Ch233-Two Of A Kind (Patreon)

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Ch233-Two Of A Kind

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Everything was going so right.

The mushroom lightning rod was working, somehow, Sylver's hearts were pumping with adrenaline, and he had more skulls to crack open than he knew what to do with.

As Sylver released his hold on his ax and watched as it flew 2 meters forwards and embedded itself into the man with teeth growing out of his chin as if it were a beard, he allowed himself a soft chuckle, as the ax materialized in his hand, and was promptly used to chop off a fingerless hand.

He could see why people struggled against these things.

Their danger was in their quantity because there sure as shit wasn’t any quality to speak off.

Just about every single one of them was built as if being symmetrical was a sin.

The only consistent thing was that they didn’t have any exposed bone, which, if you’ve ever studied flesh crafting, is a lot harder than simply growing a bunch of abominations. It meant that their shapes were the way they were on purpose, or whatever was making them was following a very strict theme.

Which meant that there was a possibility that the Krists were a creation of a deity, or possibly even a minor god.

[??? (Warrior) Defeated!]

21…

Sylver had killed at least 400 Krists, and only 21 had a high enough level for the system to even acknowledge their death.

The thing is though, as someone who had been living with the system for over a year, Sylver had gotten the hang of estimating what a creature’s, or monster’s, rough level is.

The average level felt to be over 100, excluding the very small ones, the ones that didn’t have a torso and were just a head and arms. But the rest, they hit hard, even if they were slow.

Even with that though, this “army” was pretty pathetic.

If Sylver hadn’t gotten his jaw blown off, there was a chance he might have underestimated them. The only reason he hadn’t just left everything to Spring and Mora, was that something didn’t feel right and because Sylver decided it would be a good idea to blow off a little bit of steam before Edmund woke up.

He broke open 9 more body parts that were probably skulls.

[??? (Warrior) Defeated!]

A good quarter of the shades were being used to scout, to find where exactly these abominations were coming from. But try as they might, there simply wasn’t a single place or direction from which these fleshy beasts were crawling out of.

One theory was that these things were a hivemind, and up until Sylver showed up, they were just standing around, waiting for someone to accidentally teleport into their midst.

The problem with that theory was that Sylver had fought many hive minds, and this “army” wasn’t fighting like a hivemind, not even close. Hiveminds that were seconds old, so basic and primitive that they could barely get their hosts to walk, had a better grasp on army tactics.

Unless it was purposely trying to lull Sylver into a false sense of security. Which, while clever, and something Sylver often did, wasn’t going to work on him, because that was something Sylver often did.

Then again, if Sylver was trying to attack him, he wouldn’t have thrown that metal ball to start everything. So far Sylver counted at most 10 creatures capable of a ranged attack, so what was the point of trying to hurt him before they got close enough to do anything?

Then there are the “weapons” they used. Rusty cleavers, sickles, hammers, frying pans, makeshift axes made by shoving a kitchen knife longways into a club, chains, pitchforks, meat hooks, a fucking brick, and Sylver’s personal favorite, a spear without a spear tip. Which was basically a long stick.

He was pretty sure he even saw a walking stick or one of the shades did at least.

This sort of thing didn’t make sense if Sylver was fighting a hivemind.

Unless this was a hivemind that was playing the long game, and the only purpose of this attack was so Sylver would mistakenly assume it wasn’t a hivemind.

The fight went on uninterrupted for over half an hour.

Sylver and Mora stayed relatively close to Edmund’s coffin, and as a result, there wasn’t any ground to walk on, just about every inch of visible dirt was covered in either a corpse or a piece of a corpse. From a bird’s eye view, there was a bloody circle around the platform being repeatedly stuck by lightning.

He’d lost count, or more honestly, Sylver was doing his best not to count, so he couldn’t say with certainty that it would take years worth of molten-rock level heat to wake Ed up.

Lola had her mana well, and while it wouldn’t be too difficult to connect it to some sort of makeshift forge, the amount of mana that could be sustainably taken from it was basically insignificant if over 20 lightning strikes didn’t do anything.

As Sylver expertly spun out of the way of a thrown chain, he shoved his hand into what was hopefully an empty eye socket, and with a flick of his finger tore the creature’s brainstem into pieces.

Sylver flinched as the 23rd bolt of lightning tried to strike him but ended up being redirected towards Edmund.

The thing that confused Sylver about whoever was behind these Krists, was that he couldn’t understand what the point of this was.

They were just wasting resources.

Meat doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and even if the creatures Sylver was currently fighting were “expendable,” why waste them on an impossible-to-win attack, when they could be fed to something bigger and stronger?

During the half-hour “battle,” Sylver made an effort to figure out how these things were being motivated, and the best explanation he had was that they were aggressive to everything that wasn’t one of their own.

Suicidally aggressive mind you.

Sylver would have understood it if he had somehow landed on an important piece of land or something, but the area was empty when he had arrived, the Krists came here because of him.

A potential answer was that they were stalling, but for half an hour? Even if Sylver simply ran away on foot, not a single one of these things would have a chance to catch him.

The only thing that made sense to him was that the leader of these things had been killed during the first 5 seconds of the fight, and the remaining flesh golems simply following their leader’s final order.

But even if he assumed that was the case, why were more Krists coming towards him?

Was this just their natural reaction to someone trespassing on their conquered area?

[??? (Warrior) Defeated!]

With [Dead Dominion], and the freedom [Mage Cap] provided, Sylver was pretty much flying.

When he pushed against something heavier than him, his body was pushed instead, which meant that if he picked 3 corpses to push against simultaneously, and was above them, he could effectively float, and fly.

The only way this “battle” could get better is if Sylver had been able to convert at least some of the fallen Krists into zombies.

Despite appearances, their biology was dissimilar enough to what Sylver was familiar with, that his magic wasn’t capable of taking hold of their bodies. That was part of it, the other part was that Sylver could feel their corpses resisting his magic.

If he sat down and forced one of them into unlife, Sylver was certain he’d be able to create a Krist zombie. But it was too much effort and mana, for a creature that was weaker than the shades.

Sylver felt an unpleasant itching crawl up his outer spine, and the next thing he knew, two creatures were standing on top of Edmund’s coffin, looking down at it.

One had a skull of some sort of wild dog, the teeth were wrong for a wolf, while the other had the skull of a large horse.

Their backs were turned away from Sylver, if he didn’t know any better, he would have thought they were inspecting his lightning redirecting framework.

Sylver pushed as hard as he could through [Dead Dominion] and propelled himself towards the two men. He didn’t doubt that Edmund’s coffin was impenetrable, and couldn’t be moved from where Sylver put it, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a chance he was wrong.

As he pushed himself harder, he felt the mana channels in his legs protest the volume being transferred through them.

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

The two skull-wearing sorcerers looked away from the coffin a split second before Sylver reached them, and before Sylver so much as reached for his umbrella, they teleported away. Because of his speed, he missed the coffin and wasted even more mana to slow himself down.

He ignored the battle going on around him, as he ran his hand all around the framework, and sent over 10 pulses of mana through the whole platform to check if something had been added, or removed, to his framework.

Sylver was blinded as lightning descended right next to him.

The flash was brief, and if Sylver hadn’t seen it disappear into the metallic coffin, he wouldn’t have known that it had struck true. He touched what should have been white hot metal with the back of his hand, but it wasn’t even warm.

When he was confident the framework and Edmund were fine, he lifted his head and looked around.

The Krists weren’t fighting Sylver’s shades, they weren’t running towards him, they weren’t running away, they just stood there…

Drooling, twitching, bleeding out, but aside from that, they were standing perfectly still.

Too anxious to get that far away from Ed’s coffin again, Sylver remained where he was, and another 3 bolts of lightning struck the mushroom funnel.

“They stopped moving,” Ria said out loud.

“I can see that,” Sylver said, as the last shade that had been fighting a moment earlier slithered back into his shadow. The scouts were still out there, but every single Krist creature that they could find was standing still.

Sylver straightened out his robe and took his jaw out of his [Bound Bones] storage. He lifted his mask, as he brought his jaw up to his face, and manipulated a floating string to stitch as many of the muscles together.

While he did that, a team of shades carried several Krists over, that Sylver promptly sucked dry using [Draining Blight].

The bone in his jaw healed into one piece, the various bruises littered throughout his body lost their color and finally disappeared, and although there wasn’t anywhere near enough HP to heal everything, there was more than enough for Sylver to completely fix his face and fix most of his fingers.

[Undead Mastery(VI) Proficiency increased to 92%!]

[Mirage(IV) Proficiency increased to 88%!]

[Draining Blight(VI) Proficiency increased to 90%!]

[Necrotic Mutilation(IV) Proficiency increased to 96%!]

[Mutating Override(II) Proficiency increased to 99%!]

[Vigorous Conditioning(V) Proficiency increased to 72%!]

“Huh… apparently, the fight is over…” Sylver said partially to himself, partially to Ria, and just a bit to Edmund.

“Why did they stop moving?” Ria asked.

“Maybe they realized that if they keep attacking me, I might run away, so they’re doing this to trick me into staying here. Competent units might be mere seconds away,” Sylver said, as he adjusted his jaw until it stopped clicking when he spoke.

In the background, the shades continued lifting and carrying the motionless Krists over to Sylver.

Sylver flinched as a bolt of lightning descended from the sky, and silently disappeared into the mushroom funnel.

“26,” Sylver whispered to himself.

“You said not to count them?” Ria asked.

“26 lightning bolts. And these aren’t your usual background noise lightning bolts, these are the type that leave massive craters filled with boiling rock!” Sylver mumbled towards Edmund’s coffin.

By this point in time, the wind was so powerful that Sylver should have been sent flying away, just about every tree near him had been uprooted and sucked into the air.

Thankfully, he had magic at his disposal, as did Mora. The mushroom platform was quite literally rooted into the ground and was then further aided by Sylver’s magic.

Sylver waited for the 27th bolt of lightning to strike before he walked over to Edmund’s coffin and opened it.

As he gently lifted the lid he felt a familiar mixture of numbness, heat, and prickling on his face. Inside the coffin, a nude boy was laying in a large pile of ashes. His skin was pitch black, with glowing cracks spread out all over his body, as if he was a hollow wooden puppet, burning from the inside.

Very slowly, Sylver reached out with his hand and wiped the ash off Edmund’s forehead.

“Why does he look like a child?” Ria asked, as Sylver ever so gently brushed more of the ash away and revealed more glowing cracks on Edmund’s nose and cheeks.

There was a smile on Sylver’s face, but his eyes were wide in horror.

“It’s his bloodline magic. The healing process makes him age backward… But if he was an old man when he died, just how much healing did he need to get this young?” Sylver asked as he leaned forward slightly, to see the shape of the crack on Edmund’s other cheek.

To most people, the various cracks appeared to be nothing more than random tears in Edmund’s skin, and for the most part, they were right. The pattern was never the same, but because Sylver had been around Edmund for as long as he had, he had learned to match the style of the cracks, with the magic Edmund was casting.

Sylver reached out towards Ria, and she yelped in surprise as he grabbed her. While Mora prepared to take off, Sylver kicked the coffin’s lid shut with his foot, and using [Fog Form] materialized directly on Mora’s back.

With the strength of an enchanted crossbow, Mora was flung high into the sky, directly towards the middle of the storm, which had been slowly inching towards Edmund’s mushroom platform.

The wind was largely ignored, as was the lightning bolt that tried to hit her, as Mora rose higher and higher into the sky, and in a matter of seconds, broke through the dark storm clouds, and was blinded by the unbearably intense sunlight.

Thankfully, she knew what Sylver knew, pushed past her discomfort, and continued going higher and higher. With each second there was less and less air for her to control, and use as a steppingstone, as Sylver channeled every drop of his mana into her and hoped his ribcage was as indestructible as the description suggested.

He felt a sort of shiver in the nearby primal energy touching his primal energy field and quickly moved Ria so her folded-up staff was pressed up against his chest, while Mora maneuvered herself so her “core” was directly in front of Sylver’s small inner ribcage.

Ria said something, but Sylver was too preoccupied with making sure his ribcage was angled to create as much blocking area as possible to hear her.

The storm clouds blocked out the initial flash of light, but even with what little air there was this high up, Sylver still heard the unique crackle Edmund was famous for.

He flexed his abdominal muscles and shattered two outer ribs. Instantly Sylver was surrounded by an assortment of camping equipment, but more importantly, he had a large block of water, and a similarity large block of [Necrotic Mutilation] liquid flowing to his exposed back.

Sylver used what little mana he had left to move the liquid armor into place, but it was burned away before it even started to solidify.

He clutched at Ria, and Mora, who was hiding inside her larger body, and even as his shoulders became detached from what remained of his torso, he forced his hands to remain as they were.

Few languages have the proper vocabulary to accurately describe the sheer scale and terror of being surrounded by invisible heat. Sylver’s heads didn’t even have time to melt, they skipped that step and quite simply turned into a gas, that was just as quickly blown out of Sylver’s reach.

Sylver’s bones were next, even if in reality the process was so quick, it might as well have been instantaneous. There was no shattering, cracking, they didn’t even really break, they were there one moment, and then they were not. What belongings Sylver carried inside his bones were summoned out of them but disappeared before Sylver so much as registered their presence.

His daggers, coins, books, journals, the wooden chests he made, various pans, bowls, forks, spoons, spare ink, pencils, sharpening stones, everything that hadn’t been deemed irreplaceable made the lightning-fast transition from existing to not.

***

Only a single solid piece of Sylver remained, a congealed mess of flesh wrapped around a single bone hidden deep inside Sylver’s indestructible chest, loosely attached to a bundle of charred skin tissue flapping in front of Sylver’s ribcage.

It took him a couple of seconds to come to his senses, but Sylver was relieved to see that there was a scorched black golden sphere pressed up against him. On instinct more than any plan, the sphere contained not just Mora, but the entirety of Sylver’s shadowy army.

Sylver felt the system hesitate as he summoned his very recently acquired [Mage Cap], and almost reluctantly, a crown of bright red grew out of Sylver’s shiny black ribcage and peaked out through the chainmail-covered ribs.

As he regained control over what was left of his body, he was surprised to find there was more of him left than he had expected. His right hand was almost in one piece, it was only missing 3 fingers, the pinkie, ring, and middle, and the carpal bones had fused with his metacarpal, but it was significantly better than nothing.

Compared to the mana-enhanced thermal radiation, the wave of superheated air was almost a joke. Sylver destroyed every single shade, except Spring, and used the influx of mana [Dying Breath] provided to force the hot gas to flow past him.

As Sylver’s [Gnarled Staff Fragment Of Igri] appeared on his thumb, he mentally sighed with relief, as liquid darkness oozed out of his metallic ribcage, and formed the rough shape of his body. Sylver solidified the darkness into a physical form, and only now started to scan his surroundings.

For starters, the storm was gone.

As a matter of fact, the sky was so clear it looked almost as if it had been drawn by a lazy child. It was akin to being in the middle of a perfectly calm sea, nothing but blue as far as the eye could see.

As Sylver lowered the gaze [Lesser Perception] provided, he saw a mirror image below him.

Clear blue sky, as far as the eye could see.

It was a sight very few people had the displeasure of seeing.

An expanse of perfectly flat glass tended to fuck with people’s heads, the human mind didn’t like seeing seemingly man-made structures of such an enormous size.

Bright blue sky above, reflective shiny mirror below.

Sylver felt gravity take its hold on him and realized that his [Bracelet of The Aurai] had been burned away along with the rest of his belongings, including his [Staff Of Infernal Interference].

He felt a pang of guilt over the realization, but it was brief, in the grand scheme of things, the umbrella wasn’t important.

For a few seconds, Sylver simply allowed gravity to peacefully pull him down towards the blindingly bright mirror ground.

“What just happened?” Ria asked quietly.

Her voice was so utterly devoid of any kind of emotion that it took Sylver several seconds to recognize that the sounds she had made were words spoken to him.

“Ed glassed a couple kilometers worth of land,” Sylver answered just as calmly.

Although, his calm, wasn’t the same as Ria’s “calm.” You wouldn’t call a shell-shocked person “calm,” even if they sounded relaxed and reasonable.

“How?” Ria asked.

“Does the word “entropy” mean anything to you? I feel like that’s one of the words we borrowed from Earth,” Sylver asked.

“Entropy is a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated as a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty,” Ria answered, and Sylver’s shadowy head nodded.

He looked down at her and saw the barest outline of a face on her liquid metal sphere of gold.

“Edmund’s bloodline magic allows him to absorb heat and convert it into mana. Most of his family was content with that, but because Ed is Ed, he figured out a way to expand his bloodline magic’s definition of “heat.” The end result is that he can absorb multiple forms of energy, and as you just saw, release them,” Sylver explained, as Mora poked her head out of Ria’s sphere.

She was about the size of an apple, a 7-legged pearl white arachnid, with a round abdomen, and a coin-sized head.

“So, he can manipulate entropy?” Ria asked.

“It isn’t as straightforward as I make it sound, or as convenient, but basically yes,” Sylver answered.

In the same way a single speck of dust can be obvious on a well-polished mirror, so was the coffin Edmund had been carried in.

As was the pale-skinned boy standing next to it, gazing up at the sky.

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

Can’t have a face if you don’t even have a head.

[Piss Off – Eat Shit + Cunt – 261]
[HP: ??? – ???%]
[MP: ??? – ???%]
[Stamina: ??? – ???%]
[Corpse – Unique]
[Soul – Unique]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been used!]

Sylver was surprised to feel a shiver pass through his body, mostly because the piece of him that was left didn’t have anything even remotely close to nerve endings. Luckily for him, the system wasn’t interested in what Sylver didn’t have and provided him with the impossible feeling anyway.

As they continued to fall, Ria transformed back into a 3-pronged staff, and at Sylver’s suggestion, Mora jumped onto her. About 100 feet off the ground, Ria stopped falling, and hovered, while Sylver continued to fall downward.

He landed on the clear, mirror-smooth glass with a faint clink, as his shadowy feet absorbed what little impact Sylver’s 5 or so kilograms of mass had accumulated from falling.

In front of him, stood a shirtless boy, with trousers made out of what looked like finely ground coal.

Sylver and the young man stood where they were and simply stared into each other’s eyes.

It was dead silent, what little wind there was couldn’t find anything to brush against to make a sound, the sun was searing Sylver’s shadowy body, and even without a nose, Sylver could smell the unmistakable scent of ozone.

“You look good…” the young boy said, with such a familiar cadence that it caused the tiny part of Sylver that was still “alive” to develop tear ducts, and then immediately put them to use.

The ancient lich tried to respond with something, but every time he tried the words got caught in his metaphorical throat.

The two continued to silently stare at each other.

They both discovered that they didn’t know what to say.

Since the moment they became friends, they had never really been separated. They had never bothered with hellos or goodbyes, and now Sylver didn’t want to greet the man, because that would be admitting that they had been separated.

As usual, Ed was the first to start walking, and a half moment later, Sylver began to walk towards him too.

Both ancient beings tried not to cry as they approached each other, and both failed as their relieved nervous laughter gradually shifted into an almost childlike weeping, as the two embraced one another in a hug.

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