Sylver Seeker

They moved in a swarm, a tsunami of hissing, pale-faced, vampires.

With this much open space, there wasn’t a whole lot Sylver could do, going airborne would be suicide, and digging underground wasn’t possible since the “ground” was Tuli’s flesh, which only left him trying to go through them.

Granted, these were vampires, Sylver would win, but the problem was that he would win eventually. And while Edmund appeared to be doing a good job of interfering with the demon summoning, he wasn’t going to be able to keep it up for long.

Just as Sylver resigned himself to clawing a hole in the wall of bloodsuckers, he felt a presence behind him. He swung with his hand, and the dagger harmlessly bounced off the side of the paladin’s helmet.

The paladin barely reacted to Sylver’s attack, walked past him, and smashed her sword against her shield, pointed at the oncoming vampires.

There was a brief flash of light.

The outer layer of Sylver’s robe fizzled away into a fine ash, but otherwise, he was unharmed.

The horde of vampires on the other hand…

They were strewn all over the place, in big twitching piles. Most were clutching their eyes, or their ears, more than a couple were missing limbs and were waving their ash-covered stumps around, but there were a few that were faking it. Vampires that were too powerful to get damaged by the paladin’s attack.

The fact that they decided to hide amidst their weaker comrades meant they were either waiting to ambush whoever tried to get past them, or they were hiding to protect their stunned pile from being finished off.

Either way, it was a bad idea to get near them.

The paladin followed Sylver as he ran forward, and she used her shield attack again as they got near the small mound of stunned undead.

Sylver kept his eyes glued to the metal tree and used Ulvic to build as much distance between him and the army of vampires as possible. Surprisingly enough, the paladin covered from head to toe in heavy armor not only kept up with Sylver’s wolf shade but also seemed to be capable of moving even faster.

Up near the top, Sylver could see Edmund flying around the portal/egg, as he drenched it in ivory-white fire. Near the bottom of the tree trunk, Sylver could see the vague shape of Sophia standing inside a large silver-colored barrier, using her floating feathers to hold back the metallic thorns of the tree.

The branches grew in pulses and created offshoots every other pulse, which meant that it was only a matter of time until Sophia ran out of metal feathers to block the incoming spikes. More worrying was the fact that the trunk of the tree, the initial metal obelisk, was tilting.

If Sylver had to guess it was lining up with Tuli’s brainstem, to pierce it at a specific angle.

There was just enough room between the metal branches and the ground for Sylver to get to Sophia without being impaled.

She opened a gap in her barrier to let him pass and barely managed to close it in time after Sylver entered to block a giant metal spike.

Sophia said something, as did the priests standing by her side, but Sylver didn’t hear a word they said as he stared at the metal obelisk.

The framework was completely different since the last time he saw it. Sylver had decided on a handful of potential weak points to poke at when he came here but looking at the current framework those weaknesses had not only been covered but reinforced.

“Where’s Faust,” Sylver asked as one of the priests managed to shake him out of his stupor, by physically shaking his shoulder. It was hard to think with this much holy magic surrounding him, even if it wasn’t actively hurting him.

“How do we stop it?” the priest repeated and then repeated a third time as it took Sylver a moment to process the question.

“There’s nothing we can do up here,” Sylver said slowly, without once taking his eyes off Edmund, and the ever-growing glowing sphere he was attacking.

There was a reaction to his fire, but it didn’t feel like the proper reaction. Then again, given the difference in Edmund’s current magical output and what Sylver had grown accustomed to, this might have been the proper reaction for magic of this level.

The priest woman said something again, but Sylver pulled her hand off his shoulder and walked over to where there had been a door at one point. The bone had healed, and fused, without leaving so much as a trace of the doorframe that Edmund had torn out of it.

“Make a hole here,” Sylver ordered to the nearest paladin. The paladin pressed the tip of her spear against the bone, adjusted its angle using her shield, and with a single thrust, forced the entire blade inside.

The woman then twisted the spear, and a massive crack formed on the bone, stretching upwards, and to the left. Sylver gestured for her to stop, and as the woman pulled her spear out, Sylver sent a tendril of fog into it.

Sylver looked up at Edmund and then turned to look at Sophia. Her hair was glued to her head from the sweat, and her shoulders were shaking as she exerted her will onto the silver feathers blocking the oncoming metal branches.

He turned to the spear-wielding paladin.

“Don’t separate from Sophia, and follow after me when her barrier is half the size it is now. If you see Faust tell him to help Edmund,” Sylver said, as he continued extending his tendril of fog further and further down the tunnel.

When the paladin nodded, Sylver used [Fog Form] to materialize inside the tunnel.

The “tunnel” looked like it had been dug using some sort of square instrument, the walls, ceiling, and floor all had cube-shaped holes in them. The tunnel was in the shape of a curved spiral, and the downward angle was steep enough that Sylver could see himself slipping and sliding down the bumpy square “steps.”

It was pitch black, save for the small amount of light coming out of the crack behind him, and there was a noticeable foul smell in the air. Burned toast, along with a garlicky smell.

Sylver’s shades did their best to scout ahead, but with the massive amount of interference the obelisk-turned tree was creating, they couldn’t see a thing.

Sylver sprinted down the steps and lost his footing often enough that half of the sprint was handled by his robe carrying him.

Sylver stopped as he reached a door made from the same black metal that the demon summoning tree was made from.

He considered making a hole around the door, so as not to touch it, but while Sylver channeled mana into his fingers, someone unlocked it from the other side.

The sword tip stopped a half centimeter away from Sylver’s eyeball, and the wave of air the fast movement caused the small pieces of broken bone littering the floor to fly up and rattle as they hit the ceiling.

“Long time no see,” Faust said, as he pulled his sword away from Sylver’s face.

“What’s down there?” Sylver asked.

“A bunch of dead vampires and mercenaries, and a bunch of cages filled with dead goats,” Faust explained, as Sylver gestured for him to follow him.

As Faust had said, the large room was littered with vampire corpses, along with roughly 50 cages just barely big enough to fit the dead goats they were holding.

All the goats had the same square-shaped hole in their forehead. Going by the dry blood, that hole had been what killed them.

On the other side of the room, there was an open door, propped open by a dead vampire.

“Did anything happen when you touched the door?” Sylver asked as Faust shook his head.

“Not as far as I could tell. I threw a vamp at the door before I touched it, but it didn’t react,” Faust said, as Sylver held his finger up against the open door. When nothing happened, he pressed his palm against it.

Aside from being unable to send a pulse of mana through it, the door was just a normal metal door.

“Edmund will need your help. Go up the stairs and break through the bone if there isn’t an opening there already,” Sylver said, with a gesture at the tunnel leading up.

Faust patted Sylver on the shoulder as he passed him, and disappeared up the stairs, leaving behind only a powerful gust of wind.

As he walked amidst the various corpses, Sylver pulled them closer to him using [Dead Dominion]. The goats broke out of their cages as Sylver split their corpses in two, while the vampires were all gathered into an ever-growing ball. Their weapons rattled as they fell onto the ground, as did the cages when Sylver converted the goats into [Necrotic Mutilation].

The green liquid followed after Sylver and devoured everything it came into contact with. The vampires that were missing too many pieces of their bodies were discarded into the river of [Necrotic Mutilation].

The ones that were semi whole, had a mutated [Corpse Blossom] placed into their wounds. The glowing orange honey-like liquid oozed out of the wounds and spread out along the skin the way frost did on a cold window.

Sylver kept one hand on the bright orange liquid, and tiny flecks of blue began to appear on its surface. Little by little something akin to fine hair began to sprout from the blue flecks, and by the time Sylver reached the next door, most of the floating corpses were covered in the moss-like blue hair.

He moved the moss-covered sphere of dead behind him, and while he waited for the roots to finish spreading, focused on the corpses that were whole. The slits on Sylver’s palms opened up and pitch-black smoke oozed out of them.

The bubble of smoke disappeared into the first corpse’s mouth, and as it began to shudder, more smoke appeared and spread to the 3 nearest corpses. Within the span of a minute, there was an interconnecting web of black smoke stretching from the 32 dead vampires’ mouths and wounds.

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

…

[Undead Mastery (VI) Proficiency increased to 19%!]

The vampires-turned-zombies landed on the ground with a heavy thud. The ones that hadn’t been damaged before being killed all wore heavy armor, and the only wound Faust had inflicted on them was a single hole through their left eyehole.

If these had been matured vampires, even removing their heads wouldn’t necessarily killed them. But these humans had been infected less than a week ago, the curse likely hadn’t even fully infected their bodies yet.

The zombies moved in near perfect sync with one another, as they formed into a tight rectangle formation, with Sylver walking behind them. His sphere of [Necrotic Mutitlation] splashed onto their armor, reinforced it, and did the same for their weapons.

While the zombie at the very front reached for the door handle, Sylver moved the sphere of moss floating behind him, above the zombies. As he released [Dead Dominions] grasp on the orange/blue substance it fell and broke apart against the helmets of the zombies below.

The blue mass wriggled around like a collection of worms as it slithered through the few armor gaps it could find, while the excess landed on the floor and slithered towards Sylver. The zombies twitched violently and made their armor rattle as the “fungus” injected itself into their flesh.

Sylver on the other hand merely rolled his head and cracked his neck as the leftover “fungus” pooled together on his back and formed into a deep blue scab.

You had to have a very loose definition of what constitutes a “fungus” to describe the thing Sylver had created while experimenting in his workshop. It wasn’t “alive” and it most certainly wasn’t “undead,” but given that Sylver felt like someone set his spine on fire when he tried to analyze the “plant matter” he decided that calling it a “fungus” would be adequate for the moment.

When the door opened, Sylver’s senses were immediately attacked by a painfully bitter scent.

The door that the zombie in front had opened revealed an unmoving cloud of red smoke. The smoke covered the doorway completely and was thick enough that Sylver couldn’t see what was on the other side of the door.

The zombie that stood at the very front leaned forward for a moment and sprinted through the dark red smoke.

Sylver heard the sounds of metal scratching metal, followed by hissing, followed by a wet squelching noise, and finally, he felt the mana he had used to raise the zombie return to him through [Dying Breath].

Under different circumstances, Sylver would have simply strapped a bunch of explosives onto a zombie and sent it ahead.

But he was inside Tuli and wanted to keep the destruction to a minimum. Not to mention he needed to be careful not to destroy the demon-summoning framework.

Sylver’s goal was to stopit, in a careful, controlled way. Possibly use it to trap the demon, and steal its core, but the important thing was not to destroy it. Because demon-summoning frameworks tended to implode if they were damaged, and sent whatever was unlucky enough to be within its range into the demon realm.

And at this moment in time, Sylver didn’t want to go to the demon realm.

Instead of sending another zombie inside, Sylver sent 10, in a neat single file line.

There was a lot more noise this time around, a lot more hissing, and just when Sylver felt that his zombies were about to be victorious, he began to feel [Dying Breath] refund him the mana he spent on raising them return to him.

The zombies didn’t die all at once, and they didn’t die one by one either, they died in batches of 3, which meant there was a good chance there were 3 enemies inside.

Sylver made sure to keep a zombie in front of him as he approached the smoke-filled doorway. He couldn’t feel anything past the door and the wall, even with [Dead Dominion].

Very slowly the zombie in front of Sylver lifted its arm and pushed it through the smoke. Sylver channeled his mana through the zombie and tried to get a feel for what was going on with the smoke.

As far as he could tell, the only thing it did was conceal the things it surrounded. Not quite a perfect mana insulator, but more than enough to block a mage’s mana sense.

As much as Sylver disliked going in blind, he was slightly pressed for time, on account of the demon being summoned and all that.

He had some dirt and river water stocked up inside his bones, but he was saving those for an emergency. Even if he had a vine grow into the smoke, it was unlikely to yield any useful information, and if the thing inside was powerful enough to destroy the armored zombies, it was more than powerful enough to break an overgrown stick.

Sylver prepared his spell in his hand as he walked away from the doorway. The remaining zombies lined up, and got into position. Sylver tensed his legs, and sprinted towards the door as fast as he could, with the zombies running right next to him, covering his front, back, and sides.

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