Ch257-Evasive Maneuvers (Patreon)

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Ch257-Evasive Maneuvers

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A little over 2,000 people had died in Arda.

A bit under 30,000 were injured.

The exact amount of damage caused to houses and businesses was still being determined, but suffice it to say, it was significant.

Not as significant as the economic damage that will come from Arda being disconnected from the teleportation network, but that was a slightly less urgent issue than the fact that half the population was effectively homeless.

But to quote Chrys “it could have been worse.”

Between the upgrades Lola forced the city to implement into the walls, and that everyone knew what to do from the various safeguards she built in the event of another monster outbreak, the death toll would have been 100 times higher.

If not for Lola, Arda wouldn’t be standing right now. At best there would be a bit of smoking rubble left on top of the mountain.

A few cities Sylver had never heard about were now completely unlivable. Their residents were being soaked up by whatever settlement was closest, and over the next couple of months, they would be relocated to wherever the High King deemed appropriate.

The villages were mostly untouched, they either didn’t have any barriers to break down and nothing happened, or they were small enough that the combat-capable people living amongst them were able to defend everyone.

But the important thing was that everyone Sylver knew was unharmed, Yeva, Ciege, Salgok, Ron, even the butcher Ging favored, between the Cats, the Cord, Lola’s mercenaries, hired adventurers, and the bribed guards, neither monster nor Krist got close enough for them to even see them.

Quite a few of the mercenaries got dinged, but that was their job, and with all the enchanted gear Lola provided them with, none of their injuries were life-threatening.

The wizard Allanther managed to set up a temporary barrier within 4 hours, which was impressive given the size, and while a proper barrier was going to take weeks to create, they were making very solid progress on it.

On a certain level…

Sylver genuinely didn’t care.

Once he heard that his people were unharmed and alive, he felt relief and not much else.

But once Chrys disappeared into thin air, and Sylver was left alone with his thoughts, the consequences of his decision gradually tried to weigh him down.

“Tried” being the keyword.

He would be lying if he said he didn’t feel somethingabout all the destruction and death his decision had caused, but it… it wasn’t a big feeling.

He didn’t have tears forming in his eyes, he wasn’t about to start sobbing, and while he wasn’t proud of it, he didn’t feel anything even remotely resembling guilt.

Maybe regret.

If he had to put a name to the emotion.

But even then, it wasn’t as if any of this was unexpected.

He hadn’t moved the moon without thinking about what would happen, and Sylver was somewhat cursed/blessed with the knowledge that even this carnage wasn’t going to stop him from doing it again.

And feeling sorry for himself wasn’t going to change who he was as a person, it certainly wasn’t going to bring any of the dead back to life.

Maybe if he had done this by mistake it would have been a different story.

Because then he would blame himself for doing something so horrific by accident, but as it stood, Sylver cared more about the fact that Lola was going to have to work overtime to organize everything than he did about all the people his decision had harmed.

That wasn’t entirely true either, but Sylver wasn’t going to change, and for that reason alone he wasn’t going to dwell on what Chrys had told him.

He did it, he wasn’t in a position to undo it, and that was that.

The guard at the gate was a bit iffy, he spoke at Sylver for a long while, but Sylver merely quietly stared at him, and eventually, the guard sighed and gestured for him to go.

The few things Sylver was unable to hide inside his [Bound Bones] storage he placed in a thick chest made from [Petty]shade-infused [Black Mass]. It was rectangular, about half the length of a door, and about as tall as a 1L wine bottle.

It was shaped somewhat like a rectangular suitcase if you ignored the tails coming out of it that were making it swim alongside Sylver.

Sylver in turn was laying on his back, with his hands by his side, and he was enveloped in a thick layer of [Black Mass]that made him aerodynamic and handled swimming for him. He looked a bit like a large calamari with all the tentacles coming out of the bottom of his robe.

The few monsters that tried to attack him found their jaws full of the wriggling black liquid and were blinded and suffocated while Sylver continued unimpeded.

Eventually, Sylver was left completely alone, and while he couldn’t sense anything, he could tell it wasn’t him that the monsters were scared off.

He ignored the sudden solitude and continued swimming through the silent darkness on the bottom of the sea floor.

When Sylver reached the hidden entrance, he saw a figure standing directly on top of the sand-covered opening.

“Evening,” Sylver said as he angled his body as if he was going to swim past the figure.

“I’ve been instructed to bring you in alive,” the figure said.

It sounded almost human.

The pronunciation was a bit off, but it was pretty good Eirish for someone who never breathed air.

The layers of [Black Mass] wrapped around Sylver swam him towards the ground, and as they planted his feet on the loose sand, the flat pieces of dark material disappeared into the ground.

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why, or who instructed you?” Sylver asked.

The figure shook its head. There was a clinking sound, like someone tapping two glasses together.

In terms of proportions, it was about the size of a small human man, with short limbs that made it look like a tall dwarf. It was clothed by the locally styled loose dark blue fabric full body robe. Which in this looked like it had simply wrapped its body up in a bedsheet.

“Before we begin… I would like to point out that I am an extremely reasonable man…. And if whoever hired you were to approach me in a calm and respectable manner, I would have absolutely no issue negotiating and talking things out,” Sylver offered.

Once again, the figure shook its head.

“Not my call,” the figure said.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s your unmarked grave… or… the underwater equivalent… eaten by crabs? Damn it, I thought I had something when I started speaking,” Sylver said, as he reached behind his back, and produced a short sword courtesy of [Greater Undead Armament].

“Are you ready?” the figure asked.

Sylver’s shoulders tensed up, and he straightened his back.

“If I say no, will you wait for me to prepare?” Sylver asked with a subtly bewildered voice.

The figure shrugged its shoulders and nodded.

Sylver just stood there.

A shadowy sword held limply in his hand, and a frown in his eyes at the fact that someone looked down enough on him to actually wait for him to get ready. He wasn’t even insulted, he was downright upset.

Sylver adjusted his stance, lowered his center of gravity, and flipped the short sword around so the blade was pressed against his forearm, and as every muscle in his body tensed for him to jump forward, he sunk into the loose sand.

Sylver saw that the figure flinched and following that he heard a muffled pop as the 50 or so explosives, hidden inside a bird’s rib via [Bound Bones], moved directly underneath the feet of the attacker through one of the [Black Mass] snakes, detonated and killed the figure before it even had a chance to regret giving the weak necromancer time to prepare.

Sylver patiently waited for the “so and so defeated” notification, but instead felt something moving insanely fast towards him, and if he hadn’t tucked in his feet, he would have lost both of them.

He tried digging deeper but the rock got too hard for him to move, so Sylver dug upwards and saw that there was a giant 4-sided pyramid made of ice on top of the secret entrance to the dungeon.

Floating a half centimeter above the pyramid was a see-through… thing.

It looked like a colorless jellyfish but with icicles hanging off its tentacles, along with an odd texture around the head area that made it look like it had a layer of fluffy snow on its head.

“Is that the best you can do?” the jellyfish man thing asked.

Its tone implied a smirk, but it was forced, and while Sylver couldn’t say it sounded out of breath, the thing was undoubtedly seeing him as a genuine threat.

Kinda, but you don’t have to be a dick about it.

“Of course not,” Sylver said calmly at the completely unharmed creature.

It didn’t even have any scorch marks.

Fighting against ice magic underwater, brilliant way to end this little detour.

His attempt to use [Arcane Insight] on the creature made his eyeballs turn cold, and Sylver got the feeling further attempts would freeze his eyes solid.

Sylver swam upwards, and as the jellyfish thing swung its tentacle at him, Sylver dodged to the left as a paper-thin disc of ice flew past him.

There was a trail of tiny explosions behind it, as its speed and force turned the water it cut through into vapor. Each one was loud enough to stun and deafen Sylver, but thankfully his magical defenses held up and protected his brittle ears.

“Hey man chill out,” Sylver shouted at the ice wielder as a trio of ice discs missed him.

Sylver managed to slap two discs with his hands, and they exploded into a cloud of ice shards.

Their dance of the projectile being thrown and Sylver dodging out of the way continued for a few seconds and ended with a single palm-sized disc of ice embedding itself into the back of Sylver’s neck, where it severed his spine with surgical precision.

It had struck him from his blind spot, and it turned out the discs could be curved and made to return like some sort of underwater fucking boomerang.

The torrent of ice stopped as the jellyfish man received the [Defeated!] notification, while Sylver’s motionless corpse floated limply in the cold dark water.

After about a minute, the see-through man gestured at Sylver, and an icicle the width of a pencil entered Sylver’s left eye, and cleanly exited through the back of his skull.

Following that a second pencil-sized icicle passed through Sylver’s chest and left a bleeding red hole as it came out the other side.

As Sylver’s body turned from the sudden impalement, the ice wielder sent a single disc at him, and it made a giant cut along Sylver’s back, further severing his spine. The blood that leaked out covered Sylver’s corpse in a thick cloud of red.

“I know you’re not dead,” the ice wielder said at the almost split-apart and completely motionless corpse.

10 minutes passed.

Maybe more.

Sylver wasn’t great at estimating time, but his arms had been cut off, and his legs, even his hips had been separated from his torso.

The only thing that remained was his head, and his torso down to where his bellybutton would be.

But the ice wielder remained above the ice pyramid blocking the secret entrance and didn’t seem to be falling for this particular trick. He hadn’t approached the corpse, but he hadn’t pulled it close to him either.

Not that Sylver cared, because the point of this trick wasn’t to lull the ice wielder into a false sense of security to strike him from a blind spot.

The purpose of this trick, the Sylver-shaped mushroom puppet, controlled by just 2 [Black Mass] worms/snakes, was to keep the ice wielder distracted while Sylver looked for an alternate entrance to the underground passage.

The two shades infused into the [Black Mass] puppeteering the decoy informed Sylver that the ice wielder was very slowly building a sphere of ice around them and that the movement of the mushrooms they were inside of was being slowly restricted by the forming ice.

Sylver gave them their final orders as he finally found a hole in the rough ground, and after a few cuts via abyss magic, made it wide enough for him to stick his arm through.

Sylver cupped his palm against the smooth metal at the bottom of the hole, and as he gently pushed the water under his palm out and created a vacuum, he just as gently made a pinhole-sized hole in the metal.

It sealed before Sylver had even started, but he wasn’t in a rush.

On his 6th try Sylver managed to make the hole, and before it closed, he pushed a tiny beam of fog through it and materialized on the inside of the tunnel via [Fog Form].

Sylver patted himself down, checked that he still had all his fingers, toes, that his face was still attached to his head, and lastly made sure that none of his internals had been damaged.

There was barely enough robe left to cover him, but it was a necessary sacrifice, the mushroom decoy wouldn’t have worked as well without a big clump of Sylver’s mana attached to it.

And as nice as it would have been to have the robe fragment swim back to him, Sylver couldn’t risk someone crafting a tracker out of what remained of his mana. In a few minutes the robe would disintegrate, along with the [Black Mass]and the mushrooms making up the decoy’s shell.

Sadly that meant he lost 2 [Petty] shades, but as with the robe, it was worth it not to fight someone using ice magic, while being surrounded from every available direction by liquid ice.

Sylver spent a few minutes stretching while he waited for his body to adjust to not being under extremely high pressure.

When he was done, Sylver began to walk downwards, towards where he felt the Spring-half he left with the Gorgons was.

***

He was inthe dungeon.

He had entered the wrong tunnel and was inside the portion of the maze that didn’t lead to the Gorgon sisters. It would have been too convenient if he circumvented the ice wielder and got into the right tunnel.

What was worse, Sylver was on the other side of the dungeon maze, so he couldn’t even retrace his steps to find the spot in the wall he used the first time!

And while the Spring-half he left with the 3 sisters was close enough that Sylver was getting snippets of their conversations, the connection wasn’t strong enough for him to tell him to ask the sisters for a way for Sylver to get to them.

On the bright side, between the Spring-half, and the giant soul below, Sylver had a pretty good sense of direction. That is to say, he wasn’t going to be walking in a giant circle without noticing it.

Although given the inconsistent geometry of this maze, that wasn’t exactly impossible…

But it wasn’t as if Sylver could get out and try again.

His trick with [Fog Form] only worked because the inside of the tunnel was filled with air, if he tried to push his fog from inside the tunnel out into the water, the water pressure wouldn’t let him.

It wasn’t even a matter of not having enough mana at this point, although it was possible to make it work with sheer force. Between the thickness of the tunnel wall, Sylver’s limited spell range, and his incompatibility with gas-based magic, even with 4 times his current mana capacity he wouldn’t be able to do it.

So Sylver pressed on and hoped the ice wielder wouldn’t chase after the large suitcase Sylver had sent swimming to the surface, with instructions to travel towards Tuli.

He very much doubted it would even reach the surface without being eaten by something and wasn’t sure how well the mushroom-based container would handle the decrease in pressure without Sylver being nearby, but at least this way the silt wine had a chance of surviving.

The tunnel went parallel relative to Spring’s position, and Sylver went left since that was the direction where the secret entrance that icicle-chucking dipshit blocked was.

Sylver kept his palm pressed tightly against the wall as he walked, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t for certain say he found a section where he would be able to cut his way into the Gorgons’ tunnel.

He fired off several beams of abyss magic, just in case, but either the dungeon had moved the tunnels away from each other to prevent him from doing exactly what he was trying to do, or Sylver misjudged his position and wasn’t even cutting in the right direction.

“LUCY!” Sylver shouted as continued to walk.

The only response was his own voice echoing through the empty metal tunnel.

About…

An inestimable amount of time later, Sylver heard an unfamiliar tinkling sound coming from the direction he was walking towards.

Like someone was dropping small metal beads into a glass container.

“Lucy?” Sylver asked towards the sound.

The tinkling paused, and after a second, became so loud and fast that it was like he under a flimsy metal roof while hailstones pounded the ever-loving shit out of it.

From around the corner, a gorilla armed with a 4-meter-long lance stepped out.

It stood on 2 legs and walked with a surprising amount of balance for something so bulky and tall. The lance attached directly to its left arm was held perfectly parallel to the floor and seemed to almost ignore the movement of the creature holding it, as it smoothly floated through the tunnel.

As for the tinkling sound, every single strand of brown hair coming out of the gorilla’s hairy body was at least half a meter long and was trying to pierce the nearest solid surface.

Tiny brown needles that bounced off the floor and the wall the gorilla was walking along. Some of them even caused sparks to fly from the sheer force with which they were hitting the metal walls.

Sylver allowed the daggers in his hands to slide back up his sleeves, and with arms open as if he were about to hug someone, he walked towards the needle-covered creature.

“I won’t attack if you won’t! I have a proposition for you!” Sylver said calmly towards the lance-wielding creature.

The creature angled the lance tip so it was pointing at Sylver’s stomach, the centre of his body so to speak.

“I’m considering moving in here,” Sylver said.

There was a slightly wet-sounding click, followed by the lance extending with such tremendous force and speed that the gorilla creature holding it slid back a half inch from the recoil.

Sylver turned to dodge, but he was too slow, and the lance hit him square in the side, passed through his liver, and continued ahead, slathered in glistening red blood.

Sylver’s face contorted into a grimace, and he shrieked while clutching at the pole passing through him.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE MY- Just kidding I’m fine,” Sylver screamed, then said with a grin as he grabbed the pole with one hand and slapped his palm against the top.

The red-stained pole shattered, and Sylver was left holding the longer half, with the lance behind him, while the gorilla was left holding the shattered extended shaft.

His robe pulled itself back from the white pole, along with the skewered pearl white piece of mushroom, that was leaking red liquid everywhere.

As the gorilla creature tried to lunge at him, Sylver snapped his fingers, and an uncountable number of thin strands of darkness extended out of the floor, walls, and ceiling, and mummified every single inch of the hairy creature, leaving only the eyes, nose, and mouth open.

Sylver’s robe flicked away the sticky mushroom the lance had pierced in place of his flesh and brought the lance up to his face to inspect it.

“You’re using modified keratin strands… Good for durability, but you really shouldn’t make anything straight with them,” Sylver explained, as he ran his fingernail down the lance and a layer peeled open to reveal the net of blood vessels underneath.

“Personally, I prefer bone over anything else when it comes to biological weapons, it’s more forgiving when it comes to shape, and looks better. But if you’re set on using something like this you need to curve them,” Sylver explained, as the peeled open lance flickered with tiny sparks of light, and it began to bend to the side.

Flakes of white powder sputtered out of the weapon as the perfectly straight lance became more and more like the curved horn of a rhino. The two open flaps folded back to how they were, and after a few more glowing sparks, fused onto the now curved lance.

“And since the objective of your attack is to wound as opposed to outright kill, you really shouldn’t limit yourself to a single point,” Sylver explained, as he pinched the rock-hard curved lance, and produced a couple of thorn like spikes.

He turned the weapon around in his hand so all of its sides had at least a few spikes, and then turned it around so the gorilla creature could see the bottom area of the lance.

“The connection isn’t… It’s not great, but I can see the effort you put into it. Problem is, because of the structure of the lance head, there isn’t enough space for the pole to be properly inserted. It’s important to be extra careful with joints, they’re always the first to break,” Sylver explained, as he effortlessly pulled the pole out of the lance.

Sylver grabbed a piece of [Black Mass] and directed it into the inside of the lance. He pushed the pole into it as deep as it would go, and then tiny tendrils climbed up the pole and with a wet sounding creaking fused the base of the lance to the pole.

Sylver spun it around in his hands a few times, stabbed the air in front of the immobilized gorilla creature, and repeated the motion after turning to the side so the creature had a better view of what he was doing.

Sylver snapped his fingers, and the darkness pulled the gorilla’s left arm out, the one that lance had been attached to.

“You really shouldn’t have it this long with a body of this size, but as long as the aim is to wound and infect, it’ll work,” Sylver said, as he brought the end of the lance pole up to the shattered stub and used a thin layer of [Black Mass]to glue the two together.

[Black Mass (IV) Proficiency increased to 32%!]

[Mutating Override (V) Proficiency increased to 9%!]

Sylver jumped away from the creature, and the strands of darkness immobilizing it all simultaneously disappeared.

It didn’t even try to catch its breath and lunged at him. The now modified lance once again exploded with impossible force and speed and passed straight through Sylver’s chest.

“It’s less aerodynamic, but you have to admit it’ll do more damage when you hit something,” Sylver said from behind the creature.

It swung at him with its free arm, but by the time it reached Sylver’s body, there was barely enough fog left behind for it to swing through.

“I’ve got to get a wiggle on, so I’ll keep this brief,” Sylver said from down the tunnel, as the gorilla-like creature began to chase after him.

With all the moving hair it was surprisingly fast.

“I can offer you upgrades, magic beyond your wildest imagination, even living subjects to infect. All I would ask for return is that you let me, and my people pass through without attacking us, and that you kill any intruders that try to enter,” Sylver explained, as he moved down the tunnel through streams of [Fog Form], always just far enough away that the gorilla wouldn’t reach him with its lance, but close enough that it could hear him despite the loud tinkling sound.

“Anyway, think it over when you have the time. I don’t know when exactly I’ll be back, so if that’s not enough, make a list of what you would like, and we can negotiate from there,” Sylver explained, as he continued down the tunnel.

He stopped hearing the gorilla’s tinkling, and eventually found a T-shaped intersection and was now moving directly towards the Spring-half he left with the Gorgons.

At some point, he was standing directly above them.

Sylver pressed his hand so hard against the floor that it left an imprint in the metal, but he found what he had been looking for.

He very likely spent over an hour trying to find the other tunnel by sending out tiny beams of abyss magic through the metal floor, but eventually he connected the two.

From there it was a short slide down a pipe barely big enough for Sylver to fit, and a smooth landing that didn’t involve having his head buried in the ground.

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