SS Awakening: My Monster Merging System!

When he stepped through the Portal, Zich found himself in a vast space.

In this space, pillars of black stone rose toward a ceiling lost in darkness. The walls were lined with ancient carvings. Braziers filled with pale blue flame lined the path ahead, casting everything in an eerie, shifting glow.

And in that glow, there were skeletons.

Dozens of them.

They stood scattered across the chamber floor, motionless, their empty eye sockets staring at nothing. Some were little more than scattered piles of bones. Others were intact, holding rusted weapons or cracked shields. Their forms ranged from humanoid to monstrous, things with too many arms, too many ribs, too many joints bending in directions that should not have been possible.

Bone Crawlers. Skeletal Warriors. Skeletal Hounds.

To others they were hideous, but to Zich... they were beautiful.

"Now this is what I’m talking about," Zich said quietly, a grin spreading across his face.

As if hearing his voice, one of the skeletons, a humanoid with a broken sword clutched in its bony hand, turned its head.

Its eye sockets ignited with pale blue light.

It let out a rattling hiss and began to move toward him.

One by one, the skeletons turned. Their eye sockets lit up like candles in the dark. Dry bones scraped against stone as they dragged themselves forward, weapons raised, jaws clicking shut in hungry anticipation.

Zich should have been afraid. He was injured. His mana was low. He was alone in an unexplored dungeon filled with hostile undead.

Instead, his eyes were ignited with excitement.

He withdrew his dented sword, tightening his hold on it.

FWOOSH!

The first skeleton lunged forward. Its broken sword swung in a wide arc, slow and predictable. Zich ducked under it, drove the dagger into its ribcage, and twisted. The bones crumbled. The light in its eyes died.

[ You have slain a Skeletal Warrior ]

[ Your Necrotic Resistance has increased by a small amount ]

Zich blinked at the notification.

Necrotic Resistance? Right he did saw something like that when he stepped inside this dungeon.

He looked at the other skeletons charging toward him. The air around them shimmered with a faint, demonic energy, the necrotic aura the system had warned him about. It was already eating at his HP, a constant drain like standing in a poisonous fog.

But the dungeon was giving him resistance just for killing its inhabitants.

"Well, not bad.’ Zich said, tightening his grip on the dagger and cracked his neck.

"Let’s get to work."

...

Zich was not a frontliner. He was a summoner. He was used to letting his summons do the fighting while he directed from the back. But with his mana still barely half full, he had to rely on his own two hands.

He killed skeletons until his arms ached. He stabbed them through their ribcages. He smashed their skulls against the stone floor when the sword got stuck in bone. He kicked their remains apart and used their own broken weapons as clubs.

By the end of the first few minutes, the entrance chamber was littered with bone fragments and shattered skulls.

Zich sat against a pillar at the edge of the chamber, breathing hard, staring at the carnage around him. His left arm was screaming. His legs were shaking. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been wrung out and hung to dry.

"This is going to take a while," he muttered through gritted teeth.

But even as he said it, he could feel it. The small but tangible increase in his experience points and the resistance to the necrotic energy that polluted this dungeon.

And since the Undead Crypt was rewarding him just for surviving, it was more than worth it.

In the first few hours, he figured out something.

He discovered that the skeletons in the outer chambers were weaker, slow, poorly armed, and easy to dismantle. The deeper ones were more dangerous, wielding better weapons and moving faster. He stuck to the outer chambers, clearing them methodically.

Some time later, his mana had recovered enough to summon Slimy.

The slime appeared and didn’t even need to ask what to do. It immediately began attacking the skeletons.

With Slimy helping, the kills came faster. The slime’s silk barrier absorbed damage that would have hit Zich, and its acidic attacks made short work of the weaker skeletons.

During this time, Zich had turned off his notifications as they covered his view and made it hard for him to concentrate during battle.

Because the effect of the Lucky Handband was limited to only twenty four hours, he wanted to make good use of it.

After all, there were only a few hours before the time was up.

...

Zich had pushed deeper into the crypt, following the blue light of the braziers, when the corridor opened into a larger chamber. The ceiling was higher here, and the walls were decorated with faded murals depicting a crowned figure surrounded by kneeling skeletons, their heads bowed in eternal servitude.

In the center of the chamber stood a skeleton unlike the others.

It was taller. Its bones were darker, almost black, and its armor was intact, breastplate, pauldrons, and greaves. It carried a rusted greatsword that looked like it could cut a man in half with a single swing.

When it saw Zich, it raised its sword and pointed it at him.

[ Skeletal Warden — Level 20 ]

Zich looked at it. Then he looked at Slimy.

"How do you feel about fighting something with a sword twice your size?"

Slimy wobbled uncertainly.

"That’s what I thought."

He raised his hand and summoned the Elite Undead Knight instead.

The knight appeared with its usual stoic silence, its armor gleaming even in the dim light of the crypt. It stepped in front of Zich without hesitation, its own sword drawn, its visor fixed on the Warden ahead.

Boom!

The Warden stared at it with hatred and then charged forward!

The two undead clashed in the center of the chamber, steel against steel, bone against bone.

Zich stayed back, conserving his mana, watching.

The fight was brutal. The Warden was strong, swinging its greatsword with enough force to crack stone. But the Elite Undead Knight was smarter. It parried, dodged, and struck with precision that no mindless skeleton could match. It moved like it remembered what it meant to be a warrior, which it clearly did.

Since there were no monsters in sight, and because of his confidence in the Elite Undead Knight, he decided to sort out some things in the graveyard.

And just like that, under the watchful gaze of Slimy, Zich slowly slipped into the graveyard.