The four adventurers stood paralyzed in shock, watching as the thirty-plus skeletons that had been hounding them were reduced to ash in an instant or sliced to pieces by blades of wind.
Rei and Elena approached the group.
"Are you all right?" Rei asked.
"Y-Yeah... No, wait!" The man snapped back to his senses, his face pale as he shouted and looked toward the corridor they had just fled. "We can’t just stand here! We have to run! We’re grateful you saved us, but you need to get away from here now! It’s... it’s coming!"
Terror and despair were etched into his features.
It was a look of utter desperation, one that seemed out of place for an adventurer skilled enough to reach B16F.
With fear still clouding his eyes, he turned to look at his companions.
There was a female warrior who had lost her right arm from the shoulder down, and a man frantically pulling a potion from a pouch at his waist to stabilize her.
The man with the spear, who had just urged Rei to flee, saw his comrade with the potion and called out in a panic.
"Gort! How is Tibia!?"
"Ugh, guh... I’m fine. For now, we just need to put some distance between us and that thing..."
"It’s no use," the man called Gort replied, his face white. He shook his head. "The potions I have left are barely enough to stop the bleeding. We have to get out of the dungeon and find proper treatment as fast as possible. If only I still had the pack... we had high-grade potions in there."
The final member of the group, a thief-like man wielding a longsword, spoke up while keeping a sharp eye on the passage behind them.
"True enough. But if you hadn’t dropped the luggage to stall them back there, we’d all be inside that monster’s belly by now. Tsk—it’s here!"
As the thief_man shouted, a rhythmic clatter-clatter-clatter echoed through the area, and the monster revealed itself.
Given its frame was composed entirely of bone, it was undeniably an undead of the skeleton-type.
However, the moment it appeared, Rei, Elena, and even Set understood that this creature was fundamentally different from the others.
A normal skeleton did not possess four arms—two pairs on each side. It did not stand nearly three meters tall. And most importantly, normal skeletons did not have green flames flickering within their eye sockets, radiating such pure, concentrated malice.
Furthermore, the Deformed Skeleton clutched curved blades—scimitars—in all four of its hands.
"...Well, that’s quite the rarity. Do things like that actually spawn here?" Rei muttered.
The man with the spear barked a reply, as if Rei’s casual tone were an insult.
"Of course they don't! We tried fighting it for a moment, but that thing easily has the strength of a B-Rank Monster! And besides..."
"Besides?"
The man with the spear trailed off, his gaze drifting to the spot where the Deformed Skeleton stood—or more precisely, to the skeleton remains scattered at its feet.
There lay the charred bones from Rei’s magic and the fragments sliced apart by Elena’s spells.
Rei wondered what the man was getting at, until—
"Goaoooooo!"
The Deformed Skeleton let out a roar that seemed to rumble up from the abyss. A thick, white vapor spilled from its frame, coalescing into dozens of humanoid shapes. In the blink of an eye, dozens of skeletons stood there as if they had existed all along.
"...Hey, seriously? That’s a bit much."
"That’s where the ones you just killed came from," the spearman explained. "And the worst part is, those things don't even drop magic stones when you take them down. The only saving grace is that they're weaker than a typical skeleton, but with those numbers, the strength gap hardly matters."
"I doubt it can generate them indefinitely, but it’s certainly a nuisance. ...I see."
Rei watched as the Deformed Skeleton leveled the scimitar in its upper-right hand toward them. On cue, the skeleton forces took a synchronized step forward.
"I’m not staying to fight a freak like that! We have to run! What about you two!?"
The man with the spear shouted as he began to retreat toward the passage leading to the Small Room with the Magic Circle.
He had spoken assuming Rei and the others would follow, but the response he received was entirely unexpected.
"Run? Now? Well, normally that would be the right move... but unfortunately, this monster is exactly what I was looking for."
Rei spoke as he readied his Death Scythe. Beside him, Elena offered a faint, confident smile and gripped her whip-sword.
Rei had a very good idea of what the Deformed Skeleton was. Just the day before on 15F, he had heard from adventurers of House Silwa that an anomaly species had been spotted nearby, along with reports of suspicious individuals who appeared to be creating them.
Which meant...
"So, you’re the Skeleton Anomaly Species."
At Rei’s words, the fleeing party froze.
It seemed they hadn't even considered the possibility.
Perhaps the trauma of having Tibia’s arm severed the moment they encountered it had prevented them from thinking clearly enough to identify it as an anomaly.
"That thing... is an Anomaly Species?"
"I see. It makes sense. It’s the most logical explanation for a monster that shouldn’t exist on this floor appearing out of nowhere," the thief_man said, nodding as the pieces fell into place.
Elena glanced toward the two men and then to Gort, who was still tending to the maimed Tibia.
"You should tend to her wounds properly. Leave this place to us and go."
"...No, we’ll stay and help."
"Hey, Nakt!? What are you thinking?" the spearman hissed. "We’ll just be dead weight at this point!"
"Calm down, Ecethesus. Think," Nakt replied levelly. "Do you honestly believe we can make it to the Small Room with the Magic Circle on our own in this state? Tibia is out of the fight, Gort is a porter, and while I can hold my own, I’m still just a thief. That leaves you as our only real vanguard. If we run into another pack of undead... you know how that ends."
They would be annihilated. Nakt’s unspoken point hit home, and Ecethesus bit his lip, unable to find an argument.
He knew Nakt was right. With Tibia—their strongest fighter—incapacitated, he would have to be the main wall while simultaneously protecting her. If they encountered a large group of undead on the way back, their chances of survival were slim.
Still, in Ecethesus’s mind, that risk felt lower than facing the anomaly and the horde it was currently summoning.
"Quiet down and watch them," Nakt said softly, trying to settle his companion.
He turned his gaze toward the skeleton forces.
What followed was a scene of absolute, one-sided carnage.
Flames erupted in a flash, incinerating multiple skeletons instantly. A moment later, a whip-sword in its whip-like form lashed through the air, shredding several more. Then came the Gryphon. Its front paw strikes looked almost casual, yet they sent skeletons flying in clusters, shattering their bones against the walls and floor.
They moved through the swarm that had nearly killed the adventurers as if they were merely taking a stroll—or rather, like hikers clearing away bothersome brush on a mountain trail.
Rei, who had started by launching fire from a distance, was now closing in, his massive black scythe reaping, crushing, and destroying everything in its path.
"N-No way..."
"It’s the truth," Nakt said. "And if we stay with them, our chances of getting out of this dungeon alive are much higher."
"But, we’re still just in the way..." Ecethesus muttered.
Nakt grabbed him firmly by the shoulder.
"Get a grip! I know you're terrified of that anomaly. But are you really going to gamble everyone's lives on your pride? That includes Tibia."
"Guh..."
Ecethesus stood frozen, as if Nakt’s stare had pinned him in place. After a few seconds of heavy silence, he finally gave a reluctant nod.
"Fine. ...It’s true we probably wouldn't make it out alone. But will they even take us along? What if they want to keep going deeper instead of heading back to the magic circle?"
"...If it comes to that, I’ll find a way to persuade them," Tibia cut in. Her wound had been stabilized with a potion and cloth from Gort's supplies. "We don't have much left to offer as a reward, but I’ll give them my body if I have to... assuming anyone would want a woman missing an arm."
Tibia spoke from experience. Even covered in blood, sweat, and grime, she was a striking woman. She was well aware that her looks had caused men to duel over her in the past.
However...
"I wouldn’t recommend that. It would probably have the opposite effect," Nakt muttered.
He was looking at Elena, who was currently ব্যস্ত cutting through a line of skeletons with her whip-sword.
Tibia followed his gaze and, with a woman’s intuition, immediately understood his meaning.
"Right. But then what? If we don't have a reward, we can't be sure they'll help us back to the magic circle."
"...True. And we need to get that arm of yours to a proper healer as fast as possible."
Tibia was keeping a stoic face, but the severing of a limb was no small thing. The beads of cold sweat on her forehead made it clear she was barely holding back the agony.
Seeing her like that filled her comrades with a bitter sense of powerlessness. Gort especially was filled with regret; even though fleeing was the right choice, losing his pack—his livelihood—was a devastating blow.
(There were high-grade potions in there...)
Despite their declaration to help, Ecethesus and Nakt felt equally useless. The sheer gap in ability displayed before them left no room for them to even assist.
"Flying Slash!"
Rei’s voice rang out as a blade of compressed air erupted from his scythe, bisecting several skeletons before flying off into the distance.
"He can use wind magic too...?"
Ecethesus watched, stunned, as the enemies blocking the path to the Skeleton Anomaly Species were wiped out. Rei didn't hesitate, kicking off the cobblestones to close the distance.
Having cleared the skeleton-modoki—beings that didn't even possess magic stones—Rei brandished his Death Scythe and charged the anomaly.
Finding its shield of bone gone, the anomaly’s green eyes flared with hatred. It began to exhale more of the white mist, desperate to replenish its forces.
Rei swung the Death Scythe to end it, but the anomaly displayed a nimbleness entirely alien to its kind. It leaped backward to evade the strike, leveling the tips of its four scimitars toward Rei as it landed.
"...Heh. I had a feeling, but you’re quite the overachiever for a bunch of bones."
A smirk played across Rei’s lips as he stole a glance at his surroundings.
Between Elena and Set, the majority of the skeleton-modoki had already been purged. It was only a matter of seconds before they would be free to surround the anomaly.
"Goaoooooo!"
The Skeleton Anomaly Species let out a final, defiant howl. Its eyes burned with a light that spoke of an undying hatred for the living as it raised its scimitars and lunged at Rei.