Ch261-Plan And Action (Patreon)

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Ch261-Plan And Action

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As the two shades wrestled the man onto the ground, a third shade armed with a scalpel cut open the back of the man’s shirt, and oblivious to the man’s screaming, sliced 25 sigils into his skin.

As the shade sprinkled dark blue powder over the man’s bleeding back and used a bundled piece of cloth to pat the powder into the wounds, Sylver finished the last calculation and gave the notebook over to Spring to hold.

Sylver walked over to the closed door and knocked on it.

“This is the last one!” he shouted through the door.

“Alright!” Euryale shouted back.

Out of the three of them, testing with Euryale was the easiest.

Her curse was the “weakest” so to speak, which in turn made it the slowest.

Medusa’s curse turned the pirates into sea foam, and took anywhere from 15 seconds, to 30 seconds.

Stheno’s curse turned the pirates into seawater, and one man spent nearly 3 minutes vomiting bloodied water out of his mouth before he finally died.

Euryale’s curse turned the men into sea salt, and although Sylver couldn’t figure out why, there were 2 that took almost 8 minutes to pass away.

Medusa’s and Stheno’s curses started from the inside, and moved outwards, whereas Euryale’s started from the outside, and moved inwards.

The end result was salt statues, but what was curious about them was that the structure of the salt outside the skin was different from the salt that had once been flesh and bones.

The curse didn’t leave any traces of the material it had been made from, at least enough for Sylver to sense with his mana or his [Dead Dominion].

From his experiments, Sylver figured out a few things.

The first was that the people who died due to the Gorgon’s curses didn’t grant anyone any experience. It didn’t matter if Sylver finished them off, or if they died from the sea salt, the second the curse affected them, their experience died with them.

Along with their soul.

That was the second thing Sylver figured out, the souls of the people affected by the curse disappeared. Which made sense given that the curse was given by a god.

Sylver also discovered that the curse didn’t care about mass, density, or volume, and for all intents and purposes, the speed at which a person’s body crystallized was random.

Mana conductivity, capacity, physical strength, level, whether the person had a resistance to curses, from the limited tests Sylver was able to run, he couldn’t see any conclusive correlations. Which again made sense, given that the source was a god. For all Sylver knew, the more “evil” a person was, the slower the curse killed them.

And despite what some mages/priests might claim, it’s not possible to judge the “evilness” of a person.

The shades holding the pirate down released him, and just as before, formed into a half circle behind him.

And just like the pirate before him, the terrified man got to his feet, saw the group of shades behind him, and without thinking it through, rushed through the slightly open door in front of him.

Sylver materialized inside the room via [Fog Form]about half a second before the man saw Euryale’s face and screamed in terror.

All 25 sigils on his back flashed with a faint golden light, and as the man stumbled backwards, his body instantly turned into salt and shattered all over the floor as he fell.

While Euryale manipulated the salt flakes out of the room and threw them overboard, Sylver made notes in his notebook and tied it closed with a piece of leather string.

“There are two ways we can go about this,” Sylver said, as he and Euryale stepped out of the cabin onto the other side of the ship.

The storm had died down, and while there were small holes in the clouds, Sylver wanted to wait a bit more, just to be safe.

“I can cobble together a potion that will temporarily restrict your mana, and in effect will lower the range of your curse to 1, maybe 2, meters. As long as people keep their distance, they will be able to look at you without any issue,” Sylver explained.

Medusa and Stheno were lying on 2 bed-shaped blocks of red mushrooms that were so hot there was steam coming off them.

Euryale broke a piece of Medusa’s bed and held the piece against her chest and neck.

“Once the potion wears off our mana returning to regular circulation will result in a mana backlash. Won’t kill us, but will more likely than not incapacitate for a day or so,” Euryale added.

After Sylver explained his methodology and translated some of the more complex sigils, Euryale managed to get a surprisingly firm grasp on the concept of the curse.

“What about an enchanted ring or something?” Stheno asked.

Both Sylver and Euryale shook their heads.

They gestured at each other to explain the reason why a ring wouldn’t work, and eventually, Sylver realized Euryale didn’t actually know why a ring wouldn’t work and wasn’t just being polite.

“The curse attached to you isn’t powerful, not exactly. To be very specific, all the curse on your bodies does is check if you are being looked at or observed. The actual salt rock, brine, and foam turning part of the curse is carried out by something else,” Sylver explained.

All three women nodded for him to continue.

“Because the curse does so little, it’s magically speakingthin. So thin that an enchantment that would be dense enough to catch all strands of the curse would need a framework that is tighter than the Gellman constant allows. By a factor of 3. And although it is theoretically possible it-”

“-would require an impossible amount of mana to maintain…” Euryale finished. She had a real knack for this.

“What’s the Gellman constant?” Medusa asked.

“It’s what he calls Metis’ law,” Euryale answered, and continued as she saw that Medusa didn’t know what she had just said, “it’s how small a single thread of mana is able to be. And the limitation for how magically dense a spell’s framework can be,” Euryale explained.

“So aside from a potion that will give us a magic hangover, what’s the alternative?” Stheno asked.

Sylver reached into his robe and held up a small piece of green glass.

“There are certain crystals that polarize any mana that passes through them. They are normally used as components for illusion spells, and sometimes people build lanterns that only illuminate very specific colours-anyway, the important thing is that they polarize mana. They allow mana aligned in a certain direction through, and block all the other types,” Sylver explained, as he gave the glass to Euryale who tried pushing her mana through it but couldn’t feel anything out of the ordinary about it.

“You’re going to make a lotion out of those crystals, that will filter out the observation aspect of our curse,” Euryale guessed.

“Close, I’m going to surgically replace my people’s irises with multiple layers of these crystals,” Sylver said.

Euryale and Medusa both seemed mildly horrified, and only Stheno appeared to be fine with the idea.

“Surgically… Why not have them wear glasses? Or goggles?” Euryale offered.

“So they can trip and accidentally look at you and turn into some form of salt? I know “surgery” sounds like a big word, but it will be performed by a man who can literally rip someone’s eye out and heal them a new one in the time it would have taken them to blink,” Sylver explained.

Edmund actually did that once, just to prove a point.

“What happens if they get punched in the face? Or they blink too hard, and the crystal moves out of the way?” Euryale asked.

“There will be a small framework craved on the crystal that will blind them if that happens. Not ideal, but better to be temporarily blinded, than to die,” Sylver explained.

Both Medusa and Euryale cocked their heads to the side slightly, on account of how quickly Sylver had answered their hypothetical.

“Have you done this before?” Medusa asked.

“Inserting a crystal into someone’s eye so they aren’t affected by an observation-based curse?” Sylver asked.

“Yes,” Euryale and Medusa answered in unison.

Sylver thought about it for a moment before he answered.

“5 times. Maybe 9 depending on what you consider a curse,” Sylver said.

“And it always worked?” Medusa asked.

Sylver paused just long enough that all 3 of them noticed it.

“Yes,” he said.

***

The storm clouds eventually cleared away and although the sky was still dark and cloudy, at the very least there wouldn’t be any lightning strikes.

Sylver had Aleri, the 6-winged eagle/owl hybrid shade, fly up into the sky with Will in its shadow.

Will appeared above the clouds, fell for a few seconds, and after he flapped his wings a couple of times, gained enough speed to fly. He circled around the ship as Sylver created a platform underneath each woman’s feet, and waited for Will to fly near the ship.

There was a fair bit of screaming from Medusa and Euryale, and giggling from Stheno, as Sylver threw them into the air, and a team of shades glued to Will’s back caught them and sat them down onto the wyvern’s back.

Sylver’s 4 barrels of liquid platinum were transported onto the wyvern’s back in much the same way.

He stood on the very top of the pirate ship’s sails and closed his eyes for a few seconds.

It was quiet.

And while the sound of water sloshing against the ship wasn’t exactly peaceful, there was a pleasant pattern to it.

Sylver removed the large bubbles of [Black Mass]around the ship and waited for them to slither up the mast. They travelled up his legs and reformed themselves into a protective armour underneath his robe. As Will began to fly low to pick Sylver up, he tossed 50 explosives onto the ship below him and used [Fog Form] to fly up into the air.

He materialized about 2 seconds before the timer on the explosives below went off and obliterated the small wooden ship.

Sylver kept his distance from the women as Will climbed higher and higher into the air, but oddly enough they didn’t start crying when the first sun became visible.

If anything, they kind of ignored it.

Closed their eyes, lifted their chins, and sort of sat like that for a few minutes without saying a word.

As disrespectful as this might be to say about 3 extremely beautiful women, but the expressions on their faces reminded Sylver of lizards standing on a warm rock. They remained completely motionless like that for maybe an hour, possibly more.

While they did that, Sylver made blueprints for how the eye crystals would need to be layered and tried to figure out if the surgery was something the dark elves would be capable of performing without Edmund’s assistance.

There was a fair amount of guesswork regarding how much healing potion their bodies could handle in a short period of time, but worst-case scenario, they would simply do one eye at a time.

It wasn’t like they didn’t have plenty of practice performing surgery, attaching metal to the bottom of a baby’s spine is infinitely harder and more complicated than simply sliding a piece of glass into someone’s eyeball.

At some point during the flight, Spring informed Sylver that they were being followed by an island.

That is to say, something that had the appearance of an island, was keeping up with Sylver’s magically enhanced flying shade wyvern.

The “island” was roughly 100 meters in diameter, and had a small group of palm trees in the centre of it, and while Sylver couldn’t tell for sure from this distance, he was fairly certain there was a wooden treasure chest filled with gold propped open near the palm trees.

If this wasn’t bait, he didn’t know what was.

The island persisted for an uncomfortably long time, even when the suns went down, it still kept up with Will. The circular fruits hanging off the palm tree were glowing, just enough that the gold inside the chest was glittering.

Without any landmarks, the island made it feel like they weren’t moving, like the giant wyvern flapping its wings was merely floating in place.

Nevertheless, Sylver ignored the island, and eventually, it sunk underwater and disappeared out of sight.

Sylver tried to rest his eyes, but Spring interrupted his attempt and told him there was a shipwreck below them.

Sure enough, Sylver leaned over the edge and saw 8 women standing on top of a piece of wood, wearing just the right enough scraps of cloth to make a person’s imagination run wild, and all 8 of them just so happened to look like they belonged on the cover of an erotic novel.

“Those are either sirens, whatever that island was, or something even worse and weirder,” Sylver silently said to Spring.

“Doesn’t the blond kind of look like Sophia?” Spring said, as Sylver squinted and tried to [Lesser Perception] to zoom in on the blond woman in question.

“Kind of yeah… What if we… No, no, ignore them. I’ve had enough sea-related adventures for the time being,” Sylver replied, as he stopped peering over the edge, and went back to trying to rest.

About an hour later, Sylver felt that Spring was seeing something really enticing.

But he did as he was told and didn’t tell Sylver what he was looking at.

And just as before, after a few hours’ the concoction of Sylver’s absolute favourite things disappeared underwater.

***

“Something’s wrong,” Euryale said towards Sylver, just as he had gotten comfortable enough to take a nap.

He stood up and walked towards the woman.

“Can you be specific?” Sylver asked, as he felt around with his mana but couldn’t feel anything out of place.

“I can’t. But something happened,” Euryale said.

Sylver lowered his blindfold and saw that the snakes on Euryale’s and Medusa’s heads were bobbing up and down as if they were listening to a catchy song. Stheno’s snakes were just sitting on her head, and unlike Medusa’s and Euryale’s, didn’t seem the least bit anxious.

Sylver walked over to Will’s head, glued his feet to the wyvern’s forehead, and spread his arms out.

He removed his blindfold and looked around, but he couldn’t see or feel anything.

It took him far too long to find the issue.

“Horizon isn’t curved, we’re inside someone’s spell,” Sylver said quickly, and the second he said it, the air Will had been using to fly became too thin for him to push himself against.

They didn’t quite “plummet” from the sky, nothing so dramatic, but there was a fair bit of screaming as the wyvern shade fell and spun as he did so.

Sylver threw Cory with all his might into the water below them, and the small rat-like shade managed to get control of the water just a second before it would have been too late.

Medusa’s, Euryale’s, and Stheno’s landing wasn’t “smooth,” but it was a far cry from a crash landing.

They effectively went down a water slide, made out of water, that was barely above freezing, and only the fact that Sylver had foreseen this exact scenario and covered their clothing in hydrophobic fungus prevented all 3 of them from getting soaked and losing consciousness from hypothermia.

Sylver used a combination of mushroom, [Black Mass], and ice to construct a makeshift floating platform, and for the unlife of him couldn’t understand why he was having to exert so much mana just to prevent the thing from sinking.

It wasn’t that the water wasn’t as dense as water, but something was pulling the ship downwards. The whole thing might as well have been made from solid iron for how poorly the construct managed to stay afloat.

Even the balloons of hydrogen gas barely made a dent in the thing’s buoyancy.

“We’re close enough. I’m calling Ed over, cover yourself please,” Sylver said, as the Gorgons did as he asked, and pulled up their hoods and veils.

Sylver lifted his hand into the air and snapped his fingers.

A tiny blue-tinged flame sputtered on the tip of his finger, and if someone paid really close attention, they might notice that the sputtering had a pattern to it that wasn’t dissimilar from Morse code.

Everyone turned towards the sound of an odd crackling, and a few seconds later, a small human boy wearing a cape made out of see-through orange fire simply appeared a couple of meters away from Sylver and his boat.

The boy had a blindfold over his eyes, and Sylver could almost see Edmund’s mana strategically circling around the boat, without ever touching it, or the people on it.

Wordlessly the sword hanging off Edmund’s back fell off, and as it fell it melted into a spherical blob of liquid metal that then formed into a flat disc platform. The platform attached itself to the edge of Sylver’s attempt at a boat, and one by one, Sylver helped the Gorgon sisters step off his boat, onto the metal disc.

Once Sylver stepped off his boat and stopped keeping it afloat with pure magic, the thing sunk so fast that the [Black Mass]holding it together barely had enough time to return to him.

“So, you remember how the steam clouds coming out of her were acting weird?” Edmund asked.

“How wide is it?” Sylver asked.

“The “cloud” if you can call it that, has a 30-to-50-kilometre radius. Prevents flying, floating, and I don’t know if you can feel it, but there’s a pretty significant current pushing away from the centre. Nearly impossible to reach her,” Edmund said, as the platform Sylver and the Gorgons were standing on floated into the air, and slightly titled as it and Edmund began to gather speed.

“I mean… It’ll be annoying, but all of that sounds like a good thing,” Sylver said, as Edmund nodded.

“Also blocks teleportation. And communication. On top of that, there’s a kind of 3-dimensional refraction going on. I’ve flown north, and when I left the fog, I came out facing south. Flew south, came out west, went east, came out south. If there’s a pattern, I haven’t been able to find it,” Edmund explained.

“Again, will be annoying, but overall sounds like a very solid defence system,” Sylver said.

As to why Edmund was being so uncharacteristically rude towards the 3 covered-up women, the answer was that he was slightly more skittish about god-given curses than Sylver was.

And for good reason, given that the last time he took a god-given curse lightly, he regrated it immensely.

Under different circumstances, Sylver would taunt Edmund, the way you would toss a fake spider at someone afraid of spiders, but even Sylver had to admit this curse was a bit too dangerous to fuck around with.

Thankfully he had explained this to the Gorgons on their way over here, and they seemed to understand.

“Faust settled in the north segment, the left shoulder essentially. I helped him clean out the area, and he and Anna have been drawing up plans for how it will look once fully built,” Edmund said.

“I see… Why is Faust and Anna here again?” Sylver asked.

“The dark elves will need at least 1 person capable of going toe to toe with whatever rogue adventurer manages to stumble through the defences, and it isn’t like we have all that many people to choose from,” Edmund explained, as Sylver nodded along.

“I’m guessing his cultivators are already on their way with the dark elves?” Sylver asked.

“Should be,” Edmund said.

Edmund shook his head slightly, which was his way of saying there was something he needed to talk to Sylver about but couldn’t do it while the 3 sisters could hear him.

Sylver nodded back at him.

Mid-flight, Sylver cocked his head to the side and then smiled as he realized what he had just sensed.

Edmund stopped the fast-moving platform, and at Sylver’s request, dove down into the water, to the very bottom of the sea floor. He returned a few seconds later, with a pitch-black rectangle, that was actively trying to stab Edmund in the eyes.

The thing settled down as Sylver touched it, and with Edmund watching over his shoulder, Sylver opened the slightly scuffed living suitcase and showed off the many bottles of underwater silt wine.

And he didn’t even know about the brandy!

***

Edmund and Sylver sat on one of the bumps on Tuli’s cracked-open shell, the highest point on her body, the spot that Edmund had been using while he was waiting for Sylver to return.

The steam that came out of Tuli’s shell was grey, not white, and even as though half the suns had risen in the distance, it still felt like it could be nighttime.

“Respectfully… But do you mind if I check you for severe brain damage?” Edmund asked.

“It’s a good plan!” Sylver argued.

“Your “plan” constitutes sending a rabid dog to kill a rabid… wolf or something, some other dangerous animal. The point of the metaphor is that even if the rabid dog succeeds, you still have the dog to worry about!” Edmund said.

“We’ve already defeated it once,” Sylver said.

“Barely if you remember. And you had that accursed wand back then! Even if we were both back at full power, and then some, how do you imagine a fight against the Leviathan would go down? A Leviathan, mind you, that’s had time to think and grow in strength? It was wounded back then and we-”

“I know, I know, I am extremely aware, but unless you have a better alternative, that’s my current plan to deal with the Sun Demon. The Demon, mind you, that will more likely than not ruin the atmosphere, which the vast majority of Eira kind of needs to survive,” Sylver argued.

Edmund huffed and used the silence to finish his bottle of wine.

“How is it that you went on a trip to hire some guards, and came back with 3 god cursed women, who hold 3 of the 8 keys needed to free the Leviathan? Oh, and while we’re on the subject, since when is Amphitrite alive enough to hand out curses?” Edmund asked.

Sylver chuckled to himself and ignored Edmund’s glare.

“Completely slipped my mind. Also its a god so-”

“Don’t even try! You know exactly what I mean when I say “alive.” Even Aether said she’s “dead,” so how, or why, are there 3 people with a direct link to her?” Edmund asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders without looking away from the sunrise.

“Could be one of her many daughters that took up the metaphorical mantle. Could be a copycat god. Could be that the Amphitrite we killed was half of a god, and we’re now facing the other half. Maybe the thing we can’t talk about brought her back to “life.” Anyway… I wouldn’t worry about it,” Sylver said.

“One of us needs to worry about it,” Edmund argued.

“How about… No never mind,” Sylver said.

“Were you about to say “after we handle” something, we would look into Amphitrite, but couldn’t think of something that I would believe we could do in the near future, while at the same time being complicated enough that we would more likely than not never get around to doing it?” Edmund guessed.

Sylver’s grin got so wide it hurt his lips.

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that, but yes. Current number one priority is securing Tuli. Which means getting the dark elves and Faust’s cultivators here. Once they’re all settled in, we can leave and… We’d need to set up trade routes so they have food first… Not to mention prepare in the event Tuli’s defences stop working… And it would be best if we-”

“Right, right, I forgot, no teleportation, they have to walk here… And they have children with them… What about your waystone?” Edmund asked.

Sylver held his hand out, and after a bit of muscle tensing, the waystone in question slid out of the cut in his palm. He handed it over to Edmund, who carefully held it between his thumb and forefinger and held it up to his eye.

“Well?” Sylver asked.

Edmund handed him the stone back.

“I don’t know… In theory, realm anchor and all, it’s possible it wasn’t affected,” Edmund offered.

“Counterpoint, it’ll send me to whichever realm the realm anchor is attached to. Possibly the demon realm,” Sylver said.

“Yeah, it might… You said there was a kid that helped you make a portal through Tuli when this was a prison? Works for that noble you’re friends with. Since he managed to do that, his magic is at least somewhat compatible. And he almost certainly has a skill or perk that sends him to a set location,” Edmund suggested.

It took Sylver a few seconds to figure out who Edmund was talking about.

“Melo, yeah… Activate the waystone with him, and the worst-case scenario he teleports us back… I’m now remembering that I was planning on asking him to take a look at the thing anyway,” Sylver said.

“If it’s just us two we can be there by sundown,” Edmund offered.

Sylver thought it over.

“We should finish making the Gorgons a house first. But we’ll leave tomorrow morning,” Sylver said.

“Alright… I’m going to the forest to gather the wood and see if Chrys has anything to pass onto you,” Edmund said as Sylver nodded at him.

As usual, he disappeared without a sound, and the only evidence of his movement was the large glowing light high high in the sky, along with a barely audible crackling.

Sylver swirled the wine Sophia had left behind in his cup and waited for the suns to finish rising, before he stood up, and made his way inside Tuli to where the Gorgons were setting up a place for them to live.

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