Chapter 153- Luna’s First summoning

Chapter 153: Chapter 153- Luna’s First summoning

Morning dew clung to every leaf, and a thin mist lay across the winding forest road. A cold breeze threaded its way through the trees, carrying the smell of damp earth and old bark.

Leo hitched Luna a little higher in his arms and kept walking, the wolf padding a few steps behind them. The clone talisman sat flat against his ribs, untouched.

Two days had passed since they’d set out.

Luna, as always, was quiet.

She watched the wild jungle with wide, curious eyes from the safety of Leo’s arms, tracking every bird that burst from the branches and every shadow that shifted between the trunks. The memory stone never left her small hands. She hadn’t put it down since the moment it was given to her, not even to sleep.

Every so often, she’d lift it to place it on her forehead. She clearly liked whatever she found inside.

Leo had watched her do it again and again. Each time, her eyes drifted somewhere far away, as if she’d stepped out of her own body for a while, and a faint ripple of undead mana curled off her skin.

Even Leo could feel the chill creeping in around them. But he never hurried her, and he never stopped her.

She was only reading.

And by now he’d grown used to it. It had happened so many times over the past two days that he barely noticed the cold anymore.

At a clearing in the forest, Leo stopped. Something on the ground had caught his eye. He crouched and ran his fingers across the dirt. The grass was pressed flat in narrow, winding lines, and there were scratch marks on the tree bark at about knee height. But there were no deep claw gouges and no scorched earth, and none of the heavy, lingering pressure a high-level beast would have left behind. Whatever lived here, it was small.

"Good," he murmured. "Finally, some low-tier beasts. Perfect for Luna to practice on."

Start low. Learn the basics first, he thought.

He set Luna down on a fallen log. "You keep studying, and I’ll keep watch," he told her, tousling her hair.

Luna nodded. She touched the necklace resting against her chest, then pressed the memory stone to her brow once more.

Blacky circled the two of them and flopped down beside Luna, chin on his paws, eyes wide open and alert.

An hour slipped by. Leo spent it walking the edges of the clearing, studying the surroundings.

He was just about to mark the area with the talisman when—

The air turned cold.

The pressure dropped all at once, and the hair on his arms stood straight up.

He spun around.

Luna’s eyes were open. Her small, pale face was intensely focused, though her gaze looked hazy, like someone listening to a distant voice. Her fingers were spread wide, and the death mana around her was no longer simply drifting. It was bending to her will.

Pale mist and undead mana twisted in front of her out of nowhere.

A summoning circle unfurled across the ground, and undead mana flooded the clearing. For a moment, Luna’s eyes glowed purple.

Bones began to rise out of the circle. Ribs first, then spine, then limbs, until two complete frames stood where there had been only dirt.

Two skeletons climbed out of the ground. They were about the height of a half-grown boy, lean and clean white, with violet sparks flickering in their hollow eye sockets.

Both of them stepped forward and knelt before Luna, bony fists pressed to the earth. The sparks in their sockets flickered once, as though they were bowing along with the rest of them.

Leo stared, eyes wide, his jaw hanging open.

He couldn’t help remembering the first time he’d seen her. A little girl in a slave market. The caravan. All of her memories he’d witnessed flashed past his eyes in a blur.

He suddenly recalled that in those memories, there had been moments when she’d raised the dead from corpses.

But this was different. There were no corpses here, no bodies of any kind, and he was certain this wasn’t a grave.

She wasn’t raising the dead. She had called these skeletons.

Leo studied them carefully.

A true summoning? Did she just summon them?

He stepped closer. The two skeletons instantly shifted into a defensive stance.

But Luna’s eyes had already cleared, and the moment they sensed her will, the skeletons stepped aside.

"Luna," Leo said gently. "Did you do that?"

She looked at the skeletons, then back at him. She seemed uncertain at first. Then she nodded.

Leo smiled and stroked her hair. "Good job. This makes things much easier."

The corner of her mouth twitched, barely, the smallest trace of a smile, and then it was gone again, tucked away as if she wasn’t sure she was allowed to keep it.

He nodded to himself. "Do you remember what big sister told you?"

Luna nodded.

"Then can you ask the skeletons to fight?" he asked carefully.

She turned to the skeletons and relayed her intent. They responded at once, falling into a defensive formation.

"This way, you won’t have to fight yourself," Leo explained. "You’ll command them. You tell them where to stand and where to strike. And I think they’re mostly sentient."

Luna glanced back and forth between the skeletons and Leo, then nodded her head hard.

Leo gave her a short lesson on positioning: where to summon them, where to place them, how to attack in patterns. He laid out small stones on the ground to show her what he meant.

Luna stared at the stones as though she were memorizing every single one.

Seeing that, Leo smiled and ruffled her hair again. He had a feeling he might get addicted to ruffling her hair.

"We’ll practice for real soon."

He stood and pointed toward the trail. "Send one skeleton to the left, and keep the other close."

Luna frowned slightly, but she looked at the skeletons and pointed with her fingers. They understood their assignments immediately. One set off along the trail, and the other came to stand at her side.

They were clumsy, though. They moved in stiff, jerky steps, like puppets whose strings hadn’t been tuned yet. The one guarding Luna nearly tripped over Blacky’s tail, and Blacky glanced back at it with an expression that was almost a sigh.

Leo winced. She’s got soldiers now, but they’re green. It’s like handing a sword to someone who’s never held one.

Luna bit her lip and willed the skeleton to lurch back toward the trail.

Then, finally, a horned rabbit came into view. It was a fat, absurdly fast little thing, with a horn right between its eyebrows. The moment it noticed the skeleton, it panicked and veered off into the woods.

"Pull back," Leo told her.

Luna yanked her hands back. The skeleton spun, but a beat too late, and it tangled itself up and crashed to the ground. The rabbit, which had just escaped, shot through the gap and dashed straight toward them. Blacky stepped in. He snapped it up in his jaws and shook it dead.

Blood welled up.

Leo looked down and saw that Luna’s face had gone completely pale. She was trembling at the sight.

"Now you see it," Leo said, his voice sharp. "One fumble, and you could lose your life. If Blacky hadn’t stepped in, or if I hadn’t been here, you’d have been in trouble. Remember this."

Luna nodded again and wiped her runny nose on her sleeve. Her shoulders sagged, and she was breathing fast, her small hands curled into fists at her sides. Leo could tell she was upset, and it tugged hard at his chest. But this time, he didn’t comfort her. Some lessons only stuck if they were allowed to sting a little.

Holding two skeletons at once seemed to drain her, too, sip by sip. Her mana pool was still small. She was only a child, after all.

"You can dismiss them," Leo said. "You don’t need to keep them summoned all the time. Rest for a while, and we’ll try again later."

Luna sighed and dismissed the skeletons. They bowed their heads and sank into the ground, where a circle opened beneath them like a small portal.

Leo let out a breath of relief as well.

He built a small fire and grilled some meat while Luna rested beside Blacky, the wolf’s warm bulk pressed against her side. When the smell of roasting meat drifted over, her head lifted and her nose twitched, and Leo bit back a smile. "Come eat," he called.

She ate quietly and steadily, as always, and slowly some color returned to her cheeks. By the time she’d finished, the trembling in her hands had faded.

After resting a while longer, they went back to their hunting routine.

Luna called forth the skeletons again, and Leo showed her how to move them.

The skeletons clattered forward, beating the bushes in search of horned rabbits. After a short while, one bolted out of its burrow. Then another. Then another.

This time, the skeletons moved with more confidence. Their steps were steadier, and they responded to Luna’s will a heartbeat faster than before. One flanked the burrow while the other cut off the escape route, exactly as Leo had shown her with the stones.

They were getting used to killing the rabbits.

Each time one of them made a kill, Luna shuddered. But she didn’t look away anymore. And each time, she felt something thickening inside her, a slow, steady warmth building beneath her ribs.

The kills were feeding her EXP.

Leo couldn’t see Luna’s system panels the way he could with others, and it left him oddly restless. But watching her grow stronger with every kill, he felt that all of this was a fateful encounter, a heavenly mandate that had brought the two of them together for a reason.

While Leo fought off the rabbits that kept coming, their numbers only continued to grow, bursting from the undergrowth in twos and threes as if the whole forest had decided to test them at once. Blacky was busy as well, lunging at the weak level-one rabbits and flinging them aside with flicks of his head, tail wagging all the while like it was the best game he’d ever played.

By the time the sun had climbed high enough to burn off the last of the mist, the clearing was littered with small, furry bodies, and Luna was swaying a little on her feet, tired but upright.

They continued on their way.

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