Coming over that same rise was another small squad of undead. This time only three, but it seemed like that might be enough with how we were. That and the third was a mounted skeleton. I wasn’t happy to see what amounted to an undead knight dipping his lance toward me.

A quick check showed that I was mostly out of mana still, so I couldn’t even snap off a small Lay-to-Rest. My Totem was full, but that wouldn’t give me much. Foot-soldiers didn’t tend to win against mounted. They just moved too fast and hit too hard to easily beat. When the footman managed to win, it would be after killing the horse, which was hard to do when it was living, let alone dead.

My gear was kind of strewn about from the rolling around in the fight and then me getting my leg ripped apart by Blink. I needed something that would help level the playing field, and I needed it quick. As I took stock of what was going on, Blink took action. I saw her sweep something up off the ground before she vanished.

I never did ask her how her stealth skill worked as a girl or her lizard girl form. I only knew that it did. I also hadn’t remembered to ask her where her clothes came from and went when she took on a new form. Neither of those was very important but nevertheless showed up when I was stressed thinking.

My eyes landed on my pack, and I saw my tree growth stakes in there. I had one shoved in my belt as well, and that was the one that I was going to use. My pack was about 10 feet closer to the skeleton knight than I was and beside me, about four feet behind me, was a rather large tree. I didn’t have a clue what it was, but it was the close one.

I yanked the growth stake from my hip and plunged it into the ground running through the prompts as I heard the skeleton knight come. Most of the undead had been quiet, but this one rattled armor, and even the horse was heavy enough to make noise while running.

As I heard the knight close with me, the prompts finished, and the stake took hold. There was a slight golden glow from the stake and the tree then a blast of magic rolled out from it. I turned and saw the knight with his lance aimed right at me. He was closing fast, and then I saw Blink bouncing off the side of the skeleton horse.

I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing as I saw it, but the horse stopped moving its legs while it was in a full gallop. Both front hoofs were off the ground, and only the back left was still connecting when it froze for just a moment. Then because the front legs didn’t move, it went down.

The knight seemed to notice something was wrong but was in a saddle and was only able to dip his lance a bit. This dipping of the lance turned it into a lever and removed his right arm and part of his shoulder. It also served to keep part of him up long enough for the legs that were in stirrups to move down and separate.

Just a second after Blink hit the skeleton horse from the side, the horse was trying to kick itself back up. The problem was that the magic that made the horse able to move also let it get hurt when it did wrong things like land on its chest and not its hoofs. As it thrashed, it bucked to the side a little and knocked the armored knight the rest of the way off its back. The horse wasn’t getting up. It just hadn’t figured out yet that some of the leg bones were outside its current magical pull.

I moved as quickly as I could to close my distance to them and cast claim undead on the knight. It bounced back that it was a claimed undead and asked if I wanted to start a battle of wills. I declined and tried the horse to find the same issue. So I cast mana drain on both and saw that both of them were slowly getting worn down by the tree and my spell.

I looked up at where the other two skeletons were. They had been waiting to attack. One was holding two lances, and the other had a staff. Which meant to me that one was acting as a squire and the other was likely a caster. Yet oddly, the caster hadn’t bothered to do anything to me as of yet.

I wasn’t sure why they weren’t attacking, but then I saw the caster move and then freeze. They were trying to attack, but Blink was up there with my dagger pausing them. Which meant that I needed to move up there and finish them off. She just didn’t have the power in this form to fight.

I snagged my pack and sprinted over to where Blink had the last two skeletons paused. I had enough mana from my drain that I cast a quick Lay-to-Rest on the two of them, and then I dropped a stake into the ground and linked it to the closes tree. It wasn’t very large, but it was nearby, so I started to turn them into bonemeal.

“Quick thinking using the dagger to stop the horse,” I said to Blink as I gave her a hug.

“Are yous proud?” She asked with her odd lizard person smile.

“Yup, you saved us back there. Let’s loot the mage and build a room. We need to recover before we face anything else.”

It only took a minute to loot the mage and the squire before we headed back. The lances weren’t anything that I could use as they were too heavy for me to use as a spear, so those got left. The squire didn’t have anything else of note. The mage, on the other hand, was a completely different story.

Where the squire was a complete failure of anything good, the mage had several rings and even a belt and bag. It was odd removing rings from bone fingers and even weirder just picking up a thin belt and watching the pelvis just fall to the ground. I also grabbed the staff to see if it was anything I could use. Even if I wasn’t, I would rather put the staff in the room than leave it out for something else to grab.

We went back to where most of my gear was, and I pulled out the wands needed to start turning dirt to water and then water to steam. The process wasn’t long, and today it wasn’t too bad as I had just topped off on mana from the undead. When I was empty, I drank my mana potion and finished the job. Then I dumped all my gear and all the loot down into the room, and Blink and I sealed ourselves in.

I wanted to see what all I got, but it wasn’t the thing that was most pressing. Between the blood loss and the mana draining, I was tired. I knew that I needed to eat and so I unwrapped the last of the food we had, and Blink, and I ate.

Between bites, I asked Blink, “how long before you can change back?”

She didn’t wait to finish before answering, “fur da.”

“What?”

She quickly swallowed her food. “Fulls days before I cans change backs.”

“Well then we are stuck here for a while.” I smiled, “which means that we can rest up and figure out what we need to do.”

While I hadn’t been going long, the day had been demanding, so we settled into sleep. I wasn’t sure if I was taking a nap or sleeping the night through. I had a few debuffs dealing with being tired and blood loss. So we both just passed out.

When I woke up, I wasn’t sure how long I had been sleeping, but I felt better, and my debuffs were gone. It was time to dig into the equipment and see what we captured. I started with the knight’s armor. I wanted to see if his tasset would fit me. I wouldn’t say that this was the first thing that had gone my way, but I was happy that they were almost my size. They also only had a little rust, so I figured they would be in good use.

He didn’t have a shield, and his sword was rusted through. He did have a single ring that we took. It wasn’t magical but had a large ruby in it. His sabatons and cuisses both also fit, which meant that my legs would be completely armored. I would still want to find a chain to go under it for the joins, but at least the prominent places would be fine. If I had the tasset or the cuisses, then the bolt wouldn’t put me down.

The rings were the next things that I looked through. The caster had 4 rings, all of which were magical. I got the following:

Ring of Regeneration

5% increase in Mana regeneration

—————

Ring of Regeneration

5% increase in Mana regeneration

————

Ring of Poison

+2 poison damage on all magical attacks

————

Ring of Resistance

10% increase in mental resistance

The rings all went on, which brought me up to five rings and 9 fingers. I wasn’t sure what I would do about missing my left pinkie. I thought that it would have grown back with the healing potions, but it seemed that it didn’t. I didn’t get any debuffs for missing it, but it did make things odd.

The war hammer and the axe were both things that I was happy to have. The axe appeared to be in fair condition. It only had one chip, which I figured I could sharpen out. The hammer, however, was the real prize. It was a proper war hammer, not one I would see in games. Nope, this was just over two feet long and maybe three pounds. I could use it one-handed, and against the undead would do much better than just about anything else I had.

I had at least half a day left before we could head out, so I was going to make sure that I was ready. So I pulled out my engraving tools and got to work.

* * *