The skeletons pressed in from behind while the ogre's attention was forward. Strikes landed across its back, its shoulders, and the back of its knees, the one that made an impact. Even then, the ogre absorbed them and kept its focus on Leon with the stubborn intelligence of something that had identified the soft target and made a strategic commitment.
'Intelligent,' Leon noted, not happily. He had been hoping it would be the straightforward aggressive type instead. 'It knows the skeletons aren't the real threat.'
He kept moving and kept the ogre turning, using the rotation to let the skeletons work the back and sides. The damage was accumulating, he could see it in the way the creature was favouring one leg slightly where a skeleton had managed a deep strike to the back of the knee joint. He wished he had some way of knowing how much more it could absorb, perhaps if he had a system that allowed him see some numerical display of remaining health, a progress bar, anything. He had nothing but visual read and instinct.
Out of nowhere, the ogre changed tactics again without announcement. It turned sharply on the skeleton pressing it from the left and swung not with the sword but with its powerful leg that connected before the skeleton could reposition, and the impact was total. The skeleton scattered on impact, and the pieces clattered across the stone floor before dissolving back into the summoner's space.
The pain hit Leon like a fist to the sternum. He gasped and kept moving because stopping was worse. Somehow, the pain was not as much as the first time. Whether adaptation or adrenaline, he didn't know, and he didn't care.
The ogre turned to the second skeleton immediately, sword coming down in a short chopping motion that the skeleton partially blocked but couldn't fully absorb. The blade connected with the skeleton's sword arm below the shoulder, and the crack of the bone was audible across the room. The arm hung wrong after that, the grip compromised, the skeleton's ability to generate meaningful force from that side effectively gone.
Just like that, two summons had been compromised, leaving only one functional skeleton left.
Leon was reassessing at speed.
He pulled the damaged skeleton back and repositioned it behind him, defensive use only, buying space. The third skeleton, Bone Head no. 3, untouched so far, he pushed forward with everything it had, aggressive and constant, forcing the ogre to keep its attention occupied while Leon circled and looked for the angle.
Even with that, it wasn't all effective. The ogre committed to him suddenly and completely, crossing the distance between them faster than he could fully react to, and the sword came in low this time, a sweeping strike that he threw himself sideways to avoid. Though he avoided it, the ogre stretched out its free hand and managed to grab his leg, throwing him across the room. The pain that followed was the kind of sound that preceded a very specific type of pain.
He hit the ground and rolled a couple times before forcing his head up, only to be assaulted by the pain, radiating up from the leg with an intensity that whited out his vision briefly and left him on the stone floor gritting his teeth hard enough to feel it in his jaw. It was definite that his leg had been broken.
'Get it done,' he pushed through to the two skeletons. 'Now. Both of you.'
The skeleton with the broken arm moved despite the damage, finding what force it could from its remaining functional arm. The third skeleton came from the opposite angle. The ogre, turning back toward Leon on the ground, received both of them simultaneously, one blade driving into the side of its neck where the chest armour ended, the other finding the gap between the chest plate and the shoulder guard and pushing through.
The ogre made a sound that started as aggression and didn't finish as anything.
It came down slowly, causing a shake around the room when its body hit the ground.
Leon lay on the stone beside his skeletons and breathed through the pain in his leg for a long moment as the ceiling of the boss room looked back at him without comment. He gave himself exactly as long as he needed to confirm he was still alive and functional above the leg, and then he started moving, dragging himself.
Getting to the ogre's body on one working leg was not a dignified process. He used the wall, then the floor, covering the distance in a way that would have looked miserable to any observer. When he reached the body he was already tired from the effort of it. He took out the sword he had carried from the earlier chamber, found the right point on the ogre boss's chest, and got to work.
The dense muscles made it a bit difficult, but he finally extracted it. The core he extracted was significantly larger than the ones from the corridor ogres. The colour was deeper, and the surface carried a faint luminescence that the Grade 1 cores hadn't had. He turned it over in his fingers once, confirmed it was intact, and placed it carefully into his pocket alongside the others. He wrapped them all inside the clothe he took from a previous ogre.
He was about to figure out his next problem, which was how to navigate a dungeon exit on a broken leg, when the room changed.
In the centre of the chamber, where nothing had been a moment ago, a small orb of whitish light appeared. It floated at about chest height, calm and self-contained, pulsing faintly with the steady rhythm of something that had been waiting for exactly this moment.
Leon looked at it and immediately recognized what it was. This was the dungeon core. It appeared only after a dungeon had been fully cleared, the final marker of completion, and destroying it was what closed the dungeon entirely. He had read enough to know that much.
He looked at it, then looked at Bone Head number three, the only skeleton still standing with full functionality.
"You know what to do," he said.
The skeleton crossed the chamber, raised its greatsword, and brought it down on the orb with a clean, full-commitment strike.
Immediately, the light from the orb burst outward in a silent white flash, and then everything began dissolving, from the walls to the floor, torches and the boss's corpse even, and even the darkness of the corridors beyond, all of it came apart like mist in a rising wind, layer by layer, pulling back from the edges inward until there was nothing left of it at all.
Leon felt the ground change under him. Stone became grass. The cave ceiling became open sky obscured by tree branches and leaves, the familiar air of the academy grounds replacing the close underground atmosphere in a single breath.
Quite immediately also, he became aware of the gathered presence around him gradually.
He could see several figures, officials in academy uniform, several of them, positioned at a perimeter around the space where the dungeon entrance had been. Equipment was being assembled nearby it appeared, and someone had been on a communication device. There was an organised momentum of people preparing to send a team into a dungeon that had apparently already been cleared.
They looked at Leon lying on the grass with a broken leg and two skeleton warriors standing beside him, all of them shocked at the sight.
He looked back at them.
A brief silence passed over the gathered officials with the quality of a group of people simultaneously revising what they had expected to find when they got here.
"Evening," Leon said, because nothing else immediately came to mind.