The third skeleton's sword landed anyway. It bit deep into the ogre's knee, not a clean severance but close enough that the leg buckled immediately.
The ogre grunted in agony. It didn't cry out. Instead it called back toward the chamber in a tongue that meant nothing to Leon but carried clear intent regardless.
By then, the second one was already moving, charging towards them.
Taking advantage of distance, Leon gave the order before it arrived. The two skeletons on the injured ogre struck simultaneously, one through the gut and one through the chest, and the first ogre went down. He repositioned his formation immediately, pulling his skeletons back into a tighter arrangement while he himself moved just behind the corpse of the first, using the body as a visual anchor point where he could watch the approach without being the first thing the second ogre would reach.
The second ogre came in fast and enraged. Leon sent the first skeleton with an overhead strike the moment it was in range, drawing its guard upward, and then had the remaining two went low, not with swords this time. Both skeletons hit simultaneously, tackling the ogre's lower body and pulling violently by the ankles, bringing it down face first onto the cave floor.
It fought back from the ground. Harder than he had expected, actually, but three peak Grade 1 skeleton warriors fighting a grounded opponent was not a fight with much variance in outcome. Within seconds it was over. Ogres themselves could range from Grade 1 to 4 monsters, so a fight against three peak Grade 1s was a great disadvantage if it was a Grade 1 itself.
Leon stood and looked at the two bodies in the torchlight.
Then he let out a breath he hadn't entirely realised he'd been holding.
'With these results, I can be comforted by the fact that this is a green dungeon.' The tension that had been sitting in his chest since he found himself in this cave released significantly. A smile bloomed across his face as the tension in his heart fell greatly. He checked his spirit energy reserves, expecting to feel some depletion, and found them more or less where they had been before the fight started. He knew the advice to be cautious, because beginers found it hard to really determine the level of their spirit energy if it was not significant.
Anyway, he filed that away without examining it too closely. Some things were better considered later.
He arranged his formation again, two skeletons ahead and one behind, himself in the middle, and advanced.
A minute of walking brought them to another chamber.
This one had two ogres as well, but they weren't standing guard. They were facing each other, close together, the body language of the exchange unmistakably communicative. Leon watched from the edge of the chamber entrance for a few minutes, waiting for one of them to move away, to create some kind of separation he could use… They didn't. Whatever conversation they were having, they were committed to finishing it, it appeared.
He scrapped the waiting strategy, there was no way to sneak up on them.
Deciding on a bold entry, he sent the skeletons in without ceremony, a direct charge across the chamber floor, and this time kept his own involvement limited. He watched, read the flow of the fight, and only pushed commands through when repositioning was needed or an opening was being missed. The two ogres were dealt with in under a minute.
Surprisingly, there were five other ogres within that chamber, and seeing intruders, they all charged at the skeletons.
From a safe distance, Leon observed all that was happening, and easily guided his summons so that they did not suffer damages, and the battle was over quickly.
When it was over, seven ogre bodies were arranged across the chamber floor in various states of stillness.
"That was intense." Leon said quietly to himself, surveying the scene. His eyes moved to his three skeletons standing in the middle of it all, greatswords at their sides, fixed expressions of skeletal stoicism and teeth looking back at him. "You guys really are something, huh?"
They didn't respond, of course, but the blue light in their eye sockets burned steady, and that was enough.
He looked at the ogre weapons scattered across the ground and entertained the thought briefly. They could probably be sold. He genuinely needed money in a way that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. But carrying large weapons out of a dungeon while also navigating whatever came next was not a realistic option.
That was when he remembered something.
It had slipped his mind in the chaos of suddenly being inside a dungeon, which was forgivable, but it came back clearly now. Every monster and beast carried something within them known as a core. The core was the crystallised source of their spirit energy, small and dense, and it had genuine value beyond the obvious. It was useful for growing summons, and even useful for the summoner themselves after proper processing. This was the kind of resource that accumulated into something significant if consistently collected.
He tried ordering the skeletons to retrieve them. They moved to the bodies readily enough, but the precision required to locate and extract a core without shattering it was beyond what they could manage. Leon quickly accepted that this was going to be manual work and got on with it.
They quickly returned to the first two they killed. Using one of the ogre's own swords, he opened the chest cavity of the first body and located the core. Unsurprisingly, it looked green in colour, with an uneven but mostly rounded shape. He was quite unlucky as he found out that one core was broken, probably from his summon's attack, but the other was ok. Regardless, he took both.
By the end he had a collection of cores in varying states, some intact, some damaged, and one that had shattered so thoroughly it wasn't worth keeping. He pocketed what was salvageable and straightened up.
He checked his spirit energy. Still stable and holding. "Alright," he said to nobody in particular. "Let's go."
He led his summons forward, past the chamber and into the corridor beyond. The walk was shorter this time. Around a minute of forward movement before the passage opened and presented him with something that required no explanation.
The door ahead was large. Noticeably larger than the passage that had led to it, framed by the cave walls in a way that felt deliberate, almost ceremonial. There was a quality to the air in front of it, a pressure, contained and waiting.
Leon looked at it for a moment, then he smiled, slow and dry, and shook his head once at the situation he had somehow found himself in.
"Finally," he said. "The boss room."