He noticed the change once enough skeletons were down.
The piles of shattered bone no longer carried the same weight the standing skeletons did, the same pull of floor authority he had felt when Reanimate bounced off the first one. The broken remains felt inert. Dead in a way the upright ones were not.
He tested it on a shattered pile near his feet.
[CORPSE EXPLOSION] [MANA: 1,310 → 1,282] [COOLDOWN: 40 SECONDS]
The pile went up in a burst of bone shrapnel and black force.
BOOM.
It did not behave exactly the way a flesh corpse did, with less wet force and more flying splinters, but it worked, and that was all that mattered. The blast tore into the skeletons nearest the pile and cracked two skulls, snapped an arm clean off a third, and knocked four more off their feet in a spray of stone dust and bone fragments.
That was the turning point, and James felt it land.
