In the split second after she realized there were indeed monsters down here, Sophia also realized she needed to treat it as a real fight. She didn't have a good count of how many there were, but she knew she'd seen a lot of pale shapes. She shouted "Skeletons! Lots of animal skeletons!" as she Spread her Plumes for a real fight for the first time.

She also stepped out of the doorway to give others the space to get through. Most of her allies were on the stairs and she'd much rather have them between her and the skeletons than behind her.

Dav was almost directly behind her. He stepped forward, then he stepped forward again, and Sophia blinked at the sight of two Davs. That wasn't the Call she expected him to use; she'd expected him to stick with Flowering Firewater, since he could use it to restrain the ones he didn't kill. At the same time, she couldn't fault him for it; Spirit Shatter wasn't a Call, so he could use it with both his real body and his Reflection. Killing the skeletons outright was better than holding them in place.

Lan'ti was the third one through the door, followed by the rest of his combat team. Amy's owl shape was the last out, leaving the noncombatant explorers still on the stairs with Xin'ri as a protector.

.While her allies moved forward towards the walking skeletons that were likely more ruins apparitions, Sophia pushed a little more mana into her magelight. It wasn't the absolute peak of performance for floating magical light technology, but it was close enough and it managed the one thing Sophia wanted the most well: it was sturdy. Right now, that took a back seat to the fact that she could have it give off a lot more light than it normally did as long as she fed it the mana. That might be important here, since the space they were in was both huge and otherwise unlit.

Dav could fight in the dark with no issues. Sophia doubted anyone else could. Well, she had tricks, and Amy did now as well, but more light would still be better. She sent the magelight up to hover near the ceiling and directed its light downwards, creating harsh shadows in an otherwise well-lit part of the space.

While she worried about visibility, Dav was already well ahead of her. Both of him charged forward so identically that she couldn't tell which was him and which was the reflection.

Honestly, she got it wrong about half the time even when she watched him split and kept her eyes on him. She'd have just as good a chance to figure it out if she flipped a coin. She was beginning to think that the "real" one and the "reflection" were whichever one Dav chose them to be, though she knew that couldn't be the whole story. She'd get it right a lot less than half the time if that was the case.

In fact, Dav probably wouldn't even ask her to guess.

Well, whichever one was true, one of the two Davs headed directly for the ram that slowly walked towards Sophia. The other Dav turned slightly and made his way towards a smaller animal Sophia couldn't identify. It didn't have the ram's horns that made the first one easy to guess, but it did look sort of similar, if smaller, so Sophia guessed it was probably a sheep, too. In fact, all of the skeletons that surrounded the exit from the stairs looked sort of similar, other than the presence of horns on a couple others. This was a flock of sheep.

Did undead sheep still flock?

Sophia shook off the odd thought. She was about to use a pair of her feathers to cast True Death Bolts at the nearest sheep skeleton that wasn't occupied when she noticed something odd a little farther away. She went ahead and threw the Death Bolts, but her attention was on a different skeleton, one that was a completely different color. It looked almost black in places, with splotches of red and green. A few individual bones were paler, but even then they looked more yellowed than the rest of the ruins apparitions did.

Sophia had a bad feeling about that skeleton. She wasn't even certain it was another sheep; it seemed larger and more substantial somehow. They needed to thin the nearby sheep before they could deal with that one anyway, but she'd keep an eye on it.

Sophia's attention had barely flickered off the sheep she attacked, but that was still enough time for it to surprise her. It hadn't reached her, but unlike the humanoid apparitions on the first floor, it was still moving after two True Death Bolts. They'd broken its shield but hadn't continued into the apparition itself. A third shredded it into bits of magic, but there was no way she could afford to handle half of the sheep if they were all going to take three True Death Bolts.

Dav's setup looked better and better; sure, he'd burn through a good bit of mana keeping his reflection active and using Spirit Shatter, but he could probably keep going longer than she could; she was set up to hit fast and hard while he was built for endurance. Sophia took a moment to look over her Status; she had a lot of Abilities and it wouldn't do to forget one.

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Wait. By now, she probably did have Collected Knowledge of ruins apparitions, even if it was based on the ones on the upper level. That meant she ought to be able to use Piercing Plume on them; if she could break the shield in a single hit with that, it would help a lot. That Ability was supposed to work with Focused Feather at an additional mana cost; if that meant she could handle a sheep, even a small one, in a single hit, it would be worth it.

She had enough mana to play with; why not test it out?

Sophia concentrated on the smaller sheep, the ones without horns. They were probably weaker, but the important thing was that there were a lot of them and they were all pretty similar. That meant her tests would tell her something.

Piercing Plume on its own handled the shield, but she needed another True Death bolt to actually destroy the sheep using a Focused Feather with Piercing Plume cost quite a bit more mana than a normal Piercing Plume, about the same as a Piercing Plume plus another True Death Bolt. That meant it was the same cost, but with one major difference: it was much, much faster. Using one spell instead of two was a major time savings, especially since she could cast it at multiple sheep at once with her Plumes.

If only there were fewer sheep in this herd.

While Sophia tested, nothing came too close to her; she actually had to move forward several times to have enough skeletal sheep inside her aura. This was mostly because of Dav, who was quickly slicing through them. Like her, he was having more trouble with the sheep than he'd had with the humanoids on the upper level, but between him and his reflection, they still went down quickly.

Ci'an also had good success. While she wasn't able to easily kill them like Sophia and Dav, all she had to do was glare at them for a few moments and the sheep collapsed. Sophia wasn't entirely certain which Ability she was using, but her guess was that it was probably Soothing Gaze, a Night Owl Ability that was fairly similar to Sophia's Spirit Soothe, though Ci'an had to gaze at the creature she intended to stun instead of brushing it with a feather.

Taika, on the other hand, seemed frustrated. The undead sheep completely ignored his illusions, no matter what he did. The only thing he could do that was helpful was set out small floating barriers. He'd never had the chance to really practice that before in a real fight, so he wasn't really very adept with placing them, but even as Sophia watched he became noticeably better.

Lan'ti's people were also competent, even if they didn't have the sheer killing power of Sophia and Dav. They broke legs and moved on, leaving the undead sheep unable to make any real progress until their legs reformed. Sophia saw that happen; a sheep that had been on the ground started to pick itself back up on first one leg, then another and another.

Before she could call it out, a nearby combatant turned away from the sheep she was trying to smash into bone bits and cracked the reforming legs again. It was brutal but necessary, which made Sophia glad there was no sign of an actual mind behind any of the sheep; they acted like animated automatons more than real animals.

Seeing that, Sophia continued her assault on the ones that were still up and moving around. They were a disorganized mess with no intelligence, but there were a lot of them. Sophia needed to save her mana for the ones no one else could disable.

She didn't have time to think as a group of sheep charged towards her from the side; she hadn't seen them until they started their run and it seemed like no one else had, either. Five Focused Feather Piercing Plume True Death Bolts took them out, one after another, but they also chewed through a lot of Sophia's available mana. She could do that again if she had to, but she wasn't confident she'd be able to handle two more waves like that.

Sophia frowned and scanned the battlefield near where the wave originated. For mindless less-than-animals, the fake undead sheep were entirely too tactically capable. No one other than Sophia was available to handle the charge aimed at her; they'd drawn both Davs away with a constant string of the tougher but far less common rams, which almost seemed to be seeking him out, and at the same time they'd inundated everyone else with slow-moving sheep before the group of five started its charge from the far side of the mass of sheep.

Her eyes fell on the multicolored skeletal mess she'd noticed before. It was near where she thought the charge started, which made her wonder. It was clearly different from the others; was it smarter? More than that, was it somehow controlling the others?

As much as Sophia disliked the idea, it seemed plausible. It would also explain why the sheep ruins apparitions would behave so strangely; most of them didn't really do anything until they noticed someone nearby, but some started moving from the outside in long before anyone was nearby.

They really hadn't planned well for this. They'd expected more small rooms with limited numbers of apparitions, which would mean that Sophia and Dav could fairly easily wipe them out as long as they went slow, like the first floor. Sophia wished she'd asked more about what happened when they arrived on the first floor; was there a controller like this there, too? That would make entirely too much sense, but she hadn't even thought to ask.

Sophia sent a telepathic warning to Dav, C'an, and Taika about the weird thing; she didn't think she'd be heard over the fighting if she tried to shout, so she left it at that as she started to move towards it. If it was controlling everything else, it needed to die.

She had to pause as two sheep turned and headed straight for her. Killing them was quick, but it took long enough that she had to find the multicolored mass of bones again. It was farther away, with an entire group of sheep between her and it. They didn't seem to be controlled; they just stood there silently. It had simply maneuvered to put them between her and itself.

That confirmed it. The sheep skeletons needed to be eliminated, but the real enemy was the multicolored mess of bones behind them.

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