Chapter 670 - I have a family!

“Th- This can’t be right! The crystal…” the skeleton attendant finally stammered as he sared at the debris littering the ground.

“Neeeh, not my fault if your crystal is so brittle I can break it in one punch,” Kuli snarked, “Time to pay up, mister skeleton. That’ll be a million tokens,” she said holding out her hand.

“N- no! You must have cheated somehow! This shouldn’t be possible, not for someone like you!”

“Nah? What’s that supposed to mean, huh? Want me to punch you next?” Kuli asked in a mucher deeper voice than her usual.

“F- fine! You’ll get your tokens… Follow me to the exchange desk, I can’t give out that much myself…”

“Better.”

“Hey, Kuli,” Sofia called out, “I have to go check on something, take Crowie with you and go get the prize, I’ll be right back.”

“It can’t wait? Alright, I’ll join you when I’m done, the crow can guide me, right?”

“Yes, Crowie is very smart; he will guide you to me if you ask him, but I should be back soon anyway.”

“Nice, hop on here sir crow.”

“Can we go?” the skeleton attendant pressed, visibly annoyed at the delay.

“After you.”

Kuli took a few steps following the skeleton, curiously throwing glances at the tiny crow on her shoulder. She quickly looked back to see if she could catch the direction Sofia was going to go, but she was already gone.

Sofia had rushed to a spot between two machines where no one was looking, and had taken a short trip through the spirit realm, reappearing on the floor below the main hall in a small room occupied by a single skeleton sitting behind a desk. The ghost from before had come from much deeper, but just that short floor-phasing had been enough to dissuade Sofia from using the graveyard too much. Inhabitants of the spiritual plane, unsurprisingly, were a lot easier to notice than ‘regular’ people’s souls in the spirit plane.

That’s a lot of ghosts… They’re basically everywhere.

“Hey! What are you doing here! This is a priva-”

The skull of the skeleton flew to Sofia’s hand, the rest of his bones falling undeadless to the floor.

“Shhh. Not too loud,” Sofia whispered to the skull, running her clawed fingers along the skull’s sutures. “I just want some information.”

“U- Unhand me right now! I- I will call security!” the skull complained in a panic, getting silenced by one of Sofia’s fingers piercing through the top of his cranium.

“Oh, poor thing,” Sofia whispered deep into the skeleton’s ear hole, “I think you don’t understand,” she said, as space warped around her and the skull, sending them to the Painted halls that only Sofia, bones and Skeletons could enter. “Not even a final death can save you from this Necromancer,” she said with a wicked smile, “Now be a good boy and answer my question, or this is how you will spend the rest of your undeath,” she told him, grabbing an animal’s skull from a pile of bones nearby, holding it in front of the casino employee’s skull, and compressing it into a perfect square with a thought.

The skull’s jaw opened and closed a few times. He needed some time to process the sudden situation he had fallen into, it seemed, and without even trying to resist, he just surrendered.

“Listen, I- I’ll tell you everything I can. But if I say too much, my family is going to pay the price…”

“Your family?” Sofia asked.

“I have a wife and two daughter!” the skull exclaimed, “I just… I need to pay off my debt to the casino… In just thirty years I’ll be a free man again! If… If I can get out of this…”

“Are you daughters skeletons too?”

“Of course not… Ah… Sylvie, Lonie… I’m sorry, Daddy might never get to see you again…”

“You really don’t have to die you know, just answer a few questions and nobody else even needs to know anything ever happened here. Or are you saying the casino will know you said things you shouldn’t even when you’re here, in my domain?”

“I- I can’t tell you how, but they probably will, yes…” the skull said.

“Really now? You’ve got me interested. Let’s see…” Sofia said, turning the skull around to observed the magic etched on the inside. “Oh woah, you weren’t lying. I don’t understand it all but there sure is some nasty stuff there, that’s some serious enchanting. Pretty sure there’s even a self destruct function in there.”

“The casino is known to be able to remotely dispose of employees foolish enough to attempt to escape…” the skull explained.

“Alright… I get it, well, answer whatever you can and promise not to call security when I send you back to your desk and it’ll be like nothing every happened. You can do that?”

“That… That would be great…” the skull answered, sounding uneasy and unconvinced.

“I’ll just add my own things in there, since there’s some free space. That way I can also kill you from afar if you alert the casino’s security. What’s one more death threat, after all,” Sofia said, scratching a few lines on the inside of the skull with her dragon scale claws and sending a bit of mana inside. She actually just doodled some gibberish lines and runes inside of the skull, not even a proper enchantment, but it seemed unlikely that it would know or even notice the difference. “There, now for the questions…”

After getting enough answers, Sofia took the skeleton back to his desk, leaving him with the one rat skeleton from Bookie’s pages to make sure he wouldn’t go back on his words and alert security. That done, she used the graveyard Nymphs to quickly ascend back to the main hall.

Nobody saw me? Alright. Let’s see, Crowie is in that direction… Ah, she’s playing a card game?

Hmm, let’s just let her do her thing, about time I started to earn some tokens too. According to what that guy said, the first thing I should try is… That one!

Sofia crossed a good two hundred meters through the hall to join a space with people standing in front of a giant wheel divided in many sections, each with different ‘prizes’, most of them being ‘You lose!’.

A skeleton spun the wheel, under the watchful eyes of the spectators and the player standing directly in front of the wheel. The wheel spun for a long while until it started to slow down.

Looks like a small win for this guy. Sofia predicted, as the wheel was about to stop with the big arrow on the side pointing to the ‘Wager +20%!’ section. But unexpectedly, the wheel continued spinning extremely slowly until it just crossed into the next one, ‘You lose!’.

Oh woaw. Just like that skeleton said, everything is totally rigged… And it’s not even discreet, come on, it’s obvious the wheel was going to stop on the small win and you wouldn’t even let them have that?

The player started throwing a tantrum and was escorted out by a zombie guard.

Since the wheel was sadly not made out of bones, unlike many things in the casino, Sofia had no easy way to cheat. Despite that, she wanted to start there, as she knew from the skeleton she had kidnapped what the ‘hidden prize’ in the tinyest section of the wheel was. It would greatly speed this up if she could get it. She watched a few more rounds from different angles to try to understand how exactly things were rigged. It was plain to see that some mana escaped the skeleton and entered the wheel every time it accelerated or slowed down in strange ways, but the exact ‘how’ took a bit to figure out.

The damn wheel having a mana shield sure didn’t make this easy, but I understand your trick now.

The mana coming to and from the skeleton operating the wheel came from his right foot. He never lifted it much, no matter what, only sliding it around when he needed to adjust his position, which led Sofia to a simple conclusion. The damn cheater must have a remote control enchantment engraved under his talon.

From there, Sofia’s plan took some more time. She moved around to the open space behind the wheel where a few people were just standing sipping on drinks, and stood with the wheel’s skeleton at the very edge of her close aura’s range. When his hand shot to the side to grab the wheel and spin it for the next player, Sofia gave the skeleton’s wrist a slight nudge. His hand missed the wheel, and he stumbled, lifting his foot. It only lasted an instant, but Sofia’s left eye was capable of capturing images for her to view later.

This weird feature is certainly coming in handy. She thought as the wheel’s control enchantment was now displayed in full view for her to copy. She quickly transferred that to a bone token, played around with it very discreetly for a few rounds to get used to the controls, and finally stood in line to be one of the players.