I winced as the makeshift medical trailer shook from yet another explosion; rattling the sparse medical supplies and sending a dull throb through my fever-ridden skull. Another explosion. I already had a fever, probably from something bad from last night. It was my everything that wanted to kill me, head, limbs, stomach, the dull ache from my right foot that I was almost used to. At least I wasn't vomiting every hour anymore. Anymore.

  The climate wars hadn’t been kind to refugees like me, especially ones crippled during the exodus. For people like me, the only way to not be ground into the dust was to be the ones doing the grinding. To even make this far had required everything from bloody sacrifices to stealing from other refugee caravans. Desperation made monsters of all of them, and monsters made horror stories. And I had been in a horror story for far too long.

  And that's why I didn't blame whoever was attacking, I had myself killed for survival before. That didn't mean I had to like the violence when it was directed at me. Empathy didn't make it any easier to stomach the explosions, the screams, the gnawing certainty that I wouldn’t make it to the next sunrise. Empathy didn’t make me not wish that those who were attacking us all end up dying from their injuries too if I don't make it.

  There was probably a debate to be had about whether I was being a hypocrite but I simply didn't care about not being one. I always had more pressing concerns that demanded my attention, like the explosions right now. I had perhaps naively hoped that we could have made it to some nation that wasn't already sinking or shot refugees arriving at their borders on sight before raiders got to us but it seemed that fate wasn't on my side.

  A smaller part of me whispered that it had never been with what I hoped was bitterness but it sounded more like petulance even to me. The plan had been simple, simplicity borne of a lack of options. Reach one of the mid tier countries that were only swelteringly hot and not underwater and hope to find a refugee ghetto or something to live in. It wasn't particularly ambitious, no one expected to be let in the Northern Lands that still had pleasant weather. Maybe if I were to be sold as a slave to a billionaire or something? But no one had any use for a crippled slave. That had been entirely my fault. Really, I should have expected booby traps when trying to steal food. I was lucky that I was still alive and relatively mobile. In any case, the slave idea was not going to work out, regardless of how I deluded myself into believing it. And I was under no delusions that I was pretty enough to make it in a rich asshole’s harem. I think I could do the smile validly at the camera thing though.

  Another blast, closer this time. I let out an involuntary hiss as the trailer bounced from the sheer force of it, injuries that had settled into dull throbs flaring up with a vengeance. The screams and gunfire rang in my ears like a song, like an old familiar song, one that would come on the radio when I was smaller, but something else was there too, a crackling sound that made my very bones shiver. Bones made me think of the news coming in.

  The dingy shortwave radio in the camp had been crackling with reports of something about bones for the last hour. The signal was unusually garbage and it came out all mangled with only snippets of it being decipherable. Someone in the Northern Lands evidently had enough of the refugees and launched another aerosolized bioweapon that gave everyone unlucky enough to be in its way Münchmeyer’s disease. The last outbreak was so bad that it had wiped out a quarter of a continent. Just people dying with rictuses of suffering as their very muscles hardened on them. Just my fucking luck.

  I was just so goddamn tired.

  The 2635th invasion of the Great Integration War was going well so far. This realm was already in the middle of a global crisis and resistance was feeble as a consequence of that. Except for the superweapons that could reduce entire nations to radioactive craters. The first time one of those was launched, The Unaugured God’s army had lost half a billion freshly created soldiers, along with a few thousand soldiers that were slightly stronger. Nothing that this realm itself couldn't replenish with a few cycles worth of training. Still, it was impressive for a world that only relied on non magical alchemy and crafting without the Dead One’s system. Too bad extermination was all that the rather ingenious natives of this planet had in their future. Still, admiration earned was admiration deserved and if he didn't mess up, he would help immortalize them through their creations. Karzak would love to unravel the technological mysteries of this world once it was secured. That was his purpose after all.

  Karzak was not a combat specialist, but rather a nascent [BONECRAFTER]. He technically shouldn't even be on the field but instead toiling in the workshops back home, making as many Bonewarrior armors as he could but His Divinity had ordered a few Bonecrafters down to understand this realm's strengths before the subjugation was complete and Ossific Archons would descend to simply rip the memories out of converted soldiers for the good of the kingdom. Such excursions were good for the class unlocks for newbie crafters like him, especially in such a technology reliant world and he was once again taken aback by the care His Divinity displayed for even the lowliest members of His kingdom. Not that he would disobey if the order didn't make sense to his feeble mind, he corrected himself.

  A screech ringing from above made him pause, a Lesser Dracolich was fending off a few of the machines that the locals called fighter jets. Sprays of green ghostly flames met hails of metal projectiles and slowly but surely the Dracolich was being pushed back. Until another joined the fray and the fighter jets one by one all crashed into the ground under their combined assault.

  Karzak’s thoughts raced. The jets were flimsy and didn't really have any decent offensive capabilities but they were fast. He was not even close to being strong enough to craft a Dracolich by himself but if he was sure that he could reverse engineer the metal birds to make the Dracoliches faster. A series of holes and pipes attached to their wings and propelled by the drake's own flames, oh yes he had ideas already. His Greater Inspiration skill levelled at least three times just from that.

  He filed it away for later, a project to maybe advance his specialization and focused on his immediate surroundings. They were eradicating a small camp of the natives and while they put up a nominal semblance of resistance, it was not even enough to fell a small squad of [BASE SKELETONS] without any non-starter serious specializations. And Karzak, of course. Karzak was newly raised and his other task was to eliminate whatever was about to die but hadn't yet for experience. He lazily shot bone shards at the natives he saw were still breathing until he eventually found himself in what looked like a triage camp. He had been informed that nothing in there was capable of resisting even a baseline human, easy pickings for him.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  That's when everything went wrong.

  I was quite certain I was delirious. A skeleton monster had entered the trailer. It looked like a knight clad in ivory armor but with bare bones lacking any flesh wherever the gaps in the bone plates revealed its body. The thing’s face (skull?) looked like a human’s but with an elongated snout and two massive horns that curved backwards from the skull. Okay maybe it didn't look like a human at all. I almost giggled, the drugs in my system weren't helping. Yeah, let's blame the drugs! It wasn't that I was half convinced that I had finally, truly gone insane.

  I forced myself back to reality when it moved. I was still almost convinced that I was seeing things but I tried to crawl away from the approaching thing nonetheless, my long injured legs trailing behind me like the dead weight they were. I had, to some extent, resigned myself to my fate of dying at the hands of raiders. A skeletal knight was just weird enough to knock me out of my funk.

  That was a mistake, it had noticed me moving. It pointed an arm at me and I knew that I was going to die. The thing promised death that I understood was beyond my capabilities to escape, I understood it deep in my heart. My luck had run out. I closed my eyes, wondering if I would maybe wake up from a fever dream. It hurt too much to be a normal dream but I knew from experience that pain existed in dreams if there was an unrelated source of pain in my body. Like the sense of being stabbed in the stomach because of an actual stomach ache. That had happened to me before. Stop, focus. Focus.

  The shot never came. Instead the world shook with a degree of violence that made all previous explosions seem like mere speed bumps on a road. The monster stumbled and crashed into the ground and its shot went wide as it rolled into a wall of the tent. A dull sound and a spray of red on the walls let me know that it had found itself in a different target but I didn't care. Not now. Of course, I didn't have the time to see who the unlucky refugee was as I, too, slammed onto it a moment later; along with the other refugees and bundles of blankets and sheets.

  Obviously the trailer had flipped on its side. A part of me realized once I was no longer disoriented. I untangled myself from the pile with a pained grunt and raked my eyes across the remains of the medical camp. Upturned tables and stretchers and such were ignored as I searched for my would-be killer.

  The monster was on the ground and quite close to me. Now, for all the stupidity and distractions that my mind was prone to, I had been taught by a wagonload of pain and tears to never let an opportunity slip during violence. In the camps, being a scrawny teenager marked one as a victim, doubly so when one has lost a lot of the use of her legs and relied on crutches. I was not and never had been strong enough to deter people through my actual physicality, no, it was the same reason no one really likes to hang out with me. I was the type of girl to bring a knife to a verbal argument. And the knife was never for show. I had killed people twice and only one of them was in the camp but no one had any doubts that I could do it again if pushed, not after what I'd left of him. I may be a socially awkward and shy dork at times but the caravan had a rule. Rule number 28 of the caravan, don't fuck with the small crippled girl unless you plan to shoot her from afar. This skeleton monster was going to learn why that was a rule. I was not going to die without taking my pound in bone.

  I didn't hesitate, not here. I attacked with all the violence and rage that I had been stewing in for so long, in my daydreams, in every moment when I had to eat food that had gone bad, every moment for the last few weeks. I was angry, and had been angry without an outlet for too long. And now finally I had an acceptable one. I screeched, imagining that I was mauling one of the assholes from the North that watched from safety while we struggled to stay alive. I imagined the face of the Loan Forgiveness Service guy who came to collect my parents, first my mom and then my dad. I twisted and hoisted myself over the thing while wrapping my arm around its neck. Another was meanwhile groping around for something I could use as a weapon.

  Me suddenly pulling myself up on its —his?— back had destabilized it and it fell face first back into the pile from which it was rising. Not wanting to waste the opportunity, I slammed the skull on the hard ground again and again, not to kill but to disorient, assuming skeleton monsters could even be disoriented, using my butt to pin down the arm that had shot something. The thing below me was much larger and stronger than I was but it was all bones beneath a partially open shell and I stuffed everything I could reach into its joints and between its bones. A metal flask of water, dirty blankets, my gown. Even a large shank that I kept in my pocket ever since one of the other refugees had the idea that I could be taken advantage of due to my recent disability. May Damian rest in dog poop.

  Cloth was shoved violently between the tibia and the fibula in its right leg and that limb was taken out of commision. The bones refused to flex anymore due to their obstruction. A bloody blanket for the left. More for the arms. I know that machines could be jammed with enough soft material in the moving parts and as far as I could tell, the thing below me was all moving parts.

  What I hoped was a corpse’s still attached arm and fingers went somewhere in there, I didn't really check. The thing was recovering but I had been quick in clogging every joint and point of articulation I could find.

  The creature was strong. The metal flask bent, and the knife lodged itself halfway through a bone but it was not enough. I smashed the head again and again and again as cracks began to form. The monster struggled more violently and I was dimly aware that I had been stabbed in my torso by a bone without me noticing. I was bucked off my ride as it finally rose but I hung off it for some reason instead of falling off. The reason for which soon became painfully apparent.

  The bone spike stabbing! I could feel the bone spike that had stabbed me was moving and growing within my body, it would have made me throw up if I was slightly more aware of anything other than that I was dying. I would die here, killed by this thing. A long skeletal arm was groping behind itself towards me, clawed fingers promising a hopefully quick death. But then someone else grabbed the creature, another patient and its attention was divided.

  With a renewed vigor and strength that I didn't know I possessed, I grabbed the skull and pulled, using my own body’s weight as leverage as I slowly and painfull started to slide off the spike that had impaled me.

  I expected its struggles to lower in intensity as it started dying but it kept getting worse until, with a sharp crack the tent fell silent right as the bone in my body bloomed, ripping out several new orifices. One spike jutted out of my chest, the point bifurcating into two branches that each divided themselves into two.

  "Fucking Münchmeyer disease."

  I felt the mad energy that had flooded my body leave me all at once and I collapsed on myself, only propped upright by the bone flower that had grown inside me.

  My head drooped forward as all vitality left my frame, my eyes staring at the only thing they faced at that angle, the pool of blood with shards and chips of bone in it that was all around me. My last thoughts were that the shards looked like stars in a red sky.