The two skeletons slashed in unison, one with a vertical strike and the other with a horizontal one.
"There's no dodging this one," he muttered as he ducked to avoid the horizontal slash and raised his left hand to meet the vertical one.
'I hope my armor holds up!' he thought just before his hand met the greatsword of the skeleton.
Taking the blow, it felt like a shockwave hit his body, but his armor managed to hold. Not wasting the opportunity, he brought down his sword on the left skeleton, crushing its skull.
The skeleton on the right raised its greatsword, ready to strike, but before it could, Eric slammed his fist into its skull. A few cracks appeared on the creature's skull, but it didn't die. It managed to bring down its greatsword, though it was less powerful than before.
Eric parried the blow with his sword and then smashed the creature's skull.
Grasping for air, he lifted his gaze, only to see a dark arrow flying straight toward his face.
"Fuck!" he grunted, barely managing to move his head in time, narrowly missing the attack by a hair's breadth.
"They have archers too?!"
"We'll soon be overwhelmed!" Olivia shouted from the darkness, not stopping her slaughter for even a second.
"Any ideas?!" Aria shouted, as she tore through the skeletons like they were made of butter.
'Think! Think! There has to be an explanation for why we were surrounded so quickly without us noticing!' Eric was struggling to come up with a way to get out of their current situation.
But with arrows flying toward him and skeletons rushing in with their giant greatswords, it was hard to focus.
"Wait!" he muttered under his breath as his eyes narrowed, realizing something.
'Countless skeletons ambush us without us noticing? And they fall just by having their heads destroyed… could it be...?'
"Aria!" he shouted.
"What?" she responded.
"Is it possible something is controlling these creatures?!" This was the only thing that came to Eric's mind. Back on Earth, he had played some fantasy games, and he remembered one of his favorite classes, the necromancer.
Someone having the ability to raise and control the dead—could it be possible there was something in this world too?
There was silence for a moment until Olivia responded, "Eric! You might be right. Aria and I are going to focus on the skeletons. You search for something that looks like it could be the culprit!"
Eric wanted to protest. He believed that searching for the source of the attack was the most important task, and thought the weakest one shouldn't have been chosen for it. But given their situation, he didn't have much of a choice.
He ran past the skeletons, not paying them any attention, and managed to dodge the arrows being fired at him.
"Something suspicious... suspicious..." he muttered as he ran, trying to find something that might catch his gaze, but there was nothing.
"Fuck, where is it?!" he cursed. In the next moment, an arrow struck his chest. Even though his armor held, he still felt the pain.
His eyes flashed crimson as he shifted his gaze to the archers who seemed to be targeting him specifically. Still holding onto his sword, it seemed his side effects had started to affect him too much, so his thoughts were quickly replaced with rage.
"I will kill these motherfuckers!" Forgetting his original mission, he dashed toward the skeleton archers. Some skeletons tried to attack him with their greatswords, but being faster than them, he managed to avoid the strikes.
Finally reaching the archers, his face twisted into a cruel grin as he swung his sword, killing the first one on the spot.
"NEXT!" he shouted, focusing his attention on the next one.
One by one, the skeleton archers fell lifeless to the ground like dominoes, while Eric began laughing menacingly. His desire amplified dozens of times— all he wanted now was to kill them all, leaving not a single one alive.
"Die," he muttered as he used the handle of his sword to crush the skull of one of the archers.
"Die!" He used the blade of his sword to decapitate another.
"DIE!" he shouted as he used his fist to smash through yet another skeleton's skull.
"MORE, MORE! I NEED TO KILL MORE!" He avoided the melee skeletons while picking off the archers one by one, until his gaze caught something. It was clearly a skeleton, but this one was wearing clothing.
It had some kind of purple cloth on it, like it was trying to blend into the purple light given off by the magma. Eric only managed to spot it due to sheer luck... or maybe because, now that most of the archers were dead, he was scanning for his next prey with the eyes of a hunter.
"YOU'RE A SKELETON TOO, AREN'T YOU?!" he screamed as he charged full force at the monster.
The creature seemed to have realized it had been noticed. Strangely, it didn't attack. Instead, it turned its back on Eric and started running for its life.
"OH NO, YOU'RE NOT GETTING AWAY!" he screamed in response to the creature's actions and quickened his steps.
*****
'This might be a bit troublesome,' Aria thought, cutting through the skeletons one by one. She was beginning to show signs of fatigue as her breathing grew more irregular with each slash of her sword.
"Eric… will manage, right?" she muttered. "But considering the circumstances, if one of us—me or Olivia—left the battlefield to search for the potential culprit, the other would be quickly overwhelmed, so sending Eric was our best bet."
The ground was becoming harder to see due to the countless skeleton bodies already lying on it, and still, there was no sign of them stopping.
"It seems we were right. There's something summoning them from somewhere." She muttered as she killed another skeleton.
Just when she thought the challenge was becoming too much, the skeletons suddenly shuddered and fell to the ground in union.
"He did it!" Aria proclaimed as she observed her surroundings, noticing Olivia walking toward her.
"How are you feeling?" she asked, turning to her.
"Been through worse, you?"
"Pretty much the same."
"Well, looks like our hero managed to deal with our culprit, huh?" Olivia said, her lips curving slyly into a grin.
"Yeah. We better find him. He might be injured." Aria said as she started heading toward where she had last seen Eric, and Olivia followed.
After a few minutes, they spotted the back of a man in black armor and a red cloak, standing on a skeleton's bones.
"Eric," Aria called to him with her sweet voice, but then her body froze, as did Olivia's.
Slowly turning at the sound, the girls saw Eric, his eyes burning with crimson fury and foam falling from the corners of his mouth.
It seemed he had held his cursed sword for too long.