Tyler scrambled forward as the room erupted into chaos, weaving through the sea of people in an effort to keep up with Brandon.

  "What's going on?" he yelled, his voice barely loud enough to be heard over the shouts and thundering of footsteps that now dominated the kitchen.

  He stepped over a fallen tray, its stew spilled and forgotten in the urgency that seemed to have overtaken everyone. In the span of three seconds, the room had gone from loose celebration to a manic rush of preparation.

  "The skeletons made it through our defenses," Brandon growled as he fumbled with the many pockets on the interior of his coat. "They normally don't push at this time. Alberta already spent all her mana trying to fend them off this afternoon."

  Brandon wiped his palms on his pants as they jogged through the chaos to the nearest window. The entire room of fifty or so people was rapidly streaming toward the two exits.

  "How bad is it?" Tyler asked.

  “Bad!” Lisa said from behind him. “But we’ll need to see for ourselves to figure out just how bad.”

  The woman jogged up to meet them, a second crossbow now slung over her shoulder as Brandon undid the latches on the window and held out his hand.

  Suddenly, a floating slab of stone came rushing towards them from the exterior of the building, swooping through the air to climb upwards until it bobbed up and down just outside the window. Tyler thought it must have been about twice his height and wider than his wingspan, made of a gray granite-like material with a rough polish.

  In one smooth motion, both of the siblings jumped onto it.

  "Come on!" Lisa shouted, reaching across the windowsill to extend a hand out to Tyler.

  "Wait, no —" Brandon said, but Tyler had already climbed aboard.

  “I can help.”

  Brandon shook his head. "Too dangerous. The safest place for you to be is in the base."

  “I’m a Journeyman. Aspect of Resilience.”

  The man looked at him like he’d grown a third eye. “No you’re not.”

  "He can help,” Lisa repeated. “Trust me. I’ll protect him if I need to.”

  "Ugh. We don't have time for this."

  They ascended at a fairly rapid pace, and Tyler kept a tight grip on the edge of the board, his heart pounding as they crested the first skyscrapers and the battle came into view.

  It was far, but through his Journeyman senses Tyler could make out a group of skyscrapers manned by what he assumed were friendly forces, raining arrows and magic upon an advancing swarm of metal and bone.

  Skeletons.

  They were everything he’d expected when he’d heard the phrase. Man-sized things made of cracked bone with eyes of dark green magic, they ranged from bipedal humanoids to full-on amalgamations with dozens of limbs jutting out at awkward angles. Their pitted ivory shone a dull orange in the evening light, and they swarmed across bridges like ants, reinforcements replacing their fallen faster than the Stormchasers could take them out.

  The majority of the Stormchasers from the base were sprinting across rooftops behind them, weapons brandished and ready to fight, but Tyler estimated that it’d probably be at least a couple of minutes before they made it to the breach.

  "Why are they pushing so hard right now?" Brandon said. "They never do this."

  The tall man whispered something to himself, and his aura flared for a moment as he blinked his eyes. "Building Five, right down the middle. They've brought a general out."

  Tyler turned his attention to where Brandon was pointing, and his Journeyman eyes could just barely make out a lone human form, slinging fire desperately against a flying skeletal bat the size of a car.

  It swooped down and clawed at the middle-aged man, who scrambled to the side and shot a gout of fire its way. The bat easily dodged, unleashing an ear-piercing shriek before redoubling its assault.

  Dozens of skeletons were converging upon that building, and some were already beginning to leak through to the other side. Magic projectiles instantly slammed into them from the neighboring buildings, but Tyler knew it would be only a moment before they were replaced.

  The slab accelerated toward the battle, so fast that Tyler couldn't hear anything else save for the wind whistling past his ears.

  "There's so many of them," he muttered.

  Lisa leaned toward him to shout in his ear. "So they're all tied to that big flying dude right there. He's the hub. When he goes down, they all go down. They normally don't expose their weak point like this, but I guess their gamble paid off this time."

  Another form shot toward the breached building atop a floating sword, and Tyler recognized that it was Rhett. The man wobbled drunkenly upon the magic blade, but a series of floating metal shields surrounded him, deflecting incoming arrows. He roared at the challenge, and threw himself off the sword and through a window of the breached building.

  Suddenly, the roar of the wind quieted, and Tyler recognized that Brandon had pushed out another technique to still the air around them.

  The redheaded man turned back to them. "Here's the plan. Rob — the guy fighting the general — is a Peak-Novice. Lisa's also a Peak-Novice, but she's not good at close-range fighting, and her attacks are much less effective against things that don't have blood within them. She's going to jump down when we reach the building and do her best to heal our ally and hold the line against the general, but I'll be occupied supporting them until reinforcements can come.”

  "Reinforcements." Lisa frowned. "Do we really trust Rhett to get there on time?"

  From the line of shattered windows making its way up the building, the giant man was making good progress. But he seemed to be clearing out every possible opponent on a floor, rather than going up the building as fast as possible.

  In fact, was there a reason why the guy hadn’t just used his sword to float all the way to the roof?

  Suddenly, arrows began whizzing toward them, and Brandon deccelerated as he split his concentration into another technique — a barrier of wind that seemed to knock the projectiles off-course.

  "It's the best option we have," Brandon muttered, though he looked uneasy at the thought.

  “No it’s not!” Lisa pointed at Tyler. “What does the Aspect of Resilience do, new guy?”

  “Lisa, do you really trust —”

  “Shoot me,” Tyler interrupted.

  “What?” Brandon scoffed. “No. Lisa, don’t —”

  But Lisa was already firing a crossbow bolt point-blank at Tyler’s raised hand.

  The Dragon’s Bones flared to life within him, and he blocked it with a simple catching motion, opening his hand to show the thin line that the sharp metal had left on his skin. It hadn’t even drawn blood.

  “I’m very durable, and I can hit things hard. You don’t have to keep up that wind barrier if you can go faster without it — I think I can handle the incoming arrows. Just focus on getting there as fast as possible and tell me what to do.”

  “Hell yeah!” Lisa shouted.

  Her brother just stared at them for a moment, his mouth hanging wide open, before he regained his composure with a blink. “Okay. Yeah.”

  Lisa nodded in approval and pressed a hand on Tyler’s back. Suddenly, the pain seemed to lessen just a little bit again.

  They accelerated again, and Tyler rose to his feet, trusting the Flowing Sands to keep him balanced as he fully turned his attention to the enemy.

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  Another cloud of arrows whizzed toward them, and Tyler caught one that was about to strike him in the chest, feeling the dull tip and the flimsiness of the rotted wood. He could take one of those, certainly. This was nothing compared to a swarm of duneclaws lunging at him from every direction.

  The Flowing Sands began to build within his channels.

  Brandon gritted his teeth as they closed in on the building, flinching back as a trio of arrows came within striking distance only to be caught by Tyler at the last second. “Here’s the new plan: Lisa, focus on healing Rob from up here. I’ll keep the arrows off you and fend off the rabble coming down below. Tyler — kill that thing.”

  They swooped down low, and Tyler jumped off with a wild shout.

  System Boon Engaged: Analysis

  Chiropteran Boneweld

  Upon the oceans of Cirex, there once sailed a group of feared warlords well versed in the knowledge of life and death. They plundered not just gold, but the very essence of strength — organs torn from the bodies and souls of monsters and cultivators alike, hoarded like treasures to be devoured in their relentless pursuit of power.

  But their ambition led them to one fatal mistake.

  They sought the inheritance of the Saint of Eternal Scarlet, a prize of knowledge meant solely for the woman’s holy successor that they thought poorly-guarded as the Saint waged war in a distant land. But even across the sea, the Saint felt the theft as keenly as she would a needle to her neck.

  For their crimes, she struck them down in a single blow — but not before cursing their bodies and souls to forever arise at the break of dawn, to join the gruesome pieces that they once operated upon in a horrific amalgamation of magic and bone.

  This boneweld contains the soul of a warlord himself, and serves as a conduit for the living magic seared into its legion of ancient bones. The mindless rabble at its command will never stop till this Chiropteran is put to rest.

  Tyler stared down at the unholy thing, its ivory wings flared outwards as it stood frozen in the middle of takeoff. He could see the pain on its opponent’s face — the blood running down the fire mage’s shirt from a trio of arrow wounds, the paleness of the man’s fingers as they held a mace uselessly at his side.

  He could see the desperation in the people holding the buildings around them, the panic in their eyes as their attention was forced between ensuring their own survival and preventing more enemies from spilling into the compromised skyscraper. He thought he could even hear the faint frozen sound of a drunken roar a couple stories below him, accompanied by the echoes of metal on cracking bone.

  For someone used to fighting oversized lobsters torn from their natural environment, this monster was a clear order of magnitude stronger than anything he’d ever managed to kill.

  He'd just woken up from the brink of death a couple of hours ago, and his joints should have been far too weak to support any sort of sustained combat. But the blood magic was easing his pain, and lending him strength that melded with the new power of the Flowing Sands.

  Tyler clenched his fists, feeling the urgency of the situation. The bird’s ominous, dark green orbs for eyes turned towards him as reality snapped back to its usual speed.

  The circumstances certainly wasn't ideal, but with the power of a Journeyman and a truckload of adrenaline coursing through him, he thought he could perform. After all, this thing still wasn’t nearly as strong as that bird had been.

  He landed with a hammering two-handed blow that collapsed the monster's right wing. The limb gave out under him in a sickening crunch, and he used the momentum from his attack to launch himself away, landing in a crouch on the rooftop before the thing could retaliate.

  It shrieked — a discordant, hair-raising tone like ripping metal — and rushed towards him in a scrambling limp. It was awkward and hunched — no doubt unused to being without its powers of flight — but it still closed the distance at a rapid pace.

  Behind him, Tyler caught what he thought was a choked ‘thank you’ as a glob of red magic landed on the fire mage’s chest.

  And then the bat was on him.

  It snapped forward with fangs that seemed strong enough to crack concrete, but he whirled around the bite and hit it with an uppercut, cracking the hard bone and sending the thing reeling. It twisted towards him in agony, its one good wing sweeping out like a reaper’s scythe, and Tyler met the blow with the full strength of the Dragon’s Bones. His arms stood against the blow like solid steel.

  Unfortunately, he’d forgotten that he still weighed the same as a normal human. He went shooting back, his bare feet scraping against concrete just feet away from the edge of the rooftop.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, scrambling back to his feet as a swarm of arrows bounced off of his back. “That was close.“

  He really needed a way to stop that from happening.

  The bat was already halfway to him, brimming with rage that Tyler had somehow managed to survive its strike. But luckily for him, the fire mage had recovered.

  And this time when the man lashed out with a technique, it landed on the distracted creature with a resounding boom.

  The monster screamed like a thousand tortured locusts as it emerged through the attack, the left half of its skull charred and sizzling with embers. The edges of the burnt bone seemed to crumble off in flakes, the scorching heat too much for the animating magic to overcome.

  A sharp thunk signaled the success of another attack as a crossbow bolt embedded itself into the thing’s skull.

  But it seemed Tyler still had the monster’s undivided attention. It thundered towards him, its jaws gnashing as a handful of lesser fireballs hammered into the thing.

  In response, Tyler prepared the Flowing Sands.

  More arrows caught him in a half-dozen places, but they proved barely more than a nuisance as he coaxed his mana into a frenzy.

  The monster had caught him off-guard that time. The feeling reminded him of his fight with the bird, or that first encounter with a duneclaw. But there was a difference now — he was just more powerful.

  He was moving before the creature even reached him, lashing out with a kick that took its cracked right wing clean off. He hooked a hand onto its leg as he absorbed the momentum of the limb, and flung himself up to the back of the hunched creature’s head.

  It thrashed with all its might as it realized where he’d gone, snapping its skull back and forth and clawing wildly at him with its one remaining wing. But Tyler’s grip held, and he endured the blows with the supreme confidence befitting a practitioner of the Aspect of Resilience.

  And with every second, he landed another blow on its skull with his free hand. Punch after punch after punch, he hammered the thick bone with all his strength, spreading a vast spiderweb of cracks through the torso-sized thing before his fist finally broke through with a resounding snap.

  The animating magic within it was hot against his hand — eating away at his skin like acid as he plunged his forearm into the hole, somehow grabbing hold of the ephemeral substance with nothing but instinct.

  It was like he’d suddenly latched onto a thousand steel wires, vibrating in every direction and grating against his fingers with white-hot friction that touched on more than just the physical. It refused to be broken — refused to even be held, but some deep, defiant part of him raged with emotion from the heart-wrenching loss that to him felt like just yesterday. He clutched onto it with all his strength, straining as the first bits of magic began to snap —

  And as the car-sized creature trembled in his grasp, he ripped the strings apart with a guttural scream.

  It didn’t even have time to make a sound before it collapsed into a pile of inanimate bones.

  Tyler barely remembered to catch himself as he fell with the thing.

  “Holy shit.” He was left there, huffing, his face flushed as the sound of thousands of clattering bones echoed throughout the buildings around them.

  Tyler turned around, and saw a handful of awe-filled stares trained on him from the adjacent rooftops. And more were showing up by the second as people pulled their comrades from their battlestations, leading them up to see the party that had stopped the chaos.

  He heard confused, slurred cursing rising from the floor below them.

  Then Brandon and Lisa touched down next to him with the gentle thunk of boots on stone.

  "I told you so," Lisa smirked.

  "Yeah," Brandon exhaled, smiling as he shook his head. "You sure did. I’m sorry for doubting you, man. I appreciate the help… Journeyman."

  Tyler paused for a moment. “Of course. And thanks for having my back. Both of you.”

  From across the rooftop, a small ball of magic shot up into the air, exploding outwards after a moment like a firework.

  “The battle is over!” the fire mage shouted, and Tyler saw the crowd of reinforcements come to a stop on the lower rooftops. “We beat them!”

  Another signal shot upward from the crowd, and then another from the group trailing further behind them. Then, a burst of light rose from the base, expanding outwards until it displayed giant blue letters that could be clearly read even from Tyler’s position.

  V I C T O R Y.

  It was beautiful.

  Brandon suddenly sat up, putting a hand in his pocket as he turned towards the direction of the base. “Alberta is contacting me. Let me just — yes. We dispatched of the general. No, he’s still down there somewhere. It was our refugee. He says he’s a Journeyman. Do you want to — oh, shit. Okay.”

  He turned to Tyler, and some sort of magic washed out from him as he pulled out a card-shaped silver talisman. “She wants to talk to you.”

  The man pushed the artifact towards him, and suddenly Tyler could hear the Branch Leader’s voice echoing in his ear. It was like catching a quiet conversation on a windy day, but his newly enhanced senses had no trouble picking up the words.

  "What's your name, newcomer?"

  He straightened. “Tyler. Tyler Thorn.”

  A moment of silence. Then…

  "Then the entire 21st Branch of the Stormchasers thanks you, Tyler Thorn."

  — – —

  But though he couldn’t see it, it was more than just these particular enemies that Tyler had defeated.

  In the mountainous jungle ringing the innermost layer of the central continent, the 17th Branch of the Stormchasers fled from house to collapsing house as they desperately ran from an avalanche of skeletal soldiers.

  Deep in a coastline of skyscrapers, just barely above the deadly cosmic ocean, a scarred woman led a small team through the undead-infested tunnels of a bejeweled castle, the blade in her hands shining with the sacred techniques of a legendary sect.

  And at the very heart of the outbreak, a lone man lounged on the deck of a ship floating atop a cocoon of clouds, the aura of a Peak-Journeyman emanating from him as he casually flicked wide, crescent-moon-shaped cuts at a hundred-foot-wide orb constructed solely from the ribcages of giants.

  All at once, the strings of magic animating these monsters snapped.

  The last survivors of the 17th Branch cried out in relief as they witnessed the instant collapse of the swarm of monsters behind them. The scarred woman let out an unsatisfied huff as the remains of her once-powerful enemies clattered unceremoniously onto the ground.

  And the lone man simply sneered.