After waiting for the break of dawn and seeing no movements from the portal. Ed was forced to give up.
'I can't stay here' If he stayed any longer he would be wasting valuable time. Still. That didn't mean he could just abandon his skeleton body right then and there.
Ed decided to create a simple pressure plate before leaving. The plate would be pressed down connecting the runes drawn on the ground and thus activating the array on the ceiling.
This was a quick fix and Ed didn't mean to cause much harm with it. It was at the level of pestering if anything.
It was easy to set up and with that done, Ed turned away from the ruins and began to walk away towards what he presumed was the right direction. Without a compass, it was impossible to get anything exact but Ed did his best by using the only star in the sky. The sun.
After walking in the tall grass and encountering nothing much along the way, Ed finally stopped.
'Dungeon, please return me to my body' Ed stopped and said. His skeleton body suffered no fatigue but his mind felt anything but relaxed.
Trekking through the tall grass without arms and proper balance was a challenge. Of course, Ed slowly started to get more and more used to it but the tall grass was still tall. It was already a pain to go through it uninjured.
Ed waited for a second but ultimately received no reply. Though puzzled, Ed decided not to ask again.
'I'll get some more steps in' Ed thought and acted on these thoughts. He trekked on for 10 more minutes. By this point, Ed's assimilation had long since become available but he had yet to put it into action.
He found it to be unwise to put to upgrade his battered skeleton body when his orc body was bound to face those overwhelming numbers next.
'Wait… that's not necessarily true' Ed suddenly realized that there was nothing that said he couldn't use this body in the orc plains. In fact, he could try splitting himself into the other body and having it help out!
Ed had considered separating a piece of himself and having one in the crypt and the other in the plains but that was unwise due to numerable reasons. One potential risk was whether or not the dungeon would grab his consciousness and send it back to himself.
'It would be weird for it not to, but its reaction might not be very good when it finds two of me' The dungeon was already wary against one of him so what about if it found out he could split into multiples? This was also disregarding the fact that where he got such an ability was entirely odd.
'Not all things can be attributed to the system' Even if they could be, some things were better off not being attributed to it. This was one of them.
Lest the dungeon believe that the system wanted to infest its entire being with Eds. He would truly become a calamity at that point. An Ed infestation was the worst that could happen to any avid homeowner!
It was best to avoid that from being keenly noticed. In a chaotic battlefield full of the souls and consciousnesses of the dead, the chances of the dungeon noticing the double Ed anomaly was much smaller.
'In that case…' Ed looked around the area. His gaze settled on a lone tree in the vast green expanse. His intent was obvious.
[Assimiliation on cooldown]
[Consitution +2]
[Vitality +2]
[You've been hit by your weakness. -150 hp]
[You've been hit by your weakness. -150 hp]
A slew of messages quickly rang out but what really mattered was the pain.
'Argh, what the hell...' Ed wanted to prop his head with his hand but he obviously didn't have a hand at the current moment.
'I didn't expect such a reaction' Ed was curious as to what assimilating anything containing vitality would result in as a skeleton and he had considered the possibility of suffering some damage but not once had he expected it to be so large.
His skeleton body was incapable of regenerating health on its own. The last time he opened his status his health was at 325. This meant that he was left with nothing but 25hp! ...or at least that would have been the case.
'The two constitution should come with an added 200hp' This would mean Ed only lost 100 hp which was substantial giving his current weakness but also just enough to be disregarded.
With this little episode out of the way, Ed focused on the dungeon's absence once more. He believed it to be related to the system's earlier emergency declaration. It seemed like a logical assumption but even with this knowledge, it was impossible to do much about it.
'I wonder what caused it…' The dungeon in Ed's mind didn't seem like the type to suffer from injuries or sickness. The thought of a sick dungeon was ridiculous on its own.
Ed started to think about different ways to get the dungeon's attention and quickly came up empty. The only way he could think to do so required him to be near a safe room.
'Sigh… I really need to get to my orc body' The first hour could be passed off as being a heavy sleeper but any more and most would start to think he died peacefully in his dreams.
Ed continued walking through the increasingly sparse grass coming across all sorts of trees and even bushes as he continued. Eventually, he came across an ancient relic.
'It's the angakok settlement' Ed thought with a hint of nostalgia while looking at the wooden walls of the settlement. This nostalgic feeling soon calmed as he started to see signs of break-ins.
'The adventurers must have done this when they first came' Ed thought as he watched from afar. It was really quite something to make so large a mess of an empty settlement.
'Humans are rather destructive aren't they?' Ed didn't think he would ransack an empty village when his target was to hunt orcs. Was it possible that he was no longer human?
Ed looked up and down at his body to answer his own question before continuing his walk. Intermittently, he would try and contact the dungeon but it was always of no use.
Then, while Ed was entering the darkness of the orc thickets, the earth started to rumble with familiar ferocity.
'W- Why?!?' This was the first thought that entered Ed's mind as his body became unstable and fell to the ground. He wasn't the only thing to fall either, many of the branches and leaves of the nearby trees started to fall.
The magnitude of the quake was unprecedently strong. It was certainly much stronger than in the crypt. That was Ed's thought as he took notice of some smaller trees being uprooted by the vibrations.
This shaking did eventually stop but at this point, Ed was on the ground covered with leaves and with sticks. Some of the things even managed to enter his hollow and injured skull.
Ed stood up with the aid of the pitiful mana his cracked core could hold. He then shook his head like a maraca.
No matter how hard or vigorously he shook however the leaves and sticks remained inside of him. Just as Ed was about to give up in frustration...
[Recalling Champion's Soul]
The message he had been waiting for. Ed's thoughts of anger and frustration began to fade away as his thoughts became increasingly distant. Ed lost clarity and by the time he had regained his ability to think properly, he was already inside of the dungeon's space.
The boundless void welcomed Ed with a red hue. He turned off the sixth sense skill and easily took notice of an oddity in the timer.
[One minute before respawn]
'Huh? One minute?' Ed was surprised since the timer for switching bodies was always ten.
'Is it maybe because both bodies are on the same floor?' That seemed like the most logical conclusion. The black dot that acted as the link between both floors worked as a tear in space.
Traversing space was not easy or immediate. If anything it only seemed to shorten the distance between areas by an unimaginable margin. This in turn shortened the time but didn't get rid of it altogether.
Therefore, it took anywhere from 8-10 minutes for the dungeon to get Ed's consciousness to the next floor and onto his body. The rest was just a matter of sending the consciousness into the right body once on the same floor. This likely took a minute or two depending on the distance.
These thoughts kept Ed preoccupied for the entirety of the minute and soon enough Ed's body shot right off the floor it laid on.
""Ed!"" This surprising action took both Sharog and Shel by surprise.
Both of them had been waiting for Ed's body to regain consciousness. Shel had experienced this once before but she was still nevertheless scared. Sharog had an inkling as to the reason why but had no plans to speak of it there.
"We are glad you are alright" Sharog said to which Shel nodded.
Ed didn't bother processing or asking why they were there.
"We need to prepare for war" He instead held a solemn expression as he started to plan out the different preparations he could make.
'There's a chance that they don't find the settlement but if they do…' If they did, Ed would have to make sure to crush them.