Sylver Seeker

Chapter 281: Dig A Hole

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 15 (281) - Dig A Hole

Aside from his needle, which was obviously still whole and untouched, absolutely nothing else was salvageable.

A few parts were maybe, but by this point they were so tainted by the shame of near defeat that he wanted a fresh start that didn’t include them.

Having said all that, in a certain sense the damage wasn’t all that bad.

Yes, all his bones were broken, all his ligaments were torn, muscles were mush, skin missing, teeth either cracked open or gone, his hair had been removed along with his scalp, but for lack of a better word, all of the damage was cosmetic.

Aside from his skeleton, and he didn’t like relying solely on [Lesser Perception], but even with that he wasn’t in all of that bad of a shape right now.

He had to supplement his constantly falling health with the [White Hair Ape], but that was at most annoying, rather than life threatening.

He could still fight, maybe not another [Little King] but something within 50 levels of him…

Am I trying to convince myself or Nels? Sylver thought.It wasn’t like he needed a reminder that he wasn’t on the same level with a lowercase L or scale as he was way back when, so why was his weakness such a big concern to him right now?

If I’m gone, Nels is gone too, Sylver thought… Putting words to the emotion made it a little clearer, but he could tell there was something else to it.

If Ed got hurt, anytime, anywhere, regardless of whether or not Sylver was standing nearby, the fault would lie with Ed, more than it would with Sylver.

If Nels got hurt…

That was all on him.

Start to finish…

She could put up a fight, but she was nowhere near in the same world as Edmund, or Adam, or Sylver for that matter when it came to things to do with combat.

He hadn’t given it much thought, but unlike Ed, Nels couldn’t just go off on her own, one of them would need to accompany her.

Not that he didn’t trust Lola, or Faust, or Bruno, or the dark elves to keep her safe, in theory, in practice he didn’t trust anybody other than Edmund to keep her safe, and now that he’d just showed that he almost couldn’t be trusted to keep her he felt…

Undeniably the winner of the fight with the [Little King] was Sylver, he was undead, so his whole body being damaged would be the equivalent of a regular human twisting an ankle to kill something, or a small scratch on the chest or neck that would turn into a great looking scar in a few days…

…

It sucked, it just fucking sucked, to know that he could be walking through the world, minding his own business, not even breaking into a hollow vault full of who knows what, just out and about in Eira’s wildreness, and a fucking snake that in the past would have gotten killed by an unnamed shade, managed to reduce him down to this.

A skin sack of bone chunks and mush, how the fuck did he end up in this situation?

The answer, as it usually was, was that Sylver thought too highly of himself. And allowed himself to be put in a position where he had to fight a creature directly, but the fact that he thought he’d be able to handle it anyway was a result of him thinking too highly of himself in the first place.

He had forgotten that there were things out in the world that couldn’t be affected by his magic, didn’t care about his illusions, were too tough for the shades to do anything, and had the kind of force spreading armour that even at full strength Sylver couldn’t pierce.

He’d had a good look at one of the pieces of the [Little King] and saw that it had a three finger thick layer of jelly between its scales and insides. The jelly reminded him of slimes, but even slimes could be cut if you were fast enough, but with the added protection of its scales, even Sylver’s best attempt at piercing damage would get turned into blunt damage that got spread out into nothing.

The scales, the muscles, even the bones, were all just the right amount of rigid and bendy that he was fairly certain this thing could take a swing from Edmund and crawl away alive.

Sylver wasn’t just trying to make the [Little King] seem better than it was to make his near defeat seem “unavoidable,” the snake just plain and simple had really great armour, and now that it was dead, Sylver was going to have armour that was as great, scratch that, he could already see how he could improve it.

The only issue was, he didn’t have as much volume or mass to work with, unless he made himself twenty feet tall, but being that big would make dodging and hiding a little too difficult.

He certainly wasn’t going to turn it into just a shield, that would get ripped out of his hands the first time he used it, and needed it to work.

Aside from his lack of defences the [Little King] also showed the gap in his abilities, and just like with his defences, also brought with it a solution.

The fins on its back were sharp. Not just enchanted dagger sharp, not even scalpel sharp, the cut it made in Sylver’s femur was smoother than anything he was currently capable of, if he didn’t know any better he would have said Mora had taken an hour to layer her magic and severed the bone with a single flick of her thread.

And now Sylver had eight long fins, eight smaller fins, and eight small triangular shaped fins that only needed a handle and were just a little too short to be perfectly sized daggers.

Assuming of course the thing that made them sharp hadn’t died with the [Little King], but even then, if those didn’t work, Sylver at the very least now knew about this issue.

He’d glanced at the perks offered by [Swamp Lord] reaching level 80, and while he was glad to see [Black Thumb] amidst the list, nothing else looked worth accepting at the moment.

He knew the system wasn’t going to just give him a perk that created a spear of darkness or something he could use whenever he had to face an opponent directly, but he would be lying if he said he wasn’t disappointed there wasn’t anything even remotely close to a solution.

He left his AP at twenty, and when nothing ground breaking showed up during his first glance at [Mirage]he moved all the various choices from reaching 100% in his various skills off to the side for the moment.

He wasn’t sure when it happened, but the system seemed to have decided that Nels talking to him about it, even in a general advice sort of way, was too dangerous.

He didn’t feel great about this, but watching Nels’ face squirm from the slight pain of the system pressing down on her mind brought a slight smile to his face. It was further proof they were being treated with the seriousness they deserved, and a nice reminder that Sylver was once again no longer all on his own.

He was glad he’d had the foresight to leave Ria and SAM with Mora, otherwise there would be even more fragments to pick out of his mush of a body.

He realized at that moment he wasn’t going to be able to just throw all the shit that let him down in sewers, he was going to have to store all of it in a jar until Ria woke up and picked up any pieces he had missed.

On some level, what happened here wasn’t all too different from what happened with the mask.

It was a little different, in that he actually won, but it was the same in the sense that he couldn’t approach the fight from the angle he would have wanted to, it was his fault in both cases, but the point was that both cases could be considered outside the norm.

The weather got worse as the day progressed, the living horses had to be lifted up into the float boat, Sylver supplemented the wolf shades with human shades, Mora made ropes for them to pull, and Sylver used [Greater Undead Armamanet] to provide all of them with spiked shoes help them with the issue of slipping around on the icy ground.

The wind came from the direction they were walking in, it wasn’t too bad at first, but then the float-boat started veering to the side from the wind, some of the smaller shades were lifted into the air, and as the wind picked up the snow on the ground, it stuck to the left side of the float-boat and Allson had to manually adjust its balance to stop it from tipping over.

Hail stones, mixed with regular stones, flew with enough speed and force that one of the larger ones made Sylver fall over when it hit him in the chest and he didn't manage to regain his balance in time.

They should have been in Merol by now, and yet because of “weather,” that not that long ago he could have dismissed with a single wave of his hand, Sylver now had to anchor the float-boat down to the ground, and had to spend the remainder of the day frantically running around raising walls of earth to shield the float-boat from the hailstones flying at it from every conceivable direction.

He weaved long thick vines throughout the earthen walls to strengthen then, moved the ice and snow around in an attempt to build layers of ice that he thought would help, and with the loudest whistling he had ever heard since taking Ciege’s body, several hundred meters worth of snow fell straight down from the sky with a muted thomp.

The suns were still up, it should have been light outside, and yet when Sylver dug his way out of the buried float-boat it was darker than night. It was snowing so hard it was like standing under a shower, the footsteps he left as he walked around filled up with snow and disappeared before his very eyes.

He used [Fog Form] to travel through the almost completely filled up hole he had crawled through to reach the surface, and materialized in the room Kalok had gathered the people he wanted to consult before making a decision. Allson, Lostal, Nels, Sylver, and a thin human woman with thick glasses who looked like a librarian.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“Is this normal for this area?” Nels asked.

“Are you sure this isn’t just an avalanche?” Allson asked.

“This is my first time here so I don’t know, and I know what an avalanche looks like, and this isn’t an avalanche,” Sylver answered with a gesture at Nels and then at Allson.

“How long will it last?” Kalok asked.

“I don’t know,” Sylver answered.

“Can you guess?” Nels asked.

“Not for another ten hours?” Sylver offered.

Nels looked at him with a strange expression, a smile in her eyes, but a calm face.

“You can’t guess for another ten hours?” Nels asked.

“No, I meant-” Sylver leaned his head back and let out a single laugh that was so loud it made Allson, Kalok, Lostal, and a few other people sitting in the surrounding rooms flinch. “It should stop in the morning. Assuming this isn’t the work of fae,” Sylver said.

“What happens if this doesn’t stop by the morning?” Kalok asked.

Sylver thought it over before responding.

“Worst case scenario… If the wind keeps throwing stones around and it isn’t safe to walk on the surface, I’ll fashion some sleds, Mora would tie them together, and then we all ride through a tunnel in the snow,” Sylver offered.

“What about the float-boat? We can’t just leave it here?” Allson asked.

Sylver crossed his arms over his chest as he tried to estimate how much mana it would take to store the float-boat based on how much mana it took to use [Still Water] to store a magical lantern.

“I might have a way to store it… But we would have to dismantle it, and the crystal mana alloy would need to need to be left behind,” Sylver tried to explain, he wasn’t sure if the amount of mana [Still Water] would want for storing the pieces of the float-boat wouldn’t get exponentially higher for something so big. As for the crystal mana alloy, he didn’t trust his magical ability to keep it stable, and wasn’t willing to risk his or Nels’ life by having someone other than him attempt to stabilize it.

“This isn’t a fucking cart you can take apart,” Allson said with a tense tone of voice.

“I’m aware of that. But it’s a “might” if it’s in pieces, it’s a straightforward “I can’t” if you want it to be moved as a whole,” Sylver explained.

“Can’t you just make a bigger tunnel?” Kalok asked.

“If you’re comfortable moving like ten meters an hour and being defenceless once my mana channels burn out, sure,” Sylver said.

Nels stepped in, metaphorically, since she knew what Sylver knew and could tell this direction of the conversation was a dead end.

“What if Mora brings someone to Merol, and brings back a dimensional mage or someone who could teleport the float-boat? She could be there and back in less than a day?” Nels offered.

Sylver didn’t look at her as he said this, he looked at a bent nail on the floor instead.

“I am not at full strength right now. so I need Mora here in case something attacks… I could send a shade with a message, but if visibility between here and Merol is as low as it is right now, there’s a good chance that even if I send Spring, he’ll either get lost, or run past Merol,” Sylver said.

There was a moment of silence.

“So the only thing we can do is just to sit and wait it out?” Allson asked.

“All the wounded are stable, we’re not going to run out of air or freeze to death, with all the snow water isn’t an issue, we’re low on food but a day or two isn’t going to kill anyone,” Sylver said in Allson’s and Kalok’s direction.

The woman who looked like a librarian walked out of the room without a word.

“Are we close enough for someone to spot a flare?” Kalok asked Allson.

Allson shook his head.

“Even without the storm there’s a forest with trees that reach all the way to the clouds separating us, if we were on the path there would be a chance. But even with that in mind, if I fire a flare bright enough for Merol to see it, everything nearby will see it too,” Allson said.

Sylver waited for a few seconds.

“Alright then. If anybody comes up with something, we’re going to clean up the deck and set up camp there. I’ll let you know if there’s any changes on the surface,” Sylver said, as he used [Fog Form] to pass through small gaps in the wood and materialized on the buried under thick snow deck.

Clearing the snow away was as simple as melting a little to create a long sheet of [Still Water] and then using [Deadly Darkness] to slice up the snow above into cubes that fell straight down into the [Still Water] sheet.

It was pointless to do this in a space that didn’t have gravity, and therefore didn’t have an up or down to have a floor or ceiling, but Sylver used the snow and ice he gathered to create a flat platform in the [Still Water] storage space. He also had the idea to place a specialized meat puppet in the space, so he could manipulate it through a tiny droplet of [Still Water], to perform surgery, sharpen tools, the end goal was a fully functional workshop in a drop of water.

Mora helped make a dome so the snow above wouldn’t fall down on them, and after a small group of shades moved some of the barrels and other tied down equipment out of the way, Mora made a tent since Sylver lost his during the fight with the [Little King] and was too preoccupied with making sure he wasn’t going to turn feral to send a shade to pick it up.

He was somewhat back to square one on that front, but between the [White Hair Ape] and the [Little King] he had more than enough of a buffer health wise to either reach Merol and safely work on his body, or more optimistically, for Edmund to fly down from the sky and carry the float-boat the rest of the way. And while she was a little annoyed at it, Mora also offered her health if Sylver needed it.

Mora made the odd choice to sit down like a regular horse, instead of laying on her side in a giant hammock like she usually did, and as Spring brought Nels over and placed her decapitated head down on, what at this point was Nels’ pillow, Sylver lowered his body down to the floor, and puffed out the remains of his robe so nobody would notice the [Black Mass] tendril he was using to move the broken bones inside his torso around.

Having calmed down slightly, he decided it would be a waste to throw everything away, he wasn’t keeping any of the meat, but his smaller heart was still salvageable, and for all his complaining, his bones weren’t that damaged.

“Why did you say “assuming this isn’t the work of fae?” Did you sense something before the snow fell down?” Nels asked.

The surrounding earth walls made Nels’ voice bounce around, like they were in a cave.

“I didn’t, but… I don’t know. I’ve been running into a lot of fae recently, they never showed themselves, but I know they were there. Given that you ended up where you did because of them, it isn’t out of the question they’re either trying to get you back, or they’re after me, or they don’t like the float-boat,” Sylver tried to explain.

“If it’s not fae, what else could it be?” Nels asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Could be natural. Lots of weird weather everywhere recently,” Sylver said.

During the long trip he’d told Nels, in what amounted to code and references to events only she would know about, what he and Edmund had done back when the moon flashed red.

She knew a great deal more about all things related to Eira’s ecosystem than he or Edmund did, but what he’d done wasn’t just stealing all the water from a sea, or removing a couple mountains, or even forcing a volcano to erupt before it was ready, changing the orbit of one of Eira’s moons was unprecedented.

In theory, this much snow moving around and falling down all at once, preceded by extremely powerful winds and hailstones, was naturally possible in Eira.

Sylver himself had seen and experienced weather phenomena far stranger than this, but even the oddest weather events happened in a cycle, not always in 1 year increments, but usually something like this would have occurred in the past, and at the very least the locals would know myths or legends about it.

The shades had listened in on the conversations of other people, but neither the old nor the young had ever heard about a giant sheet of snow just falling down the way Sylver had described it.

“Could be a reaction to the red ice,” Sylver said after thinking it over.

“You mean like that landslide in the place with the castle and one eyed woman?” Nels asked.

“Or the flood in that city with the trees that talked,” Sylver said.

“Maybe there’s a roaming deity?” Nels offered.

“Hard to know while standing in the middle of its storm… Since we’re talking about it, what can you tell me about the suns?” Sylver asked.

They were speaking in layers of dead foreign languages, inside a sound isolating barrier Nels had cast, but both of them knew better than to talk about something this serious and damaging to Sylver if someone found out in anything other than vagaries.

“The people I talked to said it’s been trying to shine since time immemorial. And that every time it gets close a specialist shows up, and snuffs it out long enough for clouds to cover it. The writer was… His book club disbanded due to disagreements in what type of ink was best,” Nels said, without directly saying it.

The Sun Demon has been trying to burn Eira for a very long time, and every time it got close a [Hero]appeared to stop it, or at least stall it long enough for the summer solstice to end. The writer, Sonso, was part of a group that broke apart because they couldn’t agree on the best way to deal with the Sun Demon.

“What kind of ink did the others prefer?” Sylver asked.

“I only know about two. The first one thought using natural ink was best, and thought changing anything would ruin the rest of the book. The second wanted something very bright, so he and his lot could see better in the night. I don’t know what kind of ink the others preferred,” Nels said.

First one wanted to let the Sun Demon do as it wished since it’s part of nature. The second one wanted to use the Sun Demon as a source of power.

“Did the second one have a pen and inkwell ready?” Sylver asked.

Nels gave Sylver a look he couldn’t quite tie down to any known human emotion.

“Yes.But I haven’t seen him in a while, so I don’t know where he put it,” Nels said.

There’s a tool that can be used to turn the Sun Demoninto a power source.

“What kind of feather did he use for the quill?" Sylver asked.

It took Nels a second to figure out what he was trying to ask without directly asking about it.

“He was a small man, so your guess is better than mine. The one that preferred natural ink had excellent hearing,” Nels said.

He is a dwarf, I don’t know what kind of magic the tool used. And the one who wanted to let the Sun Demon do as it wanted is an elf.

To sum up a long series of nonsense sounding questions, and nonsense sounding responses, Nels very briefly worked for the group Sonso was part of before they split apart into factions.

She described it as a halfway point between a religious temple and an academy, they were led by a woman Nels was certain was a [Hero] but never attempted to confirm her suspicion properly out of fear of retaliation.

The way she talked about it, almost made the whole thing sound like an amateur attempt at recreating the Ibis. But on a smaller scale, with significantly fewer talented and capable mages, and from her tone Sylver got the distinct feeling that the woman [Hero] was a massive hindrance to what Nels was trying to achieve while working there.

As to what she was trying to get or find, she wouldn’t say, just that she ended up leaving without getting it.

Up above the shades that kept watch on the surface of the snow brought worrying and slightly disturbing news. It was raining. And even now there was a thirty centimeter thick giant solid sheet of ice gradually pushing down on the snow the float-boat was buried under.

Snow and ice, at their cores, were both just water, even if the ice pushing down on the snow was magically enhanced at worst digging through it would be as difficult as digging through solid rock.

More time consuming, rather than difficult.

The organ Sylver managed to cobble together out of scrap and carved teeth he took from the [White Hair Ape] was the epitome of “good enough.” He was deeply embarrassed by its inefficiency, and general lack of finesse, but realized that nobody was going to spread his ribcage open to take a gander at it.

More importantly, only a necromancer would understand the flaws in the semi-solid pineapple shaped and sized organ, and only a necromancer of Sylver’s ability would know enough to recognize the organ as a barely functional piece of shit.

To every other necromancer, they would be more focused on how much Sylver was able to do with so little material and so quickly, rather than what he could have made if he wasn’t missing the contents of a glass bottle he’d left back where he fought the [Little King].

When she yawned with her mouth wide open since she didn’t have a hand to cover her mouth with, Sylver told Nels she could sleep if she wanted to, and shortly after she went out like a light, Sylver asked Mora to guard them, while he made himself comfortable on the ground, and closed his metaphorical eyes for a few minutes.