The plan was fairly simple. The miners would draw the attention of the skeletons for long enough so that the soldiers and Zack could get inside. There was much rubble around the building which when getting a closer look, appeared to be a worn-down castle. With the rubble around the castle, there were also cracks which allowed for a few openings where a person could slip inside the castle. It was quite lucky for the kobolds that this was the case because it helped with the plan quite a bit.
Zack was wanting to do some research on skeleton stats, he also noticed that the sun had started going down so he would either have to wait until tomorrow to execute his plans or he could do it tonight just without as much knowledge. he looked at the kobolds and saw them hyped and ready to fight tonight.
Zack didn't want to make the kobolds try and sleep while being so extremely hyped up, so he decided to explain the plan to the kobolds and then carry it out.
It was dark now and there were lines drawn on the ground with sticks showing the plan. It took a decent period for the kobolds to understand the plan but they finally understood and so once all the kobolds were in the correct position, Zack gave a hand signal, meaning to start the plan.
The miners ran out towards the group of skeletons, at this point they seemed to maybe regret their decision to agree with this plan. But it was too late to turn back now. They drove their pickaxes into the stone floor making a loud metallic sound.
At this point, seemingly in sync, the heads of almost all of the skeletons on this side of the castle snapped towards the metallic sounds. They limped towards the kobolds who were holding the pickaxes. The skeletons were slow though so the kobolds kept backing up to be away from the skeletons.
Once the skeletons chased the miners far enough away from the castle, Zack and the soldiers quickly ran towards the castle while trying to be as quiet as possible still which wasn't working quite well, but it seemed the skeletons didn't notice either way. They had made it inside, the first part of the plan was a success, and so he wanted to find who was able to create this many undead.
Inside the castle where they now stood there was not much but seemingly what was once a grand hallway and now was littered with stone rubble. It seemed that the skeletons were only guarding the outside and that whoever this necromancer was didn't think their security through.
The kobolds continued forth, arriving at a staircase that went down further into the castle. These stairs were the same size as the stairs on the mountain path although it seemed that these stairs were in much better condition.
They then made their way down the stairs which had started to feel almost endless after they had been going down them for a while. It was only after what had felt like walking that they reached the bottom of the staircase, and what awaited them was a sight to behold.
Looking around they saw a passageway leading to large iron doors, but the passageway that the kobolds were now walking down could only be described as magnificent, there were statues lining the walls of the passageway. Each of these statues was the size of a giant and was holding a torch that would glow with a bright flame.
Zack was amazed, there was nowhere in the real world that you could see a sight like this. He was quite excited at how far they had gotten at this point, it felt as if they were close to achieving something from this journey.
After admiring the passageway for quite a long time, Zack led the 5 other kobolds down it towards the large iron doors. At the iron doors, there were two statues, larger than the others holding spears, one spear was golden, the other was silver.
A new problem had now arisen. The door was made out of solid iron and the kobolds were quite weak, even though there were 6 of them, they wouldn't be able to even budge the door. There wasn't any race that would be able to open this door, or well none of the basic races could.
This led Zack to believe that this was some sort of puzzle, if he could figure out this puzzle then the doors could be opened. But what was the puzzle? There were the statues with spears, the door, and the statues with torches.
The first thing that he looked at was the spears, the part that he noticed quickly once he started realizing it was a puzzle was the fact that there was writing on the handles of the spears. Zack was quite delighted at first until he saw that he couldn't read many of the symbols. In the game Kingdoms, you were able to read and write in the language of the race that you chose when starting. For the kobolds, they could read, write, and speak draconic and common.
Zack had an idea of what language it would be. His guess was Jotun, the language of giants. The reason for this was the fact that everything handmade in the mountains so far had been much, much larger than human-sized, or even orc-sized, they were also on a mountain and this could've been a group of frost giants home.
And so Zack pulled up the in-game forums and searched for conversations on the giant language. 2 results had popped up, the first was titled 'How do I read Jotun?!' and the other was titled 'Is Jotun a joke?' after reading through them and getting no information he decided to move on from the writing for the time being.
He moved on to the door. There wasn't much to say about the door. The door was just a huge iron door with smooth surfaces. He moved on from the door very quickly since he couldn't find any sort of clues relating to the puzzle.
The last thing he decided to check was the statues that lined the passageway. Now that he was looking closer at each of them, the torches they held all had a colored ribbon tied to them, they were also all holding a cube about the size of a skull. Each of these cubes was made out of a different material, though Zack had no clue what each of these materials was.
He then spoke up to the group of soldiers and once he had their attention said, "do any of you know about metals?" He felt like an idiot the way he had phrased this question, but he wasn't the greatest at social encounters so him feeling awkward was bound to happen at some point.
After a moment of silence and a sigh from Zack, one of the solider spoke up.
"I know a bit..." Said the kobold. The kobold was shorter than the rest but seemed a bit stronger than the rest as well, this was the original reason Zack had picked the kobold to be a soldier, but it seemed that soldiers didn't serve only one purpose.
"What is your name, and can you determine what metals those statues are holding?" Zach had replied to the kobold, glad that a kobold may have known something about these metals.
"Uh, my name is Nev, and yeah, I think I can figure it out, let me try," the kobold replied, stressed that they might fail.
"Ok, just don't overexert yourself. If you can't do it, it's fine," replied Zack, he didn't want to worry Nev.
Nev then walked on over to a statue and stared at the metal in the statue's hand then picked it up, and after a minute or two he said out loud "It's Copper."
Zack smiled, Nev seemed to know what he was talking about at least to a decent degree, so Zack decided to trust him. Nev went around naming the metals. The listed metals were copper, tungsten, nickel, tin, sodium, and gold.
The color of the listed metals didn't correspond with the colors of the ribbons which confused Zack, he was missing something. But he remembered when he looked at the fire, it was just like a science experiment he had once done in school that he only vaguely remembered at this point. The experiment was called the 'flame test', it was a test where you put different metals into a fire and the fire turned different colors.
He ended up having to log out and look up the metals to flame colors. But he quickly logged back in and put the metals in the correct flames. After all the flames glowed different colors, the two statues with spears had moved in slow, jagged movements. The statues opened the two doors and then the kobolds with Zack at the lead walked through and well, what they saw, it was spectacular.