Chapter 101: Chapter 101: Floor 13: Bone Against Bone I

James did not move while the skeleton warriors finished pulling themselves out of the dirt.

They came up across the whole ruined town at once, fifty of them rising from the rubble and the broken ground, and they did not charge the moment they stood. They formed ranks instead. Shields came up along the front, axes and swords settled into bone hands, and a second line braced spears over the shoulders of the first, and the whole formation turned toward the five of them with the cold patience of soldiers who had done this before. There was no roaring, no snarling, none of the mindless hunger James had seen in the lesser undead he had summoned himself.

Finn tightened his grip on his axe beside him. "These aren’t shamblers."

"No," James said.

The warhammer user had lost most of his confidence from the Waiting Room. The woman with the twin blades dropped into a low stance with her weight on the balls of her feet. The young caster’s staff flickered at the tip while his eyes moved across the ranks and the numbers behind them.

James was a Necromancer standing in front of fifty undead, and the obvious question was whether that meant the floor had handed him the fight or built the fight specifically to take that advantage away.

He tested the obvious answer first.

He fixed his attention on the nearest skeleton warrior, one in the front rank with a notched sword and a cracked shield, and pushed Reanimate toward it the way he would reach for a fresh corpse, trying to fold it under his control before the formation closed the distance.

The System rejected it instantly.

[REANIMATE FAILED] [TARGET IS ALREADY ANIMATED BY FLOOR AUTHORITY]

The message landed worse than a missed cast, because it closed the door on the easy version of this floor before the fight had even started. The skeletons were not corpses lying in the dirt waiting for someone to claim them. They were already animated, already owned, bound to the floor itself, and the floor was not going to hand its own soldiers over to him no matter how many control slots he had open.

He could not steal the army. He had to break it.

Finn caught the look on his face and read enough from it. "It’s not working?"

"They belong to the floor. I can’t take them."

"Then stop thinking of them as undead." Finn raised his axe and set his feet. "They’re armed soldiers. Fifty of them. Treat them like that."

The skeletons advanced.

They came forward in a steady line, bone feet scraping across stone in a rhythm that filled the silence where battle cries should have been, shields locked, spears level. No fear. No hesitation. Just the dry, even scrape of an army walking toward the people it had been made to kill.

The two lines met in the open ground between the barracks.

The warhammer user mattered from the first second. His opening swing came down overhead and caved in a skeleton’s ribcage with a sound like a sack of crockery hitting a wall, CRUNCH, and the thing came apart at the spine and dropped in pieces. He blinked at the result like it surprised him, then grinned and brought the hammer back up. "Bone, I can work with."

The twin-blade woman had the opposite problem. Her first two cuts were fast and clean and almost useless, the edges slipping through the gaps between ribs or skating off the curve of a skull without taking anything important with them. She opened a skeleton from collarbone to hip and it kept swinging at her, because there was nothing inside it for the cut to ruin.

"They don’t stop," she said, backing off a step. "I cut them and they don’t stop."

"Then don’t cut the middle," James said. "Cut what holds them together."

The young caster found his footing faster than James expected. He stopped throwing wide bolts that scattered off bone and started firing tight compressed blasts of force into the front rank, not to kill but to stagger, and a skeleton knocked off its balance was a skeleton the warhammer could finish.

Finn anchored the center. His axe was no better suited to bone than James’s sword, but raw force did most of the work for him, and he broke a shoulder, then a skull, then sheared through a spine with three heavy swings that did not bother with elegance.

James fought at his side with the A-rank sword, and he learned the floor’s rule fast. The blade could cut bone, but a clean cut through a torso took too long and bought him nothing, so he stopped aiming for bodies. He took a knee out from under one skeleton, severed the wrist of another so its sword dropped, and put the point through the neck joint of a third so its skull rolled free and the body folded.

The first several skeletons fell. The rest stepped over the pieces and kept coming.

The team had expected the broken skeletons to slow the formation, and the opposite happened.

The skeleton warriors did not flinch at their losses. They closed the gaps where their own had fallen and kept the line tight, stepping over shattered ribcages and snapped femurs without a glance down. They did not panic. They did not pull their wounded back. A skeleton with one arm sheared off kept swinging the sword in its remaining hand. Another lost a leg to the warhammer and dragged itself forward across the stone by its fingers, still reaching. A broken torso with no legs at all crawled toward the caster’s ankles until Finn stamped down and crushed the skull under his heel.

CRACK.

"They don’t care," the caster said, and his voice climbed. "They don’t care that they’re broken—"

"Then break them more," Finn said. "All the way down."

The twin-blade woman nearly paid for the lesson. She drove a blade through a skeleton’s chest the way she would finish a living man and waited half a second for it to drop, and it did not drop, it brought its axe around toward her exposed side instead. James caught the swing on instinct.

[SHIELD INSTINCT]

His forearm came up wreathed in the skill’s hardened guard and knocked the axe wide, and the woman threw herself back and out of reach. A spear caught James across the side in the same exchange, and the point scraped over his armor and bit shallow before the A-rank plate turned it.

[JAMES HP: 820/820 → 771/820]

He ignored it. The cut was nothing, and the lesson was the thing that mattered.

"Stop killing them," James said, loud enough for all of them. "You can’t kill them, there’s nothing to kill. Break the joints. Skulls, spines, knees, whatever holds the weapon. Take the structure apart."

He took his own advice and stopped fighting the skeletons like undead he could claim. He started fighting them like machines that needed to be pulled apart.

He changed how he used Necro Blast. Instead of firing it into chest cavities where it had nothing to rot, he put it into joints and the long load-bearing bones, and the death energy did what his blade could not.

[NECRO BLAST] [MANA: 1,320 → 1,310]

The bolt struck a skeleton’s knee and the bone blackened and went soft and crumbled under the thing’s own weight, and it pitched sideways into Finn’s downward axe.

CHK.

The warhammer user caught on within three kills and started shadowing James’s targets, swinging into whatever James had already weakened so the blackened bone shattered instead of merely cracking. The caster shifted again too, using his force blasts to crack joints open and expose them rather than throwing damage at solid bone. The twin-blade woman found her role at last, darting in to cut weapon-straps, sever the tendons of bone hands, and take the heads off skeletons the others had already staggered.

James summoned the dire wolf into the gap.

[REANIMATED DIRE WOLF — SUMMONED]

The wolf hit the formation at a dead run, but biting bone was a poor use of it and James saw that immediately, because there was no throat to tear and no flesh to hold. So he stopped using it to kill. He used it to break the line instead. It slammed into a cluster of skeletons and dragged one out of formation by the arm, scattered another two off their feet, and made the openings that let Finn and the warhammer wade in. The wolf was disruption, not a killer, and as disruption it earned its mana.

He left the python where it was. The ruined streets were too tight for something that size, and dropping a disaster beast into the middle of a five-person formation would have buried his own team under it.