
POV: A Certain Skeleton
Time: A few days ago, when Alex gave a doll to a skeleton who was down on his luck.
The odd thing about being a revenant is that everything revolves around fulfilling a grudge. Someone can be killed, and hold a grudge that transcends death. But death is still death. It might not be final, but it can’t be ignored.
A skeletal revenant cleaved through a pack of imps with whatever weapons he could get his hands on. This time, he had been completely deleveled and sealed. So he started back at level 1.
His class was dark knight. Originally, he was a paladin, back before his first death. The defeats took their toll. He no longer remembered his name. But he could remember how to wield a sword. He remembered how to parry and block a blow. The stuff that he remembered the most was someone that defeated him.
On this continent it was the tier 4 demon in the capital. His grudge always drew him back to the capital. He could remember that original defeat, dying full of regret. The hero challenged the tier 4 mountain of a demon to one on one combat. However, their commander countered by sending a succubus to give a counter offer. The hero was wary from the years of campaign. Every time they liberated a city, another one that they had freed fell. A hero is the most powerful class. They had defeated enemy generals and sent them back to hell, but there were always more. No matter how much success they had on the battlefield, the demon queen’s forces never reached a breaking point where they would call their armies defeated.
There were always more imps. The only thing that limited the demon forces was the logistics of bringing them to where the fighting was. The closer to the demon queen’s castle they got, the more endless the waves would become. The hero-led army would push forward, only to be cut off from the rear. So they had to retreat and carve their way through endless waves of imps and other demons to put enough distance to give them time to lick their wounds, bury their dead, bring in reinforcements and try again.
It wasn’t until after the shock settled that the Hero wanted to give up that the former-paladin actually had come to terms that the teenage boy would forsake his quest.
“I’m not even from this world.” He justified his betrayal. “I just want to spend time with love and live a normal life.”
The hero and the healer were an item. She was a prodigy priestess of Catalina. The fact that someone whose class is based on channeling the divine power of the goddess could forsake a quest given to her by the goddess felt anathema to the knight. It should never happen.
They tried to face the unending horde after the hero and the priestess abandoned them, taking a boat to who-knows-where. But without the hero, the army’s morale was terrible. They broke and fled after one bad day of fighting. That was his first death.
His ghost lay hovering over his corpse. He had died a death of a thousand cuts. All of his healing items were gone, he had exhausted his cooldowns trying to hold the line so that they could have an orderly retreat. He regretted not protecting his men. His sword had killed thousands, and his shield had blocked tens of thousands of blows ment for the fighters at his side. But it was not enough, the demons’ numbers might as well have been unlimited.
When the grey blob appeared amidst the piles of demons evaporating, being forcibly dismissed back to their home plane, it was an easy choice to take the immortality that it offered. Even in death he would still fight the demons.
It didn’t go well at first, dying reset his level back to zero. As a human he was above the level 20 cap. But then he came back as level one. But true to his world, the revenant was no longer killable. He could be smashed to bits and each of those bits could attack it in its own small way. A severed hand could grasp. A severed head could bite. A severed leg could trip.
The thing about the [dark knight] class is that it doesn’t generate magic. If he is not taking damage, then he can’t cast anything once his pool goes empty. Being damaged gives him the power to use his skills. Of note was that his skill [syphon strike] was particularly effective on demons. It left them injured from the sword blow as well and seeming diminished in his [spirit sight].
The human army was routing but the [dark knight] kept fighting, killing thousands, leveling up. The death from a thousand cuts wouldn’t work on him a second time. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and he didn’t know if the army was able to retreat to safety. It was day and night fighting. Being dead, he didn’t need to sleep. He was doing better at this kind of battle than he did as a human even though his level was less. Eventually, his shield broke and he picked up a greatsword from a tier 3 demon and used that as his main weapon. He didn’t need to block. Damage refilled his magic. And if he could syphon strike groups of imps then he could go from almost defeated to fully healed in a second. But not all of the demons were stupid.
They realized the weakness before the revenant did. Eventually, the tier 4 general ordered the lower level demons to stop swarming the revenant. He was forced into a 1 on 1 fight against a mountain of a demon that hit like—well–how a mountain would expect. That was when the dark knight realized that his skillset was much better against groups than against a single opponent. He could strike the leg of the giant demon, and it would heal him. But not enough to offset the devastating blows that such a large demon could bring to the fight. He lost quite handedly.
But, that demon’s spirit he’d always know where it was. That was the thing about a revenant. He had a racial skill that showed him the direction of anyone that he had a score to settle with. So he knew that the giant was here. The fact that he ended up unsealed in the same kingdom as the general was not a mistake. The demons like to be sneaky. They like to betray one another.
Anyway, it wasn’t as easy as before. He guessed that his skills were spread widely amongst demon kind. He raided several villages, exterminated the demons and moved on. The people he freed would have to take care of himself. He learned his lesson last time. That woman who he warned betrayed him. No, they were on their own. Besides, he couldn’t protect his men in the final battle. They were groups of combat classers and these new people looked like mostly farmers and ranchers.
Eventually, he had some bad luck when a sect of fire demons started hunting him down. His skull sunk into the river and was washed away by the waters that were luckily very swift right there. If the demons planned to seal him, then they had failed, in a day he’d be back and try to strike from a different, unexpected point.
That was when a strange group found him. A pair of magical girls and a slime decided to clean off all the blackness on his burnt helmet.
Excuse me! (The skeleton didn’t have enough of a lower jaw to talk, so he only thought in his head)
Dark knight here! Blackness is only fitting. Don’t wipe off the soot from a battle with terrible creatures from hell. To embrace darkness, you have to be black.
Hmph.
Realizing her offense, the black-haired girl gifted him a doll. The doll had an aura similar to his own. Maybe they could brood together?
With not much fanfare, the group left.
After regenerating, the revenant continued towards the nearest source of demons. He cleared out another, bigger town down river. But they were getting close to the capital–not the one with the demon queen in it, but the one with the giant demon. He figured out the doll could be activated by pulling the string. It would start playing some music and help him rip and tear.
The music was very fitting to the situation. Demon heads flew. He cut imps in half with a broken plow he had found in the field.
With the dark music playing he might have guessed that he got some kind of boost. But he wasn’t sure. What kind of music was this? It definitely had an edge.
But there was a problem. When he finally had reached level 10, he realized that the doll did not regenerate like he did. Its armor was broken in spots and the stuffing was falling out. Having exposed stuffing was not good for fighting demons that spat fire.
But that low thrumming of the soundtrack drove him on. They cleared out thousands of mostly imps and at level 10 he could go head to head with most of the tier 2s so long as it wasn’t a 1v1 battle. He could tank their hits, and if there was a group of imps he could syphon he wasn’t going to go down unless they could one shot him.
Luck wasn’t on his side that day. A spear-with-chain demon kept trying to pull him away from the water. When all the fodder had been killed, he unleashed a devastating breath attack. It left him dust. He looked for a cooldown to mitigate the damage of the tank-busting attack but apparently the opponent had been keeping track of when he had been using his skills. This opponent came prepared to fight the revenant. It was likely a demon on the cusp of becoming tier 3.
But the demon hadn’t planned for the doll, let alone the magical girl that apparently had an ability that made her virtually impossible to hit, even if it made her look like she was doing ballroom dancing while using it.
The doll, likely on his last legs, didn't give up. That felt important. The revenant didn’t understand why, but somehow, it mattered.
After being shoveled into a bucket, the skeleton felt the world freeze. This is what happened when he was sealed. He didn’t feel anything when sealed. One second he was one place, then the next another. Time just….skipped. He came too in a cave, but was too injured to do much, so he just slowly reformed, a racial skill rather than a class one. A skeleton won’t come back when crushed to dust, a revenant will.
Another time skip, and this time in a town. But there were no demons anywhere near. This was both good and bad. He needed to regenerate, but a being of hatred for demons. If there were no demons then he’d enter a state of torpor, just barely aware of what is going on, waiting for the object of his hatred to show up and drive him into battle.
But what was this….
Was he being dressed up? Like a doll?
The doll had been repaired. Good, but he was a being of death and darkness. He should be clothed in the blood of his enemies, not dressed up like some gallant prince. The blacker and grittering the better. Hmph.
But to the onlooker he was as still as a corpse.
They tossed him in the closet and left.
This chapterreminds me of a meme.
"Noooo i am darkness i am the night." -tiny cute bat.