-
-
Ch167-Talk And Show
-
-
The dark elves needed a couple of days to get all the spies hiding amidst the “high-elves” out.
On top of that, Sylver was only 2 days away from adhering to Poppy’s suggestion of waiting 7 days before destroying the book.
So Sylver just kept doing what he had been doing since he came back from dealing with Eve and the other two.
Deciphering the grimoires he had taken from them, and writhing in pain as one of his mana channels twisted itself into a knot, and then condensed and tightened until Sylver wished he was actually dead.
The physical aspects of the change were annoying more than painful, his skin was constantly peeling away, his scars kept becoming inflamed before gradually disappearing, his teeth fell out and grew back, and his throat felt like someone was trying to cut through it using a blunt saw.
The bright side of this was that Sylver’s old voice returned, and according to Ria, changed his accent to a slightly milder one. The changes were minor enough that the handful of dark elves Sylver interacted with didn’t even realize anything had changed, they were all far more concerned about the fact that Sylver’s ears were flat, and not pointed.
Something he had assumed they were all aware of. But considering all the other weird things about him, the fact that he was a “high-elf,” stopped being shocking before the day had ended.
Sylver leaned to the side as a shiver went down his spine, and he gained yet another centimeter of height. He would deal with any problems that arose from his change in appearance after the process was complete.
Zelvash was occupied with regaining the power he had given away to weaken himself for the ritual to create a brand new Eldar tree, so Sylver’s company was limited to Ria, Spring, an unconscious Chrys, and a small handful of dark elves that were too frightened of Sylver to properly talk to him.
Sylver had used the remainder of the backup flesh he had hidden away when he rescued Chrys, to further fix up her heart and lungs, and even managed to remove some of the metallic contraptions inside of her “stomach”. He refrained from trying to craft her a new digestive system, and instead provided her body with energy and nutrients via injections directly into her veins.
The grimoires Sylver had taken from Eve were all written in code.
Most of which he could decipher, but even if he couldn’t explain it, he knew there was something he was missing. The only reason he spotted Nyx’s hidden framework was that he knew her well enough to recognize the mistakes that were there on purpose.
The fact that all the magic Nyx wrote about was the kind Sylver was very intimately familiar with also helped.
If there were some sort of obvious errors in Adema’s grimoires, Sylver hadn’t found any.
The question, “where did these grimoires come from,” didn’t seem likely to receive an answer. Considering the grimoires were the source and reason for Eve’s soul and existence, they had been here before she was.
What was worse, the magic that stopped the grimoires from succumbing to age, also messed up all of Sylver’s attempts to gauge how old they were. One thing was for certain though, every single one of them was written after the book had been sent away.
It took Sylver about 12 hours before he gave up on gleaming any further information from the grimoires.
Inspection of Chrys’ body revealed that there wasn’t a whole lot Sylver could do in the short time he had available. Waiting for her to heal, before opening a gate to Eira was an option, but the cost far outweighed the benefits.
Chrys’ body was going to get fucked up one way or another, so any effort Sylver put into fixing her up right now would be pointless. Not to mention, he needed her to remain unconscious, for one of his backup plans to function properly.
Once the book was gone, Ria could do what she did back in Chrys’ room and will take control of her legs and will walk her through the gate. Sylver already had the tanks he had built for Misha and Masha, not to mention Chrys could probably get healed up by a healer.
Granted, it was just barely, but she was still alive.
*
*
*
Sylver was finished making “Sylver” an instant-death-wand, to replace the hand he had taken from them.
It had been “done” a good 2 hours ago, but Sylver wanted to pretty it up since something that carried his name would be the one using it.
Initially, he had planned to make it into a bracelet, but Sylver got a little carried away and ended up creating a circlet that appeared to be made out of bones.
Appeared being the keyword here, because about 90% of it was simply extremely hard and dry fungus. Sylver’s [Seed Storage] gave him access to a mixture of spores to choose from, and after a bit of experimentation, he found a combination that formed a very solid interlocking lattice.
The main downside of this specific mix was that it took far too long to properly dry out. Even with magic to speed up the process, it still required roughly 30 minutes for everything to become rock hard.
The enchantment on the circlet was almost embarrassingly basic, but Sylver didn’t have enough mana for something better, and he honestly doubted “Sylver,” would even notice the difference.
And in his defense, Sylver completely understood where he would be coming from. Instant-death magic was so specific and niche that trying to explain the difference between ripping someone’s soul out of their bodies, and crushing their heart, was near impossible, considering the end result was just short of identical.
One had no heart, so that was the difference, but very few bothered conducting an autopsy on their defeated foes, so in their eyes, it was all the same.
With pyromancy at least there was a visible distinction, a tier 7 spell was smaller and weaker than a tier 8 spell, the color of the flame could be different, one vaporized, the other burned and left ashes, even someone who wasn’t a mage could tell which one was more powerful.
But instant death magic?
To an outsider, the mage simply snapped their fingers, and their opponent dropped dead. Did the mage use a 6th tier spell? An 8th tier spell? Is the soul still in the body, is it in the hands of the mage? What about the life force? The dead person’s mana?
Granted, the drawbacks were outweighed by the sheer amount of psychological damage instant death magic did.
Seeing a person burn to death was, for lack of a better word, real. In your mind, if they had the right enchanted robe, or were covered in water, they would be fine.
Fire is real, you can fight it, you can block it, you can redirect it, it can be defeated.
But magic that 99.9% of mages can’t even sense, let alone defend against?
Forget mages, they are at least aware of the fact that instant death magic is a possibility, warriors and anyone that wasn’t magically gifted will struggle to comprehend the idea of something like instant death magic existing.
To the extent that Sylver often used this fear as a way to conserve his mana.
Sure, a giant ball of fire will wipe out a good part of the army, but the rest will continue anyway since there’s no fireball coming at them right now.
But when people around you drop like flies, with no sign of struggle or arrow sticking out of their head or chest, and you have no idea if the same will happen to you or not, that’s when you shit yourself, start panicking, and run the fuck away.
Sylver put the circlet away into a small wooden box, and with a very gentle poke from his finger, turned down the negative energy absorption as low as it would go.
The reason the hand had been capable of casting magic for a seemingly enormous period of time, was only partially due to how dense and conductive Sylver’s mana channels were. The endless negative energy the “death lords” produced, was the main reason.
Similar to how Sylver had created that box that transformed meat into gun-clogging bullets, he had done the same for the instant death spell.
Negative energy goes in, magic that will kill just about everything imaginable, comes out. With Grim likely handling the rare exception that shows up.
“It’s saying it knows what happened to the Ibis,” Ria said, and for a single moment, Sylver felt as if every drop of blood in his body had turned into ice. Luckily, he didn’t need to think this decision over.
“Ignore it. Don’t listen to a word it says,” Sylver said calmly, as he turned away from the box holding the circlet and faced Ria.
He could tell by the way her body had gotten wider, that the book was partially open right now.
“It said you would say that. It also said that it knows there’s nothing it can say to stop you from destroying it,” Ria said, as Sylver stood up from his seat, and took the half step necessary to be within reach of Ria.
Sylver did his best to keep the threat out of his voice, but he couldn’t help it when he felt genuinely afraid.
“Ria… I’m going to say this only once. Don’t listen to it. I need you to trust me when I say that if we do anything other than destroying it, we will lose. We might win in the short term. I’m sure it will give me everything I ever wanted, but 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years from now, we will lose,” Sylver explained and could feel Ria’s soul backing away from him with each syllable.
Ria would later tell him that he didn’t blink once as he spoke to her and that he lowered the temperature inside the room down by 30 degrees.
“I-”
“Ria, for all we know, it is truly omniscient. I’m not smart enough to bargain with a creature that knows what I’m going to say, think, and do before I even have a chance to start. Maybe it is merely reading my mind, I do not know, but what I do know is that doing anything other than destroying it will be catastrophic in the long run. Even as I speak, I’m willing to bet it's already told you in advance what I’m now saying, and has preemptively made the perfect argument against me,” Sylver interrupted and took a half step closer to Ria.
The small crystals of ice that had formed on the floor surrounding Sylver silently crackled under his weight, in the otherwise dead silent room.
“It didn’t, but-”
“If you can’t trust me, trust that I would have been willing to risk it if there was even the smallest possibility of winning long term. I know it’s tempting; you quite literally cannot comprehend just how tempted I am… But we got lucky when we stopped it. And there isn’t an Ibis around anymore to get lucky a second time,” Sylver explained, and only now realized he had been slowly leaning closer and closer to Ria, and now could almost feel the faint warmth of her metal.
Ria quietly stayed where she was while Sylver leaned back and stopped crouching and just looked down at her.
“It’s… Alright… But I can’t stop it. I don’t understand how I can hear it without any sensors pointed at it,” Ria explained, as Sylver crossed his arms over his chest.
“Can you hear a voice, or do you just know what it wants you to know?” Sylver asked, and saw Ria do the equivalent of checking all your pockets in search of something.
While naked, and the size of a small book, and made out of metal.
“I don’t know,” Ria answered, and Sylver nodded at her.
“Would you say it sounds like 1 voice or multiple voices that speak in perfect sync?” Sylver asked.
“1 voice. Yes, but it stopped talking now,” Ria answered.
“Would you say it sounds like it’s coming from behind you, in front of you, or from your left or right side?” Sylver asked.
He felt a few pieces of his skin start to prickle, but didn’t smile.
Because this prickling meant 1 thing, and it could either go very well or very poorly.
“I can’t tell,” Ria answered.
With his body gradually morphing into what it was, some of Sylver’s other senses were returning.
Not to the level he would have preferred, and not all of them, but Sylver could feel her.
Like a snake’s tongue flicking against the soft tissue on the back of his neck. Slow, careful, steady, without raising any alarm, she was here.
Watching.
Listening.
The same way a fisherman would check to see how deep a hook was lodged in the prey’s throat, Sylver ever so gently tugged the line. He felt her pull against him immediately.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I may not know a lot about gods, other worlds, and electric golems that lost their minds, but souls and curses? Works a lot like punching someone in the throat, as opposed to their abdomen. One you can train, flex, and the other is this incredibly brittle piece of cartilage,” Sylver said at Chrys, who remained completely motionless, and still had both her eyes closed.
“What?” Ria asked, as Sylver picked her up from Chrys’ chest, and hid her away near one of the pockets on his back.
“The woman who sent me here decided to check to see what I was up to. And just like last time, she did so through someone I care for and wouldn’t hurt. Except now I’ve got just a little bit more power than I did back then. Luckily for us, I guessed correctly that she would choose the crippled and defenseless little girl,” Sylver explained, as he reached into his sleeve and pulled out the remains of his hand.
It was missing a pinkie that Sylver had bit off and swallowed.
A ring finger, and the pointer finger, that Sylver had used to create the “instant-death-circlet” to give to “Sylver,” and Eve.
A thumb that Sylver had very quietly enchanted and inserted into where one of Chrys’ ribs should be.
And what remained was the middle finger, the palm, and a portion of the wrist. Just enough for Sylver to push his body past the stages of metamorphosis that would leave him temporarily defenseless, destroy the book, and open a gate to return to Eira.
“I’m not an idiot Rose. I know you’re limited by something, or someone, in regards to what you can and can’t tell me. And while I am going to feel beyond terrible for doing something to Chrys to hurt you, you know me well enough to know that’s not going to stop me. Right now she’s sort of like a voodoo doll, except I have a direct connection to your soul,” Sylver explained, as he used the remains of the hand in his hand to lock the magic in, and then hid it away within his sleeve.
Sylver waited for a few seconds for a response, but Chrys just lay there, as if she was dead. With a flick of his wrist, Sylver produced a small syringe, walked over to Chrys’ head, and felt around her shoulder.
“There’s a nice big bundle of nerves near the shoulder blade. We can have a conversation Rose, or I’m going to insert this syringe, press it right up against the nerve cluster, and then very slowly make it decay. One,” Sylver said, as he placed one hand down on Chrys’ shoulder, and used the other to line up the syringe.
“I just want to talk. Two,” Sylver offered, as he slid the needle inside, and managed not to snag any muscle fibers on the way.
“I know what you’re doing Rose. I’m well aware of everyone making their way towards this room. But ask yourself this. Is there any chance they will be able to stop me, and once I’m done, what do you think I’m going to do to you?” Sylver asked as dark yellow sparks jumped around the base of the needle.
Sylver felt it.
If what Chrys had been capable of using the book as an aid, was a giant wave, what Rose had just done, felt more like a tsunami. Sylver actually felt woozy from the sudden interference, and he could almost feel the steaming blood staining his face and hands. His recalling of his future was blurry, but apparently, it involved lots of blood.
There was a crowd of people gathered outside the door, with one hand reaching towards the circular handle. As Chrys opened her glowing white eye and let out a deep and long sigh, Spring informed Sylver that every single dark elf standing outside did the same.
“I am not your enemy,” Rose said, using Chrys’ mouth.
Sylver pulled the syringe out of her shoulder and stored it away in his [Bound Bones] storage.
“I am very glad to hear that. You can keep the rest of your soul where it is, this little piece is enough for me. The bigger the balloon, the longer it takes to deflate, in the event someone were to tear a hole in it. Where is Edmund?” Sylver asked, gently, calmly, and while staring right into Chrys’ single glowing eye.
“I can’t tell you while we’re here,” Rose answered, as Sylver strained every sense he had to check for a reaction.
If she was lying, he had no way of knowing. Even physically holding onto her soul, it was so… foreign, that Sylver didn’t have a frame of reference to compare it against.
“Who are you? By which I mean, who are you really,” Sylver asked, and watched as Rose took another deep breath, but was restricted by Chrys’ small damaged lungs.
“We’re not gods. And we’re not the apostles of gods. We’re… [Hero]s,” Rose explained, and Sylver successfully managed to stay where he was, instead of taking a step back like his body had wanted.
“You are [Hero]s that aren’t from this world, in the sense that you were [Hero]s in a different world… And somehow ended up here…” Sylver slowly explained, half to Rose, half to Ria, and half to himself.
Although he could tell by Ria’s soul that she wasn’t following.
“Are you the one who revived me? Why were you visiting every year?” Sylver asked, having decided to skip around the topic of [Hero]s for the moment.
“One of my skills involves influence. It allows me to see it, measure it, compare it, and you are the antithesis of influence. It isn’t zero, it’s in the negatives. Your very existence goes against the grain of the world,” Rose explained, and Sylver could do little but nod along.
“Because I’m undead?” Sylver asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve seen it before, but never this much. Cult leaders, tyrants, mad sorcerers, people that only destroy, and bring suffering to the world. But theirs is like a small hole in the ground, whereas you are an endless abyss,” Rose explained, as Sylver remembered something, and pulled it up to double-check.
[Class: Koschei (Unique)]
-Neither living nor undead. Your life is bound to a silver needle, your greatest strength, as well as your greatest weakness.
-???? ????
-???? ?? ??? ????
-Plunderer Of Fate
+10CON
+10INT
+10WIS
+Perk: Living Undead
+Perk: Deathless
“What else do you know? About me, about my abyss of influence,” Sylver asked, as he pushed the screen away and out of sight.
“I know the high-elf wasn’t supposed to live. She’s just like you, a walking abyss. And the two you stole from the dungeon, you infected them too. Even Poppy lost some influence because of you,” Rose explained calmly, as Sylver continued to just stand there, and stare.
“You keep saying influence like it’s supposed to mean something else?” Sylver asked.
Rose moved Chrys’ head to the side, and now her one glowing eye was fixated on Sylver’s arm, where Ria was peaking from.
“To oversimplify it, how much a person can change the world. A man who discovers something that benefits people has a very high positive influence. A rapist has a very low, possibly even negative, influence. A tyrant that steals from his subjects, or tortures them for his amusement, has a high negative influence,” Rose explained, and Sylver kept his mouth shut.
“There are… beings that are above gods. You know about them, I know you know about them,” Rose argued.
“In theory, yes,” Sylver answered, and could see Rose was about to scoff, but then remembered the position she was in.
“There is a limit to each world. Your high negative influence is canceled out by a bunch of small positive influences, for a total of zero. But sometimes. Sometimes something happens. The world loses its balance,” Rose explained.
Sylver could tell that she meant “world” in the sense of a book, whereas “realm” was the pages in the aforementioned book.
“And the way a god can summon a [Hero] from another realm to cancel out a demon king, these theoretical Gods, do the same for worlds… That’s how you ended up here…” Sylver thought out loud, and Rose nodded.
The “Gods above gods” thing was called a theory, for very good reason. Because people significantly more intelligent, capable, and interested than Sylver had spent their entire lives trying to prove it true, but never even managed to make a god admit Gods existed.
In Sylver’s opinion, it was bullshit. It was something that people who wanted their suffering, joy, loss, mistakes, and everything else to have some sort of ultimate meaning and purpose.
“Where do I come in? Why did you go out of your way to find me, and have me come here?” Sylver asked, with a brief shake of the head.
“I’ve sent others before you. I thought that if I sent enough positive influence into this realm, eventually enough would gather to cancel out the negative… I was wrong... So I changed my tactic. Instead of adding positive influence into this realm, I will instead remove the negative influence. You’re afraid of “The Story Of The Seven Suns,” but nowhere near how much you should be. If you’re an endless abyss, the book is 100 times worse,” Rose explained.
“Why didn’t you have me stop the Dark Year?” Sylver asked, and Rose looked at him as if he had just insulted her.
“Because I don’t want it stopped. I want them to try summoning a god, I want them to gather all the negative influence into one enormous vessel so that a [Hero] can slay it. But for a [Hero] to be powerful enough to do that, I needed someone to remove a chunk of negative influence. We… I need the balance of positive and negative in this realm to be the exact opposite of what it was when I was thrown here,” Rose explained, as Sylver was informed that the group that had been standing outside the door was now walking away.
“And my hand? The grimoires? The dark elf prophesy? What was the point of that?” Sylver asked.
“You’ll have to ask Poppy. I only wanted the book destroyed, everything else was either her doing, Lily’s, or simply your high concentration of negative influence acting like a magnet,” Rose explained.
“Magnet?” Sylver asked.
“Or imagine a whirlpool sucking everything into itself. Including other whirlpools. Your home in Arda. It is the home of hundreds of atrocities, the fact that it took you so long to notice it and interact with it is entirely due to… Nameless. The boy that was traveling with Wolf, Bear, and Lion. He was interfering with you, altering your course, the way a small planet would slightly alter the course of a larger planet,” Rose explained.
“What’s going to happen after this?” Sylver asked, and Rose allowed Chrys’ eye to blink for the first time since he had started this interrogation.
“You’re going to leave, and I am going to lock this realm up so tightly that Poppy and Lily won’t be able to come here,” Rose said with a sneer that didn’t look right on Chrys’ face.
“What?”
“They don’t want to go home. They like it here. Not here here, not this arctic hell-hole, but Poppy loves Eira and all of its magical nonsense. She doesn’t give a shit about going home, she and Lily are trying to become [Hero]s in Eira,” Rose said, with a mix of very quiet anger, and the kind of regret that just barely managed not to get stuck in her throat as she spoke.
“Your high elf girl will know where Edmund is. Are you going to let me go now?” Rose asked.
Sylver just looked at her, not at Chrys’ body, but at the soul currently stretched thin, that should have enveloped Chrys’, but instead was frozen in place, before it had even started.
“I have a few more questions,” Sylver said, and reached into his pocket, and opened one of his notebooks.
He was just sitting around waiting anyway, so he might as well get as much information as possible out of Rose.
AnnouncementVote on TopWebFiction, if you have 10 seconds to spare!
You can read up to chapter 187 (20 chapters ahead) on my Patreon!
Discord for discussions, updates, and memes.
Twitter for bad takes that will eventually get me canceled!
-
-
Ch167-Talk And Show
-
-
The dark elves needed a couple of days to get all the spies hiding amidst the “high-elves” out.
On top of that, Sylver was only 2 days away from adhering to Poppy’s suggestion of waiting 7 days before destroying the book.
So Sylver just kept doing what he had been doing since he came back from dealing with Eve and the other two.
Deciphering the grimoires he had taken from them, and writhing in pain as one of his mana channels twisted itself into a knot, and then condensed and tightened until Sylver wished he was actually dead.
The physical aspects of the change were annoying more than painful, his skin was constantly peeling away, his scars kept becoming inflamed before gradually disappearing, his teeth fell out and grew back, and his throat felt like someone was trying to cut through it using a blunt saw.
The bright side of this was that Sylver’s old voice returned, and according to Ria, changed his accent to a slightly milder one. The changes were minor enough that the handful of dark elves Sylver interacted with didn’t even realize anything had changed, they were all far more concerned about the fact that Sylver’s ears were flat, and not pointed.
Something he had assumed they were all aware of. But considering all the other weird things about him, the fact that he was a “high-elf,” stopped being shocking before the day had ended.
Sylver leaned to the side as a shiver went down his spine, and he gained yet another centimeter of height. He would deal with any problems that arose from his change in appearance after the process was complete.
Zelvash was occupied with regaining the power he had given away to weaken himself for the ritual to create a brand new Eldar tree, so Sylver’s company was limited to Ria, Spring, an unconscious Chrys, and a small handful of dark elves that were too frightened of Sylver to properly talk to him.
Sylver had used the remainder of the backup flesh he had hidden away when he rescued Chrys, to further fix up her heart and lungs, and even managed to remove some of the metallic contraptions inside of her “stomach”. He refrained from trying to craft her a new digestive system, and instead provided her body with energy and nutrients via injections directly into her veins.
The grimoires Sylver had taken from Eve were all written in code.
Most of which he could decipher, but even if he couldn’t explain it, he knew there was something he was missing. The only reason he spotted Nyx’s hidden framework was that he knew her well enough to recognize the mistakes that were there on purpose.
The fact that all the magic Nyx wrote about was the kind Sylver was very intimately familiar with also helped.
If there were some sort of obvious errors in Adema’s grimoires, Sylver hadn’t found any.
The question, “where did these grimoires come from,” didn’t seem likely to receive an answer. Considering the grimoires were the source and reason for Eve’s soul and existence, they had been here before she was.
What was worse, the magic that stopped the grimoires from succumbing to age, also messed up all of Sylver’s attempts to gauge how old they were. One thing was for certain though, every single one of them was written after the book had been sent away.
It took Sylver about 12 hours before he gave up on gleaming any further information from the grimoires.
Inspection of Chrys’ body revealed that there wasn’t a whole lot Sylver could do in the short time he had available. Waiting for her to heal, before opening a gate to Eira was an option, but the cost far outweighed the benefits.
Chrys’ body was going to get fucked up one way or another, so any effort Sylver put into fixing her up right now would be pointless. Not to mention, he needed her to remain unconscious, for one of his backup plans to function properly.
Once the book was gone, Ria could do what she did back in Chrys’ room and will take control of her legs and will walk her through the gate. Sylver already had the tanks he had built for Misha and Masha, not to mention Chrys could probably get healed up by a healer.
Granted, it was just barely, but she was still alive.
*
*
*
Sylver was finished making “Sylver” an instant-death-wand, to replace the hand he had taken from them.
It had been “done” a good 2 hours ago, but Sylver wanted to pretty it up since something that carried his name would be the one using it.
Initially, he had planned to make it into a bracelet, but Sylver got a little carried away and ended up creating a circlet that appeared to be made out of bones.
Appeared being the keyword here, because about 90% of it was simply extremely hard and dry fungus. Sylver’s [Seed Storage] gave him access to a mixture of spores to choose from, and after a bit of experimentation, he found a combination that formed a very solid interlocking lattice.
The main downside of this specific mix was that it took far too long to properly dry out. Even with magic to speed up the process, it still required roughly 30 minutes for everything to become rock hard.
The enchantment on the circlet was almost embarrassingly basic, but Sylver didn’t have enough mana for something better, and he honestly doubted “Sylver,” would even notice the difference.
And in his defense, Sylver completely understood where he would be coming from. Instant-death magic was so specific and niche that trying to explain the difference between ripping someone’s soul out of their bodies, and crushing their heart, was near impossible, considering the end result was just short of identical.
One had no heart, so that was the difference, but very few bothered conducting an autopsy on their defeated foes, so in their eyes, it was all the same.
With pyromancy at least there was a visible distinction, a tier 7 spell was smaller and weaker than a tier 8 spell, the color of the flame could be different, one vaporized, the other burned and left ashes, even someone who wasn’t a mage could tell which one was more powerful.
But instant death magic?
To an outsider, the mage simply snapped their fingers, and their opponent dropped dead. Did the mage use a 6th tier spell? An 8th tier spell? Is the soul still in the body, is it in the hands of the mage? What about the life force? The dead person’s mana?
Granted, the drawbacks were outweighed by the sheer amount of psychological damage instant death magic did.
Seeing a person burn to death was, for lack of a better word, real. In your mind, if they had the right enchanted robe, or were covered in water, they would be fine.
Fire is real, you can fight it, you can block it, you can redirect it, it can be defeated.
But magic that 99.9% of mages can’t even sense, let alone defend against?
Forget mages, they are at least aware of the fact that instant death magic is a possibility, warriors and anyone that wasn’t magically gifted will struggle to comprehend the idea of something like instant death magic existing.
To the extent that Sylver often used this fear as a way to conserve his mana.
Sure, a giant ball of fire will wipe out a good part of the army, but the rest will continue anyway since there’s no fireball coming at them right now.
But when people around you drop like flies, with no sign of struggle or arrow sticking out of their head or chest, and you have no idea if the same will happen to you or not, that’s when you shit yourself, start panicking, and run the fuck away.
Sylver put the circlet away into a small wooden box, and with a very gentle poke from his finger, turned down the negative energy absorption as low as it would go.
The reason the hand had been capable of casting magic for a seemingly enormous period of time, was only partially due to how dense and conductive Sylver’s mana channels were. The endless negative energy the “death lords” produced, was the main reason.
Similar to how Sylver had created that box that transformed meat into gun-clogging bullets, he had done the same for the instant death spell.
Negative energy goes in, magic that will kill just about everything imaginable, comes out. With Grim likely handling the rare exception that shows up.
“It’s saying it knows what happened to the Ibis,” Ria said, and for a single moment, Sylver felt as if every drop of blood in his body had turned into ice. Luckily, he didn’t need to think this decision over.
“Ignore it. Don’t listen to a word it says,” Sylver said calmly, as he turned away from the box holding the circlet and faced Ria.
He could tell by the way her body had gotten wider, that the book was partially open right now.
“It said you would say that. It also said that it knows there’s nothing it can say to stop you from destroying it,” Ria said, as Sylver stood up from his seat, and took the half step necessary to be within reach of Ria.
Sylver did his best to keep the threat out of his voice, but he couldn’t help it when he felt genuinely afraid.
“Ria… I’m going to say this only once. Don’t listen to it. I need you to trust me when I say that if we do anything other than destroying it, we will lose. We might win in the short term. I’m sure it will give me everything I ever wanted, but 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years from now, we will lose,” Sylver explained and could feel Ria’s soul backing away from him with each syllable.
Ria would later tell him that he didn’t blink once as he spoke to her and that he lowered the temperature inside the room down by 30 degrees.
“I-”
“Ria, for all we know, it is truly omniscient. I’m not smart enough to bargain with a creature that knows what I’m going to say, think, and do before I even have a chance to start. Maybe it is merely reading my mind, I do not know, but what I do know is that doing anything other than destroying it will be catastrophic in the long run. Even as I speak, I’m willing to bet it's already told you in advance what I’m now saying, and has preemptively made the perfect argument against me,” Sylver interrupted and took a half step closer to Ria.
The small crystals of ice that had formed on the floor surrounding Sylver silently crackled under his weight, in the otherwise dead silent room.
“It didn’t, but-”
“If you can’t trust me, trust that I would have been willing to risk it if there was even the smallest possibility of winning long term. I know it’s tempting; you quite literally cannot comprehend just how tempted I am… But we got lucky when we stopped it. And there isn’t an Ibis around anymore to get lucky a second time,” Sylver explained, and only now realized he had been slowly leaning closer and closer to Ria, and now could almost feel the faint warmth of her metal.
Ria quietly stayed where she was while Sylver leaned back and stopped crouching and just looked down at her.
“It’s… Alright… But I can’t stop it. I don’t understand how I can hear it without any sensors pointed at it,” Ria explained, as Sylver crossed his arms over his chest.
“Can you hear a voice, or do you just know what it wants you to know?” Sylver asked, and saw Ria do the equivalent of checking all your pockets in search of something.
While naked, and the size of a small book, and made out of metal.
“I don’t know,” Ria answered, and Sylver nodded at her.
“Would you say it sounds like 1 voice or multiple voices that speak in perfect sync?” Sylver asked.
“1 voice. Yes, but it stopped talking now,” Ria answered.
“Would you say it sounds like it’s coming from behind you, in front of you, or from your left or right side?” Sylver asked.
He felt a few pieces of his skin start to prickle, but didn’t smile.
Because this prickling meant 1 thing, and it could either go very well or very poorly.
“I can’t tell,” Ria answered.
With his body gradually morphing into what it was, some of Sylver’s other senses were returning.
Not to the level he would have preferred, and not all of them, but Sylver could feel her.
Like a snake’s tongue flicking against the soft tissue on the back of his neck. Slow, careful, steady, without raising any alarm, she was here.
Watching.
Listening.
The same way a fisherman would check to see how deep a hook was lodged in the prey’s throat, Sylver ever so gently tugged the line. He felt her pull against him immediately.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I may not know a lot about gods, other worlds, and electric golems that lost their minds, but souls and curses? Works a lot like punching someone in the throat, as opposed to their abdomen. One you can train, flex, and the other is this incredibly brittle piece of cartilage,” Sylver said at Chrys, who remained completely motionless, and still had both her eyes closed.
“What?” Ria asked, as Sylver picked her up from Chrys’ chest, and hid her away near one of the pockets on his back.
“The woman who sent me here decided to check to see what I was up to. And just like last time, she did so through someone I care for and wouldn’t hurt. Except now I’ve got just a little bit more power than I did back then. Luckily for us, I guessed correctly that she would choose the crippled and defenseless little girl,” Sylver explained, as he reached into his sleeve and pulled out the remains of his hand.
It was missing a pinkie that Sylver had bit off and swallowed.
A ring finger, and the pointer finger, that Sylver had used to create the “instant-death-circlet” to give to “Sylver,” and Eve.
A thumb that Sylver had very quietly enchanted and inserted into where one of Chrys’ ribs should be.
And what remained was the middle finger, the palm, and a portion of the wrist. Just enough for Sylver to push his body past the stages of metamorphosis that would leave him temporarily defenseless, destroy the book, and open a gate to return to Eira.
“I’m not an idiot Rose. I know you’re limited by something, or someone, in regards to what you can and can’t tell me. And while I am going to feel beyond terrible for doing something to Chrys to hurt you, you know me well enough to know that’s not going to stop me. Right now she’s sort of like a voodoo doll, except I have a direct connection to your soul,” Sylver explained, as he used the remains of the hand in his hand to lock the magic in, and then hid it away within his sleeve.
Sylver waited for a few seconds for a response, but Chrys just lay there, as if she was dead. With a flick of his wrist, Sylver produced a small syringe, walked over to Chrys’ head, and felt around her shoulder.
“There’s a nice big bundle of nerves near the shoulder blade. We can have a conversation Rose, or I’m going to insert this syringe, press it right up against the nerve cluster, and then very slowly make it decay. One,” Sylver said, as he placed one hand down on Chrys’ shoulder, and used the other to line up the syringe.
“I just want to talk. Two,” Sylver offered, as he slid the needle inside, and managed not to snag any muscle fibers on the way.
“I know what you’re doing Rose. I’m well aware of everyone making their way towards this room. But ask yourself this. Is there any chance they will be able to stop me, and once I’m done, what do you think I’m going to do to you?” Sylver asked as dark yellow sparks jumped around the base of the needle.
Sylver felt it.
If what Chrys had been capable of using the book as an aid, was a giant wave, what Rose had just done, felt more like a tsunami. Sylver actually felt woozy from the sudden interference, and he could almost feel the steaming blood staining his face and hands. His recalling of his future was blurry, but apparently, it involved lots of blood.
There was a crowd of people gathered outside the door, with one hand reaching towards the circular handle. As Chrys opened her glowing white eye and let out a deep and long sigh, Spring informed Sylver that every single dark elf standing outside did the same.
“I am not your enemy,” Rose said, using Chrys’ mouth.
Sylver pulled the syringe out of her shoulder and stored it away in his [Bound Bones] storage.
“I am very glad to hear that. You can keep the rest of your soul where it is, this little piece is enough for me. The bigger the balloon, the longer it takes to deflate, in the event someone were to tear a hole in it. Where is Edmund?” Sylver asked, gently, calmly, and while staring right into Chrys’ single glowing eye.
“I can’t tell you while we’re here,” Rose answered, as Sylver strained every sense he had to check for a reaction.
If she was lying, he had no way of knowing. Even physically holding onto her soul, it was so… foreign, that Sylver didn’t have a frame of reference to compare it against.
“Who are you? By which I mean, who are you really,” Sylver asked, and watched as Rose took another deep breath, but was restricted by Chrys’ small damaged lungs.
“We’re not gods. And we’re not the apostles of gods. We’re… [Hero]s,” Rose explained, and Sylver successfully managed to stay where he was, instead of taking a step back like his body had wanted.
“You are [Hero]s that aren’t from this world, in the sense that you were [Hero]s in a different world… And somehow ended up here…” Sylver slowly explained, half to Rose, half to Ria, and half to himself.
Although he could tell by Ria’s soul that she wasn’t following.
“Are you the one who revived me? Why were you visiting every year?” Sylver asked, having decided to skip around the topic of [Hero]s for the moment.
“One of my skills involves influence. It allows me to see it, measure it, compare it, and you are the antithesis of influence. It isn’t zero, it’s in the negatives. Your very existence goes against the grain of the world,” Rose explained, and Sylver could do little but nod along.
“Because I’m undead?” Sylver asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve seen it before, but never this much. Cult leaders, tyrants, mad sorcerers, people that only destroy, and bring suffering to the world. But theirs is like a small hole in the ground, whereas you are an endless abyss,” Rose explained, as Sylver remembered something, and pulled it up to double-check.
[Class: Koschei (Unique)]
-Neither living nor undead. Your life is bound to a silver needle, your greatest strength, as well as your greatest weakness.
-???? ????
-???? ?? ??? ????
-Plunderer Of Fate
+10CON
+10INT
+10WIS
+Perk: Living Undead
+Perk: Deathless
“What else do you know? About me, about my abyss of influence,” Sylver asked, as he pushed the screen away and out of sight.
“I know the high-elf wasn’t supposed to live. She’s just like you, a walking abyss. And the two you stole from the dungeon, you infected them too. Even Poppy lost some influence because of you,” Rose explained calmly, as Sylver continued to just stand there, and stare.
“You keep saying influence like it’s supposed to mean something else?” Sylver asked.
Rose moved Chrys’ head to the side, and now her one glowing eye was fixated on Sylver’s arm, where Ria was peaking from.
“To oversimplify it, how much a person can change the world. A man who discovers something that benefits people has a very high positive influence. A rapist has a very low, possibly even negative, influence. A tyrant that steals from his subjects, or tortures them for his amusement, has a high negative influence,” Rose explained, and Sylver kept his mouth shut.
“There are… beings that are above gods. You know about them, I know you know about them,” Rose argued.
“In theory, yes,” Sylver answered, and could see Rose was about to scoff, but then remembered the position she was in.
“There is a limit to each world. Your high negative influence is canceled out by a bunch of small positive influences, for a total of zero. But sometimes. Sometimes something happens. The world loses its balance,” Rose explained.
Sylver could tell that she meant “world” in the sense of a book, whereas “realm” was the pages in the aforementioned book.
“And the way a god can summon a [Hero] from another realm to cancel out a demon king, these theoretical Gods, do the same for worlds… That’s how you ended up here…” Sylver thought out loud, and Rose nodded.
The “Gods above gods” thing was called a theory, for very good reason. Because people significantly more intelligent, capable, and interested than Sylver had spent their entire lives trying to prove it true, but never even managed to make a god admit Gods existed.
In Sylver’s opinion, it was bullshit. It was something that people who wanted their suffering, joy, loss, mistakes, and everything else to have some sort of ultimate meaning and purpose.
“Where do I come in? Why did you go out of your way to find me, and have me come here?” Sylver asked, with a brief shake of the head.
“I’ve sent others before you. I thought that if I sent enough positive influence into this realm, eventually enough would gather to cancel out the negative… I was wrong... So I changed my tactic. Instead of adding positive influence into this realm, I will instead remove the negative influence. You’re afraid of “The Story Of The Seven Suns,” but nowhere near how much you should be. If you’re an endless abyss, the book is 100 times worse,” Rose explained.
“Why didn’t you have me stop the Dark Year?” Sylver asked, and Rose looked at him as if he had just insulted her.
“Because I don’t want it stopped. I want them to try summoning a god, I want them to gather all the negative influence into one enormous vessel so that a [Hero] can slay it. But for a [Hero] to be powerful enough to do that, I needed someone to remove a chunk of negative influence. We… I need the balance of positive and negative in this realm to be the exact opposite of what it was when I was thrown here,” Rose explained, as Sylver was informed that the group that had been standing outside the door was now walking away.
“And my hand? The grimoires? The dark elf prophesy? What was the point of that?” Sylver asked.
“You’ll have to ask Poppy. I only wanted the book destroyed, everything else was either her doing, Lily’s, or simply your high concentration of negative influence acting like a magnet,” Rose explained.
“Magnet?” Sylver asked.
“Or imagine a whirlpool sucking everything into itself. Including other whirlpools. Your home in Arda. It is the home of hundreds of atrocities, the fact that it took you so long to notice it and interact with it is entirely due to… Nameless. The boy that was traveling with Wolf, Bear, and Lion. He was interfering with you, altering your course, the way a small planet would slightly alter the course of a larger planet,” Rose explained.
“What’s going to happen after this?” Sylver asked, and Rose allowed Chrys’ eye to blink for the first time since he had started this interrogation.
“You’re going to leave, and I am going to lock this realm up so tightly that Poppy and Lily won’t be able to come here,” Rose said with a sneer that didn’t look right on Chrys’ face.
“What?”
“They don’t want to go home. They like it here. Not here here, not this arctic hell-hole, but Poppy loves Eira and all of its magical nonsense. She doesn’t give a shit about going home, she and Lily are trying to become [Hero]s in Eira,” Rose said, with a mix of very quiet anger, and the kind of regret that just barely managed not to get stuck in her throat as she spoke.
“Your high elf girl will know where Edmund is. Are you going to let me go now?” Rose asked.
Sylver just looked at her, not at Chrys’ body, but at the soul currently stretched thin, that should have enveloped Chrys’, but instead was frozen in place, before it had even started.
“I have a few more questions,” Sylver said, and reached into his pocket, and opened one of his notebooks.
He was just sitting around waiting anyway, so he might as well get as much information as possible out of Rose.
AnnouncementVote on TopWebFiction, if you have 10 seconds to spare!
You can read up to chapter 187 (20 chapters ahead) on my Patreon!
Discord for discussions, updates, and memes.
Twitter for bad takes that will eventually get me canceled!
