Sylver Seeker

Without the thrall’s shadow to hold him up, Sylver began to fall toward the liquid floor. Getting caught in it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world, it wasn’t indestructible, but every second he wasted fighting this vampire was an extra second the demon had to come into this realm.

Even if it did catch Sylver, the red material couldn’t do much. If it was capable of slicing or severing it would have cut the strings connecting his arm and his leg to him. It was also vulnerable to physical attacks, since the zombie down below was digging through it, and there was still a crack left on the floor from when Sylver tried to blow the vampire away with an explosion.

The two remaining vampire thralls weren’t attacking him, and the man in the red robe was rambling something to himself, with specks of froth leaking out of the edge of his lips.

Sylver summoned Aleri from within the shadows of his robe, and to the small bird’s dismay, ordered it to fly upwards as hard as it could, while Sylver tried to lessen his weight enough and increase the many-winged bird’s strength enough, to carry him.

It wasn’t even close and almost made him feel bad for pointlessly stepping on it.

Sylver had to once again materialize near the ceiling through [Fog Form].

Two stupid fast frenzied thralls aside, the main problem was that Sylver didn’t know where the exit was. He was fairly certain he knew where the entrance was, but it was an educated guess at most. He could feel where the demonic energy of the tree was coming from, but it was vague, and he couldn’t rule out that the red half-sphere they were in had stayed in one place.

The best thing to do would be to summon a literal ton of explosives, and then detonate them. The half sphere would then rupture from the increased pressure, and then mess up Tuli’s insides, as well as the demon summoning framework, and Sylver, Edmund, Faust, Sophia, and her lovely priests and paladins would all be sucked away into the demon realm.

Along with a chunk of Tuli’s spine and skull.

If the purpose of this thing was to stall, the only way it could be better would be if it was restricting Sylver’s magic.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to fly to the ceiling again, and his left hand just about started being stitched into place, as one thrall grabbed him by his collarbone, and the other lodged her claws into his hip.

They pulled him apart, in the same way, someone might pull a leg off a roasted chicken. But instead of taking just one leg, they took both, along with his hip bone, and all the meat attached to it.

To say it “hurt” would be an understatement.

Raw speed is one of those things that’s very difficult to counter, without using some form of raw speed yourself. The normal counter is to predict what the speedy opponent will do and set a trap that will activate upon contact or something along those lines.

The problem here was that even if Sylver was able to predict the moves of a blood-crazed animal, he didn’t have anything potent enough to kill them.

He had already won of course, but his victory was going to take time he didn’t have. Any minute now they would start slowing down, as the curse Sylver had injected into them when they had touched him bypassed their defenses, and destroyed them from the inside. But given their strength, that minute might take way too long.

As he fell towards the ground, in 2 relatively equal halves, Sylver summoned just shy of every shade within his shadow. Within the span of an eye blinking, the previously empty half-sphere of red descended into utter darkness.

The two thrall women made short work of the shades in their way, but they got stabbed, scratched, and otherwise harmed as their claws and teeth tore through the balloon-like shades.

One of the effects of [Undead Mastery] allowed Sylver to split his shades into two, and those two could be split into four, and then eight, and so on. Each shade half was only 45% as powerful as the original, and the number only got smaller the more they split up, but right now, the fact that they took up space was more important than how strong they were.

Sylver gained a lot of useful information from summoning a literal mountain of shade bodies.

First of all, they weren’t in a half sphere, they were in a sphere, half of which was full of the red material that made up the walls and floor. The zombies had been pushed down to just above where the sphere ended, but digging down was pointless.

Because the second thing that Sylver discovered was that the sphere was sealed. And since a fully powered Spring was incapable of so much as scratching it, the zombies had no chance of digging through it.

He would need to make a hole with abyss magic to get out, which meant being in physical contact with the red liquid.

But it didn’t matter, because Sylver was about 99% certain the off switch was somewhere on the platform. The shades had fallen through the walls, the ceiling, and sunk deep into the floor, but the platform was as solid as rock and went all the way down to the bottom of the sphere.

As the thralls began to claw their way towards Sylver’s body, every shade that Sylver could get a wisp of mana to begin to scream. The pitch was inhumanly high, the sort of sound you heard from unoiled door hinges rubbing against each other.

At most, the noise irritated the thralls, but every little bit helped in situations like this.

The beetle shades, that came out of the snake chimera shade, tried to enter inside the two thralls, but their eyelids were too tough, the air coming out of their nose and mouth was too hot for the beetles to survive, and the entrances on the other side had the same issue as the eyelids.

They managed to get into their ears, but the beetles couldn’t do anything, other than annoyingly buzz.

These two thralls also didn’t have the under-chin weakness that Sylver had hoped to exploit. In terms of physical strength and defenses, the two women were impossible to stop and near impossible to harm. Sylver had to assume this was due to a temporary boost from their classes, and that they would eventually run out of steam and die, but he couldn’t exactly wait around for that to happen.

Sylver’s torso and hips reconnected as he approached the platform in the middle, and in a matter of seconds, Mora’s strings stitched the two pieces well enough for Sylver to walk without his top half falling over.

When Sylver was directly on top of the platform, he covered it and the surrounding area with his fog. The red-robed vampire was…

He was gone…

The shades moved out of the way so there was enough space for Sylver to materialize on the platform. Once he was on it, he saw that there was a small marble embedded into the very middle of the platform.

When Sylver reached to touch it, his fingers passed through it. It had turned into smoke and floated aimlessly around Sylver’s fingers. When he pulled his hand back the smoke funneled into the hole the marble left behind, and the marble reappeared.

He tried using his shadow to lift the marble, tried to destroy it with abyss magic, tried to pry it with his dagger, used a stick he grew, but no matter what he did, the marble turned into smoke, was blown away into the air, and then gathered into a marble he moment there was empty space in the hole.

Just to be safe, Sylver tried to use [Arcane Insight] on the red marble, and as expected, got absolutely fuckall from it.

“Figure it out yet?” a voice asked directly into Sylver’s ear.

He swung his hand with as much speed and force as he could manage, but the cloud of red smoke was barely visible, and Sylver’s hand passed through it unimpeded. Sylver decided to continue his attack and summoned half an explosive into his palm. He lost quite a few shades from the blast, and if the distant cackling was anything to go by, their sacrifice didn’t amount to anything.

Sylver could see the smoke, he could somewhat feel it brush against his skin, but as far as magic was concerned, he couldn’t feel shit.

He had to get off the platform as one of the frenzied thralls got too close. They were practically swimming through Sylver’s shades, and thankfully Sylver healed and summoned them faster than the thralls could destroy them.

Sylver was pushed close to the wall by his shades, and ever so gently, he pushed the blade of his dagger through the liquid material. He had to push with as much strength as he could manage without having anything solid to push against and wasn’t entirely sure that he reached the edge of the wall.

The dagger became red hot as Sylver tried to channel mana through it, and as the wall spat out molten metal into Sylver’s face, he honestly couldn’t tell if his beam of abyss magic had even reached the dagger’s tip.

He coated his arm in as much mana as the limb could handle, flattened his palm, and shoved it through the wall.

It might as well have been made of pure lead for all the good Sylver’s magic did. The magic that he used to slice through enchanted armor didn’t leave so much as a scratch on the wall. Sylver made the shades stop screaming.

“Come work for me!” Sylver shouted into the air.

The thralls turned on their heel and made a beeline toward the source of the sound.

There was a half moment of pause between Sylver making the offer, and the red mist vampire cackling with laughter.

The vamp said something in response, but Sylver couldn’t hear him over the two thralls snarling a short distance away from him. Since they weren’t stopping, Sylver had to assume the vampire’s answer was no.

The zombies breached the surface down below, but even together they weren’t going to do much against the thralls.

Sylver couldn’t say how long had passed since he entered this “room,” but the waves of negative mana the demon summoning tree was making had increased in intensity and frequency.

Using the fog in the little space between the pressed-together shades, Sylver travelled back to the red marble and very gently cupped his hands around it. It turned into smoke, and even though Sylver could see it with his eyes, he couldn’t feel anything even remotely magical.

If it had something to do with the two thralls, Sylver would have felt the connection, but even when he strained his primal energy field to its limit, he couldn’t feel anything.

“It’s really clever,” a mocking voice said into Sylver’s ear.

What’s the trick? Sylver wondered, as he pulled his hands away, and then tried to see if he could feel anything happening inside the platform.

Given the shape, and the fact that it had physical contact with the bottom of the sphere, the most logical-

“Edmund said he doesn’t need my help,” a voice spoke directly in front of Sylver. He flinched and looked up to see an ash-covered Faust standing in front of him.

“Everything alright up there?” Sylver asked as he stood up from his crouch.

“He said to tell you that the demon is 6th tier, at an absolute minimum,” Faust explained, as the shades spread throughout the sphere simultaneously disappeared.

Off in the distance, the two thralls began to fall to the ground, since the shades they had been swimming through were now gone.

“This isn’t some sort of cultivator tool, right?” Sylver asked with a gesture towards the small red marble embedded into the floor.

“Looks a bit like a dungeon core,” Faust said, as he closed one eye and began to point his sword towards the two red vampire thralls. He turned his body sideways and took the stance usually used by fencers.

“It actually does…,” Sylver said, as he spread his fingers out and slowly curled them into fists.

While he slowly unclenched his fists, Faust became blurry for half a second and then disappeared entirely. Multiple gusts of wind combined into a powerful blast of air that almost made Sylver lose his footing, followed by a lightning strike like flash of light, and the end result was that the two thralls had been sliced cleanly down the middle.

The two halves slipped as they tried to take a step forward, and when they fell, they fell apart.

“Do you know how to get out?” Sylver asked as his attempt to use a 2nd tier spell to influence the dungeon-core-looking thing didn’t do anything.

“Tuck your elbows in,” Faust said, as he stood behind Sylver, and pressed one hand against the back of his head.

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