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268-Cat-astrophe

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Lostal gave what was essentially a report while he slowly sipped warm water Sylver had created from the moisture in the air.

He had been sent towards the Moaning Heights shortly after the moon had flashed red because one of the nearby outposts sensed something unnatural coming from this general direction.

He went to investigate, got disoriented, he went out of his way not to use the word “lost,” in the extremely powerful snowstorm, and something that could fly and had claws grabbed him and flung him high into the air.

Instead of landing and being turned into a red splatter, his fall was softened by several trees, and he found himself in a warm jungle. About a minute after that, one of his perks informed him that he had been poisoned, and he woke up naked down in this room.

His first and only attempt at escape resulted in his Achilles tendon being snapped from his left foot being twisted 90 degrees to the right. He could still walk on it, with an awful limp, but running was out of the question.

Sylver considered reattaching the tendon but given Lostal’s total lack of reaction to the scalpel cutting him, there was significant nerve damage in the whole foot, and while Sylver was confident in his ability to stitch a torn tendon, he decided it would be wiser to have a healer handle this.

As for the curse that linked Lostal’s physical body to that of a small cloth doll, Sylver dealt with it in the time it took Lostal to finish complaining about being given a mage’s robe to cover himself with.

The connection between Lostal and the doll was very powerful, it was dense, and in theory unbreakable, but curses were one of the few things Sylver specialized in, and although the link couldn’t be broken without killing Lostal in the process, it could be transferred onto something that matched the curse’s definition of “Lostal.”

Such as a human-sized mushroom that had a beating heart, a lump of wet meat that resembled a brain, and Sylver used the human bones scattered around the room for the bones and lastly fed it Lostal’s shaved beard hair and nail clippings until the metaphorical strings attached themselves to the mushroom.

To prevent further injury, Sylver covered Lostal’s foot in a [Common] shade infused [Black Mass] cast and used a second blob to fashion the man a robe that, in the event of an emergency, would do the running for him.

“I don’t suppose you have a chef hidden down there too?” Lostal asked as Sylver glanced down at his shadow.

“Strangely enough, I do. But there’s no food if that’s what you’re asking. Unless you’d like some roasted mushrooms,” Sylver offered.

Lostal was hungry enough that he took a few seconds to seriously consider the offer.

“I mean… I’ve had fruit from carnivorous plants before… How long do you think we’ll be here?” Lostal asked.

“Couple days? Maybe a week? I don’t really know, but I have a feeling it isn’t going to take long,” Sylver said.

“I meant this room,” Lostal said.

“10 minutes, give or take. The man carrying the satchel with my nail clippings and hair stopped to talk to someone, once he’s done the shaman’s home is about a minute walking distance away. He just finished chatting as I was saying it,” Sylver said as Spring updated him on the satchel holder’s movement.

“No thank you on the mushrooms in that case,” Lostal said.

“Your loss,” Sylver said.

The young man carrying the satchel decided to sprint to make up for the time he spent talking to the woman.

But instead of bolting straight to the shaman’s house, or rather the house Sylver thought was the shaman’s house, the young man simply disappeared.

The shade that had been inside his shadow was gone too, and while the shades nearby could feel it was still close, they couldn’t figure out where it was exactly.

“Shit… For their sake I hope we don’t have to fight,” Sylver said.

“What’s happening?” Lostal asked.

“I lost track of the kid. Apparently, whatever they use to hide the village can be used inside the village. If they don’t want to talk, don’t be surprised if everyone starts rubbing their eyes and coughing their lungs out,” Sylver explained.

“Should I hold my breath and close my eyes when you give the signal?” Lostal asked.

“I want to say no, but this is the first time I’m trying this, so try to stay close to me on the off chance the whole thing gets out of hand,” Sylver explained.

In the time it took Lostal to walk over to stand a hand’s length away from Sylver, the shaman walked out of the doorway of the nearby house, along with the boy that had been carrying Sylver’s satchel, along with the shade still hidden within the boy’s shadow.

Apparently, the man could enter one doorway, and come out through a different one.

“The shaman is here…” Sylver said.

Lostal cleared his throat and cupped his hands around his mouth as he started to shout towards the tunnel leading upwards.

He said a long string of words that sounded like someone trying to sing while they were in the middle of chewing.

Both Lostal and Sylver turned towards the sound of popping, followed by a hiss, as a small dribble of brown liquid came from the hand of the Lostal-shaped mushroom Sylver had transferred the curse into.

“He pinched and twisted your doll’s wrist,” Sylver said, as Lostal cupped his hands over his mouth again and shouted another couple of sentences at the shaman.

The mushroom’s left leg shrivelled up and snapped off from the hip.

“He tore your leg off… Tell him I said his magic is that of a child’s and that I’ve got more curses in my pinkie than he has in his entire bloodline,” Sylver said to Lostal.

To his credit, Lostal didn’t ask Sylver if he was sure he wanted to provoke the shaman above them, and simply translated what Sylver said, seemingly word for word.

A few seconds after Lostal was done speaking a man covered from head to toe in square patterned scars that were stained dark green slid down the tunnel and looked at Sylver.

From a certain angle the green lines almost looked like the pattern you would find on a tiger, if you ignored the right angles, and what were obviously magical sigils.

As the tiger pattern scar lines flared with green light, the man’s body became a blur.

His claws entered Sylver’s face, they passed into his skull, and in the hundredth of a second it took the man to realize the face his hand was inside too soft, the illusion clad [Black Mass] Sylver decoy dug its thorns into the man’s hand, pulled itself towards him, and wrapped the struggling man’s whole entire body into a pitch-black cocoon.

If he had paid close attention the man might have noticed that the 25 meter, by 25 meter square room was now a rectangle, as the wall furthest from the entrance tunnel had moved inward by 2 meters.

The cushion soft mushrooms that had been pretending to be bricks moved out of the way to allow Sylver to walk into the open.

“Tell him this is everyone’s last chance to have a conversation. Otherwise, it’s going to be an interrogation,” Sylver said to Lostal, who quickly translated his words.

Lostal was mid-sentence when a giant see-through green human hand with cat-like claws in place of fingernails squeezed itself through the tunnel opening and went directly for Sylver.

The hand was as wide as Sylver was tall, and as it opened up to grab him to pull him out of the underground room, a single [Deadly Darkness] shadow tendril rose out of the floor and pierced the giant hand through the wrist.

The giant green hand closed into a fist and pulled backwards, tried to push forward, and as Sylver made a spinning motion with his finger, the shadowy tendril inside the green hand’s wrist forced the wrist to spin 180 degrees, and after a half second pause, completed the rotation, and held the violently twitching limb in place as Sylver walked past it and walked up the slippery tunnel.

The wooden grate covering the square tunnel rotted into nothing as Sylver walked through it, and as two giant stone spike-covered clubs descended onto him, his robe caught them and twisted them out of the two men’s hands, as it simultaneously snaked along their clubs and whipped their unguarded throats.

Four blobs of [Black Mass] slithered out of the bottom of Sylver’s robe and in the time it took him to walk 10 steps to reach the shaman that was clutching his bloodied arm, the four blobs had disarmed and tied up the 12 or so warriors that the shaman had brought with him.

The shaman looked vaguely like a 70-year-old human man if you ignored the nose that was flat against his face, like a cat, the glowing green slit eyes, symmetrical bumps on his cheeks that might have been whiskers that he shaved off, and elongated ears that were too wide to be mistaken for elf ears, but too long to be normal human ears.

Aside from all that, every visible inch of the man’s skin looked like it was covered in countless tiny bubbles as if he was made from sand.

The shaman was bleeding from his wrist, the joints in his shoulder and elbow were dislocated, and as the shaman attempted to channel mana into his other hand, Sylver used [Draining Blight] to grab the string of flowing mana and pulled it out of him through the neck.

“Ask him if Nels means anything to him,” Sylver said without looking away from the shaman.

Lostal mumbled a few quick words, but the shaman didn’t so much as blink. He just sat there, with his left limp hand clutched tightly in his right.

Lostal repeated his question, but the shaman ignored him again.

“You’re making this harder than it needs to be. Don’t be an asshole, just tell me what you know about anyone, or anything, named Nels. It can be a song, a poem, a god of sugar cane, give me something,” Sylver said, and Lostal translated.

The shaman made a show of ignoring Lostal and then went as far as to smirk.

With a tired sigh, Sylver released the man’s neck and two shades appeared behind to hold him in place.

Sylver maintained eye contact with the man as he lifted his empty hand into the air.

He took a deep breath as he pulled his open hand backwards slightly, and breathed out as he brought it down and slapped the man across the face.

The shaman had this strange look in his eyes.

An empty stare as if he couldn’t understand what he was looking at.

He moved his jaw slightly as if he was chewing something, and as an outline of Sylver’s hand started to appear on the side of the man’s sandy face, the shaman opened his mouth as much as his jaw allowed him to and started to yell.

The yell started low, guttural, more of a battle cry than anything else, but as the dull golden handprint on his face became more and more detailed, the shaman’s battle cry evolved into a scream.

The sides of his mouth tore open and as the two shades holding him released him, he fell forward and landed on his hands.

The shaman was on his hands and knees now, his back arched in a way that would have broken a human man’s spine, his screaming became a lion’s roar, and just as his skin began to glow with the brilliant green light of transformation, a wave of golden sparks snaked itself through his skin and forced the whole thing to reverse.

The shaman fell over to his side, and Sylver watched with cold indifference as the man’s skin expanded and contracted, his spin bent and straightened, and no matter how much he screamed, yelled, or roared, his body couldn’t reach a human form, or his werecat form.

His bones stretched and squeaked as the grown pieces fused back together, his skull made an indescribable crunching sound as the various flat pieces tried moving around, his teeth clacked against one another, and the only thing that remained constant about the suffering shaman and his appearance was the glowing golden handprint full of magical sigils burned into the entire left side of his face.

Sylver snapped his fingers and the shaman’s ever-changing body changed into that of a human.

“Ask him if Nels means anything to him,” Sylver said.

During the enhanced interrogation technique Sylver was using, Lostal was so completely apathetic to it all that it was as if he was watching the world’s most uninteresting theatre performance.

It took Lostal a few seconds to realize Sylver had spoken to him.

When Lostal spoke this time, the shaman listened as if his life depended on it.

“He says it doesn’t,” Lostal said.

“Would have been too easy if he did… I want to ask all the other villagers too. Tell him to tell them to answer my questions,” Sylver said to Lostal.

***

Sylver ran his finger along the rough stone slab and turned towards Lostal and the shivering teary-eyed shaman.

They were on top of a small stone pyramid, that looked like it was meant to be a fountain, if you ignored the many skulls neatly placed along the edges of each layer, and that every inch of it was a dull red color.

“Ask him if he’s stupid,” Sylver said.

Lostal asked, and the shaman spoke for an entire minute.

“A lot of words to say ‘yes, I’m a fucking moron’,” Sylver said at a somewhat apologetic-looking Lostal.

“He says it needs a human sacrifice, and he said sacrificing one of his people wouldn’t work. For what it’s worth, I do think he’s telling the truth,” Lostal said.

Sylver turned around and looked down at the huddled together mass of locals, who were all surrounded by shadowy humanoid creatures that were several heads taller than them, and as the bruised warriors found out, were effectively unkillable.

The shaman had been kind enough to draw a map of the nearby enemy villages, and after a fair bit of persuading, also wrote down the location of the nearby friendly villages.

He was also happy to demonstrate to Sylver how his magic dolls worked, and even allowed him to make a copy of the instructions on the stone tablet he and his forefathers followed to imbue his warriors with various feline animal spirits.

Bones gathered from dead great warriors, crushed into a fine powder, mixed with bat guava, along with sap from a local tree, and then using a very sharp rock, magical patterns are sliced into the skin, and the concoction of bones and bat shit is mixed into the open wound to permanently scar it.

As to how this village was hidden from outsiders, the answer was that it was guarded by their “guardian spirit.” And that “guardian spirit” was also responsible for making a deal with the “spirit of the jungle” that allowed their hunters safe passage.

Sylver turned away from the village people and looked at the sacrificial altar again.

“I’m going to guess he said that the sacrifice is held down, their beating heart is cut out and placed in a bowl or something, and then their head is cut off and their corpse is pushed down these stairs, to be eaten by the people below,” Sylver said with a gesture towards the long stairway in question.

“He said the heart is either eaten or burned, but rest is exactly what you said. Like word for word,” Lostal said.

Sylver ran his finger along the rough stone again.

“Would you be willing to…” Sylver didn’t bother finishing the sentence as Lostal shook his head hard enough that regardless of what he said he wasn’t going to agree to it. “Too many moving pieces to fake it… Alright, forget the spirit, this guy is going to escort us,” Sylver said with a gesture at the weary shaman.

Lostal translated what Sylver said.

“He said he can’t leave the village. Because if he left his magic would leave his body, and because of how old he is, he’s going to die nearly instantly,” Lostal said.

“Fair enough…” Sylver said as he walked away from the sacrificial stone altar, and crouched down so he was at eye level with the shaman.

“Tell him to pick his 2 most capable people, someone who is certain to be able to escort us to this city,” Sylver said while he pointed at the largest square the shaman had drawn on the map, “and while you and I are being escorted my horse is going to stay here and keep an eye on them,” Sylver said and waited for Lostal to translate.

“He asked what you plan to do there,” Lostal said.

“Same exact thing I did here. Oh and tell him that if the people he sends us with try to trick us, trap us, get us lost in the jungle, Mora and I have a perfect connection. Anything happens to me, or there’s so much as a hint of nonsense, she’s going to kill everyone here,” Sylver said.

“He said he understands,” Lostal translated as the shaman nodded his bloodied head.

The two men the shaman picked out had a tiger pattern, and a leopard pattern on their skin, and just like the shaman, Sylver wasn’t interested in learning their names.

Both men were taller than him, more muscular, and certainly looked more “intimidating,” but they flinched whenever Sylver lifted his hand to scratch his face, so he wasn’t too worried about them trying something while they thought his guard was down.

They both had impressive-looking enchanted stone-tipped spears, but again, flinched every time Sylver opened his mouth to say something to Lostal.

Their fear made sense given that they, their fellow warriors, friends, wives, and children, had all been dragged out of their homes and made to kneel on the ground with a sword held up to their throats while Sylver walked around and had Lostal yell at them whether they knew anything about “Nels.”

On top of Sylver’s overly aggressive nature, and seemingly god-like ability to summon hundreds upon hundreds of shadows, the warriors were both level 99, as was the shaman, as were most of the warriors.

Apparently, there were very few monsters in this jungle, and their only source of experience and levels was fighting enemy villages, or more recently, sacrificing outsiders to their “guardian spirit” who distributed the sacrificed experience.

Up until a certain red-tinted event, the whole thing was a closed ecosystem.

Sylver waited until they made 2 more loops before he spoke up. He stopped walking, had the wolf shade that was carrying Lostal stop too, and addressed the two warriors directly.

“I’m giving you two the benefit of the doubt. We’re walking in circles, in fact, this is the 5th time we’re passing this area. I want to know if this is your attempt to stall, or if this is the forest spirit trying to keep me away from the city you’re supposed to be leading us to,” Sylver asked.

As Lostal translated both men’s pupils dilated so much they looked almost completely black, and they spoke with such tense calmness that Sylver didn’t have any doubt they weren’t lying.

“Forest spirit. He said it probably needs proof you’re not going to cause harm to the people of the guardian spirit whom the forest spirit has an alliance with,” Lostal explained.

“Could you yell in their language that as long as everyone answers my questions honestly and quickly, I’ll not only not harm anyone, but I’ll even help them,” Sylver said.

Lostal yelled upwards towards the treetops.

A moment passed and a wave of thick rain droplets smashed their way through the tree leaves and slithered harmlessly along a sphere Sylver created using [Advanced Water Manipulation].

“Doesn’t really feel like it’s accepted,” Lostal offered.

“We don’t know that. It’s kind of hot here, perhaps the rain symbolizes being given water to drink?” Sylver countered.

As he finished his sentence, a droplet fell through his sphere and burned a hole straight through his robe.

The acid-like droplet was followed by a second that cut through one of the red mushrooms growing out of his skull, and as Sylver lifted his hand and watched as the skin on his palm turned an unpleasant dark purple, he used [Fog Form] to materialized under the nearest hanging tree trunk.

With his back pressed firmly against the tree, Sylver channelled his mana into it and forced it to grow into a roof.

Lostal struggled to get up from the muddy ground as the wolf he had been sitting on disappeared into a cloud of black smoke, and as the cast on his foot melted away into nothing, he hobbled over to Sylver and kept his hands over his eyes so as not to become blind.

He stopped just short of reaching Sylver’s roof when he looked down and felt a pleasant warmness in the back area of his left foot.

“Is... Is it raining holy water?” Lostal asked, as he held his hands together and gathered the falling liquid in his palms.

“The forest spirit blessed the rain. So now it’s fair to assume it isn’t happy with the terms I laid out,” Sylver said.

Lostal looked fearful for the first time since Sylver met him.

And if Sylver had to guess, the reason he looked as frightened as he did now, was because he was worried the rain had rendered Sylver powerless, and the two warriors watching them were going to kill Sylver and drag Lostal back to their village.

“You should drink some of it. Whole thing is effectively a healing potion,” Sylver said with relaxed confidence.

“Are you going to be alright?” Lostal asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s going to stop in a bit,” Sylver said.

“Are you sure?” Lostal asked

“Pretty sure,” Sylver said, as Lostal and the two warriors both flinched as the sound of a distant explosion reached them.

A second explosion followed, then another, and as the sound of distant trees toppling over and crashing against smaller trees got mixed into the ever-increasing tempo of distant explosions, the rain stopped as if someone turned off a shower faucet.

Sylver spoke with a calm tone as if what he was saying wasn’t important.

“Tell the spirit that if it keeps trying to get in my way again, I will level every inch of this jungle, and then turn whatever is left into rotten mulch,” Sylver said, as a smoking tree branch crashed through the tree tops and landed about 10 meters away from Sylver and company.

With the holy rain his movement had been limited, but the spirit forgot about the soft soil beneath him, which might as well have been soft butter for the worm-like [Black Mass] blobs Sylver sent out, each armed with about 50 explosives inside their bodies, that they placed underneath tree roots and then detonated at Sylver’s command.

In theory, if the holy rain continued, eventually the ground would become impossible to dig, but apparently the spirit realized that in the time it would take it to Sylver-proof the jungle, there wouldn’t be any jungle left.

Sylver had a thought a while ago, while he was having his wolf shades snarl and nip at a bunch of terrified women who adamantly refused to answer Lostal’s question, was that the reason he wouldn’t be able to find Nels with Edmund around, was because Edmund’s disapproving look would be enough for Sylver to pull his punches.

Which meant that if he hoped to find Nels, he was going to have to do the sort of things that Edmund would not only disapprove of but would result in a downright argument.

Sylver looked at the scorched and smoking tree branch, and as his [Common] shade-infused [Black Mass] worms returned to him, the warrior with the tiger pattern lifted a vine and revealed a distant sandstone brick wall.

“That’s more like it,” Sylver said to no one in particular as the tiger pattern warrior walked through and Sylver and Lostal followed after him.