“Jay, lay down your weapons and your death will be painless.” the elder Grundel said.
But he also wondered - where did Jay’s weapons and armour come from?
The T-visor helmet slowly looked around, scanning the circle of villagers around him.
No one could know his intentions; most assumed that Jay was about to break down in fear.
They had him surrounded, each with sticks and stones to harm him, some even had bows and arrows laced with more of the purple paralysis substance - and now they offered him an ultimatum?
To die slowly or quickly?
Pathetic.
The elder repeated as if Jay didn’t hear.
“Lay down your weapons. We’ll make it quick. I promise.” he said, trying to sound fierce, but Jay could hear traces of fear in his voice.
Jay looked around at the villagers - all of them were here except the children - though he had actually only seen one child since coming here.
Jay finally spoke,
“How much did they pay you to kill me?”
The elder was confused.
“Who?”
A pregnant silence, and then the elder chuckled, realisation dawned on him.
“Oh!” he laughed, shaking his head, “the knights have nothing to do with this.”
“You’re our prey.” Elder Grundel said slowly.
Suddenly everything made sense.
The starved-looking villagers.
The hundreds of disassembled skeletons outside the village.
The way the villagers treated him with a sense of suspicion and didn’t bother answering his questions; he would die soon so it didn’t matter.
The reason the little girl, the only child in this village, had run off into the forest.
The only reinforced stone hut in the entire village which was specially prepared for Jay; it was a prison.
This was a village full of cannibals.
Jay wasn’t betrayed by the villagers, but this made him just as disgusted.
The T-visor helmet turned to the elder, Jay’s voice sounding playful and insane.
“Well, this isn’t very fair. One versus… a whole village?”
“Pfft, you’re choosing to fight?” a hunter scoffed, one holding Jay’s bone dagger.
He thought himself to be superior due to the dagger Jay traded him. While it was a low quality dagger, it was much better than the sharp stones and sticks the others were using.
The elder glared at the noisy hunter for a moment, then turned back to Jay.
“Well, it will be a painful death then… I’m sorry for this.”
The hunters with the bow each pulled back the purple-tipped arrows, but before they could fully draw them back, Jay lowered his sword and shook his head.
“No. I’m sorry for this.” A whisper came from under the T-visor helmet, a sly smile hidden.
The archers waited for the signal to fire on Jay.
Suddenly, a creaking noise filled the silence.
Behind Jay, the door of the stone hut slowly creaked open.
“Wasn’t Jay alone? Wasn’t the hut empty? Is this some kind of trick?” some wondered.
Only darkness was inside the hut, but as the villagers gazed into it, pairs of lightly glowing green beads floated in the darkness.
A stir of fear and wonder filled the crowd.
Each of the hunters paused, still waiting for the signal to shoot their poison-laced arrows.
*GRAH!!!*
A desperate scream.
A villager somewhere in the crowd suddenly wailed from pain, and all the others stepped away in horror as they saw something from a nightmare.
The person screamed helplessly and flailed their arms around as a skeleton sunk its jaws into their throat, blood spurting onto others, a red cascade flowing through the undead jaws.
Most of the villagers froze, not believing their own eyes.
A skeleton - a damn skeleton appeared?
How? The dead were coming back to life?
Were the people they had eaten now coming back from the grave for revenge?
As the teeth sank into the flesh, one bone hand held the neck, while the other held a sword which was now gutting them in front of all the other villagers.
Its brutality outmatched all of the cannibal villagers combined.
The undead that was savagely slaying one of their own was Red.
Jay had recalled Red from scouting, and since it was outside the encirclement it committed a perfect sneak attack, and was both a perfect distraction.
Everyone was shocked, and for a moment they even forgot about Jay who was still standing there - no one noticed that he looked completely relaxed.
Some of the hunters had re-aimed their arrows skeleton - but with their attention shifted they didn’t see that there was movement in the hut.
The sounds of clicking bones were drowned out by the screams, no one noticed that skeletons began sprinting out of the darkness - until it was too late.
There was no battle cry. There was no warning.
No one realised until a chorus of screams began.
Suddenly in their midst the undead seemed to be everywhere.
And then, everything turned to chaos.
The skeletons’ swords slashed mercilessly as the villagers, and their ragged clothes put up little resistance to the blades.
The crowd soon became covered in spatters of crimson.
Some of the hunters released their arrows at the undead - to little effect.
The stone-head arrows simply went through the gaps of the skeletons or bounced off their armour or bones.
As for the paralysis poison, it did nothing to them. The undead already felt nothing.
A villager tried to grab onto Jay, as they were being pulled by a shepherds crook into the dark stone hut, screaming in fear as they entered the darkness.
But their screams quickly stopped.
Lamp was the most fear-inducing of all the skeletons, and soon it left the hut again to drag another victim into the darkness.
Red soon carved a path towards Jay, and slayed any villagers which dared to come closer.
Blue had the skeletons target the villagers which tried to quell the fear and panic; it tactfully stopped the villagers from uniting and fighting back effectively.
Anyone who seemed to be fearless was targeted first.
Handy was decimating entire swaths of the crowd with its two-handed bastard sword, severing legs in one swing and opening up multiple stomachs at once. It created the most blood out of all of them.
Sweeper targeted the archers, making sure its master wasn’t struck in the back.
A few villagers dropped their daggers and pissed themselves, falling to the ground and curling into balls holding their knees in fear, hoping it was all just a nightmare as they succumbed to the [Fear] aura from the skeletons.
Others put up a fight, or at least tried to.
The skeletons took some small stabs from the jagged stone daggers, but to the villagers’ surprise the skeletons didn’t even flinch. The skeletons just kept slashing and stabbing as if they were possessed.
If the villagers were armoured, had weapons and were well trained then maybe they could have put up at least some resistance, but they weren’t any of those.
All of them were malnourished, skinny and meek; their weapons were as primitive as they could be, and as for training? Well, they had none. They relied on paralysis poison and numbers to kill. Individually they were nothing, and they all fell like dead grass before a scythe.
It was not a battle, it was a massacre.
A slaughter had begun.
Bodies fell to the ground as pools of blood grew bigger, and more blood was being added to the ground every second.
A strong smell of iron filled the air, along with screams of fear and agony.
An explosion rattled out, as Jay had flicked an unstable tooth at a small group of them, curious to see what it would do to bare human flesh. Needless to say, it was torn apart like paper.
The ground and the nearby huts were all soon painted red.
The villagers which fought back with their pathetic stone daggers only lasted a moment. The skeletons were warriors.
Their bone swords easily swatted away the stone daggers, the second strike piercing chests; their insignificant lives snuffed out soon after.
Jay decided not to watch much of it. Even for him, this was quite barbaric, yet the screams of terror and pain didn’t bother him.
He kept telling himself these were cannibals. They planned to eat him, and he wasn’t their first victim - if the field of skeletons outside the village was anything to go by. These starving cannibals had no mercy, and neither would he.
So he didn’t stop the skeletons in their brutal, merciless rampage.
It was like divine justice.
Jay kept telling himself they deserved this, and remembered it was just a dungeon despite how surreal the situation was.
He still had to complete this dungeon, so he made sure to keep the elder alive till last.
Elder Grundel was the one to poison him after all, so he would probably know the answers to some of Jay’s questions.
“Wait… what did they feed me last night…”
Jay’s face grimaced in disgust.
“These fucking… animals.”
His anger now seethed. He wanted to vomit but his stomach was now empty after sleeping.
Trying to kill him was one thing, but secretly feeding him… that… It was a step too far. A personal crime against his very soul.
Jay returned to the stone hut to gather his bag. Stepping over a few skinned bodies he found it - only to find it was empty. They even stole his belongings, without even waiting for him to die. Grundel probably took it while Jay was investigating.
As the pools of blood grew larger, the screams grew quieter.
Some villagers had fled into the darkness, thinking the pitch-black night would veil them until this was over while hiding in the village - yet the darkness held no secrets before the shade vision of the skeletons. Everything was laid bare before their ghostly green eyes.
Handy was sent to hunt the hiding cannibals, while the skeletons gradually returned to Jay’s side, all of them now stained red.
Blue was standing over the elder who struggled under its bone foot.
Soon enough, the only ones still alive in this village would be Jay and the elder Grundel.
Everything returned to an eerie quietness after the last of the resisting villagers died.
The only sounds were the odd clinking of bones rushing past and a muffled scream when a hiding villager was found.
Jay slowly approached Grundel who struggled; each of his steps in the red pools sounded like a death knell to the elder.
Standing over Grundel, Jay thought he looked like he was about to pass out from the sheer terror.
Grundel now didn’t know who to fear more - Jay or the skeletons. Fear was like a form of respect, and Jay felt he was finally being given the respect he deserved.
“Where is it?” Jay’s voice was low and threatening, almost a deep whisper.
“Wh-what? Y- the skeletons obey you?!”
Yes - Jay was much more terrifying.
“Where is it? My black cube. Answer or I will let them have you.” he pointed to Lamp, who was now wearing a villagers face as a mask.
“The - the black cube? W-we traded it for the meat we gave you. They call themselves the leaf-skin.” the elder said between shivers of fear, and pointed, “that way. That path. You’ll find… no, they’ll find you.” he quickly uttered.
“What? Traded it for meat?” Jay raised a brow.
“The meat was from a wolf-boar. We couldn’t risk giving you human meat unless you identified it and got suspicious, so we traded your black cube for some of their animal meat.”
Grundel kept desperately pointing to a shallow dirt path heading out of the village.
Jay felt relieved as he realised he had only eaten animal flesh, glad that he was not a cannibal.
It was one line he would never cross. Even using human bones as his summoned creatures didn’t quite sit right with Jay, and he would not kill humans simply for the sake of getting more skeletons. As for eating humans, well he would rather starve to death.
Grundel was shocked at what Jay did next.
He used his gauntlet to gather the bones from the corpses, each of them sliding out of the flesh as if sliding off a glove - he also tried to gather the ones from under the roots outside the village too, but the roots caged them underground and he only got about one-hundred more. One-hundred and fifty skeletons total.
Jay had the other skeletons search the village for anything interesting, or anyone hiding, but there was nothing of value or interest. Just more sticks and stones.
Lamp had seemed to gather enough human skin, as at some point it stopped cutting. None of the flesh was added to its fur-covered back, but its other bones were now covered in a new type of olive-pink leather which was somehow all melded and mixed together with no signs of distinction or seams. It was like all the leather was taken from a single source and specifically made to fit the skeleton.
Jay made Lamp grab some of the tattered clothes as it seemed more naked somehow.
It was attached to the bone in some places but not in others, and as the bone figure moved underneath the leather it made him disgusted.
Blue was still standing over Grundel, pointing its sword at his throat when Jay approached once more.
“That way?” Jay pointed.
Grundel nodded.
“Good.” was the last word Grudel heard as Jay walked away.
Jay began walking towards the shallow forest path, which soon turned to roots and was marked using sticks; it would lead him to the leaf-skin people.
Unfortunately, it was in the opposite direction of the knights territory - which perhaps were not even the genocidal maniacs that the villagers led him to believe they were.
All his skeletons followed him along except for Blue - who still stood over Grundel. Business was nearly concluded at this village - but not quite.
As Jay was some distance away, he heard a muffled scream, and Blue soon returned to his side.
Jay came to the village to protect them, but only left corpses in his wake.
Following the stick-path over the roots, he was guided by Red in the black of night, towards the next village. He had numerous exp notifications which he would soon check.
He sent his skeletons to scout ahead, and made the head of his ethereal parasite appear as it coiled around his neck so he could pet it a few times. If it didn’t wake him up that night, perhaps the poison-coated dagger would have kept him paralysed until death.
Now, Jay pondered on the elders’ last words: ‘the leaf-skin people will find you’.
It was obvious to Jay that they would be camouflaged, as their name suggested.
“It seems the leaf-skin have access to animal meat. I wonder if they are cannibals too.”
