"Let's go!"
Our voices overlapped as we launched off the ground toward the Skeleton formation. Through the waystation's boundary, out into the dark grassland. Aron's back led the way; Elkan, Sed, then me and Teok, driving forward in a line.
The moon was sharp overhead. Eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the rolls and dips of the grassland more clearly than expected. The white shapes that had been moving shapes in the distance were resolving into something I didn't want to look at too closely — and with every step, they resolved further.
The distance closed. The Skeletons registered our approach and turned toward us with a grinding, dissonant clatter.
That was the moment Aron accelerated — right and forward.
His legs drove him at a speed that nearly lost me. He left the rest of us behind in an instant, cutting diagonally across the right flank of the Skeleton mass.
Two sharp flashes burst from the front of the formation. The sound hit a half-second later — an explosive crack that rattled my ears. Several Skeletons were hurled backward, nothing they could do about it.
"Over to you!"
"On it!" "Understood."
Elkan and Sed answered Aron's signal without a breath between. They poured into the right side of the broken formation — Elkan swinging his heavy axe, Sed driving his broad blade, cutting down the disoriented bone soldiers one after another as they fought toward the center.
"Move it, Yohei!"
"Right!"
Teok's shout. I followed his back in.
*(Club — come out.)*
I put the force of the next step behind the thought. The image sharpened in my mind.
Heat in my palm — and then seventy centimeters of solid weight tore through the air.
A horizontal sweep.
Two Skeletons collapsed into it and flew apart. The sound was dry and cracking. The resistance was nothing — like breaking dead branches.
"Crush the skull! That's what stops them!"
Teok's voice, sharp. He brought the mace down on a fallen Skeleton's head without ceremony.
"Understood!"
I moved to follow up. Then something slammed into my back.
"—Ggh—!"
My knees almost buckled. I locked them and turned.
The perimeter had closed while I wasn't watching. One had circled behind me and landed a punch squarely into my spine. The movement had been slow — but bare bone is hard, and the pain reached deep.
"Damn—"
I let the pain feed into the turn. Twisted the momentum. Released the club at the moment of impact rather than holding through it. The spinning weight crushed the target's ribcage and carried through into the one behind, rolling them both across the ground.
I called the next one immediately and brought it down on the fallen skull.
Hard.
The vibration that came back through my wrist told me I'd misjudged. I dissolved the club in the same instant — a fraction of a second — and rebuilt it: heavier, weight redistributed toward the tip.
The next strike landed with a different quality entirely. The skull compressed and shattered like something overripe.
Demikind bone structure differed from anything in my memory — the shapes were wrong in ways I couldn't name. Maybe that wrongness helped. I felt no visceral revulsion. In my mind these were simply monsters, not remains.
But Skeletons, if you didn't destroy the skull, kept moving. Kept trying to move. Teok beside me was struggling with a four-legged beast-type that wouldn't stop writhing. I wanted to help, but the ones pressing in from the front had my full attention.
After the third one went down, the light ahead of me disappeared.
Something stood where the sky had been.
Three meters, at least. A massive humanoid skeleton — the skull shaped like a bull's, rough and asymmetrical. One of the large-type Aron had flagged. A Minotaur Skeleton.
Reflex took over before thought. I swung the club sideways at the enormous mass.
A hit that would have shattered a normal-sized Skeleton on contact. But—
A dull sound. The club stopped. The feedback in my hands was nothing like before.
"It's — solid—"
Like hitting a stone wall that had no intention of moving.
"Bone density—!"
The word came out as a gasp.
The large Skeleton paid no attention to the impact. It raised one enormous arm, unhurried. The movement was slow.
But at that scale, slow didn't mean survivable.
"This is bad—!"
The massive arm swung down, filling my vision.