Ch244-Bloody Cubes (Patreon)

-

-

Ch244-Bloody Cubes

-

-

Without the thrall’s shadow to hold him up, Sylver began to fall toward the liquid floor. Getting caught in it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world, it wasn’t indestructible, but every second he wasted fighting this vampire was an extra second the demon had to come into this realm.

Even if it did catch Sylver, the red material couldn’t do much. If it was capable of slicing or severing it would have cut the strings connecting his arm and his leg to him. It was also vulnerable to physical attacks, since the zombie down below was digging through it, and there was still a crack left on the floor from when Sylver tried to blow the vampire away with an explosion.

The two remaining vampire thralls weren’t attacking him, and the man in the red robe was rambling something to himself, with specks of froth leaking out of the edge of his lips.

Sylver summoned Aleri from within the shadows of his robe, and to the small bird’s dismay, ordered it to fly upwards as hard as it could, while Sylver tried to lessen his weight enough and increase the many-winged bird’s strength enough, to carry him.

It wasn’t even close and almost made him feel bad for pointlessly stepping on it.

Sylver had to once again materialize near the ceiling through [Fog Form].

Two stupid fast frenzied thralls aside, the main problem was that Sylver didn’t know where the exit was. He was fairly certain he knew where the entrance was, but it was an educated guess at most. He could feel where the demonic energy of the tree was coming from, but it was vague, and he couldn’t rule out that the red half-sphere they were in had stayed in one place.

The best thing to do would be to summon a literal ton of explosives, and then detonate them. The half sphere would then rupture from the increased pressure, and then mess up Tuli’s insides, as well as the demon summoning framework, and Sylver, Edmund, Faust, Sophia, and her lovely priests and paladins would all be sucked away into the demon realm.

Along with a chunk of Tuli’s spine and skull.

If the purpose of this thing was to stall, the only way it could be better would be if it was restricting Sylver’s magic.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to fly to the ceiling again, and his left hand just about started being stitched into place, as one thrall grabbed him by his collarbone, and the other lodged her claws into his hip.

They pulled him apart, in the same way, someone might pull a leg off a roasted chicken. But instead of taking just one leg, they took both, along with his hip bone, and all the meat attached to it.

To say it “hurt” would be an understatement.

Raw speed is one of those things that’s very difficult to counter, without using some form of raw speed yourself. The normal counter is to predict what the speedy opponent will do and set a trap that will activate upon contact or something along those lines.

The problem here was that even if Sylver was able to predict the moves of a blood-crazed animal, he didn’t have anything potent enough to kill them.

He had already won of course, but his victory was going to take time he didn’t have. Any minute now they would start slowing down, as the curse Sylver had injected into them when they had touched him bypassed their defenses, and destroyed them from the inside. But given their strength, that minute might take way too long.

As he fell towards the ground, in 2 relatively equal halves, Sylver summoned just shy of every shade within his shadow. Within the span of an eye blinking, the previously empty half-sphere of red descended into utter darkness.

The two thrall women made short work of the shades in their way, but they got stabbed, scratched, and otherwise harmed as their claws and teeth tore through the balloon-like shades.

One of the effects of [Undead Mastery] allowed Sylver to split his shades into two, and those two could be split into four, and then eight, and so on. Each shade half was only 45% as powerful as the original, and the number only got smaller the more they split up, but right now, the fact that they took up space was more important than how strong they were.

Sylver gained a lot of useful information from summoning a literal mountain of shade bodies.

First of all, they weren’t in a half sphere, they were in a sphere, half of which was full of the red material that made up the walls and floor. The zombies had been pushed down to just above where the sphere ended, but digging down was pointless.

Because the second thing that Sylver discovered was that the sphere was sealed. And since a fully powered Spring was incapable of so much as scratching it, the zombies had no chance of digging through it.

He would need to make a hole with abyss magic to get out, which meant being in physical contact with the red liquid.

But it didn’t matter, because Sylver was about 99% certain the off switch was somewhere on the platform. The shades had fallen through the walls, the ceiling, and sunk deep into the floor, but the platform was as solid as rock and went all the way down to the bottom of the sphere.

As the thralls began to claw their way towards Sylver’s body, every shade that Sylver could get a wisp of mana to begin to scream. The pitch was inhumanly high, the sort of sound you heard from unoiled door hinges rubbing against each other.

At most, the noise irritated the thralls, but every little bit helped in situations like this.

The beetle shades, that came out of the snake chimera shade, tried to enter inside the two thralls, but their eyelids were too tough, the air coming out of their nose and mouth was too hot for the beetles to survive, and the entrances on the other side had the same issue as the eyelids.

They managed to get into their ears, but the beetles couldn’t do anything, other than annoyingly buzz.

These two thralls also didn’t have the under-chin weakness that Sylver had hoped to exploit. In terms of physical strength and defenses, the two women were impossible to stop and near impossible to harm. Sylver had to assume this was due to a temporary boost from their classes, and that they would eventually run out of steam and die, but he couldn’t exactly wait around for that to happen.

Sylver’s torso and hips reconnected as he approached the platform in the middle, and in a matter of seconds, Mora’s strings stitched the two pieces well enough for Sylver to walk without his top half falling over.

When Sylver was directly on top of the platform, he covered it and the surrounding area with his fog. The red-robed vampire was…

He was gone…

The shades moved out of the way so there was enough space for Sylver to materialize on the platform. Once he was on it, he saw that there was a small marble embedded into the very middle of the platform.

When Sylver reached to touch it, his fingers passed through it. It had turned into smoke and floated aimlessly around Sylver’s fingers. When he pulled his hand back the smoke funneled into the hole the marble left behind, and the marble reappeared.

He tried using his shadow to lift the marble, tried to destroy it with abyss magic, tried to pry it with his dagger, used a stick he grew, but no matter what he did, the marble turned into smoke, was blown away into the air, and then gathered into a marble he moment there was empty space in the hole.

Just to be safe, Sylver tried to use [Arcane Insight]on the red marble, and as expected, got absolutely fuckall from it.

“Figure it out yet?” a voice asked directly into Sylver’s ear.

He swung his hand with as much speed and force as he could manage, but the cloud of red smoke was barely visible, and Sylver’s hand passed through it unimpeded. Sylver decided to continue his attack and summoned half an explosive into his palm. He lost quite a few shades from the blast, and if the distant cackling was anything to go by, their sacrifice didn’t amount to anything.

Sylver could see the smoke, he could somewhat feel it brush against his skin, but as far as magic was concerned, he couldn’t feel shit.

He had to get off the platform as one of the frenzied thralls got too close. They were practically swimming through Sylver’s shades, and thankfully Sylver healed and summoned them faster than the thralls could destroy them.

Sylver was pushed close to the wall by his shades, and ever so gently, he pushed the blade of his dagger through the liquid material. He had to push with as much strength as he could manage without having anything solid to push against and wasn’t entirely sure that he reached the edge of the wall.

The dagger became red hot as Sylver tried to channel mana through it, and as the wall spat out molten metal into Sylver’s face, he honestly couldn’t tell if his beam of abyss magic had even reached the dagger’s tip.

He coated his arm in as much mana as the limb could handle, flattened his palm, and shoved it through the wall.

It might as well have been made of pure lead for all the good Sylver’s magic did. The magic that he used to slice through enchanted armor didn’t leave so much as a scratch on the wall. Sylver made the shades stop screaming.

“Come work for me!” Sylver shouted into the air.

The thralls turned on their heel and made a beeline toward the source of the sound.

There was a half moment of pause between Sylver making the offer, and the red mist vampire cackling with laughter.

The vamp said something in response, but Sylver couldn’t hear him over the two thralls snarling a short distance away from him. Since they weren’t stopping, Sylver had to assume the vampire’s answer was no.

The zombies breached the surface down below, but even together they weren’t going to do much against the thralls.

Sylver couldn’t say how long had passed since he entered this “room,” but the waves of negative mana the demon summoning tree was making had increased in intensity and frequency.

Using the fog in the little space between the pressed-together shades, Sylver traveled back to the red marble and very gently cupped his hands around it. It turned into smoke, and even though Sylver could see it with his eyes, he couldn’t feel anything even remotely magical.

If it had something to do with the two thralls, Sylver would have felt the connection, but even when he strained his primal energy field to its limit, he couldn’t feel anything.

“It’s really clever,” a mocking voice said into Sylver’s ear.

What’s the trick? Sylver wondered, as he pulled his hands away, and then tried to see if he could feel anything happening inside the platform.

Given the shape, and the fact that it had physical contact with the bottom of the sphere, the most logical-

“Edmund said he doesn’t need my help,” a voice spoke directly in front of Sylver. He flinched and looked up to see an ash-covered Faust standing in front of him.

“Everything alright up there?” Sylver asked as he stood up from his crouch.

“He said to tell you that the demon is 6th tier, at an absolute minimum,” Faust explained, as the shades spread throughout the sphere simultaneously disappeared.

Off in the distance, the two thralls began to fall to the ground, since the shades they had been swimming through were now gone.

“This isn’t some sort of cultivator tool, right?” Sylver asked with a gesture towards the small red marble embedded into the floor.

“Looks a bit like a dungeon core,” Faust said, as he closed one eye and began to point his sword towards the two red vampire thralls. He turned his body sideways and took the stance usually used by fencers.

“It actually does…,” Sylver said, as he spread his fingers out and slowly curled them into fists.

While he slowly unclenched his fists, Faust became blurry for half a second and then disappeared entirely. Multiple gusts of wind combined into a powerful blast of air that almost made Sylver lose his footing, followed by a lightning strike like flash of light, and the end result was that the two thralls had been sliced cleanly down the middle.

The two halves slipped as they tried to take a step forward, and when they fell, they fell apart.

“Do you know how to get out?” Sylver asked as his attempt to use a 2nd tier spell to influence the dungeon-core-looking thing didn’t do anything.

“Tuck your elbows in,” Faust said, as he stood behind Sylver, and pressed one hand against the back of his head.

If Sylver could vomit, he would have.

His surroundings spun, swirled, and folded in on themselves for what felt like the longest second of his life. He had shivers running down his spine, up his legs and felt as if there was a giant ball of metal pulling his stomach down.

Sylver’s legs gave out and Faust had to grab him to stop him from falling to the floor.

“Yeah, thought that might happen,” Faust said awkwardly as he pulled his hand away from Sylver, and slapped him hard on the back.

The nauseating feeling disappeared immediately but left behind a faint itching feeling in all the places where Sylver had stitches.

With his legs working again, Sylver let go of Faust and began to limp down the spiraling tunnel.

After a few seconds, he managed to evolve his limp into a jog.

“I meant cut a hole in it or something,” Sylver said, as he and Faust made their way down the tunnel.

“I tried. Chipped my sword,” Faust said.

True enough, the curved blade he was holding in his hand was missing its tip, and about 4 fingers' worth of edge.

“So… you can teleport,” Sylver said with just a hint of disapproval in his voice.

There was a moment's pause during which Faust decided that his explanation would be wasted on Sylver.

“Something like that,” Faust said.

They ran down the tunnel without speaking for a while, and gradually the square-shaped holes that had been used to dig the tunnel became smaller and smaller, which in turn made the tunnel smoother with every passing second.

By the time the tunnel stopped going downwards, the cubes were near imperceptible. Even when he ran his fingers along the wall, Sylver couldn’t feel any bumps, as far as he was concerned, the wall was smooth.

“Who was that guy?” Faust asked in an attempt to change the subject.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Just some guy. Your guess is as good as mine,” Sylver said with a shrug.

During the last couple of seconds inside the sphere, Sylver had felt magic gathering behind him, but luckily for them, the vampire didn’t have enough time to finish whatever it was he was doing. Sylver was curious as to how the whole thing functioned, but he had more pressing matters to deal with right now.

Not to mention he hoped the zombies he left behind would be enough to deal with the vamp.

By the time Sylver and Faust reached the end of the tunnel, the walls were vibrating.

Sylver’s face felt itchy as Faust armored himself with his Ki.

The air was as stale as air could get, and so full of moisture that droplets were gathering on the mana field Sylver had surrounded himself with.

The first thing that Sylver saw was the heart.

It was the shape of a fat squashed butterfly, and as big as two mansions stacked on top of each other. Thick dark chains were wrapped around it, and suspended it from the ceiling, as the heart flesh weakly shivered against them.

Pitch-black spikes sat embedded into every visible surface, most dry, but more than a few were dripping with blood.

Sylver lowered his gaze and saw that the blood dripping from the heart was flowing upwards, up the white 4-sided pyramid. The blood flowed up the channels and disappeared into the pyramid’s peak.

As his eyes adjusted, Sylver saw a barely visible beam of darkness coming out of the pyramid’s peak, straight up, through the heart, and then it disappeared into the ceiling.

Sylver’s eyesight was good enough that he could tell immediately that the “bricks” that made up the pyramid were made from giant turtle bones.

The walls were so far away that Sylver didn’t initially see them. The mere thought that such a large open space could exist inside someone disturbed Sylver in a way he couldn’t quite put into words.

“What should I do?” Faust asked.

Sylver had to wait for his racing mind to slow down before he answered.

“Stay close,” he said, as he forced his legs to walk towards the barely beating heart.

Sylver wanted to go home.

He wanted to have a drink with Edmund, and then he wanted to fall asleep in a comfortable and warm bed and have breakfast while watching the suns rise.

But instead of doing that, he was walking towards a thing he had never seen before, and most certainly didn’t understand.

He was frightened.

Plain and simple.

This was the sort of situation he would think twice about involving himself in when he was an unkillable Silver Lich.

As he was, he was an ant trying to bring down a human castle.

And yet, Sylver’s legs continued to walk, one foot after the other, while his mind took inventory of the tools available to it and tried to find a way to use them to stop a demi-god from being sacrificed.

Faust was blessed with ignorance, he couldn’t feel the mana the thing was emanating, and he didn’t reallyunderstand the threat they were up against.

Sophia said that she needed to wake Tuli up, to stop the Moon Demon from drowning the world. The god also specified that the drowning would start at the next winter solstice.

So even if they failed, nothing would happen until the winter solstice. Sylver and Edmund could use Lola’s connections to recruit a bunch of mages, and then figure out a way to stop it from raining.

So worst case scenario, they could still find a way to resolve everything.

Save for Tuli being sacrificed. Waking up a comatose demigod was one thing, but reviving one was so difficult that Sylver felt confident in saying it was impossible.

As Sylver approached the pyramid he began to see the framework carved into it. Sigils and circuits that were most certainly not from this realm, but the more worrying thing was that there was something familiar about them.

He followed the framework with his eyes and found that he was successfully guessing what the next sigil was going to be.

Faust hesitated for a split second before he followed Sylver up the pyramid. The rocks were slippery with blood, and more disturbingly, the bones themselves were warm.

When they reached the top, Sylver’s fear was replaced by an emotion that doesn’t quite have a name.

The “peak” of the pyramid was a flat square, from which a dark metal beam came out. The beam was about the width of a wine bottle, and while it was subtle, it was ever so slowly tuning.

But that wasn’t the part that was making Sylver feel whatever it was he was feeling.

On the edge of the flat surface, there lay a metal-bound book. The metal was tarnished and the latch that was meant to keep it closed had been torn off. The pages were glued together from the blood that had ended up soaking into them.

Sylver reached out with the tip of his dagger and pried the bloodied book off the makeshift table. It remained open, as he flipped it over, and stared at the empty circular hole on the front cover. Sylver heard a crunch when Faust shifted his weight, and they both looked down to see a small shard of glass. It was hard to tell unless you were actively looking for it, but the piece of glass was the shape of a coin.

Or rather, the shape meant to hold something that was the shape of a coin.

Sylver looked around, up at the almost dead impaled heart, down at the pyramid of bones, and he could suddenly see the “logic” behind it. Enough to at least understand that the ritual had been started prematurely.

Sylver had to wonder if Poppy knew what Nautis was doing.

If she was the one who gave him the book.

If this was the reason she decided to leave Chrys a parting gift, before leaving this realm.

Sylver also wondered if Poppy had any more laying around. Waiting for someone gullible and stupid enough to follow the instructions inside.

Sylver opened his mouth to speak, but the only sound he could produce was a low-pitched gurgle.

“What?” Faust asked, as Sylver tried again, but couldn’t focus his mind enough to properly manipulate his sound-making organ.

“Syl?” Faust asked.

Sylver’s response was an incoherent mumble. Every second word was a slur, and Sylver would later be grateful beyond words that Faust didn’t understand the language Sylver had spoken because even for Sylver, the things he said were bad.

“-bastards…” Sylver cracked his knuckles, broke them, to be more accurate, and spoke with a much calmer tone of voice. “I am going to fucking kill them,” Sylver said.

His robe had lost its tidy fluffy appearance and now looked like it was melting off his body.

Sylver heard someone laugh behind him, and as he gradually turned, he saw a figure wearing a white robe, along with a long hood that was sewn shut at the front, to hide the face. The figure was floating in the air and was on the same level as Sylver and Faust.

Immediately Sylver knew it wasn’t human. The way the shoulders were set, the way the hips were leaning forward too much compared to the perfectly straight back, and things were moving underneath the white fabric. Best guess, Sylver was looking at a swarm of a couple of thousand tiny insects that were doing a poor job of mimicking a human being’s body.

“Glad you could make it!” the figure, Nautis, probably, said.

Obviously, it was Nautis, Sylver could feel it in his hearts that the “man” he was looking at had at one point in the past been Nautis. It was like stepping into dogshit in the middle of the night, even if you couldn’t see or smell anything, you knew what you stepped into.

A glowing line appeared on Nauti’s neck, and with a great big gasp, he clutched at his throat with his hands. He coughed, and shook, as he tried to take a breath and-

Sylver kicked Faust’s sword out of his hand, then kicked with his foot again, and discarded the boot he had been wearing.

Nautis’ labored gargling evolved into a chuckle, and then a full-blown laugh.

He started to speak as he released his neck, but the explosive Sylver had thrown exploded before he could get the first word out.

Faust’s sword clinked, the sound of metal that wasn’t meant to be bent made when it was bent, and the leather that made up Sylver’s boot made a squeaking noise, as it melted into the floor.

Although neither the sword nor the boot were melting, they were being deconstructed, into barely visible cubes, that were instantly replaced by equally tiny cubes made from the bone bricks the boot and sword were laying on. With every passing second more and more of Faust’s sword became white, as did Sylver’s boot.

The floor on the other hand gained the rough outline of the sword and boot laying on top of it.

Now, normally, this kind of attack wouldn’t be much of an issue. Mages with dimensional magic tended to do exactly this sort of shit, it was one of their more commonly used tactics.

Under normal circumstances, a dimensional mage would need a lot of mana to interfere with a living person’s body, but given that Nautis was working with a demon, it wasn’t that farfetched to assume that he had something that allowed him to ignore that rule.

Sylver could survive having his body parts replaced, as could Faust, probably, but what could be a problem was having their primal energy field messed with. Especially for someone like Sylver, whose soul was spread throughout his body. The only reason he knew what was happening to Faust’s sword, was that it had been close enough for Sylver to feel its primal energy tearing to pieces.

If Nautis’ spell hit any part of him, even cutting off the infected part wouldn’t do anything, since Sylver could not cut a piece of his soul off him. Not without losing his mind in the process, and potentially just straight up “dying.”

Sylver shoved Faust out of the way as Nautis disappeared inside the cloud of smoke and materialized a half step away from where Sylver had been standing a moment prior. Nautis’ hands were raised in a limp-wristed attempt at grabbing something.

Because he didn’t need to grab anyone, just making contact would be enough, and he knew it.

“Syl?” Faust shouted, as Sylver continued to back away from Nautis, and kept his eyes glued to the laughing man.

The spell that attached Faust’s soul to his body would, in theory, deactivate the moment his soul was damaged. Or it was possible that Nautis’ spell would travel back to Faust’s real body and kill him.

Or mess him up to the point it wouldn’t be right to call him “Faust.”

Just as Sylver began to construct a plan of action, blood rained down onto him.

Sylver looked up and saw that the spikes had retracted, and the holes they left behind were leaking blood with every single weak contraction the heart made. The pyramid hummed with power and began to vibrate with so much force that Sylver just barely managed to maintain his footing on the slippery slanted surface.

“Seems like you got here just in time,” Nautis said.

And as the pyramid began to slowly shift towards its final position, Sylver couldn’t help but agree with him.

NEXT CHAPTER