Ch181-Three Of A Kind (Patreon)

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Ch181-Three Of A Kind

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It had 7 legs, as advertised, but instead of having them in a line, like a centipede, the creature had them side by side. Only the front left leg was alone, the other 3 were doubled up.

But even if the general shape was right, calling it a “horse,” felt disingenuous.

For starters, it didn’t have hooves, or rather it did, but they were currently folded up, and Sylver could see that it had something that looked closer to the feet of a cat. Claws as thin as razor blades peaked out from within the folds near the bit where the flesh ended, since describing the stubby appendages as “toes” didn’t feel right.

Going up the legs, the creature had 4 points where the limbs bent, as far as Sylver could tell at least. And unlike a regular horse or any animal with hooves, the joints didn’t appear to be hinge joints. Meaning the creature likely wouldn’t have any trouble using its back legs to scratch its own ass.

But its lower half was likely the least interesting thing about it. From his attempt at a mana-based inspection, Sylver discovered that its inside were a cacophony of illogical chaos.

Lungs so small they appeared to have been crushed since the moment it tried to breathe, a stomach that had seemingly digested itself, no heart, no kidneys, liver, pancreas, spleen, intestines the whole thing was mostly muscle and bone.

Or at least it appeared that way.

It was completely hairless, with a tail that looked like it belonged to a rat. Similarly, it was skinny and starved looking, enough so that Sylver could easily count its ribs and vertebrate, even without having to inspect it with his mana.

And then there was the head!

It had fucking antlers, of all things. There were 2 pairs, ones that curled protectively around the side of its head, and a second pair that was straight and pointed upwards, perfect for impaling someone.

Similar to Bruno, it had 4 sets of eyes, 2 exactly where you expected a horse to have eyes, and the remaining 6 were about half as big and located between the area of its eyes and muzzle.

Sylver stood up from the unconscious creature and wiped his hands clean on his robe.

“How is it still alive?” Sylver asked, as he walked away from the mare, and turned to face Bruno.

“Regular fresh blood injections from several donor monsters. The others died of natural causes, but this thing managed to survive somehow. There was something off about it’s soul, so I decided it would be better to keep it alive until you arrived,” Bruno explained, as the unconscious horse creature shifted on the hay covered floor.

“What it is anyway?” Sylver asked.

[N/A – N/A – 186]
[HP: 644 – 1%]
[MP: 19 – 0%]
[Stamina: 0 – 0%]
[Corpse – Unique]
[Soul – Grand]

“Before you left, do you remember how I mentioned I needed to get a functional base working?” Bruno asked.

“Yeah.”

“I found that certain monsters share a link, and found that a certain type of base works great for one monster, but produces a stillborn for another. There are currently 24 types of monster bases, mammal, insect, arachnid, bird, slime, you get the gist,” Bruno explained.

Sylver nodded along.

“Normally I create my chimeras by using one of the bases, typically in the form of an egg, and combine it with sample material from a monster with the desired feature. From there it’s a simple case of adjusting its development while it grows, to remove the unwanted characteristics, and leave only the beneficial ones,” Bruno explained.

“And what exactly did you combine to produce this?” Sylver asked as he gestured at the horse-ish monster.

“I was getting to it. Creating chimeras used to be more art than science. I would do the magical equivalent of banging two rocks together while hoping something good happened. It’s a lot less chaotic now, I can reliably gauge the chance of success within the first 2 weeks of growth. What you’re looking at here, is an amalgamation of my failures,” Bruno said.

“It doesn’t look or feel stitched together, so I’m assuming this is a classical chimera made out of failed chimeras?” Sylver said.

Bruno was right the soul did feel weird, but he was certain he could only feel 1. Chimeras were famously difficult to create because 99 times out of 100 the various mixed creatures’ souls would fight for dominance, and the winner would usually be too damaged to survive for more than a handful of minutes.

“Initially I just, and don’t judge me for this, I just fed the failures to whatever was nearest to me. But after we had a minor viral outbreak that nearly killed half the chimeras, I just tossed the dead failures into a giant locked up hole, and incinerated them every other week,” Bruno said with an odd smile on his face.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders and waited for the old man to continue.

“It was the best thing I’ve ever done. See… What ended up happening is that the hundreds of thousands of failures ended up effectively competing against each other. And every now and then something very very interesting would crawl out of it,” Bruno explained and gestured at the horse-like monster laying in front of them.

“You do know this is essentially how you make a demon vessel, right?” Sylver asked.

A bit of color drained from Bruno’s face but didn’t seem to affect his smile all that much.

“That certainly explains why some of the sigils I used appeared demonic in origin… Would you mind giving it a look over before you leave, to make sure I don’t accidentally summon a demon?” Bruno asked.

Sylver rolled his eyes and then tried to shift the conversation back to the creature on the floor.

Instead, he felt as if something slapped his right hand’s fingers. Sylver looked down at his hand and could see the tiny piece of wood wrapped around his middle finger flickering with pale white energy.

Sylver shifted his gaze from the ring to the creature lying on the floor a few steps away from him, and then returned it to the ring.

“I think I’ll have to, because that right there, seems to be a dormant demon vessel…” Sylver said as he took a step toward the monster.

“Are you going to kill it or…” Bruno asked.

Sylver wordlessly took another step towards the creature. The ring on his finger was practically humming with power.

He turned around and walked away from the creature until the ring stopped reacting.

“I’m about 99 percent certain I’m right, but I’m going to check the framework you used, just in case,” Sylver said and followed Bruno.

***

“Well, I was right,” Sylver said, as he finished going through the framework carved into the metal plate that surrounded the hole filled with dark red sludge.

“I was trying to summon a demon?” Bruno asked.

The room they were in was a sphere, it was the lowest point Bruno had access to. Small holes lined the walls, that were connected to chutes that Bruno used to dump whatever chimera failed to come to life. In the middle there was a very large, and very deep, cylindrical hole, that was lined with metal. The ceiling was covered in black soot.

Sylver peered down into the hole again and could feel the various souls leaving their respective corpses, and could also feel a couple trying to force their corpses to merge with something near them.

“Not quite. How familiar are you with demons?” Sylver asked.

“I think I could summon one if I really wanted to, but the specifics elude me,” Bruno said.

“Right, well… You know how when a demon enters a host, the host is sometimes driven insane almost immediately? And how the demon will typically start altering the person’s physiology before it’s even finished taking over?” Sylver asked, and Bruno nodded.

“Sure,” Bruno said. Sylver thought about the next part for a while before he carried on.

“Look, just between us, a very uncomfortable amount of dark magic tends to rub shoulders with demons. Necromancy and chimera magic included. I choose to believe that this is because demons believed that the people desperate enough to learn necromancy were easy targets.

“By which I mean the crazies that want to bring their dead spouse back to life, and the corpse fuckers, would be the easiest to convince to summon a demon. Sort of like… like a parent knowing that their child will be obedient if they give them their favorite candy, and as a result, the parent has a large stockpile of that candy. It’s why demon magic can sometimes feel similar to necromancy,” Sylver explained, as he and Bruno shared a look of mutual understanding.

“Sounds like a very solid theory. I mean, if a demon offered to solve my problem, I can’t say I wouldn’t be tempted,” Bruno said. “But I know better, I’m not stupid,” Bruno added before Sylver could speak.

“Fair enough, you won’t mind if I ask you to scrap this whole framework in that case?” Sylver asked with a gesture towards the metal ring that surrounded the hole.

He could see Bruno was thinking it over.

“Or I could just adjust it to remove the demonic elements,” Sylver offered.

“Yes, yes, that would be better. Even now, the only alternative I can think of also feels kind of demonic… I’m going to have to start a couple of projects over,” Bruno said.

Sylver gave Bruno a small lecture while he scrubbed out the demonic sigils and replaced them with a significantly less efficient alternative.

“Demons, when they’re first born, are just a bunch of souls without a purpose, that just so happened to clump together. Over time, if the demon is lucky, the souls clump together in such a way that they manage to agree on a direction. Killing children, eating human flesh, you know, the regular stuff the people that don’t pray to a god allegedly all wish to do,” Sylver explained.

He traced a section of metal with his finger and melted a hole in it. He pulled the metal fragment out and smoothed away the carvings before he flipped it around and left the space empty.

“Without gods claiming souls, there would be demons everywhere. But thanks to those bastards, a very small percentage of souls remain unclaimed and end up in the demon realm. Naturally born undead are the leftovers of the leftovers, the souls the gods couldn’t claim, and the ones the demons either didn’t get to or didn’t want,” Sylver continued.

With his nearly 360-degree vision Sylver could simultaneously focus on the sigils underneath him, and on the ever so slightly frightened Bruno watching him work from a safe distance.

“It’s why just about every single religion despises the undead. We’re unclaimed souls, the sooner they kill us, the sooner their god can claim us, and grow stronger. Fucking demons too, we’re easy targets for them, “oh I’ll do anything to become alive again, open a portal to a demon realm, sure, why not, I’ll do it,” the worst are the undead that used to be mages. Those fuckers know better, but don’t care, because being undead is apparently so fucking terrible,” Sylver said, as he put a little too much pressure on the metal, and pierced his glowing finger right through.

He waited for a couple of seconds until he calmed down.

“Maybe 4 out of 5 demons are summoned by desperate undead. It’s just that they’re too weak to host the demon, and they end up dying without anyone finding out about them. The living, on the other hand, demons drool over the thought of getting a living host.

“Undead bodies are usually incapable of feeling anything. What’s the point of ripping a toddler apart and rubbing its warm blood over your face if you can’t feel it properly?” Sylver asked rhetorically, as he calmly continued down the framework and made it less and less efficient with each edited sigil.

He punched the next piece, and his fist went through the 4-inch-thick metal and sent a spray of stone dust into the churning liquid inside the hole.

“At least you did it by accident, but you wouldn’t believe how many times I caught my “friends” trying to summon a fucking demon. I used to think that demonologist in the Ibis was a paranoid lunatic, but if you ask me, he should have been twice as paranoid as he was. Poor bastard disappeared into the demon realm and never came back…” Sylver said, as he continued working down the framework, and was surprised when he was finished.

“What was I saying?” Sylver asked, as he stood up from the floor, and flicked the metal pieces stuck to his knees.

“You were going to explain what exactly a demon vessel was, and why what Bruno was doing is dangerous, but you went off track almost immediately to complain about gods,” Spring said from within Sylver’s shadow.

“Are demons really that big of a problem? I mean, I know they are, but I don’t know how exactly,” Bruno asked, and Sylver stared at him.

“I’ll put it like this… If, and I mean if, I knew for certain that there was a demon in Arda, not just a demon inside a host, but a tier 1 demon, fully materialized, I would leave, and not look back. I would take everyone I care for with me, and if they didn’t want to go, I would force them. A demon isn’t something you can joke around with, you need extremely specialized knowledge to so much as speak to one, let alone try to fight it,” Sylver explained, and hoped the slight shaking in his voice made it clear he was being serious.

“I know you just took the time to edit that for me, but I think I’m going to scrap it…” Bruno said and gestured at the metal ring around the hole full of discarded monsters.

“Have you never fought a demon before?” Sylver asked cautiously.

“I think I did, but it’s all very hazy. So what’s a demon vessel?” Bruno answered, and attempted to steer the conversation away from the uncomfortable topic of his memory.

“It’s uh… So demons are a big bundle of souls, right? Now, the accepted theory is that they somehow merge into 1 soul, I say theory because no one knows for sure. Demons aren’t exactly cooperative when we tried to catch them to study them. Anyway, the problem with their soul consisting of a bunch of souls, is that it doesn’t have an agreed-upon physical form,” Sylver explained.

Or tried to, given the confused look on Bruno’s face.

“That doesn’t sound right. I was always told souls can’t-”

“Demons don’t play by the same rules we do. At all. Their magic can do shit the Ibis wrote off as impossible millennia ago. If they weren’t so impossibly dangerous to deal with, they would have been a very valuable resource for us.

“But as it stands, they are significantly more trouble than they are worth, not to mention you’ll get the attention of the gods if you fuck around with demons too much, and that always ends in tragedy,” Sylver interrupted, and could see Bruno was about to disagree, but apparently the defeated look on Sylver’s face changed his mind.

“I’ll write out all the frameworks I’ve built so you can have a look over them,” Bruno said.

“Don’t. Anyone else, I would ask them to stop. Now that you know, I can trust that you’ll go through everything with a fine-tooth comb and get rid of anything potentially demonic… Look, a bit of demon shit is alright, but this is literally a framework for a demonic vessel, that you repurposed,” Sylver said, and gestured with both hands towards the giant hole and metallic carved ring that surrounded it.

“Is that horse a demonic vessel?” Bruno asked, and succeeded in pulling Sylver back on track.

“In essence, yes… If a demon manages to successfully possess a host, one of its goals will usually be to get the host pregnant or impregnate someone else. The reason for this is that, while the host itself isn’t good enough, the demon has enough influence to ever so slightly nudge the created child’s body in the direction it desires,” Sylver said.

“I remember now; you’ve talked about this before… It’s why a priest always comes over whenever a child is born, and sometimes has to force their way inside to see the newborn,” Bruno said.

“Demons aren’t stupid… well… the ones smart enough to figure out that impregnating someone is their best bet to materializing in this realm aren’t stupid. They never make it obvious, no horns, no bright red eyes, no second head, the changes they make are subtle, barely noticeable. But, because priests are priests, they are very rarely able to find the piece of extra bone inside the child’s neck, or a small clump of flesh in the back of their eye socket,” Sylver counted out.

“Yes, yes, you said they kill the ones with deformities that aren’t demons, just to be safe, while in reality, it's so that they can pretend to be useful,” Bruno reminded, and Sylver regretfully had to correct him.

“I might have been exaggerating on that front, you do have to remember that I am a little biased when it comes to priests, or anything holy. Anyway, the point of it is, a demonic vessel, is a person, or creature, with the potential, to be a perfect host for the demon that helped conceive it. More often than not, the child dies very early in its life, but every now and then...” Sylver’s voice trailed off as he tried to think of a better way to explain everything.

“I think I get it. Why are you interested in the horse though?” Bruno asked.

“You’ve heard of soul mates, right?” Sylver countered.

“One true love, and all that. People that were destined from the moment they were born to be together,” Bruno answered.

“I always really liked that as a concept. That for all the horrible shit that exists, there’s also this one perfect person that was born just for you… That horse thing is my soul mate,” Sylver said and maintained a perfect calm and serious expression on his face for a whole 5 seconds before Bruno burst out laughing and that caused Sylver to break into a grin.

Sylver spoke after he wiped the tears that had formed in his eyes.

“No, but in all seriousness, soul mates are real. Not in the destiny sense, but there is such a thing as compatible souls. Spring, for example, is a compatible soul. So is Ciege, although he’s a different kind of compatible, the overall concept is the same,” Sylver explained.

He toyed around with the ring on his finger, and with a wet-sounding crunch, managed to rip it off.

“So now what?” Bruno asked, as Sylver pinched the oozing wound on his hand, and forced it to seal itself shut.

He tossed his finger into the air, which was starting to glow a very pale white light, and caught it.

“Now I need you to go wake that horse up as much as you can. Fresh blood, healing magic, whatever you can do to make it as alive as possible. It doesn’t need to be permanent, but I’ll need at least 5 minutes,” Sylver said.

Bruno nodded at him and went back to the area where the horse creature was kept, while Sylver focused on making sure the demonic elements in the framework carved into the ring were all gone.

***

Sylver could feel it from the moment he left the protective barrier that surrounded the reject hole. A sort of… calling, but at the same time, a warning.

As he floated using [Fog Form] he mentally prepared himself for what was to come.

On a certain level, he was glad for it. The fact that the creature knew what he wanted without him having to say it, meant it was already on a certain level connected to him.

On the other hand, that thing looked tough, and Sylver would be handicapped by the fact that he can’t kill it. An advantage the horse thing would very likely abuse to no end.

Sylver cracked his neck out of habit, or tried to, and discovered that there weren’t any bubbles inside his neck to pop. The same happened with his fingers, and his legs, but Sylver warmed himself up as much as possible either way.

Sylver materialized a few meters away from the thing and stared it right in the eye.

It towered over Bruno, its 7 legs had extended and changed the angle at which they protruded from its body, and made them look almost like spider legs. Each and every foot had daggers for claws, and Sylver now noticed that they weren’t even fully extended.

Its torso remained largely the same if you ignored the jagged ridges that formed on its spine, and that its skin had a very strange glossy look, that in Sylver’s mind meant that it was using magic to protect its body.

“I don’t know what happened!” Bruno shouted as he continued his attempt to get the animal to calm down, but it never so much as glanced down at him.

Sylver produced a small wooden bowl out of his pocket and placed his ring-wearing finger into it. He lifted it up to his mouth and whispered a single word in a language that was older than the Ibis itself.

The finger and ring liquefied in an instant and crackled with a weak pale white light. Sylver held the glowing bowl out towards the creature. The horse-like creature gradually moved its eyes away from Sylver, and instead focused on the bowl in his hand.

It shook its head, just the smallest amount before its gaze returned to Sylver’s head.

“Are you really about to get into a dick measuring contest with a horse?” Bruno asked, as he reached up into the air and was lifted up and away by a small spider string.

Part of the reason Sylver liked Bruno so much is that he could read the room, and knew when to leave.

“It seems to consider me too weak to be its partner. And I have a near-perfect track record when it comes to dick-measuring contests! Not to mention its mare, I win by default!” Sylver shouted back.

He gently floated the small wooden bowl with the pale glowing liquid off to the side and summoned a shade to hold it for him.

“Bruno, I can’t thank you enough, this is one of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten!” Sylver shouted as Bruno gave him a weak smile and a wave, as he disappeared into the hexagonal ceiling, to watch from the sidelines.

The horse-like creature stood perfectly still, as did Sylver.

One thing that worried Sylver was that he didn’t know what exactly this beast was capable of. It was made from a pile of discarded failures, and Bruno admitted to the fact that he had never actually seen it fight. It would run away into the dungeon and would return a week later having gained 10 levels.

Sylver quietly summoned his ax into his hand, and he shifted his grip so that he could hit with the blunt side. Once it drank his liquefied [Gnarled Staff Fragment Of Igri] any damage the horse sustained would be healed.

All Sylver needed to do was show this giant spider/horse/whatever monster that he was stronger than it, without actually killing it in the process…

How hard could it be?

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