Sophia glared at the mass of unmoving sheep skeletons in front of her. There were twenty of them, far more than she wanted to fight on her own. She kept an eye out for the controlling monster, but turned her attention to supporting everyone else. She wasn't the only person being charged by weirdly enraged sheep skeletons from much farther than they could see; she was just the first.

It wasn't long before Dav's voice spoke in her mind. "We're pulling back to the stairs. Lan'ti wants you and me to cover the retreat, along with Horus. That's the guy with the huge shield," Dav added.

Sophia knew that. She wasn't sure she could have identified him if he wasn't wearing his gear, but with it he was immediately identifiable. The only things she really remembered about Horus were his shield, the partial armor that reinforced his protective Abilities, and the fact that he had dark hair.

On Lan'ti's team, his job was to stand between the team's archer, Azalea, and anything that targeted her. He'd kill it if he could, but his primary job was stopping things. Oddly enough, Sophia knew her team was starting to develop similar roles, with both her and Ci'an preferring to hand back and kill things. The similar person to Horus wasn't Dav, though; Dav moved forward to kill things in the melee. Instead, the defender was Taika, with his new shielding Abilities.

"Taika should help," Sophia proposed as she backed towards the stairway door.

"He has been, but he's about out of mana" Dav answered. "You didn't notice all the times the sheep tripped on nothing and broke their own legs?"

Sophia had to admit that no, she hadn't noticed. She'd been paying too much attention to the weird conglomerate monster in the distance.

Horus was the last one out. He stepped through the door, slammed it shut, and pressed his shield against it. The entire door glowed a soft blue, which spread along the doorframe and a short distance down the wall. A pair of muffled thuds said the sheep that had chased them off the second floor weren't able to stop in time.

They probably didn't even try. They were not at all smart, and whatever the thing controlling them was, it definitely didn't care about ruins apparition sheep.

Sophia leaned against a wall and released her plumes. The physical plumes had been overloaded; they was almost out of mana herself; she could probably manage to kill one or two more sheep, but that was it. She wasn't really tired, not yet, but being low on mana was close enough that she appreciated the wall's support.

"That was amazing!" Lan'ti's excited shout pulled Sophia's attention away from the door even as another soft thud echoed through the wall. "I can't believe we killed that many of them before we had to retreat!"

Sophia raised her eyebrows at Ci'an's exuberant brother and debated if it was worth commenting on the "we" part. She was pretty sure that she and Dav had each killed as many as everyone else put together. At the same time, they wouldn't have been able to do that on their own; they'd have been overrun without more people to help hold the horde back while they killed them, even if they were held back by having their legs broken more than anything else.

"I never expected to see that many ruins apparitions together," Lan'ti continued, a little quieter but still clearly a little hyper. "This has to be a farm floor, and one where no one's been for … Volat, how long does it take for dozens of ruins apparitions to gather in a single huge pack?"

"It varies, of course," the translator and scholar of the written word answered. "And the records are limited. Still, the common answer is that full repopulation of a ruin requires a minimum of fifty years, and monster incursions extend that timeframe."

Sophia somehow expected Volat to fussily adjust his glasses, even though he didn't have any glasses and he wasn't fussy at all, at least not outside of his pedantry about what he read. It just seemed appropriate, somehow.

"There's something there that isn't a ruins apparition," Sophia contributed. "Or if it is, it's different from the others. I didn't get a great look at it, but I saw red and green splotches on it as well as bone, and I don't think it moved like a sheep either. I think it was controlling them from the outside, but when I tried to get close to it, it ran away."

"You're certain of that?" Volat sounded surprised. "There's only one thing I can think of that would look like that, and bone remnants are really rare. I've never heard of one on a farm level, they're really only found in necropolises."

Sophia scowled. Okay, maybe listening closer to what happened on the first level wouldn't have helped that much. Maybe she needed to quiz the scholar more, instead. "That sounds like you're saying it's actually undead, or at least made of real bone, not solidified mana like the ruins apparitions. Is that what you're saying?"

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Volat nodded slowly. "I'm not sure what you mean by actual undead, but yes, bone remnants are made of bones. That's why they're called bone remnants. They are inconsistent; it all depends on what bones are there." He frowned in thought, and Sophia gave him the time to think as her own thoughts raced through her head.

She hadn't gotten close enough to it to get a look at the monster's mana signature, so she had no idea if it was animated by undeath magic or not. It looked more like a bone golem than anything else, custom and unrecognizable, but the idea of a bone golem without a necromancer or a dungeon was just weird. She couldn't just dismiss it, though; the Broken Lands were that weird.

Truthfully, she couldn't completely dismiss the possibility even at home. It was dreadfully unlikely that a collection of mismatched bones would develop enough of a sense of self to start wandering around without an external force kickstarting it, but that didn't mean it was impossible. It wasn't the way to bet, though; the way to bet was that there was something triggering it.

Over sixteen hundred years of being inundated with mana without being disturbed might be enough of a reason, now that Sophia thought about it. The mana level seemed a little higher on the lower level, though it was still a little below the level inside Izel. Even so, she knew weird things could happen in places where mana wasn't properly managed, and it was definitely not properly managed in the Broken Lands.

Well, whatever. The important thing was that her magic would have no trouble killing it, not what ti was or how it was made.

"Do we have to do something special to kill it?" Lan'ti interrupted. "My plan was to repeat what we just did a couple times today and clean out enough of the sheep that we can set up a strong point, then push our way across the farm, but if there are things out there that can think, that's probably too simplistic."

"I should be able to kill them," Sophia answered before Volat could pull his thoughts together, "If I can get close enough. That's the real problem. I think it was learning, too; it was careful of me but not of the rest of you. Uh. Maybe if it doesn't see me?"

Taika's illusions would be handy for that, but Taika didn't handle moving images well. They were also solely visual, and it was entirely likely that a creature made of bone didn't actually see things using visible light. It might be better if Sophia found another way to hide herself. Magical Translucence might work, but Plume Shift seemed like a better place to start.

On the other hand, it might be better to have others shoo the creature towards her or Dav; he could probably handle it as well. Sophia wasn't certain Shatter Spirit would work on a bone golem or … what did they call it here? A bone remnant? That seemed like a decent enough name. Whatever it was called, Dav could probably break it even if Shatter Spirit didn't work.

He was ridiculously strong physically, the same way she was apparently unusually strong in her magic. Sophia blamed their slightly ridiculous Body and Core numbers; they didn't really seem to mean anything concrete, but there had to be a reason everyone emphasized increasing them as you leveled.

They spent several hours at the top of the stairs, planning. Horus stayed downstairs, watching the door he blocked, but other than that everyone contributed to the plan if they wanted to. Sophia's mana wasn't quite full and several people still had damaged levels of shield when they moved forward, but they didn't want to wait for a full recovery.

Horus couldn't guard the door continuously for that long, anyway. They were going to have to leave him and a few other people out of the assault so that they'd have someone to cover their retreat and guard the stairwell once this assault was over. It was a balancing act to take as many people as possible without making the defense too weak. The choke point helped. Oddly enough, so did the fact that the choke point led to stairs; while they were likely to be able to climb the stairs, they probably wouldn't want to, so they'd only climb if the bone remnant pushed them into it.

It was apparently well known that bone remnants that could control ruins apparitions wouldn't push outside the area they lived in. Sophia didn't entirely trust that; for that matter, it was obvious that Lan'ti didn't either. He was the one who insisted on plans to deal with it if it happened.

Even so, no one really expected an assault on the first level. If the bone remnants were both aggressive and truly smart, they'd just use a different staircase. The fact that that hadn't happened did seem to indicate that they didn't have to be that worried. Probably.

It was almost a relief when Horus lifted the protection he'd placed on the door. "There haven't been any assaults on the shield for more than two hours. I don't know what's happening out there, but they know they're not getting through."

"Or they forgot about us," Lan'ti proposed.

Sophia shook her head. She didn't believe that. Unfortunately, she didn't have anything to back up her belief.

"Be careful," Horus answered. "I'd be with you if I could." He waited for Lan'ti's nod, then pushed the door open cautiously. With his shield ready, he stepped outside. He paused and looked around. "There's nothing here? Where did they go?"

The group that was prepared to rush out and attack immediately moved a lot slower at the complete lack of resistance. Sophia's nerves were strained by the wait by the time it was her turn, but once she was out into the open area on the second floor, she could see that Horus was right: there were no skeletal sheep near the entrance. She adjusted her magelight to a more focused format to light the distance and moved it around like a spotlight until she found the ruins apparitions.

They were out there, beyond a semicircular empty area. It took Sophia a moment to make the connection, but they were a little beyond the area her light had covered during the fight. "They definitely haven't forgotten us," Sophia breathed. "Or at least, something hasn't."

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