I Became the Simp Character I Roasted Online-Chapter 39: The Bone Road

Dain was the first to move. He drew his broadsword with his good hand and walked forward, and Revan followed without being asked.

At fifty meters the shapes were still ambiguous. At thirty the first details came through — a helmet, a rifle barrel, a belt buckle green with age. At twenty there was nothing left to guess about.

Bones. Hundreds of them.

Carpeting both sides of the rail as far as the gray light would reach.

Skulls and ribcages and armor fragments piled over each other, rusted weapons jutting out of the dirt at dead angles, scraps of fabric bleached colorless by years of dead air.

The rail cut through the middle of it all and kept going, southeast, into more of the same.

No smell, which was the strangest part.

Well, maybe not that strange if thought about logically; these bodies had been here for years, and in this vast expanse, the stench of rotting corpses had already dissipated.

A dry, humorless smile touched his lips.

’At least the route has beautiful scenery.’

"What the hell happened here," one of the guards muttered from behind the cart.

Nobody answered him.

Dain moved deeper into the field, stepping over remains with the careful stride of a man who’d walked through enough battlefields to know where to put his feet.

Revan followed, scanning the ground. The remains weren’t random — they clustered in groups of three and four, positioned around cargo crates and supply wagons that had rotted down to iron frames. Defensive formations. These people had seen whatever killed them coming and had time to form up.

It hadn’t helped.

’I have a really, really bad feeling about this,’ he noted grimly, a cold knot tightening in his stomach.

"Don’t spread out," Dain said over his shoulder. "Stay tight. We don’t know what—"

As if fate itself was answering, the ground beneath them slowly began to tremble.

A low vibration that traveled through the packed earth and up through Revan’s boots into his shins, the kind of deep tremor that you felt in your teeth before you felt it anywhere else. He stopped walking. Dain stopped too.

"You feel that?" Revan said.

Dain didn’t look back. "I’m pretty sure even the dead felt that one."

’Hilarious, old man,’ Revan thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. ’Is this really the time for jokes? I’m scared half to death right now. Fuck you. Fuck you.’

They stood still. The vibration died. The Dead Zone went back to its usual dead silence, and for three seconds nothing happened.

"....?"

Then the earth split open twenty meters ahead of them.

’What a truly delightful journey this is turning out to be,’ Revan muttered under his breath, his eye twitching.

The crack started at the rail bed and ripped outward, Dust pouring into the gap as the fissure widened to half a meter across. Bone fragments that had been sitting on the surface for years slid into the dark below and disappeared without a sound.

Something pushed up from underneath.

It came through the fissure headfirst—a blunt, wedge-shaped skull covered in plates of dark bone. It was too smooth to be natural, and too organic to be metal. The skull alone was the size of a horse’s chest.

Behind it came the shoulders, or what passed for shoulders—a mass of fused bone and dried sinew that cracked the earth wider as it forced itself through the gap.

The thing hauled itself onto the surface with four limbs that bent wrong, claws digging into the packed dirt. It stood there in the gray light, low to the ground, breathing in a wet rattle that carried across the bone field.

It was the size of a large dog. Maybe bigger.

Three dim crystals — red, cracked, barely glowing — were embedded along its spine.

’Yep, saw this plot coming from a mile away,’ Revan thought with a mental sigh.

The creature’s head swung toward them. Eyeless — just smooth bone plates where eyes should have been. It oriented on them by sound or heat or something else entirely, and its jaw split open sideways, revealing rows of flat grinding teeth stained dark.

The same width as the grooves on the bones.

"Nobody run," Dain said quietly. His broadsword was already up. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

A second fissure cracked open thirty meters to the left. A third behind them, near the cart.

More of them. Pushing through the earth like something hatching.

"Dain," Revan’s voice caught in his throat.

"I see them."

Three creatures now, pulling themselves free of the dirt, shaking off dust and bone fragments. They were smaller than the cargo monster chained to their cart, much smaller, but built on the same principle.

Bone armor. CT crystals. Wrong anatomy.

Failed versions, maybe, or earlier models. They were dumped out here when they didn’t perform to spec and left dormant under the suppression field until something woke them up.

The nearest one snapped its eyeless head toward the cart.

A second later, it bolted.

It moved fast and low, claws tearing divots out of the earth, that grinding jaw open wide. It went for the cart — for the CT containers, or for the creature chained on the flatbed, drawn to the residual energy the way a dog is drawn to meat.

"CART!" Revan shouted.

Lyra was already there. She’d been beside the cart when the ground cracked and she hadn’t moved away.

She’d drawn both short swords and dropped into a stance.

The creature lunged and Lyra sidestepped it, both blades coming down in a crossing slash that caught the thing across the side of its skull. Bone cracked. The creature skidded past her, hit the rail, and scrambled back to its feet with a screech that sounded like rusted iron being bent.

"What the—" the guard behind the cart stumbled backward, fumbling for his sword.

The second creature came from the left flank, heading straight for the cluster of guards near the stretcher.

Dain intercepted it. One arm, one broadsword, and he brought the blade down on the thing’s spine with a two-handed grip that he managed with one hand through sheer fury.

The impact drove the creature flat against the earth and its legs splayed out, but the bone armor held and it twisted under the sword and snapped at Dain’s leg with that grinding jaw.

Dain kicked it in the skull. The creature rolled, found its feet, and came again.

Revan couldn’t fight. His ribs told him that in the first second — the adrenaline hit and his body tried to respond and three compound fractures said no.

He felt something shift inside his chest that shouldn’t shift and the pain whited out his vision for half a breath.

revan had already pushed his luck walking for hours. He couldn’t keep doing this.

’Fuck,’ one more forced movement, one wrong twist, and a splintered rib is going to leave me paralyzed.’

So he did what he could.

"Lyra, second one coming around the cart — LEFT! Dain, don’t let it get under you, the jaw is the weapon!"

"Shut the fuck up!" Dain and Lyra roared at the exact same time.

Revan snapped his mouth shut. A hot flush of embarrassment cut straight through his panic. He blinked, looking around. Right.

hey were standing in a flat, wide-open wasteland.

Everyone could see exactly what was happening.

Not to mention, any idiot could tell the giant, grinding jaw was the weapon the second they laid eyes on it.

Swallowing dryly, Revan took a slow, painful step back and decided to grabbed the guard who’d been fumbling and shoved him toward Dain’s flank.

"Cover his blind side, he can’t turn fast enough with one arm."

The third creature had circled wide and was coming from behind, heading for Mirael on the stretcher. Cassian stepped into its path.

Revan hadn’t seen him move.

One second the Lord of House Voss was standing near the rear of the column with his hands clasped behind his back, and the next he was between the creature and the stretcher.

He held a sword that Revan didn’t even know he carried—a thin, elegant blade pulled from somewhere inside his coat. He held it loosely, one-handed, with the relaxed grip of someone trained since childhood.

The creature lunged. Cassian pivoted, smooth and unhurried, and the thin blade opened a cut along the thing’s flank that went through bone armor like it wasn’t there. The creature shrieked and veered away, trailing dark fluid that wasn’t quite blood.

’Not bad,’ Revan thought, watching the elegant blade. ’But I could do better.’

The creature Cassian had cut circled back, slower now but far from dead. The wound along its flank was leaking that dark fluid.

The bone plates had already started grinding together. It wasn’t healing, exactly. The thing’s body was trying to close the gap the way a broken machine compensates around a damaged part.

Meanwhile, Lyra’s creature had found its footing again and was ramming the side of the cart with its skull. It hit hard enough to rock the entire frame on the rail.

The CT containers shifted inside. The stretcher case slid sideways, making the guard holding it swear as he grabbed the railing for support.

On the flatbed behind the cart, the chained cargo monster twitched. It was just a spasm, probably from the impact, but every head in the group turned toward it for one horrified second.

"If that thing wakes up," one of the guards said, "we’re all—"

"It won’t," Revan said, with absolutely zero confidence that he was right. "Focus."

Lyra repositioned behind the cart, trying to find an angle on the creature’s spine. But the thing had learned. It kept its back to the rail, using the cart as a wall to protect its flank.

Smart. Too smart for something that was supposed to be a failed experiment.

On the other side, two of the guards had finally gotten their swords out, flanking Dain’s creature while he held the center. The creature was fast—darting low, snapping at legs, then retreating before the broadsword could come down.

Every time Dain swung, the thing was already gone. His one-armed overhead strikes were getting slower. He was running out of steam.

Technically, taking these things down should have been easy. One solid hit to the CT crystal and it was over. But for some reason, these idiots couldn’t land a single blow on the core. Either they were too incompetent to hit it, or they weren’t even trying at all.

’Does a walk in the desert really turn someone into this much of a goddamn idiot?’ he thought, seething with absolute disbelief.