anymore.

…I see. So that's what this is.

Having understood everything, I strode over and smacked her upside the head.

Worried a proper punch might crack the bone, I kept the mana light and shaped a reasonably solid shadow fan. My previous life's habits were still running the show — something whispered that a folding fan was the correct tool for moments like this. Hitting someone with one somehow felt like it wouldn't actually hurt.

"You think that's going to work, you idiot?!"

So I hit her with everything I had. Mana stripped out, just in case.

WHACK!!

"Clack?!"

A crystal-clear note rang out and her neck bent about a hundred and eighty degrees. Not my problem. Even if it actually broke, as long as she didn't die I could just repair it with mana.

Clatter-clatter.

The recoil dumped the entire mouthful of root fibers she'd been holding. In that short time she'd genuinely been chewing — the roots were crushed into a pulp mixed with sap, looking like a hairball a cat had hacked up.

…I needed to say this clearly.

"You and a goblin have completely different builds…"

Keres fitted her crooked head back into place with both hands — click, clack — thought for a moment, then punched one fist into her open palm in the classic "I've got it!" gesture.

I had to slap my own forehead again.

I'd been soft. Thinking that Intelligence 5 would be a safe zone just because she was a summon like the others had been a critical mistake.

CbC.

Character by Character.

A term I just coined, short for the idea that every character has different personality and standards that fit them. Case by case is the correct phrase, but this felt more fundamentally different, so I made a new one. Source: me.

When I raised Kallion, low intelligence had burned me. I'd set the minimum cutoff at 5.

But what if that was the cutoff for a beast?

What about a humanoid undead — one supposedly descended from people?

For a human, Intelligence 5 was firmly in idiot territory. The average for a healthy adult male in this world was 10.

So this skeleton was running at half the human average.

Look at her. Forget understanding the question — she was now openly sulking about why she'd been hit in the first place. Shameless bone-head.

"…Ah."

A headache. My skull was throbbing.

…Shit. Wait a second.

Don't tell me the archery only failed at first because this idiot was too stupid to get it?

The more I thought about it, the more certain I became. When she was learning to shoot, she just kept repeating it because I told her to, right?

It looked like she'd absorbed the knowledge — but she hadn't? She just had the base specs, so after firing enough arrows she got good at it by brute force?

My knowledge probably wasn't completely useless in the process, but I'd bet my wrist that she failed to understand more than half of it and didn't even try.

So what about my effort? All the time I invested in this thing?

"Ha."

…Decision made. Intelligence for this one too.

I immediately dumped the points from the level-up into Intelligence. Let's get her to 10 first. If she was still like this after that, I'd have to seriously overhaul the training plan.

Thank god eating those souls had raised her Intelligence. Without that, she might not have figured it out even after hearing what I said.

I'm not joking. When Kallion's intelligence was lacking, he'd acknowledge my orders but completely fail to follow them in practice. He simply hadn't understood what I said.

Same here. She'd acquired knowledge, but couldn't convert it into thought or reasoning about why.

She didn't understand, so she felt no need for it.

The silver lining was that she was decent at physical commands. That was probably why necromancers just threw hastily raised skeletons into meat-shield charges.

It was literally all they could do.

I finally understood why naturally occurring skeleton populations had so few Skeleton Mages and so many warrior types — archers, warriors, thieves.

Because a skeleton smart enough to use magic already had talent and intelligence beyond the skeleton tier!

And of course fights changed drastically depending on whether a Skeleton Mage was present. A smart one in the back casting magic while coordinating the whole group's movements would make all the difference.

A secret I hadn't particularly wanted to learn — and I'd learned it in the form I wanted least.

Who the hell is happy finding this out because of a brain-dead ally? Goddammit.

If you didn't understand, you could have just said so. Why wait until later to get caught and piss me off like this, you son of a—

I took a breath and reminded myself that even her ability to think and act independently like this was only possible because she had a self solid enough to rival higher undead. I sighed.

Her initial personality had been a bit flippant. For a skeleton, her body language and light gestures had been ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠expressive enough to convey emotion — almost cheerful.

So yes, I'd been more careless about understanding her inner information compared to my other summons. I admitted that mistake.

But this was still a bit much…

…I can raise her properly, right?

Yeah. Don't go soft. I raised Kallion fine. I can do this.

Ah — but she's undead. Past pain resistance and straight into full immunity. What the hell am I supposed to use to make her suffer through education?

Any professional educator hearing that would have a heart attack, but the equation "education = brutally hard and filthy miserable work" was already locked into my brain, so it didn't matter.

I'm educating my own summon. What's it to you?

"Click, clack-clack!"

Whether she sensed my dark mood or not, the jaw-clicking skeleton picked up the stone dagger that had fallen when I smacked her head and started flopping around doing goblin impressions again.

At the sight of it, I stripped the mana from my body once more and gripped the folding fan.

Information filtering.

Take what you need. Discard what you don't. Whatever else, I was going to burn that lesson into her from this stage on.

Literally into her bones.

With that thought, I swung the fan at Keres's head as she stood there in her half-assed pose.

WHAAAAACK!!!

Being in a forest, the sound carried beautifully.

Nothing in that skull, so the echo that came back was crystal clear.

…Shit.