Ch224-Rock Bottom (Patreon)

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Ch224-Rock Bottom

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When he was younger, Sylver looked down on anyone who claimed to be “itching for a fight.”

To Sylver, a fight was an obstacle, nothing more.

Anyone who went out of their way to place obstacles between themselves and whatever it is they wanted, was an abject retard, as far as Sylver was concerned.

For the large part, he still held that opinion.

He had seen far too many people die because they didn’t go for the kill and fought “fairly,” to ever really enjoy a fight.

But there was a point where Sylver understood what they were talking about.

At times life can be overwhelming, with too many problems that all need to be resolved urgently, all at the same time. And they all require your full undivided attention, despite your undivided attention being in short supply.

During those times, having something so simple as “kill this guy, before he kills you,” is such a small and manageable problem that it’s hard not to love every second you spend solving it. If a person is stressed enough, they might go as far as to prolong the solving of this simple problem, just so they can savor it.

Because once the problem is solved, the opponent is dead, you no longer have 1 simple problem to solve, you have 50 different problems, and you have no idea which one to start with.

Sylver never did that.

Never.

He valued his time too much, and try as he might, even when his life was on the line, he never stopped looking at the bigger picture.

Even now.

Even as a ridiculously giant pillar was descending on him, he didn’t forget why he was here, and what he was going to do after he got out.

Sure, on a certain level, every ounce of his attention was focused on coming up with a plan so as to not get crushed like a fucking ant, or worse, get trapped underground, but Sylver’s “every ounce,” didn’t include the ounces in the back of his mind, that were tasked solely with worrying about Edmund.

These hidden ounces weren’t new. The back of Sylver’s mind was always worried about something, it’s why he had to drug himself into a coma to rest properly when he was the Arch-Necromancer, and why he drank himself into a blackout at every available opportunity.

There had been 2 explosions.

The first had been near the base of the stalactites. It made them fall down and left the ceiling of the cave flat.

The second explosion, from what Sylver was currently seeing, had been used to make the square shape between the tunnel fall as a single, solid, block. The simplest way to imagine it is if someone hung a big square block on 4 pieces of rope, and then cut all 4 pieces simultaneously.

The important thing was, that the block of stone currently falling towards the ground, and the people on the aforementioned ground, including Sylver, was a single solid piece of stone.

Why was this important?

Because falling rubble had a metric fuck ton of air gaps, gaps that a person with the ability to turn into gas could have easily traveled through, but a solid piece of rock didn’t have any gaps.

Sylver considered his options.

He had a fair bit of time, the block of stone was falling down relatively slowly, compared to how fast Sylver’s hearts were beating, and how quickly his somewhat panicked mind was processing information.

The block of stone was square, but the cave/city wasn’t and was wider than the rock, so if he went to the edges, he wouldn’t be crushed.

The first problem with that was that Sylver wasn’t sure he could cover that distance before the stone fell onto him. The second problem was that the demonic cultivators were already doing that, and he didn’t want to go near them.

But even if Sylver made it to the edges, and the demonic cultivators/guards didn’t kill him, what was his next move going to be? The block of stone was flush with the walls, it was practically sliding down them, Sylver was certain it wouldn’t leave any gaps when it finally landed.

Aside from the fact that it was going to land up against the only exit, Sylver also suspected that the tunnels/staircase they had used to come down here, had explosives in the walls/ceiling, and were blocked off.

There was a vomit-inducingly powerful stench of bananas in the air, which Sylver guessed was due to the liquid explosive held inside the urns.

Digging down into the ground was an option. But then what? It wasn’t as if Sylver was standing on soft soil, if anything, the block of stone falling onto him was softer than the stuff underneath him.

[Advanced Earth Manipulation] was next to useless in this environment. Moving earth around cost a lot of mana, moving solid rock out of the way would burn Sylver’s mana channels to a crisp before he had dug 100 meters.

[Xander’s Waystone] was an option.

Sylver could find a spot to stay still, and within a couple of minutes, he would be inside Tuli’s corpse. The main problem with that was that it would take Sylver months to get back to the Schlagen mountains.

Actually, if I get Chrys to tell Lola to send her teleportation mage over to Tuli, he could just teleport me straight back here… Has it been 20 days since Faust and I came here?

Yes, it has.

So, I teleport into Tuli’s corpse, find a way out, or just have the teleportation mage teleport into Tuli, and then come back here.

With a plan in hand, Sylver felt a whole lot better about his current predicament.

It wasn’t perfect, Faust’s sect and Mora would be left alone for at least a day, not to mention Sylver would have to figure out a way to get into the Schlagen mountains without Faust, but at the very least being buried deep underground wasn’t on the table anymore.

But the waystone was Sylver’s trump card. It was a last resort, when a situation was so impossible that there were no other alternatives.

Sylver felt the hair on his arms stand up straight, as something brushed up against his soul sense, in a way that let him know that something had sensed him sensing it.

Alright, there’s almost certainly a soul-based demonic cultivator nearby. Why wouldn’t there be?

“Any ideas?” Sylver asked Ria, even as he started channeling his mana towards the small waystone hidden within the shoulder area of his indestructible ribcage.

“If we hide in the dungeon below, and the entrance became obstructed, wouldn’t the dungeon create a new way out?” Ria asked, in such a casual tone of voice that it took Sylver a whole 5 seconds, which is a long time when you’re in the process of being crushed before he registered what she said.

“It will either already have a path that leads to the surface, or it will be forced to create one…” Sylver said out loud, as he shifted his vision towards the area Ria had been looking at.

Sure enough, off in the distance, there was a giant hexagon in the middle of the city. And while Sylver couldn’t see that far away with perfect clarity, he was willing to bet there was a small hexagonal hole in the middle of that hexagon.

As Sylver started running towards it, he sent a shade ahead, and the shadowy creature came back with somewhat strange news. The hole inside the hexagon was circular, not hexagonal, but according to the shade the edges were rough, and it looked like someone had tried to drill through the hexagonal hole.

A falling stalactite passed through the area Sylver’s body had been a split second earlier, as he reformed his body 5 steps closer to the hexagon and dungeon entrance. All around him he felt, and heard, people getting crushed and skewered by falling arrow-shaped stones, and a couple had even been close enough to enter the range of his [Dead Dominion] perk.

Sylver reached behind himself and pulled Ria’s staff out of the back of his robe. He stooped running for a moment, planted his feet firmly on the ground, and threw the spear-shaped woman as hard as he possibly could. She had to nudge her path a couple of times to avoid falling rocks, but she reached the hexagon and started working on opening it.

There were 2 cultivators between Sylver and Ria, one was very obviously a demonic cultivator, he had a dark red horn growing out of the spot his left eye should have been, while the other was a lanky guard.

For whatever reason, the two put their differences aside and focused on the necromancer running straight at them, that wasn’t bothering anybody.

Sure, he did throw something that looked like a spear at them, because he didn’t care if Ria killed someone on her way to the hexagon, but aside from that, he hadn’t done anything to these two, extremely angry men.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

The demonic cultivator swiped his left hand at Sylver, and Sylver saw that the space near his hand compressed into a sphere. It inverted and reflected light the way a droplet of water, or a magnifying glass, would.

As the weird-looking sphere began to fly towards him at an unfair speed, Sylver summoned 4 shades to stand directly in the sphere’s path.

The sphere created a perfectly smooth hole in the first shade’s chest, and as the shade died and became a cloud of black smoke, a smaller cloud of smoke came out of the sphere.

The demonic cultivator was swarmed with shades, they surrounded him in a literal pile of shadowy bodies. Their daggers couldn’t scratch his skin, but more importantly, every time the man killed one of them, another one appeared to replace it.

The guard… pointed his glowing green sword at Sylver, but just as the man steadied himself to enter the Ki bubble Sylver was presumable in the middle of, an archer shade materialized directly behind him, and shoved a dagger into the base of his defenseless spine.

[Human (Path of The Rendering Gale) Defeated!]

Sylver felt an influx of mana as the demonic cultivator created a displacing sphere around his body and killed the entire pile of shades. He summoned a couple more to stand between him and the cultivator, as he used the excess mana to run right past him.

With the giant pillar of stone descending on everyone, you would imagine everyone would be deafened by the sound of rock grinding against rock, right?

Turns out, the hollow-sounding clang of the mechanism responsible for opening the small elevator was distinct enough that Sylver nearly shit himself as every single living soul inside this soon-to-be-destroyed city focused on Ria, and just as quickly, focused their attention on Sylver.

Before the sound, everyone had been occupied with their own thing, mainly running towards the edges of the city, so as not to get crushed by the fucking massive boulder.

Aside from the demonic cultivators that had given up on the idea of surviving and decided to kill as many people as they could instead. The guards were similar, except they focused on killing as many intruders and demonic cultivators as possible before they were crushed to death.

But now, everyone had a collective goal of getting to the ever so slowly rising elevator.

Now, the big problem with this, is that Sylver was a mage, more specifically, he was an undead mage, and while some of his physical capabilities were above average, his speed wasn’t.

A woman with a mouth on the top of her bald head, which was open and due to its position, made it look like she was wearing a crown made out of teeth, appeared near the tiny opening, and in the next moment tried to grab Ria’s staff, presumably to force her to open the thing faster.

Sylver’s robe got a tight grip on all the daggers it could find, and in a reluctant movement, shoved the daggers into Sylver’s torso. Sylver didn’t gasp, but his whole body twitched violently for a split second, as it tried to register all the damage, and then had to start over, as the various daggers were twisted.

Despite his lung equivalent having a gaping hole, [Hare’s Great Escape] felt like a breath of fresh air.

***

Sylver nearly dislocated his kneecap with how hard he pushed against the unsteady ground, his body refused to bend the way he wanted it to, and he had to claw at the seemingly frozen in place falling stalactite to pull himself over it.

Sylver didn’t make any sound as he moved, he kept one eye on Ria, and kept the rest of his eyes on the ever-changing path he was following.

The woman cultivator had grabbed Ria by the staff piece furthest away from the 3 ribs, and Sylver moved as much [Necrotic Mutilation] armor to his legs as he could manage. The woman cultivator tried to twist Ria, and Sylver dislocated his right foot as the rock he had used wobbled the wrong way.

As the woman cultivator’s hand began to glow a disgusting light blue color, 15 shades armed with bows materialized around her and shot her nearly point-blank right in the head. The arrows didn’t do enough damage to kill, but they distracted the woman, who shielded her face with her hands, as Sylver got closer and closer to Ria and the woman cultivator.

Unfortunately, a different demonic cultivator got to them first.

His face and hands were normal, but there were weird bumps underneath his bathrobe. The man kicked the woman with the tooth crown in the stomach, and then his legs bent the wrong way at the knees and threw the woman up in the air.

She didn’t fly very far, a sharp stalactite pierced her through the shoulder on its way down.

As Sylver finally arrived at the slightly arisen platform and managed to get his hand onto Ria’s staff, about 30 or so cultivators surrounded him and the bumpy cultivator.

Sylver reached with one hand towards the man’s face, and as the cultivator tried to lift his arms to catch Sylver’s hand, Sylver used [Fog Form] and materialized inside the elevator, with Ria in tow.

Without Ria forcing it open, the tube-shaped structure started to move down, the 40-centimeter opening became smaller and smaller. Sylver’s [Lesser Perception] let him see a portion of the chaos happening above him, as the various cultivators tried to force themselves through the tiny opening, but like crabs in a bucket, kept getting pulled away, and presumably, killed.

The vast majority of them were screaming, some might have been trying to ask Sylver for help, but their begging was lost in an ocean of unintelligible shrieking.

4 people had their arms in the 20-centimeter-tall gap, and as it shrank, they realized the predicament they were in. Their enhanced and focused pushing to get inside became a terrified attempt to pull their arms out.

Sylver’s robe stopped him from falling over as the floor disappeared from underneath his feet. The giant flat pillar that finally reached the ground, and had forced Sylver’s cylindrical elevator into the ground, the way a nail might be hammered in.

All was silent and Sylver-

A dark yellow arm appeared on the ceiling and was followed by a matching dark yellow face, and head. The man’s mouth was open, he was trying to say something, but Sylver simply reached out towards the nearest wall, and sent a pulse of mana into the metal material.

The man tried to scream as his airway was suddenly blocked, while his arm went completely limp. Sylver gently reached up with his dagger, stabbed him in the eye, and pushed until he pierced his brain.

[Human/??? (Way Of  The Wisp) Defeated!]

The blood tried to trickle down onto Sylver, but he simply held it where it was using [Dead Dominion], and then converted the head and arm into more [Necrotic Mutilation] material.

A lot of people assume that if a person phasing through solid matter suddenly stops, they simply get cut into 2, by a metaphorical guillotine.

But as Sylver knew, from multiple firsthand experiences, it was more like being turned into a statue, except even being turned into a statue wasn’t as painful. When your flesh, bones, and blood is being transmuted into stone, your body has some idea as to what’s going on, it hurts, but at least you’re not caught off guard.

Having some asshole mess with the density of the wall/ceiling you’re trying to phase through, and thereby disrupting your very delicate magic/Ki technique, is so sudden, that in some cases the person goes insane.

Sylver had met several mage apprentices in Adema’s healing ward who lost a finger and had a complete mental breakdown. Sylver had been consulted on some cases since Adema’s theory was that the reaction had something to do with the soul, and as it turned out, she was half right.

Sylver wasn’t aware of primal energy then, and it was only much later that he and Edmund discovered that a large number of spells that allowed a mage to walk through objects did so by altering that mage’s primal energy.

Sorcerers and creatures that used wild magic didn’t have this problem, which was why when Sylver wanted to travel through solid matter, he had his team of wraiths extend their wild magic onto him.

After the initial lurch downward, the elevator hadn’t moved. Sylver guessed that the mechanism had been broken, but it didn’t really matter.

He had been worried that this dungeon was dormant, or even dead, but as he felt the primal energy in the walls slowly begin to move, he extended his shadow and sat down on it.

Dungeons, as a rule, couldn’t have a blocked-off section. Every room/area within a dungeon had to have a path to the outside world and the core. People far more interested in dungeons than Sylver explained that a closed-off area would be the equivalent of a blood clot to a dungeon.

And that if the closed-off space persisted for an extended length of time, the dungeon would simply die. It had something to do with the way their “bodies” functioned, and that a core needed direct access to every inch under its control.

The exception to this were doors, or structures that were meant to be opened, but even then, there was a limit to how small a “room” within a dungeon could be. The bigger and stronger the dungeon, the bigger the minimal volume it could have closed off by a door.

The Ibis’ expert on all things dungeon-related also explained that they could “hold their breath,” as he put it. They did this whenever they sensed creatures nearby, that the dungeon wasn’t ready to lure inside.

That little trick made them extremely difficult to find and was the main reason very very few “brand new” dungeons had ever been discovered. A brand-new dungeon could hide its entrance for several days, even weeks, as some people hypothesized.

But as they got bigger, the length of time they could close themselves off from the outside world became less and less, until someone either discovered it, or it became so large that it couldn’t hide for even a second.

But they couldn’t do that if a creature that wasn’t part of them was inside. Once anything that wasn’t under the dungeon’s control entered it, it couldn’t close its entrance until that thing either became part of the dungeon or died.

The Ibis’ expert compared this to a gag reflex, except it wasn’t something a dungeon could ever train itself to ignore.

“I think it’s broken,” Ria whispered.

“Give it a second,” Sylver answered in a normal tone of voice.

Everyone above them was dead, or too far away for Sylver’s soul sense to feel them. Even if there were people alive above them, Sylver was in a dungeon now, he knew from personal experience that you needed a lot of power to break into a dungeon.

The kind of power that couldn’t be killed by a falling rock.

Unless you phased through the walls, but any dungeon worth its salt would have done what Sylver did, the only reason that guy had been able to get through, was that the dungeon entrance hadn’t finished closing completely.

“What do we do if it’s broken?” Ria asked while Sylver’s robe pulled out the daggers lodged in his torso, and Sylver working on stitching them closed.

“It’s already doing something Ria. Any second now the elevator will violently move downward, and then we will simply walk through a very recently carved out tunnel, all the way to the surface,” Sylver said, and just as he finished speaking, the cylindrical room they were sitting in, moaned as the metal material bent.

Except, instead of moving downward, as Sylver had assumed, the thing shot upward, with so much force that Sylver’s knees almost buckled. His robe helped him stay upright, as the top portion of the room gradually turned cone-shaped, and Sylver realized that the dungeon had decided to kill 2 birds with one stone.

It was going to create a path to the surface and get rid of the only thing inside of it, in a single motion.

As Sylver walked to the middle of the room and kept his eye out for one of the walls suddenly bending to crush him, he had a very unpleasant thought.

Before he could ask Ria to confirm, he heard the sound outside the cylinder change. Previously the sound had been very steady because the cylinder was moving through solid rock, but now the noises outside were less consistent, as if the thing was digging through loose soil.

Sylver summoned three pairs of brightly colored bathrobes, and in the span of 10 seconds, his robe dismantled them and weaved them into a Sylver-sized robe. Sylver hid his mask away and had the robe move up to his head until it covered his face completely.

Sylver patted himself down as he forced his body to shrink, and felt his various self-inflicted wounds tear further open, as his skin tried to fold up to accommodate his body’s new proportions.

Sylver’s soul sense and [Dead Dominion] reacted simultaneously, there was a mixture of corpses and living creatures above him.

His body shivered as it forced itself into an even smaller form, and just as he finished braiding his robe’s colorful fibers into a belt around his waist, the floor disappeared from underneath Sylver’s feet. His [Bracelet Of The Aurai] created a foothold in the air for him to stand on.

The walls fell away from the center, like a blooming metallic flower, and as Sylver’s [Lesser Perception] ignored the bright light, he saw where he was.

There wasn’t a good word in Eirish to describe it.

The language didn’t possess the flexibility to explain the sheer scale of the damage.

Far in the distance, Sylver saw tall earthen walls, that surrounded the enormous square platform Sylver was standing on. It took him a second to realize that he wasn’t looking at walls, but rather, he was seeing the edges of the hole he was in.

It looked like someone had lifted the top layer of soil, the one where people lived, removed a giant square chunk of the rock the top layer had been sitting on and then allowed the top layer to fall.

Sylver lost count of the number of corpses nearby, and he even felt a lump form in his throat due to the sheer level of grief Ria felt as she examined her surroundings.

Everyone was too busy clutching at the bodies of their dead relatives, fathers, wives, or children, to pay any attention to the average-sized man covered from head to toe in bright blue fabric.

Off in the distance, a house that had been on the edge of the square hole toppled over, and Sylver could tell Ria had seen the small moving wrapped up bundle fall out of a screaming woman’s arms as she fell to her death.

Sylver was too far away to do anything and going by the almost physical pain emanating out of Ria, she knew that even at her full speed she wouldn’t reach either of them in time. Ria’s vision was glued to the falling woman, while Sylver looked around for an empty spot to leave the hole without being noticed.

Sylver flinched when he heard a sound from the dark tunnel underneath him and bolted towards the edge with the fewest houses and people.

Sylver blocked out the sounds of wailing as he ran past the wounded and dying, he couldn’t have helped him even if he wanted to, and on top of that, he didn’t have long until his body returned to its natural size.

The tip of Sylver’s nose went numb, as he felt a faint wisp of healing magic settle on him. He wasn’t sure if Tarragon knew it was him, but it didn’t matter, the elf was too busy healing everyone to focus on a single person.

Sylver reached the edge of the wall by the time Tarragon’s elves started teleporting down into the square hole, and he climbed up the almost perfectly smooth sheer surface while hiding underneath several illusions.

He was unlucky in the fact that the wall he was climbing up was on the opposite side of the rising suns, but again, there were too many people in need of urgent help for anyone to bother with one barely visible man.

As he reached the top, Sylver looked back and saw that he hadn’t been the only one who had escaped. There were 5 people, 4 that changed the way they appeared every time Sylver blinked, and a 5th that Sylver recognized by his posture.

It was Hound.

And slung over his left shoulder, was an unconscious boy, who bore a striking resemblance to the current emperor of the Schlagen mountains.

They disappeared a half second later.

Sylver turned around and sent Spring out to find a path to Faust’s sect.

***

Ria hadn’t said a single word during the whole trip home.

She was furious.

Whether she was furious with Sylver, herself, or with the people responsible for a giant chunk of the Green Circle getting destroyed, Sylver didn’t know.

Sylver knew exactly how she felt.

Except he wasn’t angry at the death that had resulted from Hound’s rescue operation, assuming the explosives had been part of his plan, no, Sylver was furious at himself, for falling for such an obvious trap.

Any second now, he would reach Faust’s sect, and he would find nothing but corpses littered amidst the smoldering remains of the main building.

But to Sylver’s surprise, everything was fine.

The guards at the main gate greeted him as they opened the doors for him, and Sylver felt Mora awaken from her nap.

Everyone was alive, and well, and nothing was out of place.

Well, not everything.

The fake box Sylver had hidden deep underground was missing.

But aside from that, everything was fine.

Sylver was going to have a very interesting talk with Owl, Hound, and Aurick soon, but that was after he patched himself up, showered, and had a few hours of shut eye.

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