Saintess Summons Skeletons

Sofia woke up in Pareth’s arms, near the altar. Bookie threw himself in her arms, “Sofia!”

Hey boys. Sorry about that. How long was I out this time? Sofia asked in her thoughts while stroking Bookie’s skull with her bone left hand.

“Almost a whole entire hour!” Bookie answered, a hint of worry in his voice.

Not too bad. My stamina is still errored out but I feel fine now. Let’s have a look at the heart.

Sofia stood up with difficulty, she was basically entirely bone now, with not a single functional muscle left. Turning her entire head to be able to look in the altar’s direction, she observed the mana heart quietly floating above the altar, it had taken even more of a golden sheen now, with only a faint hint of the original red glow remaining.

[Saintomancer’s heart]: /ULTRA EX tier/

UNABLE TO CALCULATE SETTING TIME

Imprint progress : 10000/ 10000

Transcendent ritual : 2/3

Effects (Stats will be doubled) :

All stats + 250% (ULTRA EX rank base)

All stats + 50%

Health + 67 381

Stamina + 17 900

Mana + 834 719

Slashing resistance + 25%

Explosion resistance + 25%

[Relocate Core]

Destroyer Signature Skill Modifier

Speed shard (5)

Strength shard (2)

[Infinity Engine] Lv.1

Please Select Ascendency Path 2/3

(You can pick a new path or level up the current one)

All stats went from +200 to +250? That’s more than usual for one rank. Still no additional imprint space, though.

Picking Infinity Engine again. Nice.

Now to read the full description for the third ritual. It said I was missing reagents without telling me which… Hopefully not another Keystone monster’s mana heart.

[Transcendent ritual 3]: ‘Call the titans’.

Activate the ritual while placing Sunless Debris in all reagent slots with the mana heart slot empty.

Use your mana heart to absorb a titan core (They will naturally fuse).

Awfully simple instructions… Titans…

At least it’s not another defense trial, because I would have stood no chance. This, though? If it’s killing a single big creature, this is more my kind of thing. What worries me is the plural.

Call the titans…

I only need a single one, though, if the last line is correct? So if I could find a titan without the ritual I wouldn’t need to worry about there being multiple. Where does one find a titan, though?

Also if the ritual to call them uses Sunless debris then they must be Sunless titans, right? So it’s strange that this ritual doesn’t say it needs to be held at night like the two previous ones…

Unless… Oh. Yeah, I see.

Yes! That has to work. This last step might be easier than the previous one!

Not doing the intended ritual to call the titans is a risky bet, but if this step is meant to be the hardest, there is no chance I could do it the intended way.

Sofia was cutting it close with her timing, her heart was about to set in a week or two, but after a lot of fruitless searching, on a cold night she finally found it again, obscuring the sky.

She looked up with one of the many vision tokens embedded into her body, her makeshift solution to solve not being able to move her eyes.

Her Identify not working anymore, she brought up the old result again.

[Sunless Nightbringer - Lv. 334 - Imprint power : ??? - Effect : ??? ]

‘And the sky disappeared, giving place to his endless majesty.’

Found you.

Pareth, Bookie, stay inside for now. Let’s try to be smart about this.

Sofia followed the gigantic flying Sunless while staying on the ground, quietly channeling her unlife rune. Interestingly, even in the bone body, it still appeared at the usual spot on her shoulder.

With the rune finally on, she started to walk up the air coming closer and closer to the black thing covering the sky.

It was really like the sky had been devoured by a pure black void, but the higher Sofia stepped, the more her mana vision revealed how much mana flowed through the black mass.

Seriously, how large is this thing? It’s hard to believe it is a whole filter weaker than the Chimera and the Destroyer. It has millions of times too much mana for its level…

I don’t think it has noticed me yet. How do I find the core of this thing?

The Sunless Nightbringer was flying much faster than Sofia could walk so it was only a matter of time before it left her behind.

Either I get its attention or I try to get on its back. Going inside is too dangerous since this thing is a Sunless, that’s a good way to end up crushed. Let’s just try to get up… How, though?

Finding the giant flying Sunless had been hard enough, she could not let it escape her. Finally, what she decided to do was to get as close as she could to it from below, and to wait until the right moment.

When the sky appeared again above Sofia’s head, she was ready to turn around and use her short range teleport. She barely managed to plunge her dragon claws into the creature’s back even with the teleportation. The Sunless was truly flying at a delirious speed, it was hard to just hold on like this. She could already tell that the black flesh of the creature was trying to eject her, had she used her real hand instead of the dragon armguard, it would have already been turned to meat paste.

Still, Sofia managed to pull herself in, and changed her left hand as well as both of her feet to bone hooks which she used to stabilize herself on the creature’s backside. The bone hooks were destroyed in a matter of seconds, but Sofia could let them heal up, plunge them into the creature again, and use that short window of time to move her right hand further up to gradually climb onto the giant back of the Sunless Nightbringer. While that Sunless was unfathomably large and wide, its body was only a few meters thick.

After a while, Sofia finally managed to step onto the actual flat back of the creature, although she still needed to have her right hand planted inside to avoid being ejected.

Sofia stayed there for a moment without moving, just slowly fixing her bone body which the whole improvised hook transformation thing had severely messed up. The view from the creature’s back was surreal.

It was like being on an entirely black desert, being constantly pushed back by the most violent winds, with nothing on the horizon, under a permanent sunset.

Just how fast is this thing flying?!

It’s so much effort just to hold on!

Since her entire body was controlled by [Bone Dominus], the current situation was taking up a major part of Sofia’s concentration, so much that it would be hard to use any other spell at the same time in that situation.

Sofia worked on slowly streamlining her bone body, the improved aerodynamics helping reduce the load on her right arm by a lot, but even still, she had to fiercely stay planted inside of the Sunless’s back to avoid being flung back into the sky.

I need to move if Iwant to find this thing’s core…

Sofia made very slow progress, moving up the creature’s back for hours against the relentless winds. She had noticed a bright strip of white in the distance, just like the markings on Tarren and Everelle, and that was where she was headed. The wind was calmer near the white strip, and that helped Sofia’s progression, that was because of the mana density near the white part of the Sunless. It was extremely high, suffocatingly so, and it pushed even the wind aside. While inside this soup of thick mana, Sofia could finally stand up on the creature’s back, stepping on the white part.

As soon as she did that, the black parts surrounding the white started to bubble up like hot tar.

I don’t like this. I think I’ve been officially spotted.

Sofia ran. With the vision token she had embedded on her back, she looked behind her, and saw that the ‘bubbles’ grew to be multiple four-headed amalgams, slowly rising from the Nightbringer’s insides. Sofia ran faster.

She ran forward, but she could only follow the white strip or the wind would blast her away, so it was not going to be long until her situation became worse. At first the amalgams only appeared near where she was, but soon they started appearing ahead, and since Sofia could not run anywhere else, decisions had to be made.

While still running, she summoned the skull choir with as many Bloodlight Echoes as she could, and emptied her entire mana in less than a second spreading metric tons of pulsating black rot on the Sunless Nightbringer’s back. With that done, she manually controlled her jaw with [Bone Dominus] to chew into a fake bone heart and transform to her superior demonic body while she dismissed the unlife rune.

The skulls from the choir sent her back just a tiny bit of mana through [Heat Death] when they disappeared, helping restart her regeneration even while she was still transforming. She jumped over the amalgam blocking her way, and kept following the white strip.

The entire back of the Nightbringer was starting to bubble up like a calm lake suddenly brought up to a boil, and from the black bubbles, Sunless amalgams rose by the dozen.

It’s not that it has too much mana for its level! It’s that it’s carrying thousands of fucking amalgams!!!

Sofia’s mana senses extended far and wide as she ran, contorting her body to avoid the black lances incoming from all sides.

She had five minutes left to find the Nightbringer’s core.