Sylver Seeker

Chapter 276: Hole In One

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 10 (276) - Hole In One

Sylver’s first instinct was to have everyone think Chrys’ name to have her bring Edmund over.

When Klara, Lostal, Nels and even Mora all thought the name Chrys as hard as they could without a disembodied voice yelling at them to stop that, Sylver had no choice but to call Edmund without telling him about the particulars of why he was calling him.

The oxygen rich air made what he intended to be a candle light to come out like a fireball, he immediately snuffed it out and created the small blue flame correctly the second time. It sputtered in the right pattern, he’d probably done this millions of times, and yet at no point did he get the sense Edmund heard him.

“The walls are powered by a dungeon,” Sylver said to himself, and even under these circumstances it was almost enough to completely lift his mood that Nels immediately understood the implications of what he had said.

“We should-”

He didn’t hear what she was about to say as he slammed his hand against the flat black stone that occupied the area where the white sand portal had been barely ten minutes ago.

“HEY!” Sylver yelled as he hit the black stone with enough force that it should have shattered with each enhanced slap.

When he closed his hand into a tight fist, and punched the sharp tip of his knuckle into the stone, the only thing he managed to achieve was to tear the skin on his knuckle open, and dented the bone in his hand.Without the light coming out of the eyes, mouth, and the eight glowing points, the inside of the cone shaped mountain was pitch black, which in this case was fortunate because it made it so Sylver could see everything perfectly clearly with [Perfect Night Vision].

“The whole thing is above ground, so if the limitation is the mountain, and if the dungeon core is in the peak, then it stands to reason the entrance would be the furthest point away from the peak,” Sylver said while he stared at the pitch black smoke “base” of the mountain.

From this distance it looked like a liquid.

When he turned to Nels, she had this expression on her face, wide open eyes, pressed together lips, tight jaw, he’d never seen anything like it.

“…a river,” Nels mumbled.

“A river?” Sylver repeated.

She closed her eyes for a second and her face went back to normal.

“When I was here I followed a river to the edge of the jungle. The ground was ice cold, so I reasoned that the wall of the hollow-vault was the thinnest there. But even there I couldn’t force my way out,” Nels explained.

The trees were all so unbelievably thick, tall, and evenly green that he couldn’t even make a guess as to where the river was.

Sylver reached into the sleeve of his robe, and unintentionally took Aleri out of it like he was performing a magic trick.

The small feathered shade didn’t bother to so much as nod at him, as it disappeared out of his hand without a sound, and between the speed, and that he was flying in complete darkness, not even Sylver could see him.

“Could you use this as a base for a portal?” he asked Nels after a solid minute of silence passed.

“No,” Nels said with a laugh, like the very idea itself was ridiculous.

Both Sylver and Mora’s heads snapped to the right.

“Lostal. Could you tell them I can see them and ask them what they’re after?” Sylver said.

Lostal cupped his hands around his mouth, and mid sentence an arrow flew towards his face, and disappeared before it reached him. He swallowed the lump in his throat, and finished what he was saying.

“Now tell them this is their last chance to leave,” Sylver said.

Lostal started speaking again, yelped as another arrow disappeared before it reached him, and when he finished what he was saying, and a third arrow flew towards him, Sylver lifted his hand in the direction the arrows came from, and snapped his fingers.

First there was the sound of leaves rustling, followed by odd sounding crackling noises, and after the eight shades were all destroyed by a swipe of claws, a giant creature with a black spots on its yellow fur leapt out of the bushes.

It flew towards Lostal unobstructed, and as it was about to reach him, the large cat lost all forward momentum, and fell down towards the ground like a giant arm had pushed it down.

Sylver walked over to the creature that had been stitched down to the stony ground, placed his hand next to it’s giant fuzzy ear, and extended a tendril out of his palm through the eardrum.

Red tinged foam came out of it’s mouth and snout, it shuddered for a moment, and blinked as it’s large eyes flickered with yellow light.

[Kalez (Yellow Claw*) Defeated!]

[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]

Mora released the threads holding it down, and it stood up to it’s impressive four meter tall height.

A thin string of [Black Mass] came out of Sylver’s sleeve, wrapped around the creature’s neck, and solidified into something like a collar.

The creature dropped down on all fours, and with a great deal more speed and force leapt into the air and disappeared into the bushes it had come from. There was a loud noise like someone was chewing with their mouth open, followed by a much quieter sound of a small bone snapping.

[Kalez (Yellow Claw*) Defeated!]

[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]

“I don’t mind fighting all the way down to the bottom of the mountain, but there is a chance it will start to rain holy water, in which case I might not be able to protect everyone,” Sylver said.

Klara raised her hand into the air.

“You don’t need to raise your hand,” Nels said without looking away from the bushes.

“Sorry. What happens now?” Klara asked. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper and hoarse in a way that sounded extremely painful

“That’s what we’re trying to decide,” Nels said.

There was a quick flash of green light a little further in the jungle, followed by distant barking.

“If we break out will everyone in here get thrown outside too?” Lostal asked.

“That’s actually a good question,” Sylver said, and turned to look at Nels.

“It’s very unlikely, but I can’t say it’s impossible,” Nels answered.

“The biggest thing that would need to fit through an opening is Lostal, so all we need is a half meter by half meter square, not even that,” Sylver said.

Nels, Klara, and Lostal looked at Sylver first, then looked at Mora.

“I can turn into vapor, and she can crawl through a pinhole, don’t worry about us,” Sylver explained.

Nels obviously took him at his word, but both Klara and Lostal momentarily forgot about the danger everyone was in as they tried to figure out how such a large horse could possibly crawl through a pinhole.

“Wait, if you can turn into smoke, can’t you make a tiny hole, go outside, get in contact with Chrys or Ed, and come back?” Nels asked.

Nels saw the flaw in her plan, even if it wasn’t an actual flaw, but rather the kind of flaw that shouldn’t have existed for someone of Sylver’s age. And she also saw that Sylver saw that she figured out the flaw in her plan. He gave her his friendliest smile as he spoke.

“If I’m making an opening anyway, it’s not that much more effort to make a big one for everyone to go through. Plus, what if something happens while I’m outside?” Sylver asked.

“Do you not trust Mora to keep us safe?” Nels asked, in an attempt to back Sylver into a corner.

Mora turned her head and looked at him, it was a good move on Nels’ part.

“Not with you, she’s too inexperienced," Sylver said without looking at the horse creature in question.

Nels squinted at him, like a teacher that was trying to see if one of her students was doing something they shouldn’t be doing.

‘Are you really going to let this drag out because you want to finish this without Edmund’s help?’ Nels asked with her eyes.

‘Of course I am,’ Sylver said without blinking or moving his face.

Nels looked confused, more than surprised or disappointed or anything else.

Sylver turned to Lostal as he thought of something.

“You said something threw you into the air, and you fell into the jungle. Do you by any chance remember where exactly you fell?” Sylver asked.

“I don’t,” Lostal said.

It was a long shot anyway.

“But I have it marked on my map,” Lostal added.

Sylver looked at him.

“I’m a scout, half my perks are map related,” Lostal explained.

Sylver wanted to say something rude, but Sylver just nodded at the scout, and gestured for Mora to sit down.

“You're a scout with the word lost in your name?” Nels asked as Syvler helped the scout up on the horse.

“The -al makes it translate to finder,” Lostal mumbled to himself.

He had Klara sit behind Lostal, Mora tied both of them down to herself so they wouldn’t fall off, and locked their heads in place so they wouldn’t snap their necks if she had to dodge.

[Kalez (Red Fang*) Defeated!]

[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]

He wasn’t entirely sure if it was a distance thing, or if their levels were simply too low for the system to bother with a notification, but spread out amidst the jungle Sylver had thirty two zombies of various sizes and qualities running through the dark and attacking anyone and anything they could get their claws and teeth on.

[Greater Undead Channeling] let him raise zombies by channeling his magic from the zombies throats, directly into the wounds they made on the things they killed, and the shades accompanying the zombies kept everyone coordinated with one another.

He tied Nels’ head onto the back of Ulvic’s neck with a large piece of [Common] infused [Black Mass]. The physical boost that came from the [Common]infused [Black Mass] collar wasn’t anywhere near enough for the wolf to keep up with Mora at full speed, but it was enough that Mora didn’t feel like she was walking when she was meant to be running as she and Ulvic jumped from tree top to tree top.

As he got yet another notification, Sylver decided to pick a perk before one was picked for him.

In his list of perks there was nothing as great as [Mage Cap], the closest was [Shawl Of The Swamp] which increased every stat by 10%, but required being in a swamp to be used.

He got the feeling it wouldn’t be enough to put water and dirt in his boots to trick the perk into activating.

After ruling out eighteen other perks, the remaining contenders were [Still Water] which was a superior version of [Bound Bones], [Black Thumb] which allowed 3rd tier chloromancy, and [Fungus Fungus]which as the name implied, decreased the cost of [Morbid Mushroom] by 50 percent.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

[Still Water] allowed the storage and retrieval of items and creatures from water that was still.

Since he could make water out of moisture in the air, and had [Advanced Water Manipulation] in theory Sylver would have as much storage space as he needed whenever he needed it, and wouldn’t ever have to worry about someone breaking one of his bones and making him to explode with items like one of those paper dolls children hit that dropped candy when they broke apart. It had happened enough times now that it was a pattern.

[Black Thumb] was on the table mainly because he was curious what 3rd tier chloromancy looked like. 3rd tier was just two tiers below 5th, which in most schools of magic, was where the real magic started.

He was going to reach level 80 in [Swamp Lord] any day, or even minute if he didn’t manage to get out of here soon, supposedly one of the perks it would offer would let him reach 5th tier choloromancy.

[Fungus Fungus] honestly made the final three purely because of how simple it was, no conditions, downsides, just a dead simple mana cost reduction on something that was the perfect medium for most of his magic.

Assuming the [Swamp Lord] would give him 2 perks when he reached level 100, if he picked [Black Thumb] now and its future variations he would in theory get to 7th tier chloromancy magic.

Of course, there was always a chance it wouldn’t allow him to go any higher than 3rd tier.

On top of that, he was also assuming there wasn’t going to be something as good or better

than [Mage Cap] which pulled the maximum theoretical tier he would reach in chloromancy even further down. And it goes without saying simply having the ability to cast 7th tier chloromancy wouldn’t mean he would have enough mana to actually cast it.[Still Water] would be perfect if he could store magical items in it, but while it specifically allowed creatures to be stored, it had nothing about the types of items it allowed.

[Kalez (Grey Fur*) Defeated!]

[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]

Sylver looked through all the other perks one more time, did it again, and finally with full confidence picked [Still Water].

[Perk: Still Water]

-Store items and creatures in still water.

-Storage and retrieval volume limited to surface area of still water.

-Amount of MP required for storage and retrieval dependent on volume and mass of items and creatures.

Between Aleri mapping out the area, the various zombies running around and throwing Sylver’s metaphorical scent off, that Ulvic and Mora naturally made very little sound or smell as they traveled along the tree tops, meant there were very few moments where someone spotted long enough to attack them.

The cursed cannibals in this area seemed to love shooting poison darts, if Sylver had taken the time to collect them instead of just throwing them right back at the source he would have had an entire bucket full of the small glass beads by now.

He’d kept an eye on the distant flames, and he saw that aside from certain flames covering massive distances faster than even Mora was capable of, there were also flames that disappeared, and reappeared a great deal closer to Sylver and company.

As weak as the cannibals here may be, there was no telling how fast something too strong for Sylver and Mora to handle was going to find them.

“How much further?” Sylver said at Lostal.

“It’s on the left side of that big rock,” Lostal said while pointing at the distant rock in question.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to materialize in front of the rock as Mora and Ulvic landed nearby, and while he could feel something when he touched the rock, he couldn’t feel enough to aim for a weak point.

A pair of zombies that looked like bears stood up to their full height in front of Mora and Ulvic, to act as meat shields, and as the various zombies scattered throughout the jungle made their way over to Sylver, by the time he thought he found a good spot to aim, there was a 30 zombie army standing in a protective semi circle around the group.

Sylver closed his hand into a very tight fist, extended his middle and pointer finger out, and produced a razor thin line of abyss magic out of the two fingers.

He increased the range of the cut one centimeter at a time, and when he heard a sound from the rock, he pushed a tendril of fog through the small hole, and found the fog came out on the other side of the rock.

Sylver walked around the rock, looked around for something, and felt a tiny reaction from [Dead Dominion]. The zombies’ nearby had so much blood on them that he’d ignored it, but when he focused on [Dead Dominion] he could feel a thin layer of blood on the side of one of the other nearby boulders.

He didn’t need to do anything other than touch it to know the blood was Lostal’s. He’d thrown enough people head first into walls that he was intimately familiar with how blood splattered, and when he walked twelve steps away to a giant tree trunk, he pressed his hand against it and held back a sigh of relief when the tree trunk was slightly cold.

Sylver once again formed his hand into a fist, extended two fingers, and as he made the first cut into the tree trunk, Mora clicked her teeth to get his attention, and he turned around and well over a hundred various types of giant birds flying towards them.

“Nels,” Sylver said quietly.

“Yeah?” Nels asked.

He took out one of his favourite glass beakers from his [Bound Bones] storage, and placed it on top of Ulvic’s head, half a meter away from Nels’ face.

“Heat this up please, hot as you can,” Sylver said.

He kept one eye on Nels’ whistling magic, kept another eye on the tree he was cutting into, kept another eye on the approaching birds, and kept a fourth eye on the zombies that were getting sluggish from being raised so quickly, and were also so full of poison from darts that their muscles were starting to fail.

As the glass beaker began to glow with a white light, Mora wrapped a thin fireproof string around it, tied the string around Aleri’s body so it wouldn’t get in the way of his wings, and once it was secure Sylver stuffed a piece of explosive into the beaker, along with a drop of his blood.

The explosive melted, bubbled, and as Aleri took off it left behind flickering sparks in the air.

“Everyone close your eyes,” Sylver said, and just to be extra safe, had a shade materialize near everyone, and had it push their heads down, along with pressing its palms over their eyes.

Sylver lowered his face into the crook of his elbow, used the connection in his blood to the hot glass and explosive, and after he heard the distant pop, he looked up and watched as every single flying creature in the air lost any and all sense of direction.

Some bumped into each other, others had their wings get tangled up, but the vast majority nose dived into the jungle. One major downside of having night vision that’s good enough for flying is that sudden extremely bright lights can disorient, or in this case, permanently blind.

The moment he cut through the hollow-vault’s “wall” cracks crept up the tree trunk, and veered off to the side and formed light blue cracks in the air.

Sylver followed the largest crack like he was tearing open a wound, gradually made a new cut downwards and created an upside down V shaped pale blue crack in the tree trunk and air.

He spent far too much time and energy pushing against the edge of the opening.

“Other way,” Nels whispered quietly enough that no one else likely heard her, and only after she said that did Sylver figure out that he was effectively trying to push open a one way door. Lostal fell into the hollow-vault, he didn’t fall out of it.

When Sylver pulled at the flap, it flopped straight down towards him, like wet carboard.

“Lostal you’re first,” Sylver shouted as Mora all but threw the scout towards Sylver and the opening, and without bothering to wait for the man’s feet to touch the ground, Sylver’s robe caught him, and threw him headfirst through the small triangular opening.

He was going to be more careful with Klara, but Mora kicked her off her back barely gentler than Lostal, and Sylver’s robe again caught her, and threw her head first through the opening.

He took the black box with Nels’ bodyparts, made the box thin and narrow like a wooden plank, and the [Black Mass] the box was made out of pulled itself through the opening.

Mora’s body made various hissing noises as she released the pressure being applied to the bubbles of fluid she made rigid to act as a skeleton, while she did that Sylver took Nels from Ulvic’s back, and carefully passed her head through the opening, into Spring’s hands on the other side of the opening.

Dai and Sho held their hands out on the other side, let Mora wrap threads around them, and on the count of three, they walked backwards from the opening, and Mora’s entire body was squeezed front hooves first through the opening the way an octopus would squeeze itself through a tiny gap.

Sylver lost sight in both eyes as a pillar of lightning descended on the opening, both hands he was using to hold it open lost all their flesh all the way up to his elbows.

He looked using [Lesser Perception]at the “creature” behind him, if that word even applied to something like this. It appeared human, not counting the mask on its face, porcelain white up to the nose, and pitch black, like shiny tar, up to the forehead and scalp.

Its left eye was almost as black as Sylver’s and its right glowed with a dim white light. It had two small horns coming out of its scalp, one curved upwards, the other curved downward, and as for clothing, it was wearing a very poor imitation of Sylver’s black robe.

Sylver smiled at “it” as he tried to start a conversation to buy himself time to make his escape.

“We can talk this-”

He saw it flinch, and as Sylver made a tiny hole using abyss magic in the air where the tree trunk used to be, he filled it up with fog faster than he knew was possible, and didn’t even see the creature move as he used [Fog Form] and materialized outside the hollow-vault.

He could smell something burning, and when he touched his shoulder and chest, there were four long jagged lines starting from his right shoulder, and running all the way down to the edge of the left side of his hip.

The deep lines had torn straight through his robe, his [Black Mass] armour, his skin, Mora’s threads, his muscles, and most surprisingly of all, it even got through his bones.

As he felt around for his needle, the crystallized organs he kept in his stomach area fell out into the snow, and it took him longer than he cared to admit to realize the reason he was moving so sluggishly wasn’t because a lot of his muscles in his arms relied on the muscles in his chest, which were now missing, but because [Hare’s Great Escape] had activated, and his dexterity had jumped up by 500%.

To say the attack had missed his needle by a hair was an understatement, the small piece of metal was fully exposed to the air. If Ria hadn’t moved it this would have been the end of it.

Half of Ria’s body had been shredded into brittle flakes that had blunted some of the damage the “creature” caused, but the flakes had also sliced apart parts of Sylver that should have been impossible to slice apart, and some of them were now blocking the flow of the mana in his body.

“Everyone alright?” Spring asked at Sylver’s request since he didn’t have a way to speak right now.

Lostal, Klara, and Nels, all said some variation of “yes,” and Mora tapped one of her hoof’s once against the ice to say yes.

Sylver placed as much blood that had fallen out of him back into his body, filled in the large gaps with a mixture of [Black Mass] and [Deadly Darkness] and thinned out what remained of his robe to cover himself.

The small body inside him was shredded to pieces, the head, torso, even the lower bits, were all damaged well past the point of repair. All of his hearts were gone, his ”lung” was going to take days to recover, but all of that was irrelevant, the “creature” had missed his needle, and only got him down to 3 points of HP. So he won, and it lost, this was a victory.

The waystone and the rune with explosives were both untouched, he was missing three quarters of his daggers, and a great deal of miscellaneous items were gone on account of them exploding out of him when the bone he was keeping them in was cut.

He pooled all the parts of Ria he managed to feel inside himself, but he could tell there was at least a cup’s worth of shrapnel more inside him since he couldn’t sense her with his mana.

Despite the damage he didn’t feel any changes in her soul, or in SAM’s soul either.

When he tried to stand up to his full height, Sylver was horrified at how much raw mass he had lost, his center of balance was far off from where it was meant to be, and it was only when he tried to reach up to his face to wipe his nose clean, that he realized that his mana core had been jostled.

The very thought that if that “creature” had been the tiniest fraction of a second faster or used just a butterfly’s wings worth of force more, it would have done more damage to him than literally everything else he’d faced since the moment he took over Ciege’s body combined.

He felt the chunks of him that had remained inside the hollow-vault turn into useless ash, as good as it would have been to use them to spread a curse throughout the hollow-vault, it was more important that nothing of him remained that they could use to curse him.

Sylver stopped looking at himself when Mora nudged him, and gestured with her head towards Lostal, Klara, and Nels, all three of whom were alive, but had wrapped their arms around themselves to preserve what little body heat they managed to produce. Aside from the natural coldness that came with being this high up, there was also so much wind that it magnified the cold tenfold.

The full body robe Sylver managed to create out of mushrooms for everyone looked ridiculous, it was bright red, and looked like it was made out of sponge, but even with a little mana from him it managed to warm everyone up.

“We’re on the other side of the mountains,” Lostal said.

Sylver looked around, wasn’t sure what he was looking for since the thick blizzard that made it impossible for him to see further than a few meters, and as he reached for the spell within [Xander’s Waystone], something felt off about it.

[Xander’s Waystone - Greater Quality]

[For every 2 creatures teleported inside Xander’s Hole, 1 may teleport out]

[Amount teleported in: 441]

[Amount that can be teleported out: 217]

He had to consult Spring on the number since it looked different to him, but according to Spring it was exactly the same as the last time they used it to teleport everyone into Tuli.

But even with that he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with it. It might have become faulty from when he tried to use it inside the hollow-vault…

Or the “creature” that attacked him had attacked him as a misdirection, and the real trick was with the waystone.

“Can all of you think the name Chrysanthemum as hard as you can please?” Sylver asked without looking up from the amber coloured stone.

He worked on stitching closed the giant tears in his body from the outside in while Lostal, Klara and Nels stared into space while they repeated the same name over and over in their thoughts.

When no disembodied voice spoke from the sky, neither Lostal or Klara’s eyes glowed white, and no bird or mouse appeared, Sylver asked everyone to stop and cupped a hand around his finger and flickered a small blue flame in a pattern.

He felt Edmund’s attention snap onto the flame, and after a few minutes of staring at the flickering fire, Sylver extinguished it.

He and Nels exchanged a look, both Lostal and Klara noticed it but pretended they didn’t, and when Sylver spoke he just barely managed to sound like everything was fine.

“How far away are we from Dravinsk?” Sylver asked while looking at Lostal.

“Far. At least two weeks on foot. But there’s a mining village called Velrod right below us,” Lostal offered.

“Do either of you have any problem with stopping in Velrod before we do anything else?” Sylver asked.

Both Lostal and Klara were standing on the side of a gigantic mountain range, in a freezing cold snow blizzard, and because this was Eira, there was also the constant danger of monsters roaming around.

Klara raised her hand.

Sylver nodded at her.

“I have an aunt in Velrod. Or, I mean, I had an aunt there back when…” Klara said quietly through clouds of vapour escaping from her mouth with every word.

“Lostal?” Sylver asked.

Unlike Klara, Lostal thought it over.

“I need to get a report to my commander… but… yeah, alright, let’s go to Velrod,” Lostal said.

There was a chance Chrys couldn’t see or hear them because they were close to the dungeon powered hollow-vault. If nothing else there were likely enough people in Velrod that if Sylver yelled Chrys’ name she would be able to feel them.

As for Edmund, the downside of this method of communication was that it was vague, and one-sided, Sylver could only say “I’m here” with his flame.

Best case scenario, he’d drop Klara off with her aunt, Lostal would meet someone from the army who would take him away, and Edmund would meet them in Velrod and after celebrating, Sylver, Nels and Edmund would all fly to Torg to have someone with dimensional magic knowhow give [Xander’s Waystone] a once over.

Worst case scenario…

It wasn’t as if standing bleeding out in the cold was going to do anyone any good.

Mora took Lostal and Klara on her back, while Sylver and Nels got on Ulvic, and after the wolf shade’s paw slipped on the ice, both he and Mora stopped trying to run, and instead just skated/skied the rest of the way.