SS Awakening: My Monster Merging System!

Zich’s mana had been very low when he collapsed. The link should have snapped right away. There was no way for a summon to stick around without mana, not in any grimoire, not in any skill description, nowhere.

Yet here it was. Kneeling in the dust of a dead city. Pressing cloth on his wound. Watching the perimeter for enemies and refusing to disappear.

The first thing he did was check his mana points. As expected, they were still low... it was supposed to have run out by now.

Zich felt a light headache merely thinking about it.

He did not have the energy to feel touched by it. He did not even have the right words for it. What he felt was closer to irritation, not at the knight, but at the situation. At his own weakness. At the idea that he would have been dead by now if not for the mute undead knight.

"You shouldn’t be here," Zich muttered.

The knight’s glow did not change.

"You should have gone back to the graveyard."

"I had no mana. You had no reason to stay."

Seeing that everything seemed to be falling on deaf ears, Zich couldn’t help but exhale. His breath fogged in the cold air as he said quietly,

"Idiot."

He was not sure if he meant the knight or himself.

It took Zich another hour to sit up.

The knight did not help. Not because it would not, it could fight, guard, and follow orders, but lifting a wounded person without making things worse was too fine a task for it. So it did the only thing it could. It moved back, planted its sword in the ground again, and stood there while Zich dragged himself upright one inch at a time.

His vision swam. His stomach turned. He had to stop twice to keep from throwing up. His left arm hung at his side, useless. The wound under the knight’s cloth was still bleeding, but slower.

He looked at the cloth. It was a strip torn from the knight’s own cloak. The fabric was stained dark with blood and torn from the fight, but it covered the wound well enough.

Zich touched it once.

"Thanks," he said.

The word felt heavy in his mouth. But Zich, although shameless, was not unappreciative of the summon who helped him.

The knight’s glow changed again at those words, this time slightly brighter.

’Maybe it’s mute and that’s its form of communication,’ Zich thought. ’I did see something like that even during the battle.’

Understanding that the thought wasn’t really important, he dropped his hand and looked away, wanting to take a good look at his surroundings.

He was no longer in the square like he guessed. Right now, he was in a room with one of the four walls facing the street completely missing.

He could tell that wall had not been missing before with a glance.

And he was right. It was the undead knight who had broken it to access the room and also give itself a clear view of the outside in case another swarm of undead came.

Zich sat against a broken wall with the soul stone bag in his lap, turning it over with his good hand. A smile gradually lit up across his face.

At least what he had risked his life for was still intact. It was... worth it at least.

Zich’s mana was coming back, but slowly. He could feel it crawling back into his chest region where his core was located and where his mana was stored. It would be hours before he had enough to summon anything new.

Not that he needed to fight now.

The knight was already here, and all he needed to do was sustain it.

He leaned his head against the wall and looked up at the sky. His thoughts were a mess as he wondered how he would proceed from now on.

His gaze drifted around the ruined room, and after a moment, it stopped on several empty glass bottles lying near the wall.

Zich frowned.

Slowly, he pushed himself forward and picked one up.

A mana potion bottle.

He looked at the others beside it, and his expression darkened a little more.

There were five in total.

Zich stared at the bottles for a moment before turning slowly toward the Elite Undead Knight. The knight stood exactly where it had been before, sword planted in the ground, motionless and watching.

Neither of them spoke.

Well, one physically could not.

Zich looked back at the bottles, then at the knight, then back again as the pieces slowly came together.

"You fed these to me?"

The knight’s pale glow flickered once.

Zich’s eyebrow twitched.

Mana potions were not something a person drank by accident. You had to swallow them yourself. Yet somehow five bottles had ended up empty, which meant the knight had probably forced them down his throat while he was unconscious.

The image that came to mind was absurd when he tried to think about it.

An armored undead kneeling over his unconscious body and shoving potions into his mouth. What impressed him even more was the fact that the summon was intelligent enough to even think about this in the first place.

No disrespect to Slimy or Blood Leech, but Zich genuinely doubted the two would have come up with this idea.

It somehow knew that by feeding Zich mana potions, it could stay out longer than it should have. And the clueless Zich had thought it was because of some hidden ability.

’It seems fusing smarter materials can create smarter summons.’

Still, he seemed a bit disappointed merely thinking about it because a part of him liked the idea of using his summons without thinking about the cost of mana consumption.

Suddenly, he thought about another pressing question.

"How? How did you get your hands on so many mana potions?"

The undead knight remained quiet and simply looked out toward the streets. It was an indirect way of saying it had found them out there.

Afterward, Zich didn’t bother bombarding it with any more questions and simply let it be. He flicked his wrist, sending the summon back to the graveyard, and rested his back against the wall once more.

While he was resting, he heard a giant buzz in his ears and didn’t even know when his right hand lifted up and slapped the insect buzzing around his ear.

Following that, a notification flashed across his panel.

[Ding, you have slain an Undead Mosquito.]

[Lucky Headband has been triggered.]

[Ding, you have received your own personal dungeon: Undead Crypt.]

...

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