Blue hastily cut Jay out of the dying roots. It was a simple task when they didn''t grow back between each chop.


    Jay stood up on the giant''s head, ncing at the army of knights below.


    "Now what…" he wondered.


    The knights were still hacking away at the giant''s corpse, spilling its green blood everywhere.


    One knight noticed Jay, then a few of them, then many more. They climbed the giant''s body towards him and his skeleton. It didn''t take long, and most of the knights stopped attacking, realizing the giant was dead, while the source of their vengeance stood atop its corpse.


    Jay wasted no time looking around for exits, but nothing had changed.


    Knights still blocked the passageway to the stairs, and the portal would not let him through. The only difference was that there wasn''t a storm of knights running overhead.


    Looking up to the observation deck above, Jay doubted he could make it that high, even with the mountain of bones in his gauntlet. The giant''s holding room was simply too big.


    Below him, there were great fissures cracked open by the giant, which would swallow many bones; there were only dead knights filling them, and it wasn''t a viable escape route either.


    "Nowhere to go… It looks like we''ll just have to stay then." Jay thought.


    ncing back down into the giant''s eye, there was arge opening on the inside.


    Because of the bones he had pumped into it, a cavity opened up inside its head. It was like a cave with one way in through the eye.


    "Defensible and disgusting." Jay pursed his lips, shaking his head.


    Without a second thought, he jumped into the eye-hole he just escaped from.


    The damage the bones had caused was devastating. Many cuts and impacted, squished wounds with burst blubbery nt-flesh was everywhere.


    Hended in a pool of its green blood, which went up to his knees.


    It was warm and humid inside the head, and its only redeeming quality was that it still had the fresh smell of a forest on an early morning.


    "Alright, I better fix this ce up a bit before the knights get here." Jay thought.


    Releasing some bones from his gauntlet, he dropped enough to make a tform to stand on, above the pool of green blood.


    Jay quickly summoned Sweeper and let it craft its own sword before. After it made another two-hander sword, Jay sent it onto the giant''s face to give Blue some backup.


    "Now… where is Red?" Jay wondered, thinking if he should re-summon it or not.


    He could still sense it somewhere nearby. It was still alive, but the ck fluid was interfering with his necrotic senses.


    *Cling~*


    The skeletons fought above as a knight engaged them, and Jay hastily got to work on his first set of defensive fortifications.


    Jay had just leveled up, and with mana regeneration and arger mana pool, he wasn''t cautious about using his mana.


    First, he spread a t ne of mana over the tform he was standing on, fuzing the bones together and giving himself a more sturdy foundation.


    Next, he made the necrotic gauntlet release skulls and femur bones and caused them to swirl around in a cylinder shape, forming a pir of skulls.<novelnext></novelnext>


    As the pir formed, he coated it with mana, binding it together. He arranged each of the skulls facing outwards in rings, but Jay didn''t have time to admire his work.


    [230 Exp] Another knight died above, and the skeletons began fighting more and more enemies.


    He fixed the pir on the tform, melding it into it with more necrotic mana. After crafting a second pir, they each reached up to opposite sides of the eyehole.


    Checking that the skull pirs were sturdy enough, he formed a skeletal beam from many straight bones, attaching it between the pirs.


    The giant''s eye-socket now had a skeletal beam going across it with two gaps on either side. The gaps were wide enough for the skeletons to pass through, but too narrow for the armored knights to cross.


    [115 Exp]


    Jay added more bones to help reinforce the skeletal beam before working on the next part of his defenses.


    The next part was simple. It was another bone tform, only higher up. The first tform was to get his feet out of the green blood, but this one was to help him and his skeletons to reach the opening in order to fight back any knights trying to get in.


    It was a simple process to make a raised tform of bones, and Jay topped it off with the t rectangr bone he had previously melted into a sleeping spot.


    "Looks good." Jay thought and then began crafting spears.


    Before calling the skeletons inside, he crafted six spears. On the bone tform, he added special grooves for them to slot into.


    (Blue, Sweeper. Come inside and set up these spears.) Jay ordered, then crafted more of the spears.


    "The more, the better." he thought.


    Each spear could stop 110 pounds (50kg) of force. While three for each side of the beam were enough for one knight, Jay knew he had to craft many more.


    The skeletons jumped in, nimbly slipping past the beam between the eyes. A knight followed, but its chest armor struck against the beam and caught itself there. Jay smiled, seeing that the beam and his skull pirs held their ce.


    "Hurry and kill it so we can get more of these spears into ce." Jay ordered, forming another long spear shaft within the green mana cloud before him.


    The skeletons stabbed the stuck knight with the spears, easily killing it.


    [115 Exp]


    Its body hung there, blocking one of the two gaps.


    "Damn, oh well." Jay shrugged.


    The skeletons propped more of the spears up, pointing them up into the eye socket.


    Jay propped one up and added some mana to the base, fixing it into ce on the bone tform; the skeletons copied him and released some necrotic mana, too. They pierced a few of the spears into the dead knight too, but it was more of a precaution to help hold its weight up, in the event that other knights came and piled on top of it.


    "Now… I''m mostly safe. I guess we kill them one by one until they''re all dead… or until I figure something else out." Jay thought, as his stomach growled in hunger.


    Without a frown, he crunched down some leftover nuts and some bond tussle root he had been carrying, keeping his hunger at bay.


    "Maybe the knights aren''t the biggest threat anymore. Perhaps my hunger will consume me… Why isn''t this damn thing over? Aren''t the innocent saved now? The knights will have no food without the nt, and no new soldiers either… the roots on the surface will wither and die too. I killed the cannibal vige…"


    "… yet I still haven''t found a single untainted."