Ch223-Rock And Hard Place (Patreon)

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Ch223-Rock And Hard Place

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Sylver wasn’t sure what he expected, but he kind of liked how professional everyone appeared.

Dark colors, masks, gloves, and no one was wielding a giant war hammer. Oddly enough they looked almost identical to the cultivators in Faust’s sect, except their masks weren’t skull shaped, or white.

Is this Owl’s plan? To frame me? Sylver wondered as he materialized on one of the nearby roofs.

They were meeting in the run-down “ghost town” where Sylver had collected the decoy box that was later swapped for Anastasia’s. Sylver walked down a flight of invisible steps, and to his surprise, no one paid much attention to him.

Some of the people who had arrived earlier had moved various bits of rubble around to use as seats, while others did as Sylver did, and just remained standing while they waited for whatever it was they were waiting for.

More people arrived, all dressed in dark colors, with next to no skin showing. Sylver didn’t pay them much attention, because his [Lesser Perception] was glued on Wolf/Hound, who was standing there as if he wasn’t more powerful than everyone here put together.

He went out of his way to blend in, his gloves were new, his belt wasn’t wrapped properly, and his mask wasn’t even flush with his face, if Sylver hadn’t noticed his soul, he would have missed him. Hound had a sword with him, but it wasn’t his, the length was wrong for a man of his height, not to mention the grip was too wide for someone with his kind of hands.

Sylver would have assumed Hound was one of the 4 people standing near the middle. They were all wearing a necklace around their necks that made them look different each time Sylver stopped looking at them.

The woman with wide hips and square shoulders became a tall and lanky man, who then became a muscular giant that was bigger than Sylver, and was then replaced by a 5-foot-tall hunchback. Sylver stopped looking at them fairly quickly because he knew their rough shape from the way their shadows landed on the ground.

3 of them were men, about Faust’s height and build, and the third was a 7-foot-tall woman, that had a quiver at her left thigh, and a small crossbow slung over her shoulder. The letter had said to stay silent unless there was an emergency, and apparently, everyone took that to heart.

One of the leaders simply gestured and everyone started moving as the total number of people present reached 34. Hound stayed near the back, and Sylver walked slightly ahead of him.

Everyone kept their distance from one another, but it was just for show, nobody was on guard against the people around them. Even if they didn’t know each other by name or face, this wasn’t their first meeting. No one said a word as they ran.

The group’s silent leaders led them towards a seemingly abandoned mansion, 8 stories high, and made out of the same red wood everything else in this country was made out of. Everyone began to draw their weapons and prepared themselves, and Sylver followed suit, as he reached into the folds of his robe, and drew his ax.

Sylver had refrained from sending his shades too far away from him in case they tripped a Ki alarm of some sort, and instead simply waited for their silent leaders to give the signal.

Roughly half a minute passed after everyone had finished using their Ki to make their weapons harder, and their bodies stronger, or whatever it is they did.

The 8-story tall mansion sort of hopped upward, barely an inch, but enough for the various bits of dust on the walls to fall and envelop it in a cloud.

When the dust settled, Sylver saw that the ground near the left part of the mansion had sunk, as if a large animal had made a nest underneath the building.

There was a moment of confusion in the group Sylver was standing in, as a perplexed man wielding a sword with a green glowing edge appeared right next to the hole and stared at Sylver’s group. There was a shower of sparks, followed by the sound of a limp fleshy body landing on soft soil.

The cultivator who had fought the guard had a faint burn mark on his left shoulder, and right forearm, but otherwise appeared to be fine.

No one said a word as one of the leaders jumped down the hole.

Sylver followed the group, and one by one, people started climbing down the hole. He saw there was a slightly damaged ladder down there, and the walls were covered in soot. The cultivators didn’t bother using the ladder, and instead, just spread their legs out as they fell and pressed them against the walls to slow down their fall.

When it was Sylver’s turn, he jumped down into the dark hole, and just before he would have collided with the man who had gone before him, he used [Fog Form] to become a nearly invisible cloud of vapor. He very quickly traveled down the vertical passage, and materialized at the very bottom, to the surprise of the man holding a dimly glowing yellow-colored rock.

As far as secret underground tunnels went, there wasn’t anything special about this one. It was dark, damp, and Sylver’s eyes felt uncomfortable from the increased air pressure.

The ceiling was quite low, so much so that Sylver would have needed to get onto his knees to stand up straight, but to make up for that, the walls were ridiculously far apart from each other.

There were two long pieces of metal embedded into the floor, going by the shape and the fact that there were grooves in the rock floor, some sort of wheeled device traveled along these small rails.

As the last person arrived, the 4 silent leaders gestured for everyone to walk forward.

The 4 leaders didn’t stop when the tunnel suddenly split into 3 and continued going forward. The rails on the ground turned right, and now Sylver and company were walking down a completely featureless tunnel.

A couple of people were holding small glowing rocks, that provided just enough illumination that everyone wasn’t bumping into one another.

They walked for some time, as the 4 people leading them were following a very specific path through the maze of tunnels. Sylver and Ria both memorize the path they were taking, just in case.

Sylver guessed that this was a mining operation of some sort, the tunnels looked about right, but going by the grid pattern, they weren’t mining for ores and were instead searching for something.

Just like Sylver, and Faust, no one’s feet made any sound as they ran Sylver couldn’t even hear the sound of people breathing.

Just as Sylver was about to ask, “how much longer,” the leaders stopped running. The woman leader, who currently appeared to be a dwarf-shaped man, placed her hand onto the wall and going by the movement of her shoulders, pushed against it.

Sylver kept one eye on the girl but kept the rest of his eyes on Hound. Hound had taken a deep breath when the girl pushed against the wall, and as she pushed against the wall again, he continued to hold his breath.

Is he nervous?

With every attempt to push the wall away, Hound gripped the hilt of his sword harder and harder, he was ready to lunge at someone by the 6th push.

Should I be nervous?

Sylver allowed the woman 10 more attempts at whatever she was doing, before he carefully walked through the crowd, and silently gestured towards the wall.

She gave the thing one final shove before she mockingly bowed and presented the empty wall to the masked giant.

Sylver placed his hand against the handprint she had created on the dusty surface and sent a pulse of mana through it.

“There’s something here. Feels like a pulley of some sort,” Sylver tapped out to Ria, even as she was already slithering around his shoulder, arm, and very carefully sent a razor-thin tendril out of Sylver’s sleeve.

“Oh wow… It's like a 50-pin lock and… Anyway, push against the wall on the count of three,” Ria said, as she counted down, and Sylver pushed with the rough amount of force he imagined the woman cultivator had been pushing with.

There was a barely audible click, followed by a deafening and echoing sound of something extremely large and hollow, slamming against something small and solid.

Sylver stepped away from the wall, as it started opening the way a garage door would. The dusty piece of façade effortlessly slid upward and out of the way, as Sylver’s companions did their best to shield their eyes from the sudden light.

A ridiculously wide staircase led downward, but before the wall had finished sliding out of the way, the 4 leaders were already running down the seemingly slippery with moisture carved stone stairs.

Sylver pretended to massage his hand while he waited for Hound to move and followed behind the significantly less nervous man.

He felt something weird brush against his face as they ran down the stairs, and after a couple of steps, realized he was passing through hundreds of Ki barriers. Every single step had at least 5 layers of dormant Ki barriers.

Sylver did his best to ignore them as continued silently running down the stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, there was a human sized door on the right, and a giant closed gate on the left. 2 of the leaders disappeared, and by the time the 2 that remained reached the bottom of the stairs, the 2 who had disappeared, were in the process of pushing the ridiculously thick human sized door open.

It was at least a meter thick, as was the wall, and as Sylver passed through the doorway, he felt as if his face was about to melt from the sheer quantity of Ki that made up the dormant barrier.

Sylver was so focused on the door, that he very nearly bumped into the man who had been ahead of him. The group had come to a complete halt. The ceiling had some sort of liquid flowing along it, that was glowing, and illuminated the large hallway they were standing in with a relaxing blue light.

The 4 leaders were standing on the right side of the door, while everyone else, including Hound, stood on the left side.

“Good luck,” one of the men leaders said, Sylver couldn’t even tell which one, there was some sort of augmentation to their voice that made it impossible to figure out which of the 3 had spoken.

“Follow me,” Hound barked, his voice wasn’t his, he had the same augmentation the leader had.

The remaining people wordlessly followed the man, and after maybe 2 minutes of running, they arrived at another meter-thick door. It was already open, and strangely enough, there was a very faint smell of bananas in the air.

Before them, there was an enormous city, identical to the one Sylver had been in when he was hunting the Blue Tiger heirs, save for the fact that some of the buildings in this city had bright glowing lights inside of them.

“INTRUDERS!” a voice screamed somewhere far away.

Half of the group ignored it and jumped off the platform they had been standing on and began to fight the guards that had jumped up to them, while the other half turned their heads in an attempt to find the source of the scream.

Sylver spread his vision out and watched the battle going on behind him with one eye, while he looked at the spot he was going to land with the other, and raised an eyebrow as a man in the distance kept trying to pull a lever of some sort, but seemed increasingly panicked with every failed attempt.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to make the arrow flying towards him, fly through him, as he moved his body down towards the ground. He didn’t see it, but he heard the unmistakable sound of an arrowhead piercing flesh up above him, as he landed on one of the roofs.

Sylver flicked his hand and produced Fobur’s tracker, while he leaned his head to the left, and a throwing knife harmlessly flew by him. He kept one eye on the tracker and kept the other on the man who had thrown the aforementioned knife.

He was young, just barely above 20, and was armed with a U-shaped instrument in his left hand, and a handful of throwing knives in his right.

“Walk away,” Sylver offered the young man.

For a moment he thought the boy was considering his words.

But, as the young man lifted his arm, and a dagger appeared in Sylver’s forehead, he understood that his words had fallen on deaf ears. Sylver’s decoy flicked its head back and made a show of shuddering, before it gradually fell over, as the real Sylver materialized on the street below, and consulted his Fobur tracker.

The houses were being used as holding cells, if the confused woman in the house Sylver had been standing on a moment prior was to be believed. She had a pair of shackles that connected to a collar on her neck, that had a short chain attached to something on the floor.

The boy above realized something was wrong when he went to decapitate the decoy, and instead of the masked head rolling away from the body, the whole thing instead disappeared in a puff of black smoke.

Sylver flinched as the wave of Ki brushed against his body, and as the boy disappeared, so did Sylver.

This deep underground there was very little airflow, Sylver’s fog spread out unimpeded, save for the odd clashing of swords that created a small wave of compressed air.

With the vast majority of guards focusing on the significantly flashier cultivators above, Sylver almost didn’t need to bother with illusions and decoys.

More importantly, some of the holding cells were opening, and the people who had been sitting inside them were coming out. The guards still outnumbered them, by a lot, but with every passing moment, their numerical advantage became less and less significant.

Granted, not all of the released prisoners joined in on the fighting, a couple went as far as to hold their doors closed, but there were enough to make the 200 something guards struggle to keep track of everyone.

Amidst the chaos, the necromancer slowly moving from one hiding spot to the next, was just short of ignored. A couple of guards found him, tried to attack him, but by the time they realized there was something weird with the robe-wearing corpse, Sylver was long gone.

In the background people who had allegedly been tortured for years yelled in joy, as they wretched their captors' weapons out of their hands and proceeded to murder their way through any guard unfortunate enough to get within reach.

Sylver waited a second before he used [Fog Form] again. Using the perk in quick bursts was uncomfortable, and Sylver needed to have a solid form to see which direction Fobur’s tracker was pointing.

There weren’t any signs on any of the houses/holding cells as to who was inside and to make matters worse, not all of the prisoners were fighting the guards. A couple were indiscriminately attacking their allies and saviors.

Sylver lost his footing as he clutched at his chest and turned his head towards the source of the discomfort. It felt as if there was a thick rope wrapped around his insides.

A woman with blood-red eyes and arms that looked like they had been dipped in tar was pointing at Sylver with her right hand as if she was trying to grab something. She turned her hand clockwise and Sylver felt one of his hearts mimic the motion.

The woman spoke with a lisp, likely due to her forked tongue.

“It’ss been a while ssince I-”

[Human/??? (Bloodied Demonic Crawler) Defeated!]

The combined Dai and Sho shade nearly fell over from the lack of resistance.

It had used all 4 of its massive blades to squash the demonic cultivator, and due to her lack of a Ki shield, she had been reduced to a splattering of black and red.

Even though the cunt hadn’t completely torn Sylver’s heart out, she had bruised a handful of arteries from the twisting.

Of course Fobur is in a prison filled with demonic cultivators, why wouldn’t he be? Sylver asked himself with a tired sigh, as he forced his heart back into position, and continued traveling through his rather large cloud of fog.

Now that there were actual threats mixed into the chaos, Sylver had to make an educated guess as to who was a torture victim, and who was a demonic cultivator that could bypass Sylver’s magical defenses.

As a person composed mostly out of negative mana, demonic cultivators could seriously fuck Sylver up.

They were even worse than priests.

Priests were predictable, they used magic, and even if there was a bit of variation, the result was always the same beam of scalding holy magic.

Demonic cultivators, on the other hand, were like their name implied and had the kind of random and nonsensical magic/techniques demons possessed.

Going by the name of the woman’s class, and the fact that she targeted Sylver’s heart, she had some sort of blood-related technique.

Now, a reasonable person would say “the sludge running through Sylver’s body isn’t even remotely close to human blood,” and they would be 100% right, however.

Demons, and by extension anyone associated with them, cared more about concepts, than reality. Conceptionally, the liquid Sylver’s hearts were slowly forcing through his body, was blood.

Even if the reality was that it was significantly closer to embalming fluid than human, or animal, blood.

Sylver flinched and traveled through his network of fog, as a man appeared a couple of meters away from him.

The last thing he needed right now was to meet someone with a soul-related demonic cultivation. He should be fine, his current body was built specifically with strengthening his soul in mind, but even with that, there was very little to be gained by fighting a demonic cultivator capable of slicing souls, and potentially a lot to lose.

They didn’t even leave behind good corpses.

Demonic energy wasn’t like negative mana, it didn’t take off its shoes as it entered, didn’t respect boundaries, demonic energy was a lot like allowing a shit-covered mongrel into your home.

And when the aforementioned mongrel started to shake its body, people had the gall to act surprised when their ceiling, walls, and floor ended up being caked in excrement.

“How could I have possibly known?” a sorcerer caught summoning an army of imps would say, right before one of Sylver’s shades vaporized him from existence.

The answer was of course “priests.”

They told anyone who would listen “don’t summon mother fucking demons you stupid fucking idiots,” they made songs, limericks, told stories, priests went out of their way to inform anyone, and everyone, about the dangers of demons.

The fact that there were people actively working against demons, and everything demon-related, was one of the few reasons Sylver never made a serious effort of eradicating priests from the world.

Like a beaten dog, Sylver scuttled away into his fog and reappeared a fair distance away from the man who had landed near him.

Demons were unpredictable. All the power related bullshit aside, the fact that Sylver didn’t know if someone was about to make his skin strangle him, or if they were going to make the air in his lungs tear him apart, meant he couldn’t prepare for the attack and was as good as defenseless.

Sylver checked Fobur’s tracker, more out of reflex than anything deliberate, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Fobur was very close by. Sylver got a rough idea of the distance by moving the tracker back and forth.

As he materialized near the house that held Fobur, he felt like screaming.

Because his [Dead Dominion] perk told him the last thing he wanted to hear, once he realized he was in a giant cave littered with demonic cultivators.

Sylver walked through the broken-down door, and then stood there for a few seconds, staring at the corpse, while he ran his hands through his hair.

“Is he dead?” Ria asked as Sylver gestured at the blue-lipped man.

His collar and shackles had fallen off, but they didn’t fall very far, since he had a giant bruise all around his neck, from when someone had strangled him to death.

“Going by the color of his eyes, and the cold piss that had soaked his pants, he’s been dead for a while. Maybe an hour before we got here,” Sylver explained, as he made the corpse float over to him, and turned it around in the air once before he stored it away in his [Bound Bones] storage.

Sylver gave himself a moment to gather his thoughts, and his brief moment of peaceful thinking was interrupted by a staggering amount of Ki. He ran out of the building he had been standing in and saw two people fighting near the stalactite-covered ceiling.

One fighter was using a hook and rope to swing from place to place, while the other seemed to be using a floating sword. As the two fighters clashed blades, Sylver retreated into the house, so the wave of Ki wasn’t direct, but even as the dense bit of energy bounced off the floor and collided with Sylver’s mana shield, and layered soul barrier, it still made the tips of his fingers feel tingly.

Sylver looked up a final time, as he waited for his fog to reach the exit and was taken aback by what he saw. Up near the base of the stalactites, large unmarked urns were wedged between the angled stone cones.

More importantly, there was a bright red string connecting one urn to the next, and as Sylver followed the string, he saw more and more urns scattered on the ceiling.

Sylver looked around the chaotic battles happening left and right. He honestly couldn’t tell who was on who's side, and more importantly, the people that were on his side were also on the side of demonic cultivators.

There had been times when Sylver had to make difficult choices… but this wasn’t one of them.

He wasn’t going to pretend the people dying here today, the invaders and guards alike, would be happy with what he was about to do.

But at the same time, he didn’t particularly care about the opinions and feelings of people who were trying to release demonic cultivators, and people who were keeping demonic cultivators captive.

On the other hand, this area is far enough away from Arda that it’s not really my problem… Not to mention having the emperor and the various sects busy dealing with demonic cultivators will mean they will have less manpower to spend on me.

Sylver went back inside Fobur’s holding cell/house and knelt near the shackles. The carvings looked like random squiggle lines to Sylver’s eye, but since they had been holding demonic cultivators down here surely that meant that these cuffs were enchanted to restrict demonic Ki?

Or something along those lines.

Clearly, these people knew what they were doing.

Granted, Fobur wasn’t a demonic cultivator, and it was weird that he was down here, but Sylver was certain there was a good explanation for that.

His best guess was that this cave/underground city was treated as a “throw away the key,” sort of prison. Again, weird that they didn’t just kill everyone, but once again, Sylver was sure there was a good reason for that.

In hindsight, Sylver should have done all of this thinking while moving towards the exit.

But how could he have possibly known that these people’s first move had been to burry everyone in rubble?

At the exact moment Sylver decided to just leave, without setting off any explosions, the boy who had been trying to pull the lever since the very start, that Sylver now knew was connected to the giant network of explosives up above, got lucky and triggered previously inactive mechanism.

There was an initial sound, that passed through the cave with an echoing pop.

Think cork being pushed out of a bottle of champagne pop.

Following that ever so faint sound was a silence so dead it almost hurt Sylver’s ears. Everyone who had been occupied with a life-or-death battle, put it on hold, as their sixth sense informed them of what was to come.

“FOR THE EMPEROR!” the guards screeched collectively, with a bit too much harmonization.

As if these suicidal maniacs had practiced their death cries until they got them perfect.

Predictably, the only entrance/exit out of this place was gone.

Or rather, an impassable block of solid rock had fallen out of the ceiling and blocked the relatively small exit.

Now, Sylver could make a hole using abyss magic, which he could then squeeze through using [Fog Form], but first, he would have to survive a literal mountain falling on him. He didn’t know exactly how deep underground they were and didn’t want to know, but his most optimistic guess was that they were really fucking deep.

But again, thanks to [Fog Form] it wasn’t too big of a problem, and with Sylver’s indestructible ribcage, worst case scenario he would lose a couple of limbs. He would be buried deep deep underground, but a mixture of abyss magic, and [Fog Form] was all that stood between him and the surface.

But the important thing was, Hound wasn’t nervous. His body language implied that he was laughing, which meant that he had a plan, and a way out, and-

There was a very brief sputtering of grey smoke in the spot Hound had been standing, as he teleported himself somewhere safe.

Sylver reached up underneath his mask and pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment, as he gathered his thoughts, and tried to find a way to leave this future burial site filled with suicidal guards, and slightly more dangerous crazed demonic cultivators, without having his soul torn up in the process.

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