Hopping Celestial Fox

It looked like someone had brought several bookshelves, desks, and weapon racks into a stereotypical boss arena and filled them with books, papers, weapons, and all sorts of other junk. There were motionless skeletons sprawled all over the chairs, piles of rot in the corners, and several skeleton-zombies standing or walking around, carrying papers and books.

Right in the middle, there was one particular skeleton-zombie, who sat on a chair and seemed to be poring over some documents. Unlike everyone else, he actually wore some pants and a shirt and had an eyepatch over his skull’s empty left eye socket. The right side of his skull still had flesh on it. In fact, there seemed to be more flesh on his bones than many of the other skeleton-zombies.

He looked up and spotted us a moment after we entered. As soon as he did, his half-face took on a furious expression and he gargled something unintelligible with his half of a mouth and no throat, before he stood up, pointed a bony finger at us and shouted more nonsense.

We stiffened as everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and looked in our direction before grabbing a nearby weapon and falling into a protective formation around the one we could only assume was the boss.

The boss himself leaned back and grabbed a big axe off a table. An oddly familiar axe, I realized.

“O-okay, let me–” Casey began, but Frank interrupted her.

“Wait! We come in peace!” he shouted.

“Frank, what are you…?!”

“We also want to find the cure! We don’t need to fight! We’re on the same side!”

The boss stopped for a moment as his remaining eye narrowed. Once again, he shouted something unintelligible, but didn’t move to attack us yet.

“Uh, sorry man! What was that? You’re kinda hard to understand!”

The boss growled and pointed the axe in our direction before shouting even more nonsense.

“Uh…” Frank glanced at me and Casey, looking unsure. “Look, how about we sit down and… uh, communicate with text? You can write on paper, right?”

The boss glared at us for a few moments before he turned to one of his skeleton-zombies and shouted something at them. The minion in question dropped the spear he was holding, ran to the nearest table, and grabbed some empty papers along with an ink and quill, before running to the boss and handing it all over.

The boss snatched it away from him, leaned his axe on his chair, and grabbed the quill. He began writing something while occasionally shooting a glare back up at us as if warning us.

I wasn’t sure what was happening.

Was diplomacy finally going to work for the first time ever?

Finished with whatever he wrote, the boss grabbed the paper and lifted it up for us to read. It was the same script as everything else in this world, however.

“Oh, uh… Hold on a second, I’m gonna need to translate that…” Frank said as he hurriedly brought out his phone and began tapping on it.

The boss made a motion to grab his axe again at the sudden movement, but when Frank didn’t do anything with the phone, he seemed to settle for suspiciously glaring at us again.

“You…” Frank murmured. “Who? Who are you? Are you asking us who we are?”

The boss nodded, glare still fixed on us.

“We are travelers from another world,” Casey said, taking a step forward. “We have been looking into the plague… the curse of the underwater city near this place. We want to figure out how to cure it.”

The boss tilted his head and narrowed his eye even further. He put the paper back on the desk, picked up the quill again and wrote something on the other side. He lifted it up again and we all waited for Frank to translate it.

“Know… You… What do we know about it?” Frank said after a moment to which the boss nodded again.

“We know that it’s… airborne and spreads uncontrollably,” Casey explained. “Victims start with headaches, then start growing slimy scales over their body, and then finally turn into zombies.”

“But you seem… different,” I added. “No scales, half skeleton…?”

The boss was already writing on another piece of paper as I finished. When he showed us the paper again, Frank went to translate it again, but this time couldn’t find the one word on the paper.

“Uh… It’s not anywhere on the wiki…”

I pursed my lips. It was great that we didn’t need to fight him… Not yet at least. But I really wished communicating was easier.

Although now that I thought about it, it was strange that everyone in this world understood English, but used a completely different writing system more similar to something like Chinese.

The boss growled, put down the paper and scribbled something around the text before showing us again.

It was… not text, but a series of pictures. On the left, a rough sketch of a person stood. Then there were two arrows pointing from it to two different figures, one of them a fish-like person, the other half-skeleton. There was also a small picture of a fish with an arrow pointed to a picture of a bone. The word he had written before circled below it.

We stared at the diagram, trying to puzzle it out.

“You mean, there’s two different viruses…?” Frank guessed.

“No, look… Fish into bone. The virus mutated,” Casey exclaimed. “That’s the word, right? Mutation?”

The boss tilted his head with a frown, but after a moment gave a slow nod. He grabbed yet another paper, scribbled something on it and showed us again.

“Know… You… Cure… ‘Do you know the cure?’” Frank translated. “Uh, kinda…? Not really…?”

“We… have something that turned the undead in this dungeon into just clean bones and bodies,” Casey admitted. “It got rid of the virus but…”

The boss interrupted her by shouting something as his eye widened. He went and scribbled something on another piece of paper and showed us.

“That… ‘That’s it’?” Frank translated. “What? But it killed them! That’s not the cure!”

The boss was shaking his head as he wrote on a new paper.

“Already… Gone. Oh…”

“The undead in this dungeon were already dead, you mean…?” Casey asked, to which the boss nodded. “Right… Meaning everyone in this room is still somewhat lucid…?”

Another nod even as he scribbled more text.

“Test… Uh… Oh, ‘Test it on him’?” Frank translated as the boss beckoned for one of the skeleton-zombies to come over. He did as instructed and stood before us expectantly.

The three of us shot each other a glance.

“Uh, are you sure…? We don’t know if you’ll survive it… The others all just crumpled into a heap of bones,” Frank warned.

The minion gave a determined nod, the remaining flesh on his jaw tightening as his empty eye sockets stared at us.

I pursed my lips and locked eyes with Casey for a moment. She tightened her grip on her staff and gave a determined nod.

“Alright, stand next to a wall and I’ll… do it,” Casey instructed.

The skeleton-zombie did as instructed and stood with his back against the wall of the boss arena, looking at Casey expectantly.

Casey took a deep breath, winced at the still-present smell, and then prepared her staff.

“Here I go, then.”

Just like it had done with every other undead we had encountered in this dungeon, the divine crystal on top of the staff lit up and shot a wave of white magic toward the skeleton, startling every undead in the room.

The boss shouted something as the blast hit and grabbed for his axe–

“Hold on! This is the curing process! We’re not attacking you!” Frank shouted back.

The half-skeleton half-zombie narrowed his eye and relaxed his stance, but didn’t put the axe away as he stared at his minion who Casey had hit.

The undead in question also crumpled into a heap just like the others we had encountered… but unlike them, he was still moving, breathing, and no longer half a skeleton. The divine crystal had somehow regrown his missing flesh, leaving a naked man in his thirties heaving in the corner of the room.

The boss let out another shout of gibberish and ran to the dezombified guy in a hurry, helping him up and fussing over him.

“Holy shit, it worked,” Frank murmured.

It had.

This confirmed that as long as there was still some of the person left in the undead, the crystal could revert it. But on the flip side, that could also mean that if we let the virus settle in for too long, it would become irreversible, and using the staff with the crystal on them would end up exactly as it had with all the other undead we had encountered in this dungeon.

Maybe we should just bite the bullet and go cure the rest of the people still infected back on Earth with the staff in person…? Did we really even need to fight the boss…?

“M-Mike! I’m…! I have eyes again!” the former undead cried out in delight.

It felt strange for a phrase like that to give us hope.