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Ch262-Stranger In The Night

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There’s something uniquely pleasant about building something.

They started with a bunch of uprooted trees, a handful of pretty boulders, and 2 dead deer-like monsters Edmund had killed. And after a bit of magical fiddling the trees became smooth planks, the boulders became cement for the foundation, and the deer things became nutrients for the fungus.

Sylver had initially planned to make something basic and leave it to Euryale and Medusa to further refine it into whatever they wanted. Not to say he had planned to half-ass it but to call the building he had ended up with “basic” would be not only factually incorrect but also an insult.

Edmund had chipped in by melting the stone floor into being polished smooth, handled all the delicate ironwork for the windows, staircases, doors, and fashioned a, in Sylver’s personal opinion, gaudy-looking mixture of shiny steel and thin obsidian, that he hung on the ceiling in the main hall and called a “chandelier.”

The Gorgons’ house wasn’t quite a mansion, but it was closer to a mansion than it was to a house.

And sure, if a proper craftsman got down on his knees, and inspected the wooden joints holding the building up, they would probably explain why you’re not supposed to position this kind of wood in this kind of way, but it didn’t need to be perfect, it just needed to stay upright long enough for the dark elves to arrive.

Faust on the other hand, got a box.

Stacked on top of another box.

Stacked on top of 4 more boxes.

Which in turn left him with a very tall box, that had 6 levels to it.

This wasn’t due to laziness on Sylver’s part, Faust asked for a box, specified the dimensions, criticized Sylver’s attempt to give the box some style, and ended up with a building so plain and simple it was almost painful to look at.

When Sylver moved away from it, he realized it was a stripped-down replica of the building Faust lived in when they were staying at the Schlagen Mountains. Maybe a bit bigger, with slightly taller ceilings, and none of that martial artist “flair.”

As for Faust’s fiancé, Anastasia, her only concern was that the very top room had thick blinds and that all the doors opened outwards.

She explained that the blinds were for privacy reasons and that the doors needed to open outwards in the event of a fire.

She didn’t care what the rest of the house looked like.

She didn’t care about most of the things going on around her, she ate whatever Faust or Edmund put in front of her, and from what Sylver had been able to gather, hadn’t complained once.

About anything.

While she was staying at Novva’s place, Chrys had answered a few of her questions regarding her family, and while there was some bad news regarding a distant aunt and one of her cousins, for the most part, the Da’Munio family was doing quite well.

Probably due to a giant influx of political connections and favours, courtesy of a certain unnamed high-elf woman.

They lost some people when the moon turned red and their defensive magic broke down, but nobody Anna knew well enough to grieve over.

While Sylver put the finishing touches on Faust’s home, Edmund dove underneath Tuli and confirmed that she was indeed standing on 4 feet, plus a tail, and an oddly shaped head.

The diagram Edmund drew did in fact look odd, but it was difficult to say what was “normal” for Tuli.

For food, Faust had the foresight to bring with him a large crate of rice, various seeds, and a large sack of tightly pressed flour pellets, that through a Ki technique, Faust turned into freshly baked bread.

Before Sylver and Edmund left, there was a brief moment of utter dread and panic.

Anna had decided that the curse on the Gorgons wasn’t going to affect her, and without telling anyone, or warning Faust or Sylver, took off her blindfold and looked fucking right at them.

Luckily for everyone, she was right.

As a reward for her daring feat, she got an earful from Faust, then from Sylver, then from Edmund, then Euryale, a very stern glare from Medusa, and a quiet high-five from Stheno.

Sylver left a quarter of his shades with Tuli, for Faust and the Gorgons to share, and left a Spring-Quarter to keep the shades organized and useful.

Sylver was left with three-quarters of his army, a Spring-Half, and a Spring-Quarter.

Both of them complained about feeling “slow,” but all they needed was a bit extra mana from Sylver, and they were back to their “full strength.”

Or at the very least didn’t have a feeling of being ever so slightly unpleasantly hungover.

Edmund carried Sylver up through the crack in Tuli’s shell, and once Will managed to get his wings under him, Edmund effortlessly flew along the powerful undead wyvern.

It was cold in the morning. Not just because of the height, but even down below it was freezing cold. The sea wasn’t going to freeze over, but unless they somehow closed the crack in Tuli’s shell, it was going to be an uncomfortable winter for the dark elves.

The Eldar tree would cover the centre, but that still left the sides, which weren’t exactly small enough for them to just stretch a tarp over. They would have to use wood or metal, they would need to effectively build giant bridges, and then rebuild them every couple of months as Tuli’s shell closed up.

Assuming it did close up.

In pure theory, there was no reason Sylver’s plan wouldn’t work. An Eldar tree is as magically conductive of a material as you can get.

The first mages and wizards build their wands and staves out of Eldar wood tree.

Until they figured out what the tree was, and with a great deal of shame did their best to make sure nobody else repeated their mistake.

Obviously, not everyone cared, Igri certainly didn’t, according to documents his staff was massive, and it was made from living roots, not simply from discarded twigs and branches.

His apprentices followed suit, and while not all of them succeeded, if a corpse was found with a staff made of Eldar wood there was a good chance the corpse belonged to a direct decedent of one of Igri’s students.

Sylver fiddled with his ring while he waited for Edmund to say whatever it was that was on his mind. Since he was taking this long to figure out a way to phrase it, it was most likely not something Sylver wanted to talk about.

Edmund was on his back, with his hands folded over his chest, looking up towards the sky, as he flew parallel to Will, and was about 2 meters away from a similarly relaxed Sylver.

“I feel like we’re missing something,” Edmund said.

The statement was so utterly pointless that if his tone was slightly different Sylver would have ignored him and continued resting.

“You mean like a long-term plan?” Sylver asked.

There was a pause, as Edmund got off whatever train of thought he had been on, and realized what Sylver said was better.

“Dark elves settle in, Eldar tree is sprouted, trade routes set up, and then what?” Edmund asked.

Sylver hadn’t mentioned the lack of a long-term plan as a shot in the dark, it was something he too was concerned about.

“Chrys. She’ll tell us she found Lenora, and after a short trip to the other side of the planet, we’ll have a third Arch to help us out,” Sylver offered.

“Since when is waiting for something to happen a long-term plan?” Edmund asked.

“Since we already shook the metaphorical tree and are now just waiting for something to fall from it,” Sylver said.

“Ah… Well, kicked the hornets’ nest more like,” Edmund countered.

“As long as we get the honey, I’ll do more than kick it,” Sylver said.

“Hornet hives don’t have honey,” Edmund said after a brief pause.

“No, they don’t, you’re right… I wanted to expand on the metaphor and was thinking of bees,” Sylver said.

“How is it that out of seven hundred and sixty-three possible people, the two least capable of searching for people on a large scale are the ones trying to find them?” Edmund asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Could be worse. Imagine trying to get anything done if you had Manon here instead of me. Or one of the Leverfe brothers,” Sylver said.

The nearly invisible fire coating Edmund and keeping him in the air flickered as his skin crawled at the thought.

“If you were offered Amunet instead of me, would you still go through an entire ice-covered realm, and a mountain full of cultivators?” Edmund asked.

Sylver pretended to think about it.

“I would be complaining constantly. And I mean, the way I complained when I was an apprentice. And when I found her she would get a detailed account of every single splinter I acquired on my path to rescuing her,” Sylver said as both he and Edmund chuckled.

“You know who I miss? In a personal sense?” Edmund clarified.

This one Sylver had to think about.

“Either Junia or Pione… But if I had to bet, I’d say Junia,” Sylver guessed.

“What I wouldn’t give to see Junia again…” Edmund said wistfully. “You know who would get a real kick out of this whole thing? The number stuff, and starting from scratch?” Edmund asked.

“Adam?” Sylver asked as Edmund nodded. “He would have hated this. Might have cracked the whole thing open before he even reached level 2,” Sylver countered.

“Maybe, but he would have been grinning the whole time. A spell that has a hold on an entire realm, and is perfectly synchronized with at least 9 other realms, the magical magnitude boggles the mind. Just the volume of circuits you would need would-”

Edmund sucked in a breath through his teeth and pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead.

Sylver just grinned to himself and shooed away the buzzing sitting in the base of his skull.

“For all her faults though, Amunet took the whole thing in stride. Never been in so much as a fistfight and she didn’t even flinch. Even got a few shots in before…” Sylver’s voice trailed off.

“You know the really funny thing?” Edmund asked after a short pause.

“What?”

“That butler you mentioned. The one with the thin moustache. That ended up being the very last Archmagi before you?” Edmund said.

“Yeah?”

“That was his second day on the job!” Edmund said as both he and Sylver broke into laughter.

“Really?” Sylver asked once he calmed down a bit.

“Really! I remembered it a couple of days ago, I was with Millon when we picked him up, and I remember I decided to trim my moustache because the thin design he had looked so good on him,” Edmund explained, as he gestured at his completely clear of hair boyish face.

“25 years of training, an unimaginable amount of talent and effort, and the man died 2 days into the job he was quite literally born to do...” Sylver said as he stared up at the empty sky.

Sylver and Edmund quietly watched the sky together, as Will flew fast enough to be a blur for everyone who saw him, and Edmund matched the wyvern’s speed without even focusing on the spell he was using to fly.

“You said to remind you about your 80 points,” Edmund said after an unknown amount of time passed.

“Fuck’s sake,” Sylver swore, as he stood up, and found a spot to sit down.

Total Level: 189
[Koschei-16]
[Necromancer-100]
[Swamp Lord-73]

CON: 200
DEX: 110
STR: 110
INT: 507
WIS: 288
AP: 80

Health: 1,984/2,000
Stamina: 999/1,000
MP: 30,551/33,385

Health Regen: 23.34/M
Stamina Regen: 20.00/M
MP Regen: 33,852.39/M

Sylver was tempted to ask Edmund for advice but knew from the last time it would be pointless. There was plenty he could say, but the second he got to something useful, he would grit his teeth and close his eyes as something dragged a nail file against the inside of his skull.

The only thing Edmund could offer were vague words of encouragement.

The system wasn’t as cautious with Lola, Yeva, or any other magic users or warriors that Sylver spoke to, but in their cases, their advice was kind of useless since Sylver didn’t really get anything out of increasing his Constitution and didn’t really need to increase his Strength.

He was already past the point where if he couldn’t magically lift something, his meat muscles wouldn’t be able to either.

His choice was between Dexterity, Intelligence, or Wisdom.

For no reason other than to round things off, he chose to put 43 points into Intelligence, and 37 points into Wisdom.

CON: 200
DEX: 110
STR: 110
INT: 550
WIS: 325
AP: 0

Health: 1,985/2,000
Stamina: 999/1,000
MP: 34,582/35,750

Health Regen: 23.34/M
Stamina Regen: 20.00/M
MP Regen: 40,218.75/M

Sylver placed his hand over his stomach and tried to figure out what was going on inside of him.

He’d had his mana core ripped out of him a few times and remembered what that felt like very clearly, but this…

It wasn’t being grabbed, so much as someone was hovering their hand over it.

“You alright?” Edmund asked.

Sylver looked up at him, and the odd feeling intensified.

He blinked, and for a fraction of a second Sylver felt the planet turning underneath him. Like he was some great big immovable object that reality itself was forced to move around.

The next thing he knew he was on his back, and it was nighttime.

His robe removed the blanket Edmund had draped over him, and like a puppet being pulled up by a single string, Sylver rose from the smoothed-out ground.

“How are you feeling?” Edmund asked.

He was sitting on a log and was poking a small campfire with a pair of metal tongs. Sylver saw something silvery inside the fire, and going by the smell, guessed that Edmund was cooking himself potatoes.

“Like someone stretched out my mana channels and then rinsed them out,” Sylver said, as he experimentally closed his hands into fists, and willed the magic in his chest into his arms and fingers.

“You look better. More solid I mean,” Edmund said.

After a fair bit of standing around and organizing his slightly larger mana conducting channels, Sylver sat down on the log Edmund had prepared for him.

“I-”

A swarm of hornets might as well have landed on Sylver’s head, for how loud the warning buzzing was. He took a deep breath, and let it go.

“Did you dig these up?” Sylver asked with a gesture at the metal-encased potatoes.

“There’s an abandoned village a few minutes that way,” Edmund said as he pointed south with his tongs, “found them growing in what used to be a field.”

“Any bones?” Sylver asked, as he reached into the fire with his bare hand and unwrapped the steaming hot root vegetable.

“I looked around, but it must have been abandoned for a long while. So, forty thousand MP per minute. Five thousand more than your capacity per minute,” Edmund said.

“One step closer to 4th tier magic,” Sylver said.

“Cheers to that,” Edmund offered, as he took his own wrapped potatoes from the fire and unwrapped it.

***

Sylver was laying on his stomach and was looking down at the ground below from the edge of Will’s shoulder.

The port town, which according to Sylver’s map was called Laketula, was minutes away from being attacked by a fleet of pirate ships. He could see the large vessels heading straight for the relatively compact port town, and given the lack of guards, had to guess that they weren’t ready for a raid.

“How are we doing this?” Edmund asked.

Frankly speaking, Sylver wasn’t in the mood to deal with pirates, especially not 8 ships’ worth of pirates, but on the other hand, fresh corpses, possibly a level or two, and perhaps even a local festival named after him.

“If we break the ships, the debris will take weeks to clean up, not to mention the possibility of something toxic getting into the water, so we need to keep them whole… They’re here to loot, so we don’t need to worry about cannons or long-range attacks on the city… We can’t really use fire, since it might spread to all the docked merchant ships…” Sylver thought out loud, as Edmund nodded along.

The town was a loose line spread out along an unnaturally straight cliff, where the people had built a maze of wooden docks that currently had about 200 ships tied to it. Most of the ships were relatively small, but there were a few giants on the edges of the dock area.

There were 2 cliffs sticking outwards, that covered the docks and the town from both sides from wind and waves, sort of shaped like a “U” but with perfect right angles.

“Where are their guards? Are they hiding for an ambush?” Sylver asked out loud, as he tried to figure out how such a town might have been completely lacking in defence.

“Maybe when their barriers went down, the guards lost their connection to the High-King and lost their strength. And amidst the chaos were all killed, and the town doesn’t have anyone left to defend it?” Edmund offered.

Fuck…

Chrys had mentioned that that had happened in a few places. The moon flashing red had made the magic that made the guards neigh immortal, mortal, and in a few cases that small window was enough time for all of the guards to be killed.

And in a few places, their strength-granting magic never returned.

“You know what… Can you fly down and ask them what’s going on?” Sylver asked Edmund as he remembered who he was with.

The small man nodded at him, and with a speed that should have produced several deafening sonic booms, silently flew towards the town.

Edmund returned after about a minute.

“Pirates normally never reach the port because of how well-patrolled the area is, but they lost communication with all the patrol ships a few days ago, so the pirates must have found an opening and slipped past,” Edmund explained.

“Of course they did,” Sylver said with a sigh.

“On top of that, the Marquis called all of his soldiers back, and when the moon flashed red, the handful of guards they had stationed here ran off, and haven’t returned. The few adventurers in the town were hired by merchants to protect their ships, leaving the town itself without anyone to protect it,” Edmund explained, as Sylver nodded along.

“Which Marquis?” Sylver asked.

“The one we spoke to a few days ago,” Edmund said.

“Huh… I see…”

“Is there a reason not to help them? There must be at least 500 pirates on board those ships. This will be the port we’ll use in the future, might as well build some goodwill… And I think this is the town you said all the bare-chested women are,” Edmund offered.

And they might have Atolonian brandy Edmund more likely than not thought to himself, but didn’t deem it an important enough detail or motivator to mention to Sylver.

“So that’s why the name sounded familiar… Yeah, alright… Hover above the docks and keep the ships and town safe while I take care of the pirates,” Sylver said.

Excluding a few minor details, and scale, what they were about to do was standard procedure when it came to defending a location from attackers. Even if you ignored all the positives Edmund listed, Sylver liked the idea that he and Edmund were working together in such a way.

What he didn’t like was that the current situation could technically be interpreted that he was the direct cause of it.

If he didn’t speak to the Marquis, they would still have soldiers and would have been able to defend themselves.

If he didn’t meddle with the moon they would have had immortal guards, and would have been able to defend themselves, not to mention the patrol ships wouldn’t have let anyone slip by.

And if he sat down and spoke to the invading pirates, he was certain they would explain that the reason for them attacking right fucking now, had something to do with something Sylver had done.

Like that Tuli’s fog pushed them out of their usual hunting grounds. Or that the army of Finnish soldiers meant to protect the water around Tuli had spooked them and the pirates had banded together to do one big run on the town, before moving elsewhere.

A whip-like tendril of [Black Mass] flew out of Sylver’s back and caught an unlucky seagull. It snapped its neck as it pulled it towards him and placed the dead bird into Sylver’s hand.

Through [Seed Store] Sylver created the relevant strain of fungus in his hand, and with the aid of [Greater Greenhouse] used the bird as food for the mushroom.

It very quickly became as big as a watermelon, and as Sylver fed it water from the air, the thing grew to the size of a small carriage. It was a sickly dark grey colour, like dirty cigarette ash, and despite being dry to the touch, the large bubble of fungus looked like it was covered in oily slime.

Sylver moved the blob of mushroom over to Will’s nose and glued it into place with a small string of [Black Mass]. As the wyvern shade angled its wings, it stopped flying parallel to the ground and was now “flying” directly towards the pirate-infested seawater.

Sylver jumped off a few seconds before the dive-bomb of a shade reached the water and landed on top of the crow’s nest of the largest ship in the very middle.

There was a pirate woman sitting inside the wide barrel, armed with a small thin dagger, and a metal ball tied to the end of a rope.

She didn’t even get a chance to open her mouth to shout, as Sylver’s boot lightly tapped her forehead, and her skull lightly bounced off the wooden pole behind her and caused severe internal bleeding of the brain which resulted in the near-instant loss of consciousness.

Sylver sat down inside the crow’s nest and placed his hand over the woman’s left ear while he waited for the mushrooms below to work.

The slit on his palm opened up and a thin string slid into her ear, pierced through her eardrum, and injected a half droplet of blood directly into the inside of her brain.

The string then found a good vein, travelled downward, and injected the other half of the droplet into the woman’s rapidly beating heart.

[Shade (Petty) Raised!]
[Evolution Available]

Right, I’ve got 3 “evolutions” I can use… Sylver thought, as the woman’s body began to shiver and turned into an inky liquid that gradually sunk into the dark wooden floor.

He decided he was going to use one of his 3 evolutions on one of the pirates he was going to convert. Bruno said to wait as long as he could, but Sylver needed to know what exactly the system meant by “evolution.”

He peeked over the edge of the wooden platform, and in the distance saw a thin waterfall of glittering white lights. As the lights reached the ground, they froze in place and an uncountable number of silvery threads connected all the floating sparks to one another.

The result was a giant “tent” like structure, that enveloped the entirety of the long town, along with the ships tied to the dock.

Edmund, as a rule, took very few chances when he was tasked with defending something. And the reason he was the one defending, as opposed to attacking, was that Sylver intended to turn these men and women into undead, and the process worked a little better if he was the one who killed them.

Edmund could obviously vaporize every single invading ship, but then there wouldn’t be any corpses, not to mention it would ruin the ships Sylver was intending to sell to the port town.

Or keep and have the dark elves use them when they ventured outside of Tuli to trade.

There were 8 ships, 3 really big ones, 2 medium-sized ones, and 3 ships so small they only had 10 people on them.

As Edmund’s shield finished forming, it made a crackling sound, and in the deep dark of the night, produced so much light Sylver could still see the glowing tent through his closed eyelids.

Spring informed Sylver that they were ready, and Sylver told the shade to wait for the signal.

Sylver cracked his knuckles, armed himself with 2 ball-peen-like hammers coutersy of [Greater Undead Armament], and as Edmund’s tent lights flickered, and stopped glowing, gave Spring the signal to begin.

In near-perfect sync, the water beneath the ships exploded and covered all 8 ships in a thick blanket of blinding black mist.

The mist came from the mushrooms the shades had scattered underneath all 8 ships, and the “black” portion was what was left of Will after he had popped from hitting the water at full flying speed.

The result was an unnatural black fog that snuffed out all their lanterns, and further blinded people who had already been blinded by a side effect of Edmund’s plasma-based magic.

Using [Fog Form] Sylver materialized behind a man shouting orders in a language Sylver wasn’t familiar with, and as the man felt Sylver’s presence behind him, Sylver brought the ball side of his hammer down onto the back of the man’s skull.

Before the man even began to fall, Sylver was already behind the next man, and in a very similar fashion, bashed the back of his skull with a hammer.

Sylver materialized behind the next man and had to use both hammers to block the lightning-fast swing for his neck. He and the man locked eyes and simultaneously headbutted one another.

Sylver felt a crack reverberate through him and saw that the man’s eyes had popped out of their sockets from his forehead being caved in.

He stumbled backwards half a step, somehow managed a half-hearted swing, but Sylver was already done with him and used [Fog Form] to move to his next vict-opponent.

Within the first 10 seconds of the dark fog covering the boats, well over 50% of the pirates had been strangled, had their heads bashed in, or otherwise rendered comatose by Sylver’s well-organised team of shades.

Now he only had the other 50% to deal with.