The green mist ca fast.
It rolled out from under Darion’s hand and swallowed the wolf’s body completely, thick and luminous, the black-green light glowing through it the sa way it had glowed through the skeletons in the graveyard.
But this was different from the graveyard. The wolf still had flesh and so the process looked different when there was sothing left to work with beyond bone.
The mist churned for a few seconds, and then it began to thin.
What erged from it made two of the nearest knights take an imdiate step backward.
The wolf stood. But it wasn’t the wolf anymore, not entirely.
The fur along its back and shoulders had split away in places, revealing bone beneath, the spine visible and grey-white against the darker flesh still clinging to its flanks.
The face was the worst of it, or the most striking depending on how you looked at it: one side still carried the thick fur and features of the living animal, and the other side was stripped to the skull, the amber eye on that side now glowing the sa cold green as the undead knights.
The tail was half bone, the vertebrae exposed and clicking slightly as it moved. The paws left marks in the dirt, claw marks from the side that was still flesh, bone impressions from the side that wasn’t.
It looked like sothing pulled directly out of a nightmare and told to be here.
It turned its head toward Darion and lowered it.
The system screen appeared.
[Undead Wild Wolf – Fleshbone Tier]
Forr Rank: —
Combat Instinct: Preserved (Fragnted)
Strength: 55
Endurance: 61
Loyalty: 80
Pain Response: None
Morale: Irrelevant
Special Trait: Tireless (Does not fatigue)
Weakness: Core Destruction (Skull / Spine)
Fleshbone Tier.
Darion looked at the stat line for exactly one second. Strength 55. Endurance 61. Both of those numbers were more than four tis anything his skeleton knights were carrying.
And Fleshbone, that was a new one. Not Rotten, not Decaying and not Rust. Sothing new, sothing the system hadn’t shown him before, sitting above everything he had seen so far on the tier ladder.
Darion looked up.
The Bogoarts were still coming.
Two knights were already down, dead.
The remaining creatures had spread slightly. Moving confidently, with low aggressiveness, creatures who had just ’sensed’ the thing opposing them get destroyed and were now dealing with a group of humans on foot with reduced weapons and nowhere to go.
"Kill the Bogoarts," Darion said to the wolf, and pointed. Then he looked at the half-flesh half-bone face and added clearly: "Not my knights."
The undead wolf turned toward the Bogoarts.
Then it ran.
The speed was faster than the living wolf had been, which had already been fast enough to be shocking.
The Fleshbone tier apparently ca with significant physical upgrades, because the creature covered the distance between Darion and the nearest Bogoart in about four strides and hit it with enough force to knock the Bogoart completely off its feet.
The two animals went down together and the wolf was back up before the Bogoart had finished rolling, pivoting and going for the next one before the first had even registered what had happened to it.
"Forward!" Darion shouted at the knights. "Now, while it’s got their attention!"
They moved. All of them, whatever fear had been holding them at the tree line overridden by the sight of the wolf tearing through the Bogoarts like they were sothing considerably less dangerous than they actually were.
The archers fired their last arrows into the mass of movent ahead. The knights with spears threw first and then drew blades and followed in.
The clearing beca loud and close and brutal.
A Bogoart swung its tail at a group of three knights and caught one across the chest, sending him skidding across the ground.
Two others drove spears into the creature’s side from opposite directions before it could follow up. The Bogoart staggered, took another spear from behind, and went down.
The wolf had two Bogoarts simultaneously, one pinned under its front paws with its throat being destroyed, the other trying to gore it from the side with a horn strike that scraped off exposed ribs without slowing the wolf at all.
Pain response: none.
The horn struck again. The wolf didn’t even turn to acknowledge it. It finished the one underneath it, stood, and turned to the one that had been hitting it with an expression that, on a half-skull face, managed to communicate sothing very close to indifference.
That Bogoart backed up.
The wolf followed.
Darion was in the middle of it by this point, sword in his hand, working the edges of the fight where Bogoarts were isolated or wounded enough to be finished.
He took one down with two strikes to the neck; the sa weak point he had used yesterday, the muscle mory of it already more natural than it had any right to be after one hunt.
Garren was beside him. He moved like he was controlling his efficiency, soone who had fought many things in many years and understood how to conserve energy while doing it.
The knights were everywhere now, filling in around the wolf’s work, finishing what it started, keeping the Bogoarts that tried to disengage from getting clear.
The plan had fallen apart completely and what replaced it was just chaos, loud and close and running on montum.
It was working though.
One by one the Bogoarts stopped moving.
The last one tried to run. It got three steps before the wolf ran it down from behind, and that was the end of that.
Darion stood in the middle of the clearing and counted.
Every Bogoart down. The wolf standing among the bodies, the green eye scanning the tree line, the half-flesh head turning slowly to check each direction. Unhurt. Not a scratch on the bone side, and the flesh side had taken so damage but nothing structural.
It turned and walked back to Darion and stood beside him, head level with his shoulder.
Two knights dead. Several injured, the four with snake bites still on the ground at the edge of the clearing needing urgent attention.
But overall, they were alive. Most of them at least. Standing in a clearing full of dead Bogoarts, breathing hard, looking at each other and at the thing standing beside their Baron.
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