The attack on the students during their "return visit" was sudden.
Someone had set up a psionic barrier here to disguise the area. From the outside, it looked flawless, like an ordinary jungle scene, but it couldn't fool the veteran players who had fought here before.
Car was the first to notice that the terrain was off. The others spread out to look for clues and, naturally, blundered into the disguised barrier.
They were immediately attacked by a fairly elite skeleton army.
Unlike the weak skeletons that wandered the Smuggler's Woods, with nothing but decaying bones and bone spears and wooden shields, these skeleton soldiers were all clad in armor and stood in neat formation. Their weapons were decayed too, but the wicked glow embellishing them carried a vile deathly corruption. One stab was enough to infect someone with a deadly plague.
These things were undead, but they were nothing like ghouls.
When a ghoul's body was attacked, it was forced to defend itself and retreat. Skeleton soldiers, however, didn't have that troublesome thing called flesh. Even if their bodies were smashed to pieces, their scattered limbs could keep attacking. Even if all they had left was a head, they could still bite any living creature in front of them.
Their only weakness was that without flesh and sinews to pull them along, the skeletons weren't very fast, and their individual combat prowess wasn't as ferocious as a ghoul's.
But this elite skeleton army made up for that weakness with its orderly formations.
Skeleton shield-bearers in the front rank protected the archers behind them, while skeleton cavalry darted back and forth along the flanks. A few skeleton mages directed the battle from the center, periodically hurling large-scale slowing spells, Stinking Clouds, and War Fog to disrupt the players' vision and