“High Priest,” Viktor said, flicking his eyes toward Khenemhotep without taking them off the courtyard completely. “I didn’t know that you could make the skeletons bigger.”

  “It is but a simple trick, Sovereign of the Dungeon. Yet, merely making the bones greater in stature achieves little on its own, for their substance remains unchanged, so a greater size only yields greater emptiness. Thus, I filled their hollows with earth, fortifying them from within.”

  “I see.”

  In other words, those things weren’t merely oversized skeletons. Each one was a hybrid, shaped by death magic to reanimate the dead, and by earth magic to give their forms mass and resilience. Now, they were not just bones. More like walking tombstones.

  Viktor squinted down at the arena. He could count twenty of them. Khenemhotep had mentioned he had twenty warriors and five mages, hadn’t he? So these were just the warriors. The mages hadn’t shown up yet.

  The nearest skeleton lunged. Sebekton immediately twisted his body, letting the enemy’s bde gnce harmlessly off the pauldron on his shoulder, while unching a counterattack aimed straight at the thing’s exposed spinal column just beneath its ribcage. A smart move, Viktor thought. That part of the skeleton looked like a weak spot, as the upper and lower halves of its body were held together only by some fragile, brittle vertebrae. Yet, even though the strike connected, the skeleton only staggered back a few steps, but did not fall.

  Another tomb guard came in from the side, swinging its sword, a two-handed overhead blow that looked like it was meant to split the ground open. Sebekton dodged to the side and swept his tail around in a wide arc. The skeleton’s legs were knocked out from under it, and it crashed to the ground with a ctter of metal and bone. But it didn’t stay down. Before the Guardian could press the advantage, the thing rolled, kicked off the ground, and leaped backward, unnervingly nimble for its size and weight.

  At the same time, a third skeleton fnked the Guardian, its heavy shield raised. Sebekton turned in time, bringing his axe down in a crushing diagonal swing. Sparks exploded on impact as steel met steel with the resonance of a temple bell. The shield was dented, but held firm.

  Viktor knew that the Crocodilian wasn’t going all out yet. He was still probing, testing his opponents, conserving his strength. There was no reason to waste energy right from the start, before he could figure out how to fell them more efficiently. Nevertheless, even those measured strikes could have easily killed any human in a single hit, so the fact that the tomb guards could withstand them was undeniably impressive.

  Now, the skeletons had arranged themselves into formation. Two rings around Sebekton, six in the inner, fourteen in the outer. They slowly circled around him, moving in eerie, synchronized patterns, weapons held at the ready.

  While such a formation had the benefit of constantly threatening the surrounded enemy from every angle, spreading thin like this against a juggernaut like Sebekton might not be the best idea. The Crocodilian was no fool. He knew that staying confined inside a ring of enemies would eventually lead to him being overwhelmed. So, as Viktor predicted, he wasted no time with an attempt to break through.

  With a primal roar, Sebekton charged forward. He didn’t bother to dodge or block the incoming attack from the opponent before him, letting the blow hit uselessly against the Reliquary on his chest. He rammed the skeleton with a headbutt, skull smashing against skull. As the undead warrior reeled, stunned by the hit, Sebekton grabbed it by the ribcage, his cws sinking deep into the bones, and threw it toward the second rank.

  The hurled skeleton flew through the air and crashed into two others. As the second rank faltered under the sudden assault, their formation disrupted by the collision, Sebekton’s feet didn’t slow down even one bit. The mass of muscle and scale kept charging ahead, tearing through the perimeter. In the blink of an eye, the rings broke, and he was free, out of the surrounded position and into open space.

  It was not over, of course.

  Sebekton spun on his heel the moment he was clear of the encirclement, his cws digging into the ground. He dropped into a low stance, his tail swaying behind him. His golden eyes didn’t blink, didn’t stray. He was waiting for his opponents’ next move.

  And the tomb guards did not disappoint. They reorganized with unsettling speed, abandoning their loose rings for a tighter, denser formation, five ranks deep and four files wide. They had adapted. More mass meant more resistance. They weren’t going to let him punch through them again.

  However, this was exactly what Sebekton was waiting for.

  A predatory grin spread across the Crocodilian’s face as he saw his foes fall for the bait. He drew a slow breath, chest rising as he hefted his massive axe, bulging muscles rippling across his arms and shoulders.

  Then, he struck.

  From the arc of the swing erupted a crescent of invisible force that tore through the air with a soundless howl. It hit the enemy line and cleaved right through it. One moment, the skeletons stood, shoulder to shoulder, and the next, they splintered apart. The waning moon sliced through them like a scythe through stalks of wheat. Spines snapped, ribcages shattered, and weapons fell from lifeless fingers. The five tightly packed ranks of soldiers became five colpsing waves of steel and bone, crushed by a force none of them could brace against.

  The destruction didn’t stop there. The crescent smmed into a building outside the arena, behind the tomb guards, carving a long scar into its stone surface, dust and fragments raining from the wound.

  “Truly, this is a thing most impressive,” Khenemhotep said, giving a slow nod.

  “Of course it is,” Viktor replied with a smug grin. He couldn’t be more proud of his Guardian.

  “But Sovereign of the Dungeon, the end has not yet come.”

  “I know. There are still the mages—”

  No.

  Not all of the undead warriors had been destroyed. There was still one left, who leapt forward from the remains of its shattered comrades. How did it survive? Viktor’s eyes narrowed. Did it withstand the strike? Or evade it altogether?

  The lone skeleton lunged at Sebekton, closing the distance in a heartbeat, its two-handed axe raised high. The Crocodilian didn’t flinch. He adjusted his footing, bringing his own axe around to meet the attack.

  Two massive weapons collided with an explosive impact that sent a bst of air across the arena. Both combatants were forced back a step, the ground cracking beneath their feet. But neither faltered. They struck again, and again. The two behemoths had traded three thunderous blows in quick succession.

  “Interesting,” Viktor said.

  This one was clearly different. The other tomb guards were also strong, no doubt, but they had fought like soldiers. Their strength y in structured, coordinated combat, maneuvering together in a formation. Each was a cog in a machine, and none could meet Sebekton head-on in a one-on-one fight like this. The st skeleton, on the other hand, fought like a warrior.

  Also, there was something else behind those hollow eyes. Not intelligence, of course, but something. A burning fury that fueled the skeleton’s every action. It was not just another animated corpse doing a job. Instead, it fought like this was personal.

  Sebekton seemed to recognize that too, his two slit-pupiled eyes ignited by the thrill of a true challenge. A grin spread across his reptilian face as he leaned into the next swing, pressing harder, moving faster.

  And then—

  The skeleton broke.

  Yes, it broke. The spine below its ribcage cracked with a snap, and the upper half of the skeleton colpsed to the ground. Its two hands still gripped its axe, swinging uselessly in Sebekton’s direction, but obviously, it was not going to achieve anything.

  Viktor blinked. “What just happened?”

  It made no sense. He had seen a different skeleton receive a direct hit at the same spot, and yet it had remained intact. But this one, supposedly stronger than the rest, had broken in two under the pressure. How could that be?

  Sebekton himself stood frozen, just as dumbfounded as Viktor by the anticlimactic end to the duel. His golden eyes widened, staring at the lower half of the skeleton, now futilely kicking at his feet in a comical attempt to continue the fight.

  Khenemhotep sighed, his raspy voice tinged with a note of mencholy. “And so, in the end, the frailty of the soul is greater than the weakness of the flesh.”

  “What do you mean, High Priest?”

  “I told you before, Sovereign of the Dungeon, that the soul leaves its mark upon the flesh, and that mark remains long after the soul has departed. These sentinels weren’t entirely mindless, animated by sorcery alone. No, I have listened to the songs they bore in life, and with those songs, I wove strength into their very dust. Yet know this: though the dead may still carry the might they once had in life, they also bear the same frailty that walked beside it.”

  “And the weakness of this skeleton is... its stomach?”

  “Verily. Those bones once belonged to a warrior woman, who met her end in a death most violent. She was cleaved in two, struck down in the very prime of her days. So grievous was her death that the wound left a mark on her spirit, and that mark lingered in her form even as she rose anew. I tried to bind her with the strength of earth, to reinforce her body with craft and spell, yet the wound was too deep. The scar endured. The weakness remained.”

  Viktor chuckled. A bisected axe-wielding woman? He knew exactly who it was. Alycia’s redhead friend, obviously, the one who had been cleaved in two by Sebekton himself. She had spent the st seconds of her life in two pieces, bleeding out on the ground, so yes, it was certainly traumatic. And the experience had damaged her psyche enough to weaken even the integrity of her undead form.

  Everything made sense now. She was fighting against the one who slew her, so no wonder she burned with rage. The thirst for vengeance was embedded in her very being, even in death. And that also expined how she managed to evade the invisible strike. It was her Reliquary to begin with, so she knew what was coming.

  With that, all of the undead warriors had been defeated. But this was merely the first phase of the fight. The mages were still lurking somewhere out there.

  And here they came.

  From the earth beneath the arena, four robed, skeletal figures emerged. Unlike the warriors that had preceded them, these undead kept the original size they had in life. Made sense. They were not going to engage in physical combat, so they didn’t need the enhanced, enrged bodies.

  As they rose, rocks and stones of all sizes, from pebbles to boulders, levitated off the ground, hovering and swirling around two of the mages. They raised their hands, bleached fingers protruding from the sleeves of their tattered garments, and the stones surrounding them shot toward Sebekton in a barrage. And while the Guardian was kept busy—dodging, blocking, deflecting the storm of projectiles—the other two mages made their move. They raised their staffs in unison and tapped them against the ground in a rhythm. The scattered remains of the fallen warriors began to stir, bones crawling across the floor, reassembling themselves like pieces of a puzzle. The destroyed tomb guards were coming back to life.

  Sebekton saw that and immediately understood what was going on. Without hesitation, he seized the axe clutched in Redhead’s skeletal grasp, wrenched it free, and hurled it at one of the staff-wielding undead mages. But before the weapon could find its mark, the ground itself seemed to react. A massive pilr of earth erupted from the ground beneath the mage’s feet, unching it to the sky. The axe struck the rising column harmlessly and cttered away.

  But it was not the only pilr to rise. At the same time, five columns of earth in total exploded upward from the arena floor, four of them carrying the four undead mages.

  On top of the fifth, the st, the tallest pilr was—

  A headless skeleton.

  Lahmia.

  The sorceress stood high, slowly lifting her arms, and a swirling vortex began to form above her skeletal form. Sand from all around spiraled toward her, gathering and condensing into a sphere. As it grew, the sphere gradually took shape. And Viktor knew what it was before the shape was even recognizable.

  A bird. Of course, it was a freaking bird.