Ch253-Golden Brown (Patreon)

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Ch253-Golden Brown

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Lucy left Sylver alone for a good half hour.

He wandered through the seemingly deserted underground laboratory, opened doors, looked for hidden entrances, and was almost relaxed enough to use the 45 AP he had saved up.

Thankfully, Lucy’s patience ran out before Sylver’s did.

[Lucy – Fur Fume – ???]
[HP: N/A – 100%]
[MP: N/A – N/A%]
[Stamina: N/A – 198%]
[Corpse – Common]
[Soul – None]

It was an obese human man, without any armor, with just about every visible piece of skin covered in thick pulsating liquid-filled brown boils. The bubbles jiggled as the man walked, and as Sylver looked closely, he saw something moving inside the boils.

Sylver lifted his hand, just as the man-shaped creature lifted his.

“Can we not do this?” Sylver asked, as he slowly closed his hand into a fist.

Instead of being pierced by a hundred shadowy spikes, the boils on the man's left arm burst and released a cloud of brown-colored gas. The gas interfered with Sylver's magic as it was made of lead, and turned his razor-sharp shadows into mush.

And did the same to the shades that were trying to materialize behind the boil-covered man.

“Alright then,” Sylver said, as he summoned a bomb into his hand.

He pulled his arm back, threw with all the force he could magically muster, and his aim was so off that the thing collided with the wall before it had even reached half the distance to the creature. The resulting explosion pushed the gas back, but not long enough for the shades to kill the thing.

It also didn’t help that something with a shield had blocked most of the force from reaching the boil-covered man.

The creature holding the shield peaked around it, and as the brown gas surrounded it, it began to walk towards Sylver, with the boil-covered man walking behind it. The shield was painted blue, had a word written in white paint in the middle of it, and appeared to be made out of thick metal.

“Let me guess,” Sylver said to himself, as he turned his head to look behind him, and saw a near-identical setup advancing at him from the back.

Sylver turned back to the original duo, although it was more likely the ones behind him had been near him longer, and summoned an explosive into his hand again.

The creature holding the shield pressed it down against the ground, and stayed like that, while Sylver silently sprinted towards it. Sylver kept his eyes glued to the left side, the creature’s right, and as he predicted, it swivelled its shield at the very last second, to stop Sylver from running past it.

As Sylver summoned a bomb into his other hand and lightly tossed it against the right wall, the creature’s left, he grabbed the side of the shield and pulled as hard as he could. The bomb he had thrown exploded on impact, and hit the boil-covered creature, the shield carrier, and Sylver, from the side, and violently pushed them against the wall and ceiling.

Sylver’s skull left a dent in the ceiling as it collided with it.

Before either creature could get its footing, or even recognize what had happened, Sylver shoved his hand into the shield carrier’s face, pierced it with his fingers, and slammed the back of the creature’s skull against the boil-covered man’s chest.

Neither of them made a sound, as Sylver used [Draining Blight] on the shield carrier, and simultaneously used the shield carrier’s body as a conduit for draining the life out of the boil-covered man.

The boil-covered one flapped its arms around and tried to get as much fluid onto Sylver as it could manage, but between the shield carrier’s body, and the actual shield, barely enough to fill a cup reached Sylver.

The few splatters that did clung to his robe, and tried to soak into it, but it thankfully was no match for the Morana enriched fabric, and simply slid off.

The boil-covered man tried to stand up at some point, but he was in a bad position, and Sylver was significantly stronger than him.

[Lucy (Fur Fume) Defeated!]

Sylver didn’t celebrate, because he had to immediately pull his feet up, so as not to lose them to the shield coming down onto them.

His plan was to roll back, throw the shield that he rolled back with him, and while the other shield carrier was distracted, do the exact same trick he just did with the explosive.

What happened instead was that Sylver rolled back, had a spike as thick as a wine bottle go through his forearm, and instead of throwing the shield, it began to wrap around the spike-pierced forearm. When Sylver grabbed the floppy shield with his other hand, to pry it off his forearm, he very nearly got his free hand glued to it too.

Sylver continued his backward roll, and with a slight flourish, kicked himself up into the air, bounced off the ceiling, and landed on his feet.

The previous slightly curled rectangular shield was folding in two, like a fly trap plant, around Sylver’s arm, and flapped so violently it nearly managed to get his head.

The shield carrier, the one that was still alive and had flanked him from the back, charged at Sylver with far too much speed for something this big and heavy, and came dangerously close to knocking him off his feet. Sylver allowed himself to fall back, used his free hand to pull the top of the shield with him, and as the creature fell with him, Sylver continued his roll backward until it was on top of him, and kicked it down the tunnel.

Sylver pushed himself to his feet, and using the shield attached to his arm slapped the boil-covered man so hard that he was flung down the other side of the tunnel. The bubbles of brown exploded from the impact, and the gas made its way toward Sylver.

But instead of waiting for it to get to him, Sylver sprinted towards the shield carrier, who was almost on his feet now and shoved a timed explosive into the front side of the shield. As predicted, it tried to wrap around the small sphere, and when it did, Sylver grabbed the man by the leg and tossed him toward the boil-covered guy.

As the explosive went off, Sylver bashed his shield-covered arm against the metal wall until it died.

[Lucy (Fur Fume) Defeated!]

[Lesser Lucy (Shield Mite) Defeated!]

[Lesser Lucy (Shield Mite) Defeated!]

[Draining Blight (VI) Proficiency increased to 95%!]

[Black Mass (IV) Proficiency increased to 16%!]

[Vigorous Conditioning (VI) Proficiency increased to 53%!]

At first, the shield tried to harden, to permanently embed itself in Sylver's arm, but after a few seconds, it wilted and fell off as it disintegrated into fine ash. The hole in his forearm was almost wide enough for him to put his hand through, but Mora’s strings stitched it shut by the time he finished brushing ash off himself.

Sylver was about to say something, but he found his head almost touching the ceiling, and that there were thick pair of pincers grasping his neck. He gently placed his hand on the rough claw and turned to see a human man, with hairy brown-colored crab pincers where his arms should be.

“You need to put your back into it,” Sylver said calmly, as he reached out with his hand towards the man’s neck.

“Like so,” Sylver said, as his fingers passed through the cartilage and spinal column, and using his thumb, the almost detached head was flicked off the man’s crushed neck.

[N/A (N/A) Defeated!]

The next attack didn’t even wait for Sylver’s feet to reach the floor, as a curved blade the width of a shovel tried to pierce Sylver‘s torso. It bent as it collided with Sylver's stomach, and as the attacker tried to pull its arm back to try again, Sylver grabbed the blade and was pulled along with the blade.

With a single downward open hand hit, the creature’s human-shaped head folded into its neck, and then disappeared into its torso.

[Lucy (N/A) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 20 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

The creature remained upright for a while. It swayed on its feet, as Sylver finished brushing ash off the front of his robe.

As it fell over, Sylver had one piece of [Black Mass] strip its clothing and sent another to bring him the boil-covered man in the back, once the gas had dissipated.

Once the man was nude, Sylver pulled the [Black Mass] back into his armor and crouched near the corpse to dissect it.

Where Eira’s humans had a kidney, this man had the same deflated organ Sylver saw in Tristan and Amelia, and the “humans” in the ice realm. The brown hair inside the man tried to get into Sylver's skin, but it might as well have been a regular non-magical worm against Sylver’s dark magic coated body.

Most of the worms were near the spine, the base of the neck, and they seemed to utilize the nervous system, to control the person they were infesting.

What was odd, in the context of a hair-shaped worm inside an underwater dungeon, was that from what Sylver could see the worms didn’t just sit there like roots of a tree, they crawled up and down through the man’s nerves, often enough that they had formed passages wide enough for Sylver to stick his pointer finger through. As for the blade-

“-not look angry? Hold on, he stopped moving,” a voice whispered somewhere high above Sylver's head.

He looked up, but there was only ceiling, close enough that he could reach out and touch it.

“He’s looking for something. He’s leaning heavily on his right leg, other than that no. No. Yes. A little,” the quiet voice continued, as Sylver stood up from his crouch, and physically moved his head to look around with his eyes.

“Chrys?” Sylver asked the empty tunnel.

“Wait, wait, shush, he said something,” the voice said.

“Chrys?” Sylver repeated.

“No. I don’t know. I’m trying,” the voice said, and with every word sounded as if it was moving further away from Sylver.

“CHRYS!” Sylver shouted with all the volume his lungs could muster. His voice came back to him after a second with an annoying overlapping echo.

“Underground. I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t. No,” the voice continued, as Sylver used [Dead Dominion] to draw the word “CHRYS” on the floor, walls, and ceiling in big capital letters.

“Yes. No. It’s some kind of metal tunnel. I don’t know. I don’t-” the sound cut off completely, even as Sylver strained his hearing to its limit, he couldn’t hear anything else.

Spring materialized next to Sylver and the dead body, and joined Sylver in staring at the ceiling.

“Could this just be the dungeon fucking with you?” Spring asked.

“Or maybe something is interfering with Chrys’s magic,” Sylver said.

“Or it’s the dungeon making you hear things to slow you down,” Spring offered.

“Or, because of a recent event, Chrys is unable to use her magic properly,” Sylver offered.

“Since when can she speak without something to speak through? And since when can she see inside dungeons?” Spring asked.

“Since she let you-know-who fiddle with her eye. Who knows what she’s capable of,” Sylver said.

“Could be the gas. A hallucinogenic or something similar” Spring offered.

As a rule of thumb, undead were immune to poisons, venoms, hallucinogenics, and any sort of mind-altering substance.

But as with anything, there were exceptions.

Sylver had been careful not to breathe any of the gases in and was certain none of them made physical contact with his skin, but it wasn’t impossible there was some sort of Perk or Skill for bypassing a mage’s magical defences.

Sylver’s [Swamp Lord] granted [Poison Immunity] was limited to poisons ranked A or lower, which meant S-rank poisons could still affect him. And while his grasp on what constituted an A or S rank poison was vague, he was fairly certain a monster below level 200 wouldn’t be able to create S rank poisons.

At least that was what he hoped was the case.

Because it would be a massive relief to know Chrys is alive, isn’t on the run or anything, and has enough time to sit down and attempt to reach out to Sylver.

Sylver had had training for the rare occasion something might affect him, so he was fairly certain he would be able to tell if he was under the influence, but like everything in the world, it wasn’t foolproof.

Instead of dwelling on it, Sylver made the corpse float next to him as he walked and continued his dissection.

***

As something of an expert on biological human-ish augmentation, mutation, and all forms of alteration, Sylver could say with a certain degree of authority that whoever created the boil guy, shield guy, claw guy, and blade arm guy, didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.

The only way something could be this loosely connected to the host was if it was grown separately from the body, and was attached later on. Which defeated the entire point of linking a creature’s biology to a specific weapon or tool.

If you’re going to do such a shit job you might as well just give a person a sword, or a balloon full of gas, or a shield to hold, as opposed to replacing their arms with sticky tentacles thing to hold the shield a little better.

Sylver was fairly certain that if he simply grabbed the blade, and pulled hard enough, it would slip out of the man’s arm. It was also very unevenly sharpened, the tip was sharp enough to cut bone, but even 5 inches down the blade, it was dull enough that Sylver could hold it in his bare hand.

Which is weird in its own right, if the purpose of the weapon was to pierce why the fuck would someone use such a wide blade?

Has whatever created this never heard of a spear?

Or a rapier?

But then the idiocy of the choice of weapon is immediately contrasted by the genius of the hair worms themselves. They were simple, in a structural sense, but the curse dancing on their skin wasn’t too far away from being something the Silver Lich might have crafted.

Sylver stopped walking, moved the dissected corpses out of the way, and turned to see a woman wearing a bright green dress standing behind him. Her face was covered by a piece of draped cloth, and the only visible part of her were her hands.

Her fingers were black, charred, like some sort of dry necrosis, but she moved them without any issue.

“Medusa?” Sylver asked, just in case.

The woman creature twitched its head as if someone had slapped it across the face. It leaned down, placed its hands on the floor, and as if it was a professional diver, it dove into the ground.

It fell into its shadow and disappeared entirely.

As Sylver stomped his foot on the ground, a splattering of red, brown, and green exploded out of the floor where the woman creature had been a second prior.

[N/A (Sage Of The Shadows) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 90 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 73!
+5AP

Sylver remained where he was for a few seconds, and then extended a cloud of [Draining Blight] towards the thing.

Sylver’s arm flickered with golden sparks as his body couldn’t contain the excess mana, and as Sylver approached the creature, he prepared for the surprise attack.

But no surprise attack came.

The corpse just lay there.

Bleeding.

Dead.

The woman’s face was stuck with a smug grin, that remained there on account of the sheer speed at which she died from having the shadow she was trying to swim through disturbed.

Sylver floated her arm over to him and uncurled the blacked fingers.

“She never practiced magic before she died… Any kind of magic for that matter…” Sylver mumbled to himself, as the woman’s torn apart body was pieced together in the air. The worms inside her formed links and tried to reach the arms and the legs, but a small puff of [Draining Blight] killed them off.

“So these things know how to use magic, even if the host doesn’t?” Spring asked.

“Seems so,” Sylver said, as the skin fell off the woman’s hand, and revealed black spots on her muscles and bones. It was the sort of marks you saw on the corpses of dark mages that died before they cast their first proper spell.

Sylver was about to throw the corpse parts into the ball of [Black Mass] when he noticed the ones sticking out of the woman’s eyes were wriggling in the same direction as the ones coming out of her ribcage. He turned her head, and the worms stopped wriggling. He turned it back the way it had been, and they started moving again.

Sylver shook the other body parts until the few worms that remained came out, and the same thing happened.

Spring used his finger to draw in the thin film of [Black Mass] Sylver had spread on the wall.

“We came from here and got attacked here, from this side. Then followed the tunnel this way, and were attacked from here,” Spring explained, as he marked the spots where they were attacked with small crosses.

“They can move through the walls... Or they were in the walls and were waiting for us to pass them, to attack from behind…” Sylver said, as he floated the makeshift map off the wall, and placed it on the floor.

He aligned it so it was pointing north, or at least the direction Sylver felt was north and then placed the severed hand on top of the spot where they were.

“Are they crawling away from something, or towardssomething?” Spring asked.

Sylver tried moving the body parts around, but the worms always pointed southeast. Even when Sylver moved them far away from each the worms were still parallel to one another.

Which meant they were trying to go southeast, in the directional sense, or that whatever they were going from or towards was so large that the amount of distance Sylver was able to create wasn’t enough for them to change the angle.

In the end, Sylver separated some chunks of flesh with worms in them into glass jars and had shades carry them, in case something happened.

Sylver eventually reached an intersection and had the option to continue forward, turn left, or turn right.

He chose to go right since that meant going toward the direction the worms were crawling.

If they were crawling toward the main body, great!

If they were crawling away from the main body, Sylver would find the edge of the lab, and then make his way to the main body.

If the direction they were crawling towards was completely random… He’d think of something.

Using magic on the corpses the [Lucy] infested creatures left behind was a fool’s errand, the curse from the worms was potent enough that any form of tracking spell wouldn’t hold long enough to give anything of use.

At some point during his walk, Sylver’s robe brushed against the wall and he felt something.

It was a wisp of positive mana, not enough to see or feel properly, but just enough that Sylver’s highly attuned senses registered it. At first he thought it was Chrys’ magic, materializing inside the wall or something along those lines, but as Sylver moved his hand along the wall, he found a spot where the wisp was stronger.

Sylver tapped his index finger against the wall and cut a toothpick-sized hole through the thick metal.

He flinched his hand away, to not be cut by the intense water pressure, but to his surprise, no water came. The hole made a whistling sound, as the air in the tunnel Sylver was standing in forced itself through the hole into the tunnel on the other side.

Sylver had the shades scout it out and was informed that although there were traces of positive magic all over the tunnel, the “tunnel” was tiny.

So tiny that if Sylver cut his body down the middle, he still wouldn’t fit.

Sylver pressed his hand up against the hole and pushed as much [Fog Form] into it as he could. The fog filled up the tiny tunnel-like water coming through a pipe, and Sylver found out that although he could tell where his fog was, there was a limit to the range at which he could see through the fog.

He must have spent a good 10 minutes spreading his fog out through the tiny hole, but try as Sylver might, he couldn’t find a single spot that was big enough for him to fit.

Sylver felt something move inside his fog, and as he focused his fog toward whatever moved, he felt the thing move even more. He wasn’t exactly chasing it, but from its perspective that was what it must have looked like, because the thing’s movements only became more erratic the longer Sylver followed it.

And just as suddenly as the thing had appeared, it disappeared into a wall.

Which was a really stupid way of saying it passed through an airtight door, and closed it behind itself, to stop the sinister-looking fog from catching it.

Sylver turned to see a man wearing a green t-shirt with long fleshy spirals where his arms were supposed to be, like coiled springs, but meaty, wet, and with a hooked-shaped appendage at the end of it.

“Can you just fuck off?” Sylver asked the thing, as he continued working on the pinhole.

The thing leaned back, pointed its arms at Syvler, and continued leaning back as Dai and Sho pulled it down by the shoulders. It released its fleshy weapons, the hooks bounced up and down the wall and floor, curved at unnatural angles, and bounced harmlessly off the large shield the shade sitting on Dai’s shoulders was holding.

The hooked tip curved around the shield, and as it made contact with the nameless shade on Dai’s shoulders, it exploded with thin tendrils and engulfed the small shade.

[N/A (N/A) Defeated!]

Sho lifted his sword from the splatter-covered floor, and along with the other two shades, disappeared into the shadows.

Almost completely on the opposite side of the tunnel maze Sylver was pushing his fog through, he found an opening into an area large enough for him to fully materialize.

Given that his options were to either try his luck with the dungeon and worms that were always pointing southeast, or going through a several-kilometer-long tunnel that he found because he felt a slightamount of positive energy, he chose the latter.

Because he was ready for it, Sylver was disoriented for less than a half second.

He found himself standing in a metal tunnel, identical to the one he had come from, except, this one was warm, and there was a smell in the air.

A hint of wood smoke from a cooking fire, a bit of dust from corners that didn’t get cleaned properly, and a flowery scent, that was either soap or smelling oils.

Along with the smell, the light in the ceiling had been ripped out, and replaced by a spell that was reacting to Syvler’s presence. It illuminated the area 10 meters in front of him and 10 meters behind him.

Sylver crouched down to the tiny crack he had come from, so thin that he couldn’t even fit his nail into it.

The sound of a metal door slamming shut echoed through the tunnel, and Sylver gently sent a stream of fog in the direction the sound came from.

He materialized next to the door without making a sound and saw a familiar-looking circular opening mechanism. It was the same one the dark elves had on their underwater boat, it had a liquid inside that heated it enough to stop ice from forming.

As Sylver moved his hand towards it, to turn the wheel to open the thing, he realized he was hearing a buzzing noise. Silently Sylver took a step back from the door, took another step, and then 10 more steps, and quietly summoned a shade in front of the door.

The second the shade’s hand made contact with the metal wheel, it evaporated into the air, with a flash of light so bright and powerful that Sylver went partially blind. His robe rubbed the pain and tears out of his eyes, while he waited for whoever was on the other side of the door to finish turning the wheel.

It made a sort of clank sound as the wheel reached its end, and as Sylver opened his eyes to look, he saw a countless number of gold-colored orbs staring into his very soul. It was like looking at the night sky from above the clouds, an endless number of stars sparkling in the darkness.

In front of the half-opened door stood a pale-skinned woman, with thousands of tiny snakes in place of where a human woman would have had hair. Her eyes were gold colored, as were the beady eyes of the snakes, they were slithering over one another, without once breaking eye contact with Sylver.

Initially, the snake-haired woman seemed almost bored, she looked at Sylver the way he looked at a piece of furniture. Not dismissively, not disrespectfully, but she was disinterested, it was just a chair, there was nothing more to it.

The rapidly moving snakes slowed down, and the woman’s face contorted into concern, which evolved into full-blown panic, as Sylver continued to hold eye contact with her.

“You have the most gorgeous eyes I have ever seen,” Sylver thought to himself.

I’m only here to talk, he said out loud.

The snake-haired woman, and all of her snakes, blinked at him.

She turned around, cupped her hands over her face, and made a strange sound.

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