Finding a secluded space behind the dormitory building, Leon stood still for a moment and just sat with the feeling that had been trailing him since earlier that evening.
It was strange. There was no pain, not exactly, but the feeling was present in a way that kept pulling at his attention like a loose thread. 'Couldn't be that my summon has been completely destroyed, right? Or perhaps it has already recovered?'
There was no way to be sure just standing there thinking about it. Under normal circumstances, a summon that had been shattered the way his skeleton had been shattered would need considerable time before it was functional again. The damage had been total. But this was a skeleton, an undead, and undead operated by different rules than living creatures, not to say the summons were exactly living in the truest sense. Maybe those rules extended to recovery as well. Maybe not. He genuinely didn't know yet.
He looked inward, accessing his summoner's space with the focused ease he was slowly getting used to. He was shocked to see something surprising had appeared in it. For some reason, the door from which his skeleton stepped through had appeared.
It sat in his summoner's space exactly as it had appeared at the awakening, carvings and all, ancient and patient and entirely unexplained. Leon stared at it for a long moment without taking action. His first instinct was confusion. His second instinct, arriving about three seconds later with considerably more enthusiasm, was something else entirely.
'No way.' The thought came slowly, then faster as his mind caught up with what he was looking at. His web novel saturated brain, years of reading transmigration stories and progression fantasy and every variation of the chosen-one narrative, began connecting things at a speed that probably would have concerned a more grounded person. Was he actually the protagonist of this world? Or just a transmigrator with a cheat ability nobody had documented yet?
Either option was, genuinely, incredible!
"If it is what I think it is, then this is gold!" He said it inwardly with the contained energy of a person who very much wanted to shout and was choosing not to for practical reasons.
He didn't wait to think it through further. He acted on instinct, reaching through his summoner's space and initiating a summon, only this time he wasn't targeting the skeleton. He was targeting the door itself.
Unsurprisingly, it materialized into reality.
Ass soon as the door appeared, the death energy that rolled out with it was immediate and heavy, spreading across the atmosphere of the secluded space in that same slow, inevitable wave it had produced at the awakening grounds. The temperature even appeared to have dropped a bit after it was materialized. The air thickened, an if anyone was walking nearby, they would feel it before they understood what they were feeling.
Leon watched the door as it continued to open slowly, waiting.
Just like before, something moved in the darkness beyond the threshold, slow and deliberate. Dragging itself forward with the unhurried patience of something that had been standing in the dark for a very long time and had no particular feelings about the wait, a skeleton stepped out. This one actually also had a greatsword in hand, nearly identical to the first, same frame, same posture, same dull weight to every movement.
Leon kept watching.
He waited for more, some kind of escalation, a second figure, something different emerging behind the first. He waited with the optimism of a person who had just convinced themselves they were holding something extraordinary.
Nothing came…
Instead, the door disappeared.
His expectations were thrown to the dirt and stomped.
He checked his summoner's space immediately, but truly, just like last time, the door was gone again, as though it had never been there at all, leaving only the first skeletons standing quietly in the internal space, where his summons resided, almost suspended as it recuperated. He looked at it for a while then returned to the physical.
After observing the new skeleton for a while, he unsummoned it and let it settle into his summoner's space beside the first.
He was a little disappointed, but thinking deeper about it, his spirit was lifted. This was incredible, truly a never heard before ability. He was a person who had read enough of these stories to know that the first impression of a cheat ability was rarely the full picture. He started thinking it through properly, and the more he turned it over, the more the shape of it became interesting.
This door, if he was correct, would grant him a chance to draw out one summon everyday at random. All of them, based on what he'd seen and what the vision during his awakening had shown him, would be undead. That much he was fairly confident about. The army of skeletons on that mountain. The throne. The two figures standing beside it. Everything pointed in the same direction.
If he was lucky, and luck was a variable he was choosing to remain optimistic about, something significantly more powerful than a skeleton warrior would eventually step through that door. A death knight, maybe, something ancient and armored and genuinely threatening. Even one of those two figures from the vision standing beside that throne was a possibility, though he immediately caught himself on that thought.
'That's too greedy, too greedy. I didn't think that, great door. Please don't factor that into whatever calculation you're running and reduce my luck.' He directed the thought at the door's absence with the earnest energy of someone who wasn't entirely sure the door wasn't listening.
He checked the skeleton's stats, it was the same as the first, both Peak Grade 1 with potential of 1. While this looked bad, taking the skeleton's performance into consideration, having two didn't seem that bad all of a sudden.
'If having one destroyed felt like that...'