(To people reading through emails/epubs, please let me know if the formatting in both cases looks right on your end -Kennit)
Sylver Seeker Book 8
Chapter 5 (296) - Skirmish
Watching Nels you would think there were twenty of her.
Individually the frameworks were all small, and made slowly, but they weren’t being made individually, Nels was working on all of them at the same time, while also enchanting her robe, as well as her boots, while drinking a glass of water.
And she did it with such casual ease that even knowing full well that there was an insurmountable skill gap between them, Sylver kept thinking that he could do what Nels was doing.
The heating device Nels concocted was surprisingly large, she tended to lean towards the miniature side of things.
From looking at the magical framework inside the fridge sized metal brick, ten percent of its volume was taken up by the actual heating mechanism, while the other ninety was to prevent it from blowing up, along with backups for the backups.
Even if someone wanted to make it explode, they would first need to figure out how.
As for the sabotage Sylver requested, if he didn’t know Nels well enough to be absolutely certain she wouldn’t leave it out without telling him, he would have thought she hadn’t done it. Because he looked for it for a good while, and couldn’t see anything to even suggest it existed.
And unlike the people who were going to be inspecting the framework, Sylver knew what he was looking for, and even then he couldn’t find it.
While Nels weaved her spider’s web of spells to make the float-boat float in the air, Sylver carried the heating device down to the daphnaeae.
It was a miscalculation to go alone, with all the commotion and slight relief of putting Nels being put back together, he had forgotten what he had done for the large group of slender women.
In their heads getting the Eldar sapling was a done deal. Whether that was them being extremely optimistic, or that they trusted that undead possessing an Eldar sapling wasn’t your regular every day zombie, but everyone in the know had to force themselves to walk around instead of skipping or sprinting everywhere.
It was as if they had won the lottery and were making lists of all the things they were going to buy, and as a side effect of that, all the fully grown adult women were giddy, which under different circumstances might have been creepy, but in this case Sylver couldn’t lie, he liked it.
Most of the time the best news he had to offer to anyone was “you’re not going to die, today,” which is to say being actively celebrated like this was a very rare experience for him.
There was a lot of touching after he had placed down Nels’ heating device.
The daphnaeae who would be in charge of the device had all but climbed on his shoulders to pretend to get a better look at it.
The four around him seemed to have trouble standing on the same solid dirt they’d been walking on all their lives, and were using his arms to support themselves, the pair of daphnaeae in front of him were standing on their tiptoes to lean their backs against his front.
They would take offence if he voiced this comparison, but they were acting like a bunch of cats, rubbing themselves against a person, with no regard for anyone’s personal space, not that he was complaining.
All under the guise that they had trouble understanding the complicated controls Nels had attached to the device, a single small lever, and a dial that needed to be turned clockwise.
None of this was new to him, he’d seen all of this before, this wasn’t his first time being around nature spirits that were ”friendly” towards undead as a whole, and him in particular, and this wasn’t the first time a large group of women weren’t being the least bit subtle about trying to seduce him.
But Sylver was an ancient Lich, far beyond the petty desires of lesser mortal men, all of that is to say that if not for the issue of the demon lord tightly wrapped around his neck like an ice cold noose, he beyond any shadow of a doubt would have agreed to follow them anywhere they wanted to lead him.
The heating device worked like an induction coil, water within roughly 10 meters of it was heated up to exactly one degree below boiling.
The device adjusted for things like the water’s density, the air pressure, Nels tried to explain the exact mechanics of the, in Sylver’s personal opinion, overly complicated self heating rock, but when she saw everything beyond the basics was going right over his head, she just said to use it like a large self heating rock.
They had placed the float-boat high in the air because the heat it produced was unpredictable and when the water around it turned into steam too fast and the steam caused an explosion, by the time the droplets reached the ground the air cooled them down to a pleasantly warm rain.
Once the device was in a good spot, and had water flowing around it, the daphnaeae gifted with magic practically ran away from Sylver as their leader made her presence known.
She introduced herself as Breeze, but the thing with the names of nature spirits is that their “name” isn’t a single word, it’s a description of something condensed down into the closest translation.
Her full name, translated directly into Eirish, was “a warm breeze shaking a ripe acorn.”
Since a different daphnaeae had already introduced herself as Breeze, Sylver asked if he could call her Acorn instead, since Shaking, or Ripe, just didn’t quite roll off the tongue.
Elves had a similar naming system, if you go far enough back in Elvish history books men named Trickle and Whoosh start to show up.
But just as Sylver had done, non-elves that met the elves similarly picked out the best word out of their sentence long names, and over time the elves just started directly naming their offspring something easy for non-elves to say.
Sylver calmly followed Acorn through a tunnel in a tree, and ended up sitting in her mansion of a “bigger on the inside” tree, where she poured him tea and told him how she and her people ended up here.
It was his fault.
Not all that long ago they lived in a ravine inside the Moaning Heights mountain range, they lived in peace, and were kept hidden and safe by a large amount of fairies, they lived together like bees and flowers.
Except one day, without a single word or warning, every single fairy disappeared, they were gone like the wind, no goodbye, no explanation, it took the daphnaeae three nights to come to terms with the fact that this wasn’t just the fairies playing a sick joke on them.
Their disappearance, Acorn explained, coincided with what they later learned from the Redcaps was the night the moon flashed red.
Not long after the fairies left, the fresh mountain water the daphnaeae needed stopped flowing as freely, and the rocks surrounding their grove that had been near perfect insulators started to suck up so much heat that they had to use precious mana just to keep themselves warm.
Sunlight that before bounced around off the sides of the smooth rock walls stopped bouncing cleanly enough for the sunlight to be useful to them, eventually they were left completely in the dark.
Acorn made the decision to go to the surface, they traveled during the night by following the stars, and settled down in the Needle Fog Forest.
It wasn’t ideal, something about the soil was bad, and the entire forest was in chaos from monsters and other creatures moving around so much, which was exceptionally dangerous for them right now, because they had daphnaeae with them that were completely defenseless.
Children…
They had very recently born children with them, who couldn’t just hide in a tree and wait out their attackers…
Their first day in the forest they met the people with the red hats, the Redcaps, they initially kept their distance, but the Redcaps knew they were there and left them gifts until Acorn decided to make direct contact with them.
Their agreement was for the daphnaeae to hide the Redcaps inside the forest, while the Redcaps would keep them safe from monsters and people that somehow snuck their way inside. And when things settled down in a few years, the Redcaps would send scouts out to look for a better location.
A little more recently, it started to rain, then snow, and finally it snowed so hard that they couldn’t do anything other than bunch together and wait out the snow, which turned out to be the wrong decision because now they were trapped here. The Redcaps had some magic that let them dig through the snow, but the daphnaeae didn’t have enough… energy saved up to survive walking through snow for more than a few hours.
As long as they had remained in one place and had access to soil the daphnaeae could sit under the ice and wait however long it took for the snow and ice to melt.
But the Redcaps were going to run out of food any day now, since the Redcaps needed meat to survive, and had no use for the fruits the daphnaeae could produce.
The daphnaeae had seen Sylver and the float-boat moving along the road through the surrounding trees; they had, as Sylver suspected, taken it in the hopes of using it to move everyone somewhere far away from the cold and ice.
But neither they nor the Redcaps could figure out how to get it to float, so they instead hotwired it to keep them warm while they stored up their mana to attempt a journey through the snow.
Acorn admitted that she thought nobody would be able to find them here, and hadn’t planned for anyone to show up to ask for what they thought was the same as stealing a regular boat, not a big deal essentially.
It wasn’t that they were dumb, they just didn’t know what they didn’t know, if the float-boat had an active tracker on it, they would have found it.
The fact that Sylver had Nels with him to metaphorically press her ear against the ground and hear hooves from a hundred kilometers away wasn’t something even the wizards who made the float-boat could have predicted, let alone daphnaeae who looked at human magic the way humans looked at a sea urchin, sharp and dangerous.
As for the Redcaps and the masks and metal rods, they had those on them when Acorn contacted them. As well as the, she used a word that Sylver didn’t know, but she was talking about their “tree,” that wasn’t a tree. It was a pine tree, that the Redcaps had done something to, that Acorn didn’t want to explain, and Sylver wasn’t quite that interested at this specific moment in time to press her to explain it.
When it was Sylver’s turn to talk and answer questions, he told Acorn about the island, explained that there was a cave above the water on the island, and that that island would be temporary, but he already had an even better location lined up.
He told her about Tuli, and that they were only going to stay on the “island” until she woke up, but couldn’t say whether that meant they were going to be there for a couple years, or several lifetimes.
The dark energy inside Tuli wasn’t going to be a problem for the daphnaeae, it would be for the Redcaps if they ended up agreeing to join them, but Sylver had a plan for that.
As for using an Eldar tree as sacrificial glue for Tuli’s shell, he couldn’t get a read on Acorn in either direction, he wanted to say she didn’t care, but there was clearly some kind of reaction from her, but no one Sylver’s human-leaning mind could understand.
He asked point blank if it was a problem, Acorn said no, Sylver took her at her word and changed the subject.
He didn’t tell Acorn, or anyone, about the demon lord, or what he planned to do about it, because in either case, if he failed, this close to Merol, everybody died, so why make them panic?
On the one in a million chance that these bay leaf tree spirits just so happened to be experts in sealing away demons, Sylver talked about demons in a general sense. He knew there wasn’t any point talking further about them when he had to describe, and then explain, what a demon was, but he was just killing time by this point while Nels created in several hours what took Manoc and Allson several long months to do.
Nels’ biggest advantage was that she didn’t need to spend days going over her calculations, she didn’t need to run simulations or experiments, she made the whole thing look like it was a giant puzzle being fitted together, like she’d done this a hundred times already and could do it blindfolded at this point.
The only thing slowing her down was that she had to make the puzzle pieces to fit them into the float-boat, and that there wasn’t anybody around close enough to her level of skill to do even the grunt work of dismantling the previous frameworks.
It’s important to note nothing was going to happen.
Especially not before the covenant was made and sealed, he wasn’t an idiot to muck things up by mixing business and pleasure.
But the inside of Acorn’s tree was warm, it was quiet, the tea was sweet with honey, he somehow ended up laying on the soft blanket on the floor with his head resting in her lap, he wasn’t about to fall asleep or anything like that, or do something untoward.
He’d veered completely off course at some point while talking to Acorn, according to Spring, Sylver had apparently started complaining about all the many difficulties of his life to her, and she apparently just warmly smiled at him and nodded without interrupting him. And a little later he noticed that some of his hair had been braided.
It took him a good ten minutes for him to fully wake up and compose himself when a daphnaeae came into the room and informed Acorn and Sylver that there was a group of 30 men walking through the forest.
The problem was, one of them was immune to the daphnaeae’s subtle magic meant to lead them away from where the daphnaeae and Redcaps resided, and whether by accident or on purpose, that one immune man was leading the group directly here.
After Sylver got dressed, and stretched his body to wake his and retighten his overly relaxed muscles, he followed the young daphnaeae woman through a thin wooden tunnel, and came out a couple hundred meters in front of the 30 men.
Being tree spirits, the daphnaeae could use the trees that were in the same soil as their trees as portals, it wasn’t teleporation in the magecraft sense of the word, but it was several steps above crawling through an underground tunnel like a rabbit or a rodent.
The “spell” the daphnaeae used to prevent the snow from hitting the soil where they were had spread out to the entire forest, there was a huge amount of empty space underneath the tall foliage of the trees with snow piled on top of them.
Sylver left Nels in the float-boat, and with a yawn stepped out of the tree line so the men approaching him could see him.
He wanted to say something, but yawned again and had to cover his mouth while the yawn slowly came out of his system.
“Are you lost?” Spring yelled as he stepped out from behind Sylver, this fucking yawn just wouldn’t stop.
“Who are you?” one of the men called out.
Spring looked over at Sylver, who still had his hand over his mouth and was leaning back slightly, this yawn just refused to end. Sylver shrugged his shoulders at the shade.
“This is Sylver Sezari, mage, and C rank adventurer, currently residing in Merol! Who are you!” Spring yelled at the group.
All of them had slightly different clothing, there weren’t any matching emblems or colours anywhere that he could see, the only thing that was throwing him off a little was that there was something about their armour that made him tense up when he looked at it.
It was enchanted, but the magic didn’t look correct, and not in an unskilled enchanter sense…
32 men, all dressed in light clothing given the cold weather, but even from here Sylver could feel something to do with their-
[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]
[Lesser Imp - Grey Skinwalker + Servant of [N/A] - 131] [HP: 210,000 – 100%] [MP: 50,000 – N/A%] [Stamina: 838,900 – 94%] [Corpse – Grand] [Soul – N/A]
Credit where credit is due, there was zero fucking around, the second that imp felt his attempt to see Sylver’s status bounce off and reflect back to him, he’d made a bow appear out of seemingly nowhere, and shot an arrow that would have went in through Sylver’s left eye, and blew out the back of his skull.
What happened instead was that Sylver slightly leaned out of the way, as if he was letting someone squeeze past him in a tight corridor, and as Sylver reached out a hand to grab the arrow, he changed his mind at the last second, and saw the tree the arrow ended up hitting get incinerated, like it was hit by a lightning bolt.
He used [Arcane Insight] on the Imps in the back and on the sides, the ones that looked the strongest, all were [Lesser Imp]s, all with the [Grey Skinwalker] and [Servant of [N/A], the highest level was 149, the lowest was 82.
The group split up, either they could jump faster than Sylver could perceive, unlikely, or they had short range teleportation, which was very in line with the kind of magic imps loved.
There were four “men” Sylver thought could be the one that was immune to the daphnaeae’s magic, so as a man that wasn’t one of the four appeared in a crouch directly behind him, and slashed at the back of Sylver’s knee, the blade passed through a thin Sylver shaped cloud of fog.
The man froze on the spot as Sylver appeared behind him, and placed his palm directly on top of the man’s bald head.
[Lesser Imp – Grey Skinwalker + Servant of [N/A] - Defeated!]
There wasn’t any need to mess around with decapitation, or crushing the skull, the imps were situated right above the back of the throat, up under the brain, with the direct contact Sylver could almost see the little fucker laying there.
The beam of abyss magic that came out of the bottom of his palm was the width of a pencil, and only slightly longer, he’d basically stabbed a magical scalpel through the back of the man’s head.
On a completely theoretical level it was possible to remove an imp from its host without killing the host in the process.
But practically speaking, you need at a minimum four priests, two healers, someone with advanced surgical knowledge, and about 99% of the time you shouldn’t bother because the host took in the imp willingly and will just do it again the second they have the chance.
A thin rapier’s blade passed through a Sylver shaped cloud of fog before he had a chance to collect the body, and the wielder of the rapier did this really funny thing where he swung his little sword behind him, then swung it in front of him, and Spring said the imp repeated that move six times before he figured out Sylver had “run away.”
The entire forest felt like it ground to a halt, the thick leaves didn’t dare rustle, no wood creaked, no water flowed, even the dead man with the tiny hole in the back of his head leaned forward and rather quietly laid down in soft dirt.
It was just light enough in the forest that it was too bright for night vision, but not bright enough to see clearly, if that was a deliberate move on the daphnaeae’s part, it was brilliant, but that was something Sylver could only appreciate from a distance, right now he hated it.
Sylver pulled his hand inside his robe through his long sleeve, took out a small piece of glass from his [Bound Bones] storage, and held the coin sized piece tightly inside his fist as he heated it up.
He gently stepped on a branch that was too thin to hold his weight, it creaked, and snapped under him, and as he fell towards the ground, he took the hand holding the hot glass out from his robe, used his other hand to completely cover his eyes, and heard a very faint pop.
Bodies infested with imps feel pain, but since the imps have full control over them, they don’t react by flinching and often fight with no sense of self preservation, but Sylver wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, he just wanted to blind them.
It worked better than he could have hoped, where before the shades couldn’t see anyone inside the faintly lit forest, now 14 “people” had accidentally touched a leaf and made it move, or their foot slipped on the branch they were standing on.
Moving around while hiding your presence and not making a sound was difficult in any circumstance, basically impossible when you’re in control of a body and you hadn’t thought to make a proper connection with the nervous system, because you didn’t care if the body got hurt in the process of you using it.
[Lesser Imp – Grey Skinwalker + Servant of [N/A] - Defeated!]
…
Sylver only paused between each imp to move the message out of the way, six men were hiding right next to each other, from the outside it might have looked like he was playing duck duck goose with them.
On top of being better at concealing his presence, Sylver could also see what he was doing, and while a couple were faster than him, and reacted faster than he was able to cut the imp inside their head with abyss magic, the small dagger, and weird metal claw thing on the man’s elbow, both times were caught and stopped by Sylver’s robe without even reaching his flesh.
After about ten minutes of making tiny holes in heads with abyss magic, the eight men that were left were so good at hiding that there was a point where Sylver thought they had run away, and he was hiding for no reason.
He silently crawled out of the ground, and as a thin dagger skewered out through his tongue through the back of his head and throat, he went to grab the person behind him, and felt the faint whiplash of air rushing in to fill in a hole left by teleportation.
He pulled the dagger out, and ignoring that the poison on it was kind of shit, it was a really nice dagger, the handle was ever so slightly too small for his hand, but the blade was perfectly flat, and the metal felt very pleasant to his mana. Good balance too.
Sylver stood there, in the shadow of a tree, with chipped front teeth, and had the water down in the wet soil gather in a plate sized pool in front of his feet.
A bright red pillar of gore came out of the pool of water, like ground meat being squeezed out of a tube, the outer surface of the meat immediately darkened, and just as fast, developed a fluffy white coating.
More meat came out of the pool, it turned into a pile, and kept growing bigger and bigger from the inside, and as a rapier sliced clean through his robe’s attempt to catch the blade, it cut into his skin, and to both Sylver’s and the attacker’s surprise, it stopped dead when the blade touched the snake jelly underneath Sylver’s skin.
He swung at the man, and as the man teleported away, Sylver shook his head.
“Couldn’t have picked a worse place to do this,” Sylver said, as he watched and felt the thin wispy cotton candy like growths coming out of the pile of meat spread out in the air like a flame climbing up a dry bush.
In the dim light shining from the air around the trees, it was hard to see it, but something analogous to spiderwebs were reaching out from the ever so slowly shrinking pile of human gore.
Sylver pressed his hand against the poisoned wound on his hip, he sealed it shut to deal with it later, and through his soul sense he felt the exact moment everyone realized what he had done.
Walking through the thin mushrooms was as uncomfortable as it was annoying, it was brittle and slightly wet, it was like trying to walk through a paper thin curtain, or several hundred cobwebs. The glassy material gathered around and on his face, hair, and robe, like snowflakes, but it never melted, he looked like a stick with cotton candy wrapped around it after just a few steps of walking through it.
He could hear the material being torn up in the distance, heard it hiss as the imps tried burning it, freezing it, tried to send electricity through it, but they misunderstood the purpose of the thing completely.
Sylver wasn’t trying to immobilize them in a mushroom based web, he wasn’t even trying to hurt them with it, the sole entire purpose of the thing was to take up physical space everywhere.
The difference between real teleportation, and low range “blinking” as people called it, was that real teleportation will let you teleport inside a piece of rock and kill you.
Whereas blinking had safety rails on it, some variants could pass through a solid wall, but none would let their user teleport directly into a rock.
It will allow a person to end up in a very tight and confined space, but it won’t let them teleport into barbed wire for example, or into a tree branch, the thing will only let someone blink into an area if there is sufficient, and much much much more importantly, single, unsegmented, unbroken, volume for them to materialize in.
And as Sylver had correctly predicted, the blinking method the imps were using couldn’t tell the difference between a completely harmless, thinner than a human hair strand of mushroom breaking up one cubic meter into two halves, and a completely solid rock.
Sylver’s guess was that the invisible to the naked eye imp though that if it stayed perfectly still Syvler would walk right past it, and he was somewhat right, even as Sylver stretched his hand out towards the empty space he wasn’t 100% certain there was actually somebody there.
[Lesser Imp – Grey Skinwalker + Servant of [N/A] - Defeated!]
But the second Sylver felt his fingertips touch the man’s helmet, he made a fist sized hole in the man’s head with abyss magic, before the man had a chance to so much as twitch.
There were leaves, branches, snow, and then ice above, and nice hard dirt below, and the longer these guys waited, the less room they were going to have to teleport to.
Morons.