Ch173-Coming Home (Patreon)

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Ch173-Coming Home

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As they continued to walk towards Sylver’s house he used [Advanced Water Manipulation] to freeze the puddle before Chrys’ boot touched it, and then used his shadow to stop her from slipping on the ice. He felt, and almost saw, several white blurs appear behind and ahead of him, but none of them slowed down to talk to him.

It was still dark outside, but the streets were already becoming alive with people walking to work. Chrys and Ria both quietly gawked at the passersby, while Sylver did his best to formulate a way of asking Lola about the [Hero] without making it sound threatening.

“Why exactly are you so afraid of a [Hero]?” Ria asked, and Sylver turned to look at the metallic creature, that had decided to get out from Sylver’s robe, and now formed itself into a golden pauldron.

To her credit, she was a damn fine pauldron. Fancy without being gaudy, neither too big, nor too small, and somehow matched Sylver’s style, despite him never wearing any armor.

Aside from the armor [Necrotic Mutilation] created, but that looked more like slimy fish scales. Ria on the other hand, actually looked like someone with an eye for detail had crafter her.

“Because they rope you into their “quest.” Your goals stop mattering, and your options are to either help the [Hero], or die,” Chrys answered, and Sylver had to be careful with how he said what he said.

He fucked it, and sounded far more hostile than he meant to.

“Don’t do that. Not to me, and not to anyone you’re close to,” Sylver explained, as he stopped walking, and gently turned Chrys so she was facing him.

After Lily’s “healing,” Chrys had lost a lot of her height, and the soft lightly freckled face that she was left with was a painful contrast to the ice-cold calculating eyes staring at Sylver. She looked like a 12-year-old girl, but she sometimes spoke like an old woman, and her unnaturally stiff gait did very little to make her appear normal.

But the eyes were the biggest offenders. Enough so that Sylver made a mental note to find her a good pair of glasses to hopefully dilute the edge in them. She knew too much, had seen too much, and had done enough that she had earned those eyes, even if she didn’t deserve them.

“Why? That’s what you were going to say anyway,” Chrys asked, and Sylver was relieved to feel she hadn’t tried peeking into the future for an answer this time. He considered crouching down to be at eye level with her but decided to remain standing.

“I want to preface all of this by saying that you are important to me and that I care about you. I have told you things only 1 other person knows about,” Sylver explained.

“Yes, I know. I care about you too,” Chrys answered, and Sylver felt a light warmth in his heart at her words.

“Good… I don’t want to have to be on guard around you. You can use your magic however you wish, but you can’t use it against me or Lola, or Ria, or anybody you consider even remotely important to you. Because you will slip up, and you’ll do something that will hurt them, and you’ll lose their trust, and I say this from personal experience, you’ll never get it back,” Sylver explained.

“What should I do?” Chrys asked, and the calm way with which she wanted to correct her error reminded him of Oska.

“To mages words are important. To the extent that speaking for another mage, has in the past been considered a grave insult. It is only ever done by mages that are extremely close to one another. You don’t know me. Not well enough to speak for me. That’s part of it, one of those unspoken rules you’ll pick up as you grow older,” Sylver explained and made sure to keep his tone relaxed and casual.

He could hear with his ears that he wasn’t doing a good job of it, but Chrys seemed to be able to understand that he wasn’t anywhere near as angry as he sounded to be. He was tired, agitated, and had just now been metaphorically kicked in the unmentionables.

“I will keep that in mind,” Chrys promised.

“The other part is that I can’t do what I do while worrying that you’re working against me. If there’s something you want, let me know, and I will do everything I can to get it for you. If at any point you feel that my actions are going to negatively impact you, talk to me. I need to know you’re on the same page as I am,” Sylver explained.

“You want to become strong enough that you, and by association, the people under your care, are safe and untouchable. I don’t… I don’t ever want to go back there,” Sylver could almost see the chill in her blood spread to her face. “I’ll do everything I can to help you,” Chrys said.

“If you want our relationship to be purely transactional, I will respect that. But there’s more to life than not going back there. Take all the time you need to realize that. I got off topic… In short, don’t speak for anyone, and if I tell you someone is a friend, don’t use your magic to see their future. Other people… I’ll leave it to your discretion. But know that if they take offense, and either threaten you or try to hurt you, I’m going to kill them. So… you know… be careful with that,” Sylver finished, as he felt the disapproving hum emanating from Ria.

“How does a city like this even function if everyone is constantly killing each other over every slight?” Ria asked as Sylver and Chrys went returned to walking.

“The guards usually get involved and stop everyone before things get out of hand. With all the various temples, even life-threatening wounds can be healed, for a price. In my case thought…” Sylver explained and gestured with his empty hand as he tried to think of a good word or phrase.

“You kill them dead?” Ria offered, with her equivalent of a shrug.

She sounded like she was about to laugh, but there was also an odd note of tiredness in her voice.

“I’ve witnessed, and experienced, firsthand what ends up happening if you let enough enemies live. You can’t be too careful. Also, I don’t kill everyone who crosses me…” Sylver explained and paused as they came to an intersection, and he had to wait for Spring to remind him which direction to go.

“How do you know when to kill someone, and when to let them go?” Chrys asked, as Sylver turned left, and pulled Chrys along with him.

“Gut feeling? Anyone that keeps trying to get up after you cripple them, has got to go. Anyone that believes you only won because you cheated, will always try to kill you afterward. Let me think… Anyone whose honor you’ve besmirched… Honestly, you can just tell after a certain point. If their soul rolls over and shows me their belly, I’ll let them go, they’re not a threat… but…” Sylver trailed off as his idiotic mind kept bringing itself back towards Lola, the [Hero], and that stupid prophesy he claimed to have forgotten.

“But the people crazy, or confident, enough to attack you in the first place, aren’t the types to be scared into surrendering,” Ria finished.

Sylver thought the explanation over.

“That’s a good way of putting it. Anyway, I’m polite to most people, so the only ones that choose to pick a fight with me, deserve whatever happens to them. And the city is likely a better place due to their absence,” Sylver explained, as he turned another corner.

Having lived inside the house for only a few weeks, Sylver hadn’t really considered it to be his home.

But either due to being away for a long time, due to having someone he cared for to house at his home, or because he was exhausted, Sylver felt a lump form in his throat as the building came into view.

It wasn’t quite as strong as when he returned to the Ibis after doing something particularly awful, but it wasn’t nothing.

Which worried Sylver, as much as it relaxed him. If Edmund was alive, who is to say Aether isn’t as well?

But Sylver was too old to be that optimistic and forced himself to keep his expectations low.

As they approached, the two large gates swung open. Both had been polished to a mirror finish, and Sylver noticed that a delicate-looking layer of barbed wire had been added near the top. As he stepped through the barrier surrounding the house, Sylver felt his old magic circling him and Chrys.

Even if it was powered by a naturally occurring leyline, it didn’t have that oomph that Sylver’s new body’s magic had. It felt just a little blunt, even if Sylver could feel at least 300 souls currently trapped in the basement.

He had to assume these were all from would-be intruders because any other alternative was worrying. The shades spread out and inspected the property, as Sylver and Chrys walked towards the front doors.

Every imaginable surface was spotlessly clean, even the small pipes through which Sylver moved from room to room, had somehow been polished. The bushes and flower beds surrounding the front entrance were in pristine condition, forget dead leaves, the flowers didn’t even have a limp petal.

“You’re bald,” a young woman’s voice said, from the now wide-open front doors.

Misha looked like she was shorter than Masha, but it was only due to her crouching behind the straight-backed Masha. Both wore similar clothing, Masha had long ash white trousers, and a dark red shirt, while Misha had ash white shorts and an off-color dark red blouse.

They were both also holding wooden staves…

Sylver ran his hand over his shiny scalp, as the mask that had been covering his face disappeared.

“I am. Looks good, right?” Sylver asked in jest.

“You look like someone painted a face onto an egg,” Masha offered, and Sylver could do little but shrug.

“Is it permanent,” Misha asked from behind her sister.

“I can literally bring the dead back to life, why wouldn’t I be able to grow myself some hair?” Sylver asked, and regretted it instantly, well before they had formulated a response.

“But you can’t change the color of your eyes, or that your hair is white?” Masha asked.

“You’re also freakishly pale,” Misha added.

“All very valid points, that I cannot think of a good response to. In short, yes, my hair will grow out, don’t worry about it. The better question is, I’ve been gone for 5 years, why are you so unsurprised by my return?” Sylver asked.

Misha and Masha exchange a look.

“You said you’d come back,” Masha said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Sylver made another mental note to work on his face, to stop himself from blushing in the future.

“That I did,” Sylver said. “This is Chrys. She can speak elvish, so ask Ging to translate while she’s learning Eirish,” Sylver explained and gestured at the small girl standing next to him, who was still holding his hand.

“And this is Ria,” Sylver explained, as he gestured at his shoulder.

“Hello,” Ria said, as she created a small head out of a tendril, and used it to speak.

Truth be told, the whole interaction was beyond awkward. Most of it was due to the simple fact that Sylver didn’t know what to say, and neither did Misha, Masha, Ging, or any of the other rabbits.

They spoke as if he had only been away for a couple of days, and not 4 years and 10 months. Masha told Sylver about what they had been up to since their bodies finished being repaired, and they figured out how to enter them.

And for the most part, they ate, slept, took baths, and when they felt like it, looked through the notes and exercises Sylver had left them. Misha had progressed much further than Masha had, on account of the fact that she couldn’t sleep as well as Masha could, and spent the vast majority of her sleepless nights practicing magic.

They were more surprised by Ria, and the strange mana coming out of Chrys’ eye than anything else.

Lola was in Sylver’s workshop down below. Sylver asked Ria and Chrys to go along with Misha and Masha to clean up and have breakfast and such because Sylver needed to have a very private chat with Lola.

Chrys had an odd smile on her face as the two sisters led her away, but by the looks of things, she had decided to keep that particular joke to herself.

He would later be told that Chrys asked Maul, the house chef, to make her pancakes, which she ate until she felt sick, and then fell asleep at the table.

Ging, with the help of Benny, carried the small girl to one of the empty bedrooms, where she would sleep for nearly 18 hours.

Sylver reached a small hole hidden behind a bookshelf and didn’t even bother coming to a full stop, as he simply sent a burst of fog through the hole, and materialized on the other side.

It felt like trying to put on a coat that you had grown out of. The sleeves were so tight that you couldn’t even fit your hands through them, it creaked at the seams from the mere attempt, and Sylver didn’t even try to zip it up.

How mana is perceived, is 100% dependent on the person inspecting it. While mana does have a “fingerprint,” in a certain sense of the word, describing a person’s mana was akin to describing an abstract painting, one of those that’s made entirely out of colorful splatters and splashes.

Now that Sylver had some of his Silver Lich mana coursing through his veins, the slurry swimming inside his workshop was embarrassingly pathetic.

For a while, Sylver just stood there and breathed it all in.

Contrary to popular belief, there wasn’t a stench of death and decay, if anything, there was a hint of lavender for some reason. Proper necromancers kept their workspaces clean and sterile, it was only the corpse fuckers that enjoyed walking around with their sleeves soaked in blood and feces.

“He had my mother’s sword,” Lola said from the corner of the room.

“…”

Sylver ran his hand along the polished clean metal tables as he walked towards Lola, and nudged the various souls trapped and funneled down into the workshop, out of the way.

“The city was being overwhelmed by Krists when the [Hero] arrived. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that he fended them off single-handedly, but the local nobility certainly believes he did,” Lola explained, as Sylver sat down onto his own shadow using [Deadly Darkness].

“The Krists started acting up around 3 years ago. Everyone assumed that once their island base was destroyed they would-”

“The [Hero] had your mother’s sword, so you traded with him to get it, is that correct,” Sylver interrupted, and could almost physically feel the nerve he had just ripped into.

There was a long pause.

That in different circumstances would have resulted in a slap across the face. When something as serious as a [Hero] is the topic of conversation, there were very few people from whom Sylver tolerated a long dramatic pregnant pause.

“What do you want me to say?” Lola asked, and Sylver was thankfully too shocked to react in any way other than silently staring at her.

In three short steps, Sylver was standing close enough to Lola that he could feel her slightly panicked breathing on the wispy edges of his robe’s collar.

“I want to know exactly what the [Hero] did, said, what he touched, who he spoke to, how he talked, which language, did he sound angry, sad, what was his level, where did you meet, did you find him, did he find you, which sword specifically was he carrying, what-”

Sylver leaned away as Lola opened the palm of her hand in front of her, and a dark red blade appeared between them. The hilt was a bright golden color, and the slightly tarnished dark red blade was bent at a 45-degree angle. There were slightly glowing dark green cracks at the bent area, with a couple of the cracks spiraling as they traveled through the metal.

Lola tried to talk but all that came out was a high-pitched squeak. She had droplets of water forming in both of her eyes.

“Look at it,” she whispered.

3 very distinct emotions made themselves known inside Sylver.

One was a happiness that he could barely contain, let alone put into words.

Another was fear, which felt like throwing water on a red hot piece of metal.

And the last, and the one that muffled the other two, was anger.

Which was immediately snuffed out, and stuffed in a jar high up on a shelf, as Sylver remembered he wasn’t in a position to act out on the aforementioned anger.

There was a difference between being confident, and being stupid.

And starting a fight with a [Hero], was about the dumbest thing any person, creature, or thing, could ever do.

Unless you had enough power to defy a god’s will and knew exactly what you were doing.

Even then, it was still a huge fucking risk.

Sylver had a decision to make.

Sadly, there was barely any point considering his options, because he knew all of them, and knew the consequences. As much as it was about to hurt him and Lola in the short term, being honest always worked out in the end.

“Lola… I’m going to talk for a while, and you’re going to listen to me. I will answer any questions you may have after I’m done so… please don’t interrupt me,” Sylver said with a sigh and a shrug of his shoulders, as Lola lowered the faintly glowing sword in her hand.

Sylver dragged his hands over his face as if to wipe away sweat, and gave himself and Lola a couple of moments to compose themselves.

“The sword in your hand is a fake. I don’t recognize or understand the magic being used, but I can see the effect it’s having on you. The [Hero] has tricked you. And you’re not going to do anything about it,” Sylver said calmly and kept his tone relaxed and level.

Somehow Lola either suppressed her reaction to the point that Sylver couldn’t even feel it in her soul, or she already knew. The slight shivering of her lower lip and the faint redness in her face pointed to some sort of spell that prevented Sylver from feeling her soul properly, or more likely, some sort of enchantment.

“You’re not going to look for the [Hero], you’re not going to send anyone after him, as far as anyone is concerned, he has successfully fooled you, and that is the extent of your relationship with him. You won’t think about him, you won’t ask me about him, and once we’re done talking, we are never speaking about him ever again. Ever,” Sylver explained, and with each tentative step could feel more and more of the alien magic emanating from the damaged sword.

Lola’s throat moved in a way that suggested that there was a lump she couldn’t swallow, or that she was about to say something. She spoke before she could.

“Lola… I could have lied to you, and pretended that was your mother’s sword. I can just barely sense the spell on it, and I apologize if this sounds demeaning, but if I can barely tell it’s a fake, you definitely can’t. And-”

Sylver briefly closed his eyes as Lola disappeared in a bright flash of light.

When he opened them, he immediately found the alteration to the spell that should have prevented this and was oddly more proud than annoyed that Misha managed to understand the framework well enough to edit it without destroying it.

“Do you want me to go after her?” Spring asked as he materialized a step away from where Lola had been standing and picked up the sword she had left behind it. It had fallen onto the floor and was partially embedded into the reinforced stone.

The blade slid out effortlessly, as Spring pulled it out, and inspected it for a couple of seconds.

“No… She needs time to process things, I trust she won’t do anything stupid…” Sylver said as he took the sword from Spring’s hands, and very gently carried it over to one of the polished metal tables.

The blade wobbled back and forth, as Sylver put it down, and searched through the drawers until he found what he was looking for.

“Was she always this rude? I remember her being a lot less rude before,” Spring mentioned, as Sylver held up a vial with a colorless liquid inside of it, and poured it over the slightly glowing green cracks on the sword.

“She wasn’t rude… Well, I did say no teleporting when I’m around, especially inside my own house, but it’s been 5 years, she probably got used to teleporting whenever she wanted. More likely, she understood that I wasn’t going to budge on the [Hero] situation, so she left to clear her head… Not to mention, I doubt she’s all that happy about me revealing the sword she thought her mother made is a fake,” Sylver explained, as the colorless liquid turned foamy.

It fizzled and seemed to boil as if the green cracks on the blade were extremely hot.

Sylver worked in silence for a while, gently poking and prodding the crack, while Spring walked around and made the shades move things until they were all in their proper place.

“About Ria…” Spring said, in a way that sounded as if he wasn’t sure what he was about to say.

“Depending on what she wants to do; I’m thinking of having a golem made for her. So she can walk around, make friends, and all that… I’ll admit I would prefer to have her come with us… She’s like a skeleton key when it comes to magical barriers and locks. If a concentrated abyss plane couldn’t do anything to her, there isn’t much in Eira that could hurt her,” Sylver explained, as he tapped a glass rod against the foaming bright green liquid, and it wrapped around the glass rod as if it were cotton candy.

“You could have her slither all the way to the source of the barrier, and shut it down… Or just make a small hole in the barrier, for you to fog through... Not to mention she can do that net thing around your body, to protect you from holy magic, and such…” Spring counted out, as Sylver gently pulled the glass rod away from the glowing sword, and pushed it down into a beaker full of a dark red powder.

As he pulled the glass rod out, the dark red powder made a hissing noise, as the glowing green goo sunk to the bottom, and the glass rod was now completely clean.

“There’s that, but there’s also the fact that she’s the only one who seems to be able to see a certain topic we can’t discuss. And it goes without saying, true loyalty isn’t something you can buy. And… It is nice to have someone with a fresh perspective around. Someone to question my methods, reasoning, tactics-”

“I always-”

“Someone who doesn’t already know what I’m going to say before I say it, and therefore makes any argument we might have largely pointless. If I don’t think I’m wrong, you don’t think I’m wrong, so if you’re trying to poke a hole in my reasoning, you’re doing it armed with the same knowledge I am. And given that I’m objectively smarter than you, if I can’t find a fault in my reasoning, you won’t find it either,” Sylver explained, as he repeatedly pulled wrappings of green glowing foam out of the sword, and sunk it into the dark red powder.

“You know who was great at poking holes in things? Rook. The shade could out plan Aether. He was a psychopath to end all psychopaths. If I didn’t kill him, I have no doubt he would have eventually ruled the world,” Sylver explained, as the sword moaned with a noise that sounded like a cat, more than metal, and ever so slightly straightened out.

“Rook… Oh yeah, the king tyrant, I remember now… Why was he so thin when you made him into a shade?” Spring asked, as Sylver covered the fake sword with a piece of cloth to keep out of view, and focused on the beaker half full of green glowing goop, and dark red clumps of powder floating above it.

“The shade conversion process wasn’t as smooth back then. I focused too much on his mind and fucked up his body. But he said he enjoyed the unnatural limberness his new form gave him, so I just left him like that,” Sylver explained, as he turned away from the small beaker and faced Lola.

He could smell the slightly tangy scent of dwarven black ale, presumably due to the large stain on the front of Lola’s robe. She had a small book in her left hand, and the aforementioned black ale, in an open bottle in the other.

“My mother’ses sword would never bend,” Lola said with a giggly slur in her voice.

She lifted the book in the air and limply threw it towards Sylver. He caught it with his shadow before it hit the floor, and moved it into his hand.

“It’s all there. Whats he said, what he ate, who he talked to, what about, everything. I knew you’d get your panties in a twist over him,” Lola explained, as she used one of the polished clean tables for support, and then floated up a little, to sit on it.

Sylver considered voicing his opinion of drinking at the first sign of trouble but decided against it. He walked over to Lola, who now had her face pressed against the cool metal, and appeared to be moments away from passing out.

He also briefly considered asking Lola what exactly prompted her to drink herself into a coma, but as she fully lay down and looked up at him with tears freely pouring out of her eyes, he decided against it.

Lola mumbled for a while, about how she knew the sword was a fake, before she leaned over, threw up onto Sylver’s floor, and then passed out on one of his operating tables. He had Ging bring him a blanket and pillow to make her comfortable.

After Ging cleaned up the vomit and used magic to get rid of the smell, Sylver went back to using the trace amounts of Edmund’s green magic to make a tracker.

He would later be told that Lola had teleported into her office, trashed it in a screaming fit of rage, then drank three bottles of black ale to calm herself down before she went back to Sylver to try and talk to him.

Sylver left her alone to sleep it off, while he read through Lola’s report, as he waited for the tracker to solidify.

NEXT CHAPTER 

(AN: This, and the next couple of chapters, might feel a little wobbly, so please bear with it until I get back into my proper groove.
PS: Merry Christmas! (a couple of days late)
Next chapter will be out in 48 hours, and there will be a proper schedule after that.)