The final monster in the Tower of Death stood no taller than Tybalt, it seemed to him—though he had already seen how measurements became tricky in this place where he had no point of reference to guess proportions. Nothing but that ruined keep.

  But it looked like the figure had been a man, so he guessed that his height estimate was correct.

  Like the other creatures that had attacked him, this monster was undead.

  From its visible skull, he thought it was a skeleton.

  But it was clearly unlike the other skeletons that Tybalt had fought in this place.

  The glowing green eyes set in a hollow skull were the only point of similarity.

  Its bones below the skull were concealed beneath a long black cloak with loose, dangling sleeves that even covered its hands. It wore a long golden chain around its neck, which ended in the center of its chest with an emerald pendant encased in gold. And the skull’s mouth grinned.

  The other skeletons had been unemotional, simple creatures, their mouths hanging slightly ajar unless they were in the middle of biting Tybalt, but this one was definitely smiling.

  Tybalt swallowed hard. The smile itself did not disturb him, but the implication of intelligence told him that this fight would be different from the previous ones.

  I need to kill it quickly!

  Tybalt carefully pulled the cork on his remaining health elixir and drank down the remainder of the bottle. He had already consumed half earlier to partially heal some broken ribs, and the first elixir was of course long gone too. He felt the pain from most of his injuries beginning to fade immediately—everything but his mana exhaustion migraine, which he knew couldn’t be treated this way—and he reflexively recorked the empty vial and put it back into his belt. That was all he’d had left, but he didn’t feel he could spare anything now.

  Above all else, he did not want the final monster to kill him in one hit, before he had a chance to attack or try to work out its weaknesses.

  He raised his spear and stepped forward. Since the skeleton seemed to be human, there was no reason Tybalt couldn’t try to kill it with the spear, even with his supply of mana depleted.

  Human spines were fragile things when one slashed them with a metal spear, after all.

  As he moved toward the skeleton monster, however, the creature raised one of its sleeved limbs. The sleeve slid down so that the bony hand became visible, and a dark aura appeared around the phalanges. Tybalt paused for a moment and waited to see what it would do. He prepared his body to dodge a magical attack. It made sense to him that the final monster would be a skeleton mage, since that would be an obvious upgrade from the Tower’s other, less intelligent creatures.

  If that turned out to be the case, he would have to dodge attacks as best he could, try to stay behind the mage as much as possible, and look for an opening where he could attack a blind spot. That was how to fight a mage. Of course, usually, he would not dare to challenge a mage of any kind by himself. For a normal, classless human like Tybalt, that was typically suicidal.

  Given that he had beaten all of the Tower’s other creatures, however, Tybalt thought he might be able to win a battle of attrition if he could simply avoid the monster’s attacks until its mana reserves ran down.

  But the expected blast of arcane energy was not forthcoming.

  Instead, as the skeleton mage waved its fingers, Tybalt saw the pieces of dead monsters that he had fought before begin floating in the air and slowly recombining. Multiple specimens were fused in the process, forming larger but fewer monsters than they had been when he first killed them.

  Ghouls combined with skeletons. Skeletons joined with zombies. And, mostly, skeletons merged with other skeletons—there had been a lot of skeleton enemies in the Tower—to form hulking, multi-limbed behemoths.

  A thousand enemies, my ass! Tybalt thought. He had not expected this skeleton mage to be the type that fought through minions.

  “I should have known,” he murmured.

  Fucking typical. Fuck!

  The Baron took an interest in his bastard—and abandoned him when Tybalt needed him the most. The tutor said Tybalt was talented in reading and arithmetic—and then he failed to get a class, and none of that potential mattered. Tybalt learned falconry and trained his first bird—and it left him, because he no longer had resources to feed it on. He joined the military to better his station—and wound up in the crappiest unit sent into the least glorious situations, with the worst commanding officer he could imagine.

  Fuck! How many is that? Gods damn it! Ugh!

  He clenched one hand into a fist as the situation reminded him of the fundamental truth that hard years of experience had taught him: nothing worth having in his life would ever be easy. No one and nothing kept its promises fully.

  And it had been foolish to imagine the Tower would actually keep to Tybalt’s expectations as to the number of enemies he would have to kill. There was always a trick.

  Tybalt made a quick decision. He started running straight toward the robed skeleton. Its freakish hybrid soldiers were still forming. They were almost done, but he thought he had a second or two to try to get to the mage and run it through before they would be able to defend it.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  He sprinted across the distance, drawing fuel from the deep well of spite and defiant determination within him.

  The skeleton mage made no move to retreat, simply standing there, almost taunting him.

  As Tybalt got to within striking distance—he could see the twinkling within the skeleton mage’s glowing green eyes clearly now—he took his spear shaft tightly in both hands and put all his strength into a single strike aimed at the hood of the skeleton’s cloak, right at the connection between skull and spine, the spot where the neck should be most vulnerable.

  The spear touched the neck of the mage’s cloak—and a dark-colored mana barrier appeared and stopped it in the air.

  The skeleton mage turned its head slightly to look directly in Tybalt’s eyes.

  “Did you truly think it would be so easy?” A low, mocking voice emanated from the skeleton’s unmoving jaws.

  Tybalt froze and gaped for a moment. He had heard of talking monsters before but never seen one. They were usually high level, or rare variants. Far above his pay grade.

  “This is a test, fool, not a gift,” rasped the same voice. The skeleton mage tilted its head in such a way that Tybalt imagined for a moment that he saw the face that had once worn those bones—and a pair of thick, sneering lips on the mouth.

  The illusion held for only a moment, though.

  The mage waved a hand, and the world around Tybalt burst into motion as the combination monsters, suddenly mobile, threw themselves at him, lumbering with heavy footsteps and thick limbs.

  He pulled back his spear and ran from the skeleton mage, whose figure was now the center of monstrous activity. The creatures followed.

  There must have been a hundred of them or more.

  They seemed to have become slower as a result of being combined and growing larger, but Tybalt was not in a position to take much advantage of their sluggish movements. The necks of most of the newly fused creatures were so thick that he did not dare to stop and try a decapitation stroke. His mana was still empty, and a single swing could lose him his only weapon.

  As his body weaved around the creatures in a desperate game of tag, his mind raced, trying to come up with some strategy to chip away at the overwhelming numbers that confronted him.

  There was nothing.

  He had no mana elixir—and no way of fighting these powerful creatures that would not depend on mana for its effectiveness.

  Even his impressive physical stamina was slowly whittling down, he knew.

  Shit. Fuck. I should have saved something for the end…

  Even as he thought that, he knew he probably would not have survived the earlier rounds of the challenge if he had actually saved anything. Everything that had confronted Tybalt thus far had pushed him to his very physical and mental limits.

  There was only one option left that Tybalt imagined might help him delay the inevitable for a while. If he could make his way to the keep within the ruined castle, perhaps he could bar the door and wait the monsters out until he had restored some of his mana and stamina. Even at full health, he didn’t care for his chances, but he would have better odds than he did right now.

  Every whole number is greater than zero, he thought wryly.

  Tybalt located the keep at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he began slowly working his way toward it. He didn’t run straight at the goal, as he had with the skeleton mage. Now that he knew it was intelligent and controlled all of these creatures, he could easily imagine it simply ordering them to block his route.

  So, instead, he zigzagged, moved around the ever-shifting edges of the monstrous company’s force, and occasionally tried to cut at one of the more vulnerable-looking monsters with his spear. He knew he couldn’t chop through the newly reinforced necks without mana, but there were ankles that looked weak, joints that appeared fragile, and other soft bits of flesh that he could cut to try and slow the creatures down.

  Anything to make it appear as if he was still planning to stand and fight, rather than angling to get into the keep. If the little injuries he inflicted now helped him later, all the better.

  As he was drawing closer to the keep, however, his luck ran out.

  He tried to weave between two monsters that were moving to block his path, and one of the skeleto-zombies managed to trip him, sending him sprawling on his face. As a skeleto-ghoul near him bent down to try and grab him, Tybalt stabbed up with the spear, sticking it through the creature’s neck.

  Then he pushed himself up off the ground and tried to pull the spear the rest of the way through the skeleto-ghoul’s neck.

  As he had feared, however, the blade was stuck fast in the dense flesh and bone.

  Tybalt turned his head, hands still gripping the spear shaft, looking for a gap in the monsters to run away through. But the other monsters now blocked his path of escape on every other side.

  He gritted his teeth, grabbed the spear shaft even harder, yanked—and the much-abused wooden shaft finally broke, leaving Tybalt holding nothing but a broken wooden pole with splinters at the end. It was technically still a weapon, but he wouldn’t even want to challenge a normal human with this if he could avoid it.

  Tybalt grimaced and clenched his jaw as the monsters stepped in closer.

  He would go down fighting.

  As the skeleto-ghoul with the spear tip jutting from its neck leaned in closer to him, Tybalt used all his strength to shove the splintered end of the spear shaft through its eye socket. He pushed until the wood would go no further, and the hands of the monster, just inches from his face, stopped.

  There, at least I killed one, he thought.

  The energy seemed to leave his body at this act, and only his locked knees kept him from collapsing to the ground.

  The other monsters moved in to finish the job their associate had failed to complete, and Tybalt’s body whipped into a last frenzy of feeble but furious activity. He stuck close to the body of the monster he had just attacked, using it as a sort of shield, as his hands searched again for his dagger. He had the idea in mind that he could take out one more monster as the twice-damned creatures finally killed him.

  Then the dying skeleto-ghoul’s body spasmed, and the two hands closest to Tybalt jolted forward, striking him in the chest with all the force of a charging bull. He felt his freshly healed ribs scream in protest, and his body flew through the air like a rag doll thrown by a careless child.

  By comparison, Tybalt barely registered the pain of the impact as his body collided with solid stone. It forced the air out of his lungs and jolted his ribs, but at least it did not seem to break bones.

  His mind was almost ready to submit to unconsciousness—he would die in his sleep, and he had heard somewhere that was the best way to die—when he suddenly realized that he felt solid stone against his back.

  The creatures were moving sluggishly after him, but with that flailing monster’s last movements, it had thrown him to his goal!