Douglas sees stars.

Instead of the luscious carpet of twinkling lights he has seen before, this sprawl of stars is made out of a grand total of two sparkling dots. His previous experiences - teleporting into outer space, smashing into a wrecked spaceship, docking at a Histaff infected space station, and all the other hijinks - have taught the armoured skull some much-needed context. It thus takes the skeleton a mere hour of contemplating what only seeing two stars means; either the universe has partially disintegrated, or something is blocking his vision.

The faintly illuminated rocks he sees all around him might have something to do with this. His flaming eye sockets shine enough light on his immediate environment for him to recognise the grainy texture of natural sandstone. Douglas ponders the facts of life for a few more minutes, even contemplating why he recognises the stone’s structure for what it is. He knows that he should start taking action, but to be totally honest, he is still somewhat overwhelmed by recent events.

Contemplating the rocks around him puts the skull into a somewhat philosophic mood. Douglas knows what he is, he realises. He knows that he is a soul glued to a skeleton by an intricate weave of magic. He knows that he had a proper life at one point before some random purveyor of deathly energies called him back and stapled him to his current frame. He knows that the faded images that keep slipping in and out of his grasp have a deeper meaning, even though he can’t find it inside himself to truly care.

So Douglas reminisces for the first time in his life. He knows not what caused this sudden impulse of higher thought. He only knows that he feels like revisiting the cosy and known universe that is his past.

He warmly recalls being a mindless drone, raised from sodden earth amidst his fellow bony brethren. Remembering the necromancer that raised him - a parchment skinned ancient fossil of a man he revered like a god - now only causes a small sliver of familiar contentment to emerge in his cold core. No longer does the ultimate dread and undoubtedly obeyance he used to feel when seeing the very controller of his soul bother him any longer. Now he sees but a small man, trying to avenge a small plight by taking out a small wizard in a small tower.

Then the teleportation accident happened. He happily recalls the single-minded process of elimination the previous version of himself went through. The ponderous and slow trip through the broken spaceship in microgravity and his adventures in the scant few rooms left in the wrecked slagheap makes him feel all warm inside. Not a physical warmth, no this feeling comes from the fact that he knows what will happen next as he steps through his memories.

Douglas’ one track mind recalls the escape pod and the arduous process he went through in order to slowly don the emergency spacesuit. He feels like smiling as he recalls losing hours, days, while pondering the smallest piece of meaning. The trek through bioweapon infected space station brings more nostalgic warmth to the armoured skull. The accidental and honestly miss-guided revival of the woman caused all kinds of complications. Where before, he traversed a logical and sound path of progress, all actions involving the woman are accompanied by an odd sort of confusion.

The blue box system - which up until then had made a lot of sense - started telling him random things. It was almost as if the skeleton had been overwhelmed by the sudden calculating power the system had gained when he introduced a true multitasker - a functioning human brain - to said system. Douglas might’ve gained a lot of intelligence and wisdom over the past few days he’s been alive, but this doesn’t mean that he has gained enough common sense to understand the female mind.

A weird form of a shiver runs through the buried skull. For some reason, the thought he just had seems very dangerous indeed. A lot of things are clear to the skeleton, the way his companion acted is most definitely not. Normally, the underground skeleton would feel up to analysing this particular fact for a couple of years. Once again for reasons unknown, Douglas is not enthusiastic about trying to understand the semi-undead female at all.

His escape from the space station was a harrowing one, the chaotic assault by Histaff behemoth making him wonder how he got out of that situation with his skull intact. The long period inside the white ships’ cockpit that followed allowed him to calm down a bit. The sudden burst of activity as alarms went off before everything went white was rather unexpected, but the long period of floating through empty space while he slowly regenerated his bones once again was calming. Then he lost all of his bones, again, when burning up in the atmosphere as he smashed into the red planet. And now he is lying somewhere, buried in rubble, his neck itching something fierce. The stone surrounding him is stopping his regeneration, and the fact that his mana keeps flowing towards the back of his skull without doing anything is rather disconcerting to the skeleton.

Finally snapping out of the weird mood he has found himself in, Douglas decides to get going. Normally, he’d just want to wander around for a bit, see the sights and maybe try to find some food - not this time. Something is calling out to him, a weird pull that comes from somewhere to his left. The growing mix of discomfort and curiosity is the trigger for him to act, finally. Recalling the spell shape that seems most suitable for this situation, he keeps the complex circle in his mind’s eye while happily pouring mana into the mental construct.

The rock encasing the skeleton tears itself apart in order to obey the foreign laws suddenly imposed upon local reality. Otherworldly energy is consumed by a mystical and illogical process as normal, boring stone is forcefully transformed into air. The metal-covered skull is quickly freed, floating in the high-density gasses kept in magical compression and stillness. Then Douglas suddenly wonders if this was a good idea. He has seen the effects of the decalcinate spell on more than one occasion, and the concussive force resulting from the process has resulted in physical devastation every time. He just cast the biggest version of this very destructive spell right around his own skull. He has time to think the beginning of a muted curse when his control slips.

The thought that a sudden gust of wind is much less destructive than the atmospheric entry he went through a short while back isn’t present in his skull. Instead, his sudden doubt only causes the spell to fail in the most explosive manner possible. The air, instantly expanding in an attempt to equalize pressure, turns opaque as it’s moisture content condenses. A large chunk of the rock surrounding Douglas is turned to dust as the concussive force grinds the solid stone to powder. From the middle of this dust explosion, Douglas is shot directly upwards.

His vision turns into a red and grey-green blur as his gleaming metal skull starts spinning like mad. Shrieking through the atmosphere, as he is blasted upwards like a cannonball. At the apex of his flight his rapid spin has slowed enough for him to observe his surroundings. He sees flashes of barren red sand, dark jagged rocks, and endless stretches of dead wasteland. Then his skull turns another hundred and eighty degrees, and he spots something that makes his initial glimpse look like paradise. He catches sight of a sprawling ruin, endless decaying infrastructure clearly demarcated by crumbling roads and fallow fields.

As he starts falling back down, Douglas spots the centre point of the landscape, a wide and shallow crater spanning many kilometres just beyond the ruined urban sprawl. Or rather, cutting into the crumbling city. Another spin, and Douglas sees the place he flew away from just now. A large expanding dustcloud marks his launch site, a small avalanche of rocks rumbling down the slopes. A mountain range stretches into the horizon, jagged rocks cutting into the grey air with knife edge tops.

Then the ground rushes towards him from below, and the metal skull smashes through one of the few remaining panes of glass in the entire town. Accompanied by a glittering rain of shards, his forehead horn jams into a decorative synthetic tabletop as he lands in the middle of a ruined living room. The glass finishes falling to the cheap synthetic wooden flooring all around Douglas as he takes in the world from his new viewpoint - eyeballs staring at a fake marble pattern printed upon plastic from a scant few centimetres.

Douglas studies the pattern in front of him for a while, the interplay between low-resolution printing and cheaply patterned plastic somewhat interesting. His concentration is broken a lot earlier than usual, however. This is caused by two reasons. The first one is the constant mental pull he feels, something or someone calling and pulling at his mind. The other one is the steadily increasing tremors shaking the room he is in, as well as the increasing rumble of noise coming from outside.

Desiring to no longer be stuck inside the table with the angular horn jutting from his forehead, Douglas does what he does best, randomly casting magic. He tries to cast the decalcinate spell, expecting to be launched up and away again as the solid matter around him turns to air in an uncontrolled explosion. Absolutely nothing happens except for the fact that a single mug dissolves. Pouring more mana into the spellshape does exactly nothing. Releasing the spell only causes a small, cup-sized, gust of wind, which blows dust into his face.

Small items all around Douglas start shaking as the stomping grows louder still. The low rumbling noise that has been growing in the background turns into a steady pattering of many, many feet. Douglas is now getting somewhat worried, the ominous shaking and other growing noises have him thinking of all kinds of Histaff related scenario’s. He hasn’t had a single positive experience with the engineered bioweapon so far, and the skull just knows that he isn’t rid of the slimy and bony fuckers just yet.

Instead of continuing onto a path that doesn’t work, Douglas reverts his course a hundred and eighty degrees as he calls up the opposite of the spell he was just now casting. The Calcinate spell does even less as he shoves mana into the shape. A calm breeze blows past his bony visage as a small arrow of stone materializes. Dropping the spell in disgust only reverts the soft wind blowing past his cranium, the stone now dissolving into air once again.

Douglas is thrown into a crisis of faith. His spells, the one tool he has been relying on to solve all his problems, do very little. The background noise becomes clearer still, and despite not having any ears, the metal clad skull can swear he can hear drool dripping from the slavering maws of the undoubtedly approaching hordes. Fumbling for a solution to his immobility problem, he calls up the spell that turns air into water, the phlogistonate spell. The air around him is sucked into a point once again, this time forming transparent droplets of water that freeze in short order. The little remaining moisture in the air condenses on his cooling frame as the ice lance spins into being between his eyes and the table. Commanding the spell to launch, it does nothing except for the fact that it creates a small patch of frost.

Now truly starting to feel a hint of desperation, he shoves power into the last spell he reasons can help him, the turning of water into air, the dephlogistonation spell, also known as fireball. The little layer of ice is sucked up as Douglas commands the spell to form on the table beneath him, and the cheap synthetic material starts burning and bubbling the moment the gathering liquid ignites. Overjoyed that his horn will be freed soon, Douglas fails to notice the fact that a rather large white beast has just entered the same room he is in.

Three red eyes lock onto the smoking skull, a small forest of tentacled tongues licking a rather impractical looking array of protruding teeth. The hulking Histaff reworked gets stuck in the doorway for exactly point two seconds before ramming its frame through the cheap concrete. Douglas doesn’t notice the cloud of dust, so fixed is he upon the small flame burning the table and covering his face in soot.

Then teeth cover him entirely, tongues licking over his hyper-bonded carbon diamond covered exterior, and he is unceremoniously pulled free from the table. Only to be trapped inside the gelatinous substance of the monster’s insides.

It takes him a good few minutes to adapt to this situation. The view from inside one of the bone plate covered beings is honestly rather interesting to the skull. Normal beings would undoubtedly be digested within seconds, yet the hyper acidic enzymes and chemicals present in the reworked’s interior fail to even scratch his mana enhanced skull. Normal beings also wouldn't be able to see a thing, yet the skeleton’s Darkvision skill allows him a decent view of his red surroundings.

Light seeps in between slight gaps in the monster’s bone plates, showing Douglas a wondrous tableau of the being’s internals. Cords of muscles seem to form at random as its exterior armour plates slide across each other, other parts of the red interior seem to be dedicated holding areas for general detritus. A shining network of lines runs through the entire being, forming connections to areas moments before they change. The monster’s five legs all seem to have dedicated strands of softly glowing nerves to them as the beast moves.

Douglas is jostled around a bit as he studies his new resting place. He knows he should feel some form of negative emotion at the fact that he was so easily eaten, but his interesting new environment makes it hard to hold a grudge. Staring at its moving surroundings, Douglas studies the things interior with a morbid kind of fascination.

But then the jostling stops and the thing’s legs fold in on themselves, the straining cords of muscle visible as they dissolve back into clear gel. Another hour later, Douglas is bored again. He has studied and observed all there is to study, and despite his Darkvision skill, the slowly dimming illumination around him has started preventing him from seeing a lot of the interesting details.

Although his spells failed to do anything interesting previously, Douglas secretly hopes that that situation was but a fluke. His dephlogistonation spell did the most to the irritating plastic table, so he starts pouring mana into the spell construct. Suspecting that the previous failures might have been a result of him being too conservative, he pours in half of the mana he has instead of a small trickle. The result is immediate and extreme.

Although the Histaff reworked’s are near perfect shook troops, able to shrug off an amazing amount of firepower with only minimal damage, this is all thanks due to their liquid insides combined with hard bone plating. Their bodies can instantaneously form new muscles and internal structural reinforcements, allowing them to take on physical and energetic hits in the most optimal ways. The combination of the ability to discard compromised parts of their body and the possibility of replacing armour plating on the go makes them feared throughout the entire galaxy.

The one thing they are not well equipped to fight, however, is a superheated steam explosion happening inside of them. Douglas is covered in slime, and although the liquid contains an amazing blend of macromolecules, complex biomatter and organic nanomachines, it is still mainly water. The dephlogistonation spell rips a good tenth of the beast’s internal matter into its sphere of influence, starting the process of turning the water into the depleted version of phlogiston. A hundred litres of water is turned into steam, the liquid turning into gas that wants to occupy around seventeen hundred times its previous volume.

Douglas, being at the centre of this explosion, is suddenly freed from his captivity. The bone plates are shot outwards as they shatter, turning the Histaff apex predator into a fragmentation grenade. Red goop paints a large portion of the ruined town a nice shade of pink as a small mushroom cloud rises to the heavens above the startled skull. Douglas unceremoniously falls to the ground, landing inside a steaming puddle of red with a wet splash.

Feeling like he should blink, the skeleton looks around. Ruins tower above him, dwarfing the diminished skull. Grey monstrosities made from shattered glass and crumbling concrete block the majority of the sky, their jagged silhouettes painting stark contrasts against the fading grey and green of the cloudless heavens. Having landed right-side up, he has a rather nice view of his new surroundings. A road, more pothole and crack than flat surface, stretches away from his low perspective, sidewalks and streetlamps in equal states of ruin. He spots rare shards of billboards here and there, any and all paint either removed or stripped by the elements. Not a single building looks unmarred, and most are little more than heaps of ruined building materials.

Douglas finds himself in what undoubtedly used to be a bustling metropolis. The building right in front of him is a couple dozen floors at the minimum, a towering skyscraper that now has a rather dangerous looking tilt. Next to it is a pile of concrete slabs, which is sitting next to a barren park, its fountain long dry and its benches stripped. The road he is lying on seems to be made from square pieces of stone, covered by a crumbling layer of what looks to be a dark asphalt. White lumps lay here and there, their pristine cleanliness a shining contrast with the downtrodden environment.

Looking around, Douglas sees that the highest building is the one he is lying next to. The amount of damage done to the infrastructure also seems to increase further down the street. A moment of clear thought lets Douglas realize that the crater he saw is probably in that direction. The pull on his mind is that way also. Clacking his teeth in contentment at his own reasoning and mental deductions, the armoured skull fails to realize that the white shapes - slightly covered in red slime - around him have started moving.

Having finished with looking around, for now, Douglas turns his focus inwards. He had told the blue messages to shut up during the harrowing escape from the space station, and he hadn’t bothered to check them since. He’d been too busy with piecing his own bones together, once again, directly after the escape, and had sunken into a spellshape studying and self-enchanting frenzy shortly after. He’d never bothered checking them even after his ship was blown to bits, nor when he shot through the planet’s atmosphere, leaving a trail of ablated bone in his wake. So Douglas allows the furiously blinking blue dot to tell him what is going on, ignoring the shifting white and red shapes all around him.

[ Microgravity Manoeuvring lvl 5 ]

[ Spell shaping 2 lvl 19 ]

[ Mana Sense 2 lvl 20 ]

[ Mana Sense 2 has reached lvl 20; Associate Arcanist 1/6 ]

[ Meditation 2 lvl 19 ]

[ Mana Control 2 lvl 20 ]

[ Mana Control 2 has reached lvl 20; Associate Arcanist 2/6 ]

[ Mana Stone Production 2 lvl 16 ]

[ Magical Animation 2 lvl 6 ]

[ Shattered; ended ]

[ Mana Reserve; you have embedded mana stone inside your body, increasing your mana pool. +50 MP ]

[ Mana Reserve; increased. +538 MP ]

[ Outfit ‘nWear sVital autoSuit’ is no longer present ]

[ Shattered; you are missing over 90% of your body mass, limiting health regeneration by 90% ]

[ Mana Reserve; drained. ]

[ Meditation 2 lvl 20 ]

[ Meditation 2 has reached lvl 20; Associate Arcanist 3/6 ]

[ Shattered; ended ]

[ Mana Stone Production 2 lvl 20 ]

[ Mana Stone Production 2 has reached lvl 20; Associate Arcanist 4/6 ]

[ Spell Shaping 2 lvl 19 ]

[ Magical Animation 2 lvl 7 ]

[ Mana Reserve; increased +21,137 MP ]

[ Shattered; you are missing over 90% of your body mass, limiting health regeneration by 90% ]

[ Mana Reserve; decreased +945 MP ]

[ Spell Shaping 2 lvl 20 ]

[ Spell Shaping 2 has reached lvl 20; Associate Arcanist 5/6 ]

[ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 33 slain; 19,574,453 xp earned ]

[ Arcane skeleton lvl 18 2,278,400/2,278,400 xp earned ]

[ Arcane skeleton lvl 19 3,686,400/3,686,400 xp earned ]

[ Arcane skeleton lvl 20 5,964,800/5,964,800 xp earned ]

With a clarity of mind that only comes occasionally, Douglas reads the blue screens as they catch up to recent events. The first section of skill gains, regeneration, and mana stone creation all happened inside the ship. The bright light then destroyed his suit, his ship, his skeleton and his mana reserves. Also, he isn’t sure why he thinks this, but he feels like Katare is fine, somehow or another.

The long tumbling in empty space let him do some more studying and mana stone production. This then came to an end when he fell through the atmosphere of the planet, and the rest is recent history. The tingle at the back of his neck informs him that he is regenerating once again, hopefully for real this time. The skull feels irritated about the fact that his mana stone filled bones are all gone, and he doesn’t think that he can get the fragments back this time. He will have to regrow his entire body the hard way, once again. For the first time in his undead life, Douglas feels a bone-weary tiredness. Normally, he doesn't really care, but the clearness of thought that seems to come with each level-up allows him to be thoroughly sick of losing his body time and time again.

Maybe he should engrave his bones this time, and not just stuff them with compacted magical power. Briefly wondering why he didn’t do so before, he makes up his mind to never again lose a single shred of the calcium he regenerates. His skull is filled with mana stone and engraved runes or resilience both, and Douglas vows to make his entire being as seemingly indestructible as his skull.

His internal promise is immediately broken when one of the many white lumps lying around approaching him sniffs him once with its undulating nostrils, and swallows him. The small shard of regenerated atlas bone is immediately dissolved as Douglas once again ends up inside a Histaff reworked. Douglas is still mentally slapping himself for not using a spell to get away from the slowly moving monster when he feels something odd. The mana that was flowing towards his neck, slowly regenerating his vertebrae, actually sticks to the slime around him. His Mana Sense skill tells him that where usually, the mana would have vanished into nothingness right after leaving his body, it instead sticks around for a bit. The faint cloud of blue at the back of his skull takes an entire minute to dissipate.

Then another idea hits Douglas. The Magical Animation skill that came with his Associate Arcanist class has been extremely underutilised so far. Singly reinforcing a ship or his own skull might be seen as a weird form of animation when looked at it correctly, he knows that the spell can do so much more. This, combined with his affinity for bones, calcium, and the awe he feels for the mechanically amazing bone plated beasts lead him to a rather sudden desire. Douglas wants to ride a Histaff reworked, he wants to own one that listens to his every whim.

Unfortunately, Douglas fails to notice that the mental level-up clarity has mostly faded at this point. So with his new goal in mind, he casts the same spell that got him free last time. Credit where credit is due, in his attempt to secure the being’s precious outer shell, he puts less mana inside the dephlogistonation spell than last time. Unfortunately, he fails to take into account that his skull is still stuffed full of mana stone, tripling his otherwise already large mana pool. Instead of vaporising the entire reworked, the spell merely makes it burst like a watermelon, shattering each piece of bone the beast possesses into small fragments.

[ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 25 slain; 746,221 xp earned ]

[ Arcane skeleton lvl 21 8,243,200/8,243,200 xp earned ]

Mentally sighing to himself as his mind receives another moment of clear thought, Douglas prepares for a fight. He might want to keep at least one of the many, many, many Histaff reworked’s now surrounding him in one piece, but it doesn’t look like the beasts themselves are keen on the idea. Still in the process of forming another fireball, Douglas’s still falling skull is swamped by at least a hundred bone-white beasts.