The majority of my children were ready to evolve and the scribes witch were just the mages but they still enjoyed the job of noting down everything that an evolution changed about a particular type of skeleton i think two of the mages had already evolved and the mages said there were a whopping eight choices for them to pick from and the archers even though only just under half had evolved said that there were four choices one that specializes in useing a bow and arrow one that gifted a crossbow 50 bolts and related skills one for a blowpipe they were gifted the blowpipe a case of 50 needles and a set of cursed poison vials that only worked for them but never ran out they varied in both strength and effect and finaly the skeleton musketeer they were gifted a musket a cleaning kit a bag of 500 balls and a cursed powder horn
they decided through a vote to seperate into four equal groups and pick one of the options so that each option was equally prevalent and they would all remain useful to the town it was nice to see the kids be so free thinking with thier decision making instead of butting heads like the humans do they also decided to put one of each archer sub type exept the blowgunner in each tower to maximise leathality and coverage the blowgunners would only be put on hunting teams as an extra archer to take down any and all screech owls and other flighty prey before they could flee after everything was said and done they all marched down tho the proving grounds to test the new weapons and hone thier skills with them we had even started taking up the practice of capturing monsters when we can for a live fire test of new strategies for hunting
the soliders had three choices like the archers the first one doubled down on what they already knew and enhanced thier gear the second one gave them a set of twin axes as well as five smaller throwing axes and the berserker's rage skill and the final one gave a spear and two sets of javelins they chose to do the same thing as the archers and went down to the proving grounds with thier heads held high and thier weapons at the ready
I watched my children train for a while then i walked to the workshop to see if anything needed done but nothing was needed at this point in time so i decided this was as good of a chance as any to take bellator vene dio and bris to go and explore the tunnels to see what was out there it took awhile for them to appoint a new temporary commander for each type of skeleton once that was done we went to the stock house to grab some ration packs just in case we didn't find anythind to eat and then we grabbed some hide bags as well as a basket for tor and went to leave the gate
the trek to the tunnels took a few hours when we got there we chose a tunnel and started walking into it we started leaving markings on the wall so we can find our way back later on and so the trail was marked for future expiditions into the deep these tunnels were cramped then spacious at a steep decline than completely level it makes no sense there were monsters in them too we had found one new type so far it was a giant rat that had a whip for a tail it was easy enough to fight it was just too hard to kill we had shot this on through the head five times it had been beaten stabbed and slashed in every way possible
It was bellators idea to lop it's head off and it suprisingly worked it stopped moving and tor got the experience from the kill so it worked but i don't know how we didn't think to do this sooner it really was the simplest solution that fixed our problem after that whole fiasco witch lasted much longer than it needed to we started walking the tunnels again we walked for what seemed like three more hours before we saw from down the tunnel a glowing purple light we walked over and looked around the corner and i saw a swamp it looked like the same type of open space as the prairie but with a different landscape
We saw monsters here they were rotting festering masses of flesh there were others too such as the whip tail rats and a new one an ostrich with obsidian talons nice to know we have another source of weapon points if we need them we decided to fight the ostritch to see what it would give i shuck up behind it with bris while tor and dio got it's attention and vene stood off to the side prepping a spell me and bris disabled it's legs almost simultaneously i did it with a clubbing to the knee while bris shot an arrow into its foot pinning it in place
it stood there trying furiously to rip its foot free from the arrow while tor and dio wailed on it with repeated blows to the neck and head while vene got the killing blow with a death ray spell the monster started to shake violently then it foamed at the mouth while making a sickening noise it then seized up and fell limp dead vene got to level 3 from that kill alone i still had mine and tor's evolution to deal with but i'm going to do that when we get home as to not add any unneeded stress to this trip we started to pluck the beast for it's feathers and then started eating i got the basic profile for the novacula ira struthionis it said it was the rage razor ostich it was a very good find id gave plenty of recources
we then walked further into the marsh we found a few semi useful things there like some cattails witch were useful to make strong cordage out of we headed further and then we saw it
A HUMAN TOWN SITTING SO CLOSE TO MY FAMILY'S HOME