[Shrubley, the Monster Adventurer] Chapter 46 – The Milk Assassin II

Lukas was one of the newest serpentii recruits. He slept soundly in the formation known as the chaos ball. No predators would be stupid enough to attack serpentii in such a state.

They were able to strike in all directions at once, able to inject their venom ten times before anybody was able to extricate themselves, and within a few steps, their would-be assailant was dead.

It was a good life, being a serpentii.

All the rats and mice you could eat, with a few larger prey in the mix. And with the promise from the Family of more worlds to go to, more worlds to feast upon, things were looking up.

Though he was technically a kind of eldritch monstrosity, he didn’t have to deal with any of that nasty tentacle business most Outsiders did. Lukas could one day steal whatever power and face he wanted, and without most of the work and effort it usually took to build all that up.

Lukas blinked his slitted eyes and squinted at the cold ash of the banked fire, and then looked around the campsite. Something had woken him up. He was sure of it.

Well, there’s always one way, nobody can hide from a serpentii!

Flicking his forked tongue out, he tasted the air, sensing the slightest changes in heat. He frowned his snake-like mouth. But there definitely was something. He swore he heard something go “shoot!” in a hissed voice.

With another careful look and flick of his tongue, Lukas was absolutely sure nothing was out there. Every creature gave off some sort of body heat, and a serpentii’s tongue was very keen.

Besides, he couldn’t see anything in the moonless night, so he settled in to go back to sleep. Must’ve been the wind–

–were the last words that entered Lukas’ mind before they were interrupted by a sharpened soot-stained bone that spiked through its head in one smooth blow.

Another came, followed by another, and then more continued to fall until the coiled ball of snakes was roused to its full fury. But they could neither see nor sense the foul creature attacking them.

With several of the snakes dead, their defensive formation was impossible to slither out of. They were knotted fast among their dead or dying brethren and within a few moments, their hissing ceased.

Cal, his soot-blackened bones darker yet with purple blood, stood and heaved his chest from the exertion. It felt so good to enact some revenge.

Alone with the ball of dead snakes, Cal placed a hand gently on a scaly body. “So many bones,” he whispered darkly to himself. “All for the taking.”

For a moment, he hesitated. Were the serpentii’s bones perhaps a little too foul, even for a lowly skeleton like him?

Maybe I can’t tolerate them for structural replacement, but for armor and weapons? Maybe even for more friends?

It was the work of a few moments to relieve his bony brethren from the confining bodies of the snakes. Cal always did say that inside every person was a skeleton friend waiting to get out.

He had a particular way with bones, and hours later, when the serpentii patrol found their dead brothers and sisters, it was to their great horror that their bones had been taken. They looked like a bunch of deflated rubber tubes with fangs.

All that remained of them were, as Cal would put it, “their soft bits” and a trail leading deeper into the woods. A trail that pointed away from where Cal and his friends were.

Riled up with rage, the serpentii’s hissing filled the forest as they surged after their assailant.

Two more groups met their end earlier in the night, adding to Cal’s growing bone collection. His ribcage was getting stuffed full of skeletons. He really wished he had some pockets or inventory like the others.

Even Slyrox had a [Kobbie Bag] that could hold more than its outward size should permit.

By the time he returned to the clearing, the serpentii were boiling through the hills and forests, hunting the trail of the mysterious snake killer. Cal’s grisly work had been, perhaps, a little too effective.

More serpentii than he had ever seen were scouring every inch of the forest looking for him. And since he was effectively deep within enemy territory, it made his escape all the more difficult.

The serpentii were a full army, and Cal was just one skeleton against them all, no matter how strategic and effective his attacks were.

There was a reason his group was trying to escape, and more than just to leave this cursed mirror realm behind. There simply was no way they could fight or defeat all these serpentii.

Still, he could make a dent. And he had made not just a dent, but a devastating crater indeed. It made his grief a little easier to bear.

He had a few close calls, but there wasn’t anything for the snakes to detect if he stepped into a shadow and stayed still. His [Undead] racial ability made sure of that.

[Undead]: You have no organs and no blood. You are effectively invisible to anybody who can sense other living creatures, though your undead nature is still quite obvious. Provided at least some of your body remains intact, you cannot truly die.

It was too bad he couldn’t use that to hide his friends from detection. Though Cal didn’t think highly of himself, he wouldn’t abandon them.

Not like I did to Shrubley.

Slyrox clobbered Cal when he tapped her on the shoulder from the depths of a darker shadow. There was a pale light on the horizon suggesting that dawn was coming.

She hadn’t heard the skeleton approach and when she turned around, the figure that stood before her looked so unlike her friend that she reacted before she heard his voice.

“Really, Slyrox!” a voice from the forest floor spoke to her. Skeletal hands reached down and picked up Cal’s darkened skull. He placed it onto his vertebrae where she had knocked it clean off and twisted it once or twice until it clicked into place.

“Bonecal gives Slyrox the big-eyes!” she hissed back at him. “Where were you?”

“Out,” he said.

Slyrox didn’t miss the countless snake skeletons adorning his body like some sort of armor made entirely out of intact snake skeletons. They looked ridiculous.

That is, until he set several of them down and they began to slither across the floor, their ivory bones gleaming in the burgeoning pale pre-dawn light.

“What–?” Slyrox began, but stopped as Cal pointed.

She watched as half a dozen snake skeletons slithered into the hole she made to hide the Countess. They came out beneath the stretcher they used to transport her, writhing across the ground with the unconscious vampyr Lady on top.

For a moment, Slyrox’s mind blanked with fear. The serpentii had caught their vampyr teacher!

Slyrox shook herself out of it. It was easy to mistake those reanimated skeletons as the enemy, but it went a bit deeper than that. The koblin had grown attached to the vampyr.

Slyrox had a soft spot for anybody who protected those weaker than themselves. That was part of why she had grown so attached to Shrubley, too. And why it hurt so much that he was gone.

“See?” Cal said with pride.

Slyrox was stunned. She didn’t know Cal was a necromancer, but as the snakes got closer, she realized something even more impressive.

The trail the snakes left were… well, snake trails. They no longer looked like somebody dragging two sticks behind them.

“I don’t need to clean up our trail anymore,” Cal told her. “And if any serpentii come looking, they’ll see nothing more than a trail of their own kind and think nothing of it.”

Slyrox nodded, her green velvety ears flopping with the motion. It was impressive. She had figured that Cal was out for the count after they lost Shrubley.

He was not dead, no matter how many others tried to convince her. He was like the Havior.

Death held no sway over people like that.

“Muchly thankful for hand-lending,” Slyrox said with a gentle pat on the skeleton’s femur. “We going?”

Cal nodded, reorganizing his bones as they headed toward the rising sun, with Smudge riding atop Slyrox and the ambulatory stretcher keeping pace with them.

It wasn’t long after that Cal stopped them. “Wait, we’re heading toward the sun.”

Slyrox tilted her head curiously. “Yes?”

“Pyuu?”

“No, Smudge,” Cal said. “I remember Shrubley telling me that the Haalften farms were to the west of Taamra, not the east. And the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, right?”

Sose tiredly poked his muzzle out. With the Countess falling unconscious, his constitution had significantly worsened. In some way, the pair were intrinsically linked. “No,” the oppa said weakly. “Mirror world, remember? Everything is… flipped. Follow the sun.”

Cal looked down at him, then up at the pale watery sunlight barely peeking through the narrow trees. “I do think I can just barely see the road in the distance,” he said.

If that was true, then it was just blind luck that he had led the serpentii in the right direction instead of the way they should have been going.

It’s a good thing I can’t read the stars or tell direction without the sun then!

True to his word, as soon as they neared the road and the distant view of Taamra, Cal begin to see several landmarks that he remembered from his trip with Shrubley.

The memory of the little bushy guy broke his undead heart, but he carried on putting one foot in front of the other.

“Would muchly like to eye-peek the real Worldshard’s rising sun,” Slyrox said with sincere enthusiasm.

It was easy for Cal to forget after everything they had been through together, Slyrox had barely stepped foot on Almora proper.

One day, if they made it, Cal wished to introduce the koblin to Sel, the elf. Perhaps he and Slyrox—with Smudge, of course—of them could carry on as adventurers in Shrubley’s memory.

“Me too,” Cal told her. “Me too. You know, Shrubley and I stopped to take a break and watch the sunset. It was beautiful, and you could tell that he enjoyed it greatly. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the sun rise or set… but I can tell you that I never once enjoyed it half as much as that night.”

“Pyuu….” Smudge said forlornly.

“I know you miss him too,” Cal said, reaching over to pat the slime affectionately, only to remember that his left hand had no finger bones left.

He had placed them into the snakes slithering on the ground with the Countess on their backs to bring them to life. He was no necromancer, but he could insert his bones into a skeleton to control it for a time.

He wished more than anything they had been able to go back for Shrubley, but they had been on the run ever since.

They kept to the woods that skirted alongside the road, always keeping the path in sight. At this rate, it’ll be a couple more days at best before we reach the manor, Cal thought. If we don’t run into anything nasty in the meantime.

Just as that thought came to him, the rotting log and pile of leaf mold ahead of them rose and snapped its massive, fanged maw at them.

Cal staggered back, readying his staff. “I just had to jinx it!”