Ch081-Fish In Water (Patreon)

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Ch081-Fish In Water

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As Sylver approached the temple gates he considered what he would do if the two guards wearing silver armor were to attack him.

The first obvious solution would be to run away.

Between Spring, the shades, the wolves, and Will, there would be more than enough pure mass of bodies to give Sylver the 2 or so seconds he would need to find a manhole cover and disappear into the sewers.

But then what?

The first question would be if he would retaliate publically or privately.

If it were public Sylver could just circle above the temple on Will and summon some of those infinite bombs Lola was going to give him. When he felt that he had enough, Sylver would simply step onto an invisible platform, and allow Will to dive-bomb right onto the barrier surrounding the temple.

Will would be disintegrated instantly, but assuming Sylver got the timing right, the force of the explosion would be enough to damage or downright destroy the barrier.

After that Sylver would continue to stay where he was and drop bombs down onto the temple. When the priests teleported up to fight him, he would take whatever damage he had to and would stab them with a lead-coated dagger. Then he would retreat with the body of whoever he captured, and use it to give himself and his shades enough of a resistance to holy magic to put up a fight.

After that, it would be a simple case of dive-bombing the recently repaired barrier, and then going in and causing enough chaos that they wouldn’t be able to organize and Sylver would kill them off one by one.

Alternatively, Sylver could track down the demon worshipers, and show them how to prepare for a proper possession. They could be used as either a distraction to empty the temple or as a direct attack force. It would take some convincing, but at worst Sylver could prepare them and simply force the possession, before dropping them down into the temple.

But that would be public and would bring with it other issues in the future.

They’re priests, so supposedly they don’t have families outside the temple…

Political interference? Use the cats' influence to trick them into lowering their defenses? Have the strongest priests sent away on a wild goose chase, some sort of mythical undead demon monster, it wouldn’t be that difficult to fake it…

Or make a real one just to be safe…

Sylver already knew where to find a demon, and undead monstrosities were just a matter of time and materials…

Controlling it would be out of the question, but Sylver could just give it a limited lifespan…

But what about when the priests return and find their temple in rubble and their people destroyed?

If the purpose was a show of force, digging a tunnel system underneath the temple and then sinking it into the dungeons below was an option. It would take time, but it wasn’t impossible. Sylver had used giant worm zombies in the past, it wouldn’t be that difficult to find some and bring some into Arda. Ron’s door might not work but-

“-help you?” a voice said.

Sylver looked sideways to see the source of the sound and an old-looking priest was standing a few steps away from him.

“Yes. I’ve taken the quest to retrieve the ring in the Anderey residence, and I need a priest to open the barrier surrounding it for me. I would normally offer a share of the reward, but I indented to live inside the house, so I would like to pay with gold instead,” Sylver explained.

Sylver burned through nearly 400MP just to stop the priest’s leaking mana from damaging him. In another 10 minutes, Sylver would be all out and would start to smoke.

The priest took the quest paper from Sylver’s hand and read through it. He furrowed his brows at one point and read over one section several times before handing it back to him.

“Wait here please,” the priest said.

Sylver didn’t even get a chance to nod before the man teleported away.

He spent a good 20 minutes hanging around the entrance, and eventually returned to thinking of ways to destroy the temple of Ra. In the highly unlikely case that it should it ever become necessary.

The result was almost painfully boring. Sylver would simply dig underneath the temple, would find the bottom of the spherical barrier, and would introduce a slow-acting zombie pathogen into the water and air. He would use his blood to act as the trigger, and after waiting about a month to make sure everyone was infected, he would walk inside of the barrier, activate the pathogen, and would turn all the priests and people inside into undead.

It wouldn’t kill them, obviously, but the holy energy trapped and concentrated inside the barrier would. Any attempts at healing would also damage them, they would be rotting from the inside out, and if they tried to heal it, they would be burning from the inside out.

This still wouldn’t kill them, but it would weaken them enough that Sylver could kill them himself. He would be on a tight time limit, but as long as the head priests were all dead, the others could be picked off after Sylver had had time to heal up and prepare a bit more. There would also be a fairly good chance that the weaker ones wouldn’t be able to counteract the zombie virus, and would either die in the processes or would turn into zombies and kill the remaining priests for him.

Sylver stared at the two guards who impassionedly scanned the area behind and around him, never once concentrating on him for more than a fraction of a second. One of them brought his right hand up to the ear area of his helmet. The guard tapped his partner on the shoulder and the two disappeared together.

Sylver was left completely alone. Up until he felt something similar to scalding steam narrowly stop from searing his skin and robe off appear right in front of him. The effect disappeared entirely as Sophia put her bracelets on. The first was the same one she had used the first time Sylver had met her. But the other was a lot bigger and looked to be carved out of black rock. It hung loosely around her wrist before she pulled it upwards towards her bicep.

Before Sylver could say anything, Sophia fiddled with one of the rings that hung in her hair, and her previously frilly dress disappeared to be replaced by an almost insultingly simple priest robe. Her hair was covered up by a shawl. The robe was a tasteful mixture of red, yellow, and grey, made out of seemingly rough fabric. Everything apart from Sophia’s face was completely covered up, even her hands were covered in dark grey gloves.

“With the tournament going on, we’re stretched too thin to spare any priests for this…” Sophia said, as she walked out of the gates and started to slowly walk towards the haunted house. Sylver knew this was for his sake since with her long legs and matching long steps, he would normally have to jog to keep up with her. “…and there was something I wanted to talk to you about,” Sophia finished.

“I thought it was a bit of an overkill to send the head priest to essentially open a lock,” Sylver mentioned as he felt the two guards reappear back at their spots near the gates.

“Regarding your duel with Samuel Du’Rodier’s-”

“What about it?” Sylver interrupted. Whatever minuscule pleasure Sylver took in Sophia’s company was almost instantly replaced by irritation.

“I don’t want to talk about him specifically, but I want to talk about what you did to him. The curse, skill, or perk that you used to stop him from being healed. I would like to know what you would want in exchange for telling me how you did it, and how it can be removed or counteracted,” Sophia explained. The irritation disappeared and was replaced by a warm feeling in Sylver’s chest. He had a soft spot for people that didn’t beat around the bush.

“Any particular reason? I wasn’t lying about the several months’ part; the effect will disappear in a few more weeks or so. And as much as it pains me to say, but even if you’re the one asking, I’m not going to undo it. I didn’t do anything illegal, it was a fair and honest duel, and I would have been in the right if I had killed him,” Sylver explained, as Sophia already started to wave her hands before he had finished speaking.

“Oh no, you misunderstand, I don’t care about Samuel. If what I heard he did is true, I would have cut his legs off, as a start,” Sophia said, with the kind of dangerous spark in her eye that put a smile on Sylver’s face. “No, I’m asking because there was a man that came to us with a very similar issue, except his was a lot more violent, and a lot more permanent. Similar to how we collect poisons to find antidotes, I was hoping to collect your curse, to find a solution for it, so to speak,” Sophia explained.

Sylver mentally consulted the path from the temple to the haunted house as they walked.

“There’s no cure. Or at least, I would be willing to bet everything I owned there isn’t a cure for it. You’ve seen Samuel in person, yes? Inspected him?” Sylver asked.

“I have. The temple of Ra isn’t exactly world-renowned for its healing abilities, but Samuel eventually came to us just in case we had a solution. I’ve seen damage done by level 200 undead that wasn’t as severe. Or, if not severe, not so resistant to healing magic. If anything, I feel like we made worse by the attempt,” Sophia explained, being careful to pick the right words.

“You didn’t, at worst the pain from the healing stressed him out, but it isn’t enough to kill him. But I’ll be honest with you, I’m unwilling to explain how it works because it would require explaining things that I can’t explain,” Sylver said.

“I see… But is it something from your necromancer class, or your unique class?” Sophia asked.

“Would you believe me if I said neither?” Sylver asked as Sophia turned to look behind them at the two invisible guards following them from the rooftops. She sounded irritated as she spoke, but it wasn’t directed at Sylver.

“So a custom skill… Or a combination of skills that you rightfully can say wasn’t meant to be combined… And yet low tier enough that you were able to use it right after a fight…” Sophia thought out loud, reaching up with a hand to bite her thumb’s fingernail.

“If this is an attempt to get me to correct you, and accidentally over-explain until you have more than enough information to figure the rest out, you should know that it isn’t going to work. I’m always willing to trade information for information, but this particular magic is far too valuable for me to ever trade with anyone. Not to mention, in the same way I’m certain it cannot be cured, I’m certain no one but me would be able to use it even if I wrote it out into an easy to use guide,” Sylver explained, with a gentle and polite tone, as the Anderey house started coming into view.

It looked like it was built just yesterday. The tiled bright white roof didn’t have so much as a single smidge on it, as far as Sylver could see at least. The dark stone walls that surrounded it practically glittered in the mid-day sun. The garden in front of it had a white stone path leading to the front doors, connected directly to the locked gate, and wide enough for 2 carriages to easily pass each other without setting a wheel onto the weed-infested grassland on either side.

The house itself looked like it was built yesterday. But everything else, from the tangled mess of dead tree branches to the dead birds strewn around the white path, to the dead priest slouched against the front door, with visibly rotten skin showing up through the shreds of his robe.

“It belonged to a man named Andrey. Written as Anderey, with no one knowing why or where the extra E came from. It’s been classified as an A-class dwelling, with an unknown specialization. Numerous tests have been done on it, and everyone is certain there are only phantoms inside. Normally if an exorcism isn’t possible we would just burn it down with holy fire, but the current owner has been paying our temple to only secure it and has refused to allow it to be demolished,” Sophia explained.

“You’re sure there are only phantoms in there?” Sylver asked.

“Anytime anyone’s attempted to enter it, they would have awful visions and would run away or they wouldn’t return. People immune or resistant to mental magic have attempted to enter it to find the source of its strength, but as far as my records are aware none have returned,” Sophia explained. Sylver felt the two invisible guards change places and then felt 4 more appear near them and spread out.

“How long has it been here?” Sylver asked.

“I don’t know. But it’s been haunted for the last 80 or so years. Sometimes people like you attempt the quest and our temple or one of the others ran tests on it to check for any changes. The last one was… 5 months ago? A level 140 something paladin, if I’m remembering right. Never returned,” Sophia explained. She somehow managed to say it with such an oddly unconcerned voice, that Sylver half thought she was joking.

“I see… Is there anything else I should know?” Sylver asked. Sophia shrugged her shoulders.

“Nothing that wasn’t already written on the quest page,” Sophia answered.

Sylver stood in place and looked at the house for a while. He couldn’t understand what was bugging him until he realized that Sophia didn’t seem all that concerned for him. Which was understandable, given that they were just short of strangers, but it didn’t quite fit.

“When I finish the quest and live in the house, will I have to let anyone inside?” Sylver asked. It was hard not to emphasize the “when” part of the question, but he thought it sounded natural enough.

“Not that I’m aware of. This is a house for nobles, and the laws regarding what they can and can’t have or do on their property depends on the noble in question. Privacy of your own home and all that. Myself personally, if I were in your shoes, I would sell the house for nothing to a noble you trust, and rent it from them for 100 years for a copper coin, or something. It would make your life a whole lot easier,” Sophia explained.

It was odd to hear a priest explain how to bend the law in your favor, but Sylver had another question before that.

“Normally with a seemingly impossible quest like this, people wouldn’t just assume I would be able to handle it,” Sylver asked. He tried to be subtle, but Sophia didn’t even try.

“Well, considering you somehow broke the curse that had been plaguing Kitty’s family for generations, a couple of high-level phantoms aren’t going to be much of a challenge,” Sophia said, without once smiling as she spoke. Sylver continued to silently stare at the house and did his very best not to phrase it like a threat.

“Who the fuck are you that she tells you my business?” Sylver asked calmly.

The very idea that Kitty would so blatantly ignore his simple request for anonymity pissed him off so much that he could feel the slightly relaxed guards hiding behind them perk up and get ready. It said something about Sophia that she didn’t so much as flinch.

“She didn’t tell me anything. Which quite honestly hurt considering how long we’ve worked together. But there are boundaries we don’t cross. In her case, we turn a blind eye when she asks for Cord members to be healed. In our case, she doesn’t interfere with my plans or my people. This includes killing them to silence them after they saw a white-haired man with completely black eyes, covered in sigils carved into his body, black as charcoal arms, and laying inside the shattered remains of one of the most powerful barriers’s the temple of Ra has ever made. Which right afterward just so happened to no longer be necessary, as some nameless mage had undone the curse,” Sophia said, slowly and nonchalantly, chewing the words as if she were savoring them.

“And wouldn’t you know it, there just so happened to be a mage with a similar appearance in Medera, right when the curse disappeared? I can’t describe to you how insulting it was that they refused to admit anything, even when I already knew your name,” Sophia said. If she spoke with a drop of poison before, now there was a bucket of it. Except it was once again not directed at Sylver.

“So back when we first met, you already knew everything,” Sylver summarized.

“No.”

“No?”

“Ellari recognized you. If not for him, I wouldn’t have known about the barrier, the curse, or you, for another year. He’d written out a report on the matter, and if it went through the proper channels, I would have only heard about it during the next summer solstice meeting. After you left to find demon worshipers, he casually joked that you overdid it with the healing and made your hands too white to compensate for them being burned. It is pure luck that I was within earshot and asked him to elaborate,” Sophia explained.

Sylver tapped his foot as he thought things through and spoke without so much as a hint of malice.

“Who else knows about this? About me and the curse and the cats?” Sylver asked.

“A small trusted group of people, that will sooner die than speak of it, if I were to ask them to. Which I had already done. With Kitty and her people, I don’t know, but I would imagine it’s a similar situation. Outside of that, no one. Or at least not that I am aware of. Kitty had done everything she could to make Ellari forget what he saw, but unluckily for her, he is one of the few that genuinely believes in Ra,” Sophia answered.

“So when I returned to accept finding the demon worshipers, with the cats and Cord acting as backup-”

“The cats that spoke to us were not aware of it. And neither is the Cord, as least as far as I could tell. Their whole thing is information, I would find it hard to believe Kitty would have trouble keeping certain information from spreading. She got plain unlucky with Ellari. I only found out about the whole thing, after we had spoken and you left. I would have been more… courteous if I was aware of what you were capable of,” Sophia answered, with a vague gesture of her hand as she searched for the right word.

“So the one guard that just so happened to have seen me, just so happened to get transferred here, and you just so happened to overhear a joke, and found everything out?” Sylver summarized.

“More or less. I can’t do a whole lot about the report he had written, not without essentially starting a civil war inside the temple, which I am unwilling to do again, even for you. But until the summer solstice, no one is aware of what you’ve done. You aren’t named in the report, but adventurers with white hair and black eyes are very rare, especially full-blooded humans. If you were a gnome or a dark elf, maybe there would be some wiggle room regarding your identity,” Sofia said.

Sylver could almost hear the faint sound of Spring scribbling inside his shadow to speak to Kitty when he had the chance

“Well, not a whole lot I can do about it now,” Sylver said. He wasn’t certain if this was a good or a bad thing, but he and Kitty had a deal. If it was genuinely accidental and happenstance, it was one thing.

If she had purposely allowed this to happen, it was a very big problem.

Sophia wordlessly opened the gates and shut them behind him after Sylver had entered. The moment the gates had shut, Sylver suddenly found himself surrounded in blood-red fire.

*

**3503

*

Sylver closed his eyes as he gently sent out tendrils of mana and found the path beneath his feet. He stepped over several small rodent and bird skeletons as he walked, all the while deafened by the sounded of a roaring flame. Even with his eyes tightly shut, Sylver still only saw flickers of red and yellow.

He walked up the up to the house, and spend a few seconds blindly searching for the door handle. Upon opening it, he saw and heard the fire disappear. But even when he opened his eyes Sylver still couldn’t see anything. He was standing in complete and total darkness, only his own body was visible to him.

“Hello! Please allow me to introduce myself! I am Sylver Sezari. 1st tier necromancer and adventurer extraordinaire!” Sylver shouted into the never-ending void. He had to hand it to the phantoms, they even muted his voice from bouncing around.

“I’m here looking for a ring! And once I retrieve it, I will be moving in here!” Sylver continued to shout, as slowly walked down the hallway, careful to avoid hitting any of the statues or vases on either side. He stopped by one that felt strange and found that there was a dried-up corpse in place of a statue. Even with his hands touching it, he couldn’t see it.

Going by the way the skin near the face was broken, the dead woman had scratched her eyes out and bled to death. Sylver left her where she was as he continued down the hallway.

“Some things about me! I tend to forget where I was going when I speak for a long time! I ramble in short! I’m also so used to always having someone in my shadow, that it’s going to seem like I talk to myself a lot!” Sylver continued to shout.

“Something else about me! You can’t hurt me! My mind also can’t be read, so you can’t give me visions or the like! But I loved the illusionary fire, it was very well made!” Sylver continued to shout. He stopped walking for a moment and spread his mana out in all four directions as came to an intersection.

On Sylver’s left, a tall man appeared. His face was contorted into an unnatural smile, his cheeks ripped open with his jaw unhinged to the point it hung as if it were a beard. His tongue came out of a hole in his throat, and reached down to his crotch, dripping with blood. His left leg was a mixture of white and red, nerves and muscle and bone, while the other was covered in a ripped trouser leg.

The man held a metallic potato peeler in one hand and pointed it at Sylver. He screamed an inhumanly scream as he started to slowly limp towards Sylver, dragging his skinless leg behind him. It snapped and cracked with each step he took as he put his weight on it.

“I’m sorry about this, but I need to see where to go,” Sylver said.

The screaming disfigured man started to speed up, now panting like a dog as he screamed, each breath sounded as if he were about to drown.

Sylver walked to the right and searched with his hands until he found a wall.

The man with the potato peeler began to speed up, still limping towards him, but now making more progress than he should with each limping step. Sylver found a flat enough surface and laid his palm flat against it.

The man suddenly stood right next to Sylver, one skinless hand on Sylver’s shoulder, and the other edging closer and closer towards his face and eyes.

Sylver turned to look at the man.

“Wonderful details. It’s the little things that make an illusion come to life. But what’s this?” Sylver asked, with his free hand poking the screaming man in one of the strands of muscle that stopped his jaw from completely falling off.

“This isn’t enough to hold the weight of the lower jaw. Either add more strands of muscle or don’t open it up so much,” Sylver said. The potato peeler entered his eye and Sylver lost sight of the man in that eye. The potato peeler came out and a pierced pitch-black eyeball sat deflated on its tip.

“See, now this I like. You could have been lazy with it, but you checked my eye color and matched it!” Sylver said. The screaming man shoved the eyeball-tipped potato peeler into his throat. He forced it down his throat and splattered blood everywhere as he began to violently cough.

Sylver waited a few more seconds, while the man’s tongue came alive and licked the side of Sylver’s face, temporarily blinding him in the other “remaining” eye.

Sylver lifted his hand off the wall and slapped it back down. A wave of crackling yellow sparks exploded from the wall and traveled outward from it. Sylver watched the partially revealed walls, floor, and ceiling before complete and total darkness replaced it. The screaming man had turned transparent for a moment, as the illusions were interfered with.

Sylver decided that the direction the potato peeler man had come from was a fair guess as to where to start. There was no map for him to follow, so Sylver would simply have to wander around until he found the ring and the item the phantoms are tied to.

“I’m going to guess the majority of you are women! I can’t say why, but that’s the feeling I’m getting! The few phantoms I’ve dealt with that were men were a lot more aggressive than their female counterparts!” Sylver shouted.

He removed his hand from the wall and used his tendrils of mana to not bump into any of the walls or furniture lined up against them. The potato peeler-wielding man limped next to him and continued to stab and scratch at Sylver's face and eyes, screaming and coughing hoarsely all the while.

“Just want to clarify, I’m here to negotiate! I’m not going to hurt anyone; I just want to talk. If you want revenge, peace, or whatever it is, tell me and I will see what I can do!” Sylver continued to yell. The potato peeler was still screaming in the background, but he stopped and disappeared once Sylver turned a corner.

The darkness dissipated, and Sylver could see clearly again. Light came out of a small window at the end of the hallway and illuminated the surrounding area. Sylver continued to slowly walk forward and looked up to see as the light started to disappear.

The effect was something close to a solar eclipse, except Sylver could see that something was coming towards him and was becoming bigger and bigger. A large eye looked in through the small window into the hallway where Sylver was standing.

The window, wall, ceiling, and floor shattered violently, as a giant mass of tentacles ripped its way inside the house. A countless number of eyes sat inside the mass of tentacles, each one a different shape and color, but all locked on Sylver. The tentacle creature screeched as it shoved more and more of itself into the narrow corridor, and started to drag itself towards Sylver.

The tentacles looked slimy, with glistening needles sticking out of their ends, all snapping and becoming crooked as it used them to pull itself into the corridor.

“If all you have are illusions, I wouldn’t bother!” Sylver shouted, as the mass of tentacles, eyes, and needles wrapped itself around him and pierced his skin with the needles. Sylver walked through the mass and came out the other side completely unharmed.

He suddenly found himself standing outside the gates with Sophia smiling politely at him.

“What took you so long?” She asked.

Sylver rolled his eyes and didn’t bother responding, as the potato peeler-wielding man appeared behind Sophia and grabbed her by the throat, and ripped away the front of her robe.

Sophia started to scream with a high enough pitch that Sylver’s ears stung. The man used the peeling side of the peeler to remove strips of flesh from her bared chest, before finally-

“Good effort! Making me think I made it out, and then trying to see if torturing someone I know personally would work! But you should know breasts don’t bleed like that!” Sylver corrected, as he put one foot in front of the other and watched as the man dragged Sophia backward as if moving away from Sylver.

“Especially the large kind like Sophia’s. They’re not water balloons filled with blood, they are a great deal of flesh, glands, fat, and mostly capillaries. It shouldn’t be gushing out like that, especially considering you’ve shredded them, not simply cut or stabbed them!” Sylver advised, as he hit his hand against the wall and sent another wave moving through the house.

Sophia and her torturer turned transparent for a moment, as Sylver walked through them and continued down the hallway. If nothing else, he admired the creativity.

Sylver spent a good 10 minutes wandering around the lower floor of the house, constantly surrounded by one screaming creature or another. A man made out of crawling insects surrounded Sylver with flies that ate into his flesh and went into his mouth, eyes, nose, and ears, and disappeared all at once when Sylver hit the wall with his hand.

Then they tried snakes, scorpions, children, babies, a slime, they made it look like there was a spike trap below him with only a small plank of wood holding his weight. All completely useless and pointless, given that Sylver knew they couldn’t do anything to him, and had his disruption spell when it got too annoying.

If there was even a fraction of him that was afraid, everything would have been “real”. Not real in the sense they could kill him, but real in the sense Sylver would feel the pain of the potato peeler digging his eye out, even if his physical body was perfectly fine. Every single errant fly, eyeball-filled monstrosity, and the piles upon piles of gore would smell and feel as if it was the real thing.

They were going for the psychological angle now.

Which would have a chance of working if they could access Sylver’s mind to find the things he was afraid of. As it stood, they simply threw things at the wall to see what would stick.

At first, they tried to one-up Sophia’s torture. Which would have worked, had Sylver not been a necromancer. After what he had seen and done no amount of gore or knives going into places they shouldn’t would ever get a reaction out of him.

At some point, the illusions disappeared altogether. It almost felt like they had given up and surrendered, but Sylver didn’t let his guard down and continued to use his tendrils of mana to see where he was going, as opposed to trusting his eyes or ears.

Sylver hit his hand against the walls now and again, but there was nothing to interfere with. He couldn’t even feel anything nearby.

“Listen! Whatever you’re planning, don’t bother! I understand you’re confused and afraid, I understand that to you it feels like I’m trespassing in your home! But you should understand this! I am in my element! I’ve dealt with cities filled with phantoms such as yourselves!” Sylver shouted. His voice didn’t echo because of the carpet on the floor and the wooden walls.

Sylver walked around for a while, talking to himself essentially until he heard a sound behind him.

A suit of armor stood in the middle of the hallway, holding a spiked mace in one hand, and a small shield in the other.

[Living Armor (Warrior) – 134]
[HP-999,999]
[MP-???]

Loose strands of dark grey smoke seeped out from within the cracks of the armor. It floated slightly, the angle the helmet sat on its shoulders suggested the neck had been snapped. Its left arm was twisted to the point it was thin and elongated, and there was a hole in the chest piece, that Sylver could see through.

The armor slowly walked towards Sylver.

“Possession. That’s quite an advanced skill, I’m surprised you’re able to use it if you’ve only been around for 80 something years. And almost a million in HP, that’s downright cheating. I could spend an entire day hacking at the thing and get no closer to killing it. Then again, faking a status probably isn’t that hard,” Sylver said, as the suit of armor started to walk a little faster.

“But it has,” Sylver covered his mouth as he yawned and raised his other hand towards the now sprinting creature. “but it has one fatal flaw,” Sylver said.

The creature lunged into the air and very nearly touched the ceiling. It brought down its spike-covered mace down onto Sylver, which passed right through him. The floor shattered, as did the walls on either side of it, as the mace made contact with it. Sylver’s smoke form materialized next to the creature, and he used one finger to lightly tap it on the helmet.

All at once the hollow armor disconnected and fell to the ground into a pile of lifeless metal.

“There are ways to make the connection more secure, but it’s a very long and difficult process. Very good for defenses though. These things could be made to be nigh unkillable if there’s enough mana to restore them. Explains what happened to the people with mental resistance thought,” Sylver concluded.

Sylver waited for a moment before he picked up the floating helmet and tucked it under his arm. He had to ignore the helmet being tugged towards the slowly rebuilding suit of armor and focused instead on the direction of the connection attached to it.

It took the phantoms about a minute to realize what he had done, and what he was doing, as they doubled down on trying to pull the helmet out of Sylver’s hands. When that failed, the phantom Sylver was tracking tried to sever the connection to the helmet.

Except Sylver’s soul was interfering with all of her attempts.

More illusions showed up, one more gruesome and disturbing than the other, Sylver walked outside about 10 times while he followed the connection to the source, and all 10 times something horrendous happened to Sophia.

Sylver finally arrived at a large bookshelf and felt around with his mana until he could find the secret entrance.

When that failed, he placed his hand onto the bookshelf, and ripped it out of the wall, and gently placed it to the side. Behind it was a small square door, barely tall enough for Sylver to go through without crouching. Everything went black once again as the illusions returned, but Sylver already had a hand on the door and was already fiddling with the locking mechanism.

It hurt Sylver’s pride that he couldn’t figure out how to open the door properly, but in his defense, there was lead inside of the lock. Somewhere inside the house, there was very likely a very fancy-looking key hidden inside of a piano, or some other ridiculous hiding spot. Sylver put the helmet down onto the ground and forgot about it since he was now close enough to feel the general direction of the connection by himself.

It took 5 kicks from his charged foot for the door to bend enough for Sylver to enter the tunnel ahead in the form of smoke. The tunnel behind the door was of a similar height, so Sylver remained in the form of smoke so as not to hit his head by accident. The illusion of complete and total darkness remained, but it was pointless now.

Sylver could feel where he was going, and the tunnel walls were charged with enough mana that they might as well have been glowing.

The tunnel ended with a ladder, and Sylver went downwards to the source of the phantoms. The walls were lined with cobblestones, with just enough room for a person’s back to not scratch against them as they went down. He found a tripwire but didn’t have a physical body to trigger it, so he didn’t worry about it. The ladder went further down, but Sylver materialized only after a minute or so of going down it.

The ladder was simple and metallic, square metal rods inside of a dug-out square hole. Sylver found a small keyhole on the back of one of the ladders and tried to force some mana into it, before finding it made out of lead.

Sylver followed the mechanical locking mechanism until he found something he could fiddle with, and spent a few seconds putting pressure onto it until it snapped.

Sylver heard a click behind him and saw the stones near his back pull away to reveal another passage.

Sylver waited for it to open all the way and turned into smoke to enter it. Rows upon rows of skulls lined either side of the passage, each one with an identical carving on the forehead. Sylver walked down the passage and entered the basement.

Going by the giant stairs leading upwards towards a normal-sized door, there was apparently an easier way to come here, than the path Sylver had found. He made a mental note to check to see how deep the ladder tunnel went, and what was down there.

The room was large, or it was more accurate to say it was wide. The ceiling was low enough that Sylver could almost touch it with his hand, but it stretched out further than he could see. Most of the space was taken up rusted cages, with small identical tables standing near them.

Sylver walked among them, and each and every cage had a dead body inside of it, with dried-up skin and visible scarring and damage on the face, chest, and hands. Self-inflicted as far as Sylver could tell.

Sylver walked around for a while and saw a dead body, dressed in a purple robe, laying on the floor near one of the cages. Sylver flipped it over with his foot and pulled the man’s squashed lips back to reveal a mouth full of pointed and sharp teeth.

In one hand he had an empty syringe with a needle that was wide enough to be called a straw. The other hand was missing.

Sylver followed the trail of blood and saw the corpse of a woman clutching a ring of keys close to her chest. Next to her lay the shattered bone remains of a hand that had been eaten.

“You managed to somehow cut his hand off, but even with the keys couldn’t get out of the cage... And then you, and everyone else starved to death, all alone, in complete and total darkness…” Sylver summarized.

Sylver walked around the cages, but couldn’t understand it. There were only 2 souls here, where were the rest? He returned to the body with the keyrings and spoke at it.

“There’s no use in hiding, I can see you,” Sylver said. The corpse remained perfectly still, and his voice bounced around and echoed through the silent room.

“What if I said I could bring you back to life?” Sylver asked.

He heard a scuffling sound from one of the other cages, in the direction he could feel the other soul.

“I’ve done it before. Quite literally 2 weeks ago. And again 3 months ago,” Sylver added.

Sophia appeared next to the cage and had an expression that didn’t quite match her face as she spoke.

“We’re stuck here. This house, this place, our souls are fused into it,” Sophia explained. Her voice was wrong. Not wrong, but different.

“I know. It will take 3 years to undo that, if you’re lucky, and 10 if you’re not. Your original body is still here, it would be extremely easy for me to repair it and make it habitable,” Sylver offered.

Another woman appeared, one that Sylver hadn’t seen before. She looked to be a very young human woman, barely in her 20s.

“You’re lying. You’re trying to trick us,” the woman said. There was a slight delay between the sound of her voice, and her lips moving.

“What would I gain from tricking you? And more importantly, what’s your alternative? If you prefer I could bring a priest down here to try to exorcise you. It would hurt like nothing you’ve ever experienced, but it wouldn’t send you away. They would have to burn the whole house down for that, and even then it isn’t guaranteed that you’ll be able to move on. Your souls aren’t just fused to this house; they’re fused to this space,” Sylver explained. Sophia’s face flickered a few times, before settling on a slight frown. The other woman’s did the same.

“You’re lying,” fake Sophia said.

“Considering where we are, and the way you presumably died, I understand why you would be distrustful. I’m going to leave and I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Think it over until then,” Sylver said. He walked back to the purple-robed man and reached down to the corpse on the floor and twisted the ring off its finger. A light grey silver ring, with the outside area nearly invisible under all the white stones embedded into it. Oddly enough, this one hurt a little to touch.

“You’re not leaving,” fake Sophia said. Sylver was once again standing in complete and total darkness.

“I am, I memorized the layout of the lower floor, and you’ve already seen there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” Sylver explained, as he spread his awareness through his mana and made his way towards the large staircase leading out somewhere.

He walked in complete and total silence. He had been expecting something, but it seemed strange to him that fake Sophia would let him go just like that. Sylver could feel the two souls connect behind him, and hoped that they were discussing it, or that one of them was convincing the other.

The staircase opened up into some room Sylver couldn’t see, given that he was still effectively blind. Sylver couldn’t tell what was used to hide the entrance, but the mechanism that opened and closed it was simple enough that he could force it open when he returned. He found his way out easy enough, the two souls acted like a compass.

Sylver stopped with his hand on the front door.

“I forgot to mention this, but in return for bringing you back to life, I would like to hire you both to work for me. Mostly as guards for the house, but we can discuss the details tomorrow. I’ll pay you a salary, and in 3 years you could be alive, rich, and with all the time in the world to enjoy yourself,” Sylver said. He had felt the two souls stop moving while he spoke, and carried on since he had their attention.

“The way you two have been able to use your abilities is extraordinary. I’m all but certain you could become great mages if given the chance… I’ll add this just in case, but I’m willing to negotiate the terms if there’s anything else you want,” Sylver said.

He waited for a moment and was hoping one of them would agree on the spot. The darkness illusion receded as he left the house and walked down the white path. It was littered with dead bodies of rats, pigeons, and people, but otherwise perfectly clean.