Sylver Seeker Book 8
Chapter 6 (297) - The Plan The Plan
Imps control the bodies they are in much like a puppet, which is to say, they don’t feel any pain the body feels, and therefore the bodies don’t flinch, falter, and fight without any sense of self preservation.
It was actually kind of refreshing to pin someone down and not have to listen to them scream for mercy, and that they had children and parents waiting for them back home.
The bodies infested with imps just quietly did their best to wriggle out of the shades hands, and the only point where they started to panic was when they felt Sylver force their host’s jaws open to make an incision in the roof of the mouth.
After this one, there were two more left out of the thirty two Sylver had seen on the road.
He did his best to keep the damage to a minimum, these little things had claws and a sharp tail that they curled into a fishhook. He initially tried to encase them in [Black Mass], but for the first time since… for the first time since he took Ciege’s body, someone managed to yank his magic out of his hands.
Only for a half second, and it didn’t actually do anything, but just to be safe Sylver used metal tweezers, a scalpel, and a pair of spoons after that.
“Fuck,” Sylver whispered quietly to himself as he accidentally ripped the imp’s leg off, and had to dig around inside the man’s mouth to catch it a second time.
He pressed it against the spoon as its tail whipped around and sliced up the mouth and shredded the tongue, and as Sylver pulled it all the way out and lowered it into the jar, Spring dropped a drop of Sylver’s blood into the jar, followed by the imp inside screaming far louder than something of this size should be capable of screaming.
Spring closed the jar while the thing hobbled around and hit its head against the glass, and after getting a good grip on it, he started shaking it as hard as he could.
The screaming got louder and louder, until it just stopped.
While the curse that slipped past the imp’s natural “immunity,” minor resistance given how relatively easily he managed to get around it, Sylver lowered the brain dead, but not actually dead, human body down into a [Still Water] puddle to deal with it later.
As Spring stopped shaking the jar and swirled the small imp’s body around in a mixture of Sylver’s blood and, call it vomit for the sake of simplicity, he placed the jar down into the same [Still Water] puddle, also to deal with later.
Having been given the very simple and direct order “spread” the mushroom Sylver had created was starting to overlap with itself, the many thin threads were starting to make it look like there was a fog hovering perfectly still between the dark brown tree trunks.
He used [Black Mass] tear through the threads as he walked through them, and couldn’t really think of anything to do.
The two imp infested men left had hiding skills that were better than his current sensing abilities, and he couldn’t think of a solution for that.
Trying to track the imps inside them using the “blood” of the imps he’d already caught wouldn’t work, the spell wasn’t designed to work with something with this high of a dark energy concentration, it’d melt into itself.
Sylver held his hand up to his throat.
“I THINK WE ARE HERE FOR THE SAME REASON!” Sylver yelled/screamed/gargled in demon tongue at his surroundings.
In hindsight that particular move might have worked better before he removed the imps from their hosts…
The only real idea he had was to set the forest on fire, even if they had something against the smoke and heat, just forcing them to move around might be enough for Sylver or the shades to spot them.
Except if he did that, the snow above would end up melting, which would defeat the whole purpose of the threads to stop them from teleporting around, not to mention the daphnaeae might not appreciate him burning down a portion of the forest they were drawing their strength from…
He walked around as he rummaged through a loose pocket of spells, rituals, minor enchantments, and in an act of near desperation, turned to the system to see if it had any bright ideas.
His choice of perks for reaching level 80 in [Swamp Lord] had neither anything direct enough to help him deal with something heavily armoured like another [Little King], nor was there anything even remotely good enough tracking people down wise to merit wasting a perk on it.
Sylver pulled out a piece of the thin glassy mushroom strand that had gotten into his eye, and as he was about to throw it away, he stopped walking and looked at it.
“Couldn’t hurt to try,” he said to himself, as he flicked the piece away, and dug through [Seed Store] until he found what he was looking for.
The little pepper was a dark red colour, and looked oddly harmless in his hand, the thin vine that climbed up the glassy lattice looked equally as harmless, he started to doubt this was going to work, but carried on since he didn’t have anything else at the moment.
The peppers looked small and kind of soggy when they matured and fell to the ground, they looked more like cherry tomatoes that dried out on the vine, he remembered they were called C-something Reaper peppers, but he’d thought they’d be shaped like the end of a scythe given the name.
Within five minutes [Greater Greenhouse], combined with a really strong push from [Novice Chloromancy] and a tiny modification to speed things up and skip some steps through [Mutating Override], Sylver had a mountain of tiny peppers as tall as he was.
His doubts went away as he caught a whiff coming out of one of the peppers that must have cracked open at the bottom, it stung his skin, as well as the gums in his mouth. His eyes thankfully couldn’t feel any pain, but he could feel the skin around them turning red.
He made a tall pitcher plant grow near the ever increasing pile of peppers, and had a big blob of [Black Mass] carefully drop the peppers one at a time into the pitcher plant’s mouth so it had time to grow and adjust.
While the plant chewed, stirred, and lastly, heated up, boiled, and released a thin mist, Sylver covered every inch of his body in a good solid layer of [Black Mass] to protect himself, and a third piece of [Black Mass] turned itself into a long thin sheet and started fanning the gas coming out of the pitcher plant.
He stood where he stood and listened.
There was a reality where this didn’t work, the bodies the imps were inside were “alive,” but how deeply were they connected to them? And more importantly, how much did they leave to work on autopilot?
Partially to help spread it out, but also so he could get where he needed to get, Sylver pushed fog away from where he was standing, and the second he heard that garbled wheezing cough, he sent Cory in the direction of the sound, and had the small rat like shade materialize directly on top of the man’s head.
Without any water to control, Cory was popped in a single relatively light slap of the hand, but as the man’s body shook as his magic looked for a spot to blink into, Sylver materialized a few steps away from him in a tiny empty spot he’d pulled apart for himself in the glassy mess of fungal threads.
He could really see, feel, or in any way sense the man, Sylver just walked towards the spot he felt Cory be earlier, and kicked empty air three times, before his boot connected with something solid. A metal thing with spikes on it was thrown towards his face, and embedded itself into his [Black Mass] face cover.
Getting his hands on the man was like trying to grab a fish in a pond full of muddy water, Sylver just blindly grabbed and squeezed at the air, he felt bones break a few times, but he couldn’t figure out where the man’s center of mass was to pin him down properly.
He managed to get a good grip on something really solid, the [Black Mass] covering his arms slithered off him and onto the man’s leg, and as the shade infused [Black Mass] spread out along the surface, it found the head, face, mouth, and very quickly cut off the struggling body’s air supply.
The thrashing sped things up significantly, and when the body went limp, Sylver pressed down on the chest until he felt the ribs crack, and only when he was sure the body was completely out of air and immobile, the [Black Mass] forced the mouth open and Sylver started digging for the imp.
As before, glass jar, drop of blood, and shaking so hard it would have killed any living creature.
Optimistically, Sylver thought the last one was going to start reacting to the overwhelmingly dense cloud of irritating gas, some of it was condensating on the leaf ceiling and sprinkling down on Sylver’s protective suits in tiny milky white droplets.
After roughly twenty minutes of walking around in a grid pattern to spook the creature out of hiding, Sylver was just about to call it a day and leave, when he just so happened to place his hand against a tree trunk, and felt the body’s incredibly fast pulse practically hammering against the hard wood tree.
Same as before, it was a messy and very “trying to drown a man in a shallow puddle” fight, if it could be called that, but eventually Sylver and a big blob of [Black Mass] suffocated the body into going limp.
The only difference from the other one was the imp inside was facing the wrong way in the man’s head, and Sylver’s first attempt to grab it’s leg crushed it’s neck and killed it.
[Lesser Imp – Grey Skinwalker + Priest of [N/A] - Defeated!]
[Black Mass (VI) Proficiency increased to 11%!]
[Mutating Override (V) Proficiency increased to 94%!]
[Arcane Insight (V) Proficiency increased to 4%!]
Satisfied with himself, Sylver waved the notifications away, and about ten minutes later, as he was in the middle of cleaning up the extremely potent irritant, he looked back at the notification and saw the word [Priest].
“Shit…” he flipped back to previous notifications, he’d killed five priests, which meant there had been six in total, shit.
He wanted to pull up one of the captured imps and ask who its master was, but Sylver stopped himself. It was stupid to even try, these things weren’t wild or feral, trying to get anything out of them would be like trying to get a loyal dog to bite its owner.
And most annoyingly, they were stupid, but they knew they were stupid, so instead of trying to trick someone through lies or deceit, they just kept their mouths shut.
Shit…
He ended up just standing there, and tried to figure out where this fit in his dangerous vs urgent matrix, imps on their own aren’t a good sign, one priest meant there was an objective, six priests meant there was a multi stage fucking plan.
Sylver summoned the mental map of the surrounding area in his head, and drew a line in the direction the imps had been walking in.
If he assumed that this was a coincidence and misunderstanding, that they were just trying to get through the forest and had no interest in the daphnaeae, they would have reached…
The line just kept getting longer and longer, he had Spring hold out a real map for him, there was nothing there, just towns and a single city that barely qualified to be called a city.
He reversed the line, tried to see where they might have come from, and again there was nothing there for him to look at and say “these men came from Velrod.”
Sylver pulled out one of braindead bodies and couldn’t even begin to guess whether or not this man was from around here, or from far away.
He tried looking at the already dead bodies, there were differences and similarities between them, but to a face blind undead, there was no chance he was going to match their faces to a location.
They were all human, so there was that, but that wasn’t very helpful in answering the question of where did 32 humans infested with imps come from?
For a bit Sylver thought their clothing was going to be a clue, but there was no insignia, the style kind of looked foreign, but then again, everything looked kind of foreign to Sylver, given that he was a foreigner in this area. It looked cheap to him, but he didn’t know if that meant anything, most of them were over level 100, and they clearly had some combat ability, why would they walk around with cheap boots and cloaks? Pockets were empty, and the only thing of note was that their weapons were all small, and stealth oriented.
The demonic magic dancing around on the clothing and weapons made him feel like his mouth was salivating, but in an unpleasant choking on his own spit kind of way, no clues there either. Simple enchantments to hide scent, sound, everything he recognized was stealth related, and the few pieces he couldn’t figure out looked like they leaned towards cold resistance.
For the time being, Sylver had Spring put a pin in it, and after cleaning up the thin strands of mushroom and the pepper gas, he walked alone through the forest until he felt a presence coming from one of the trees.
###
“Hmm…”
“Yes?” Nels asked.
“Your classes are mainly crafting based, right?” Sylver asked.
He took out a cup’s worth of water out of his [Bound Bones] storage as Nels was talking.
“No, well,” she made a vague gesture with her hands, “they’re not crafting based,” Nels said, as if there was a second meaning to the word “crafting.”
“Do you have a good [Appraisal]-like skill that you could use on these?” Sylver asked, as he took out a dead imp, and an unconscious imp out of a floating [Still Water] puddle.
He saw Nels’ eyes move slightly as she looked at the two creatures. He then waited while she walked over to a nearby table, picked up a piece of blue glass, and molded it into a cylinder with her bare hands, as if it were made of clay.
She held the cylinder up to her left eye and pointed it at the alive imp and the dead one, like it was a tiny telescope.
“They are both six days old, both male, exactly level fifty each, and servants of… I can’t write it down or say it,” Nels said.
Sylver clicked his tongue, she knew how to speak demon tongue, but given that she wasn’t immune to the dark energy it would bring, even a word would tear up her throat, or crack the bones in her fingers if she tried to write in it.
“Just yes or no… Does the name have something to do with a synonym for chaos?” Sylver asked.
A single word in demon tongue can sometimes need a paragraph to fully convey its meaning, names were similar in that way, if he knew the pieces that made up the Eirish translation, he could narrow down the name without the concept of the name picking up on it being used and hurting her.
“Yes.”
He sat up from the barrel he’d been sitting on while Nels was tinkering with the float-boat.
“Alright, shit, that’s not great… Black, ash, dust, dark, nightmare,” Sylver counted out.
“No, no, yes, yes, yes,” Nels said while looking at the small imp laying face down in its own filth in the jar.
“Damn... Uh… Wet, or dry?” Sylver asked.
“Wet,” Nels said.
Sylver ended up rolling his eyes at her, and dropped the two jars back into the [Still Water] puddle.
It was exactly the thing missing from the situation, a named demon with a connection to the demon lord of spies and assassins sending his tiny priests out into the world, with a plan no less.
Instead of sitting around breathing in fumes from metals being melted and bonded to crystals, Sylver walked outside and sat down on top of the upside down float-boat.
There was an angle here, but he didn’t like it.
It wasn’t unheard of to make a deal with one demon to kill another, but it was a far cry from standard practice. It also didn’t help that Sylver learned the hard way that trying to solve a demon problem using a different demon more often than not ended up creating a different, but much bigger, problem.
He tapped his fingers against the hard wood he was sitting on, and a really stupid part of him kept asking “how much worse could it get?”
The direct solution would be to ask one of the imp priests to deliver a message as high up the ladder as it could manage, and if his message reached a powerful enough demon lord, ask it to kill the one sitting below Merol in exchange for agreeing to stay out of the Eira for 100 years and a day.
Thing is, Sylver would be bound by the deal to never do anything that might in any way shape or form impede the demon lord from showing up in 100 years and a day, and it is impossible to properly predict what a demon lord could consider an act of impeding from Sylver’s side.
Aside from that, he planned to still be alive in 100 years, and he had no intention of leaving this realm so this would end up being his problem anyway.
He also told that clairvoyant about the High King’s people sensing the realm threatening danger and narrowing it down to Merol, if he did this, they would end up narrowing it down to him, before he even did it…
This was a dead end...
Ultimately there was no point considering it, it was short sighted, sacrificing the future to deal with the present, just because he had the body of an amateur, didn’t mean he had to act like one…
So slowly that he barely noticed it the float-boat had started to move towards the ceiling, off the giant thorn it was sitting on, and upon fully getting off of it, it started to just as slowly turn rightside up.
He could hear doors slamming shut as gravity pulled them down, wooden furniture somewhere slid and crashed against the wall, and as Sylver reached Nels, he saw that all of her neatly laid out tools were sliding across the wall/floor, while she ignored them and focused on the small dials and levers next to the float-boat’s engine.
“Everything alright?” Sylver asked, as the float-boat continued turning, and the “floor” was slowly moving downward to become the real floor, instead of the wall they were standing on.
“Once I plug the hole in the hull we’ll be able to leave in about four hours,,” Nels said.
The reason they were bringing the float-boat to Merol was because Sylver didn’t want anyone to come here and potentially find out about the Redcaps.
If everyone could write off the various deaths by “hooved goblins” they will just kill goblins, as opposed to going after a group Sylver intended to take with him to Tuli.
And he didn’t want to deal with having to negotiate for the daphnaeae stealing the float-boat, this way he and them came to agreement, the details aren’t important, here’s your boat back, you’re welcome, leave the tree spirits alone.
What I wouldn’t give to not deal with this…
Why did I even come to Merol?
This could have all been happening in the background without bothering me…
Until the demon lord got out, and then it would bother me…
Or the two temples would end up trying to find me to ask about the demon lord in the basement.
Sylver still didn’t like the only plan he could come up with.
But he couldn’t think of anything else.
The clairvoyant was right, if the Sun Demon was the thing she was trying to protect herself and her people from, there was no compromise, in her mind she was dead if she didn’t have a demon powered barrier, any threat he made would end up being some variation of “die now, or let this go, and die later.”
He needed something to give her to reach a compromise, but the only sort of alternative he could come up with was telling her how to open a portal to a different realm and waiting out the Sun Demon in there…
Huh…
He’d had the thought it in jest, but now that he thought about it…
Wouldn’t that be better than a demon powered barrier?
The point, presumably, was to keep herself and her people safe, even if she did get the demon lord powered barrier to work somehow, the rest of the realm would be in vaporized ruins, what good would a barrier do other than buy them a few weeks of time to starve or suffocate to death?
Also, if the High King really was working with the Sun Demon, wouldn’t the High King just declare war on Merol?
Even if the demon lord powered barrier was perfect, nobody goes in or out without the clairvoyant’s permission perfect, what percentage of the people inside the barrier would sit idly by while their temporary leader branded them and their extended families traitors for life?
The two biggest hurdles with the portal concept was the volume of people and things it would need to move, and the slightly more difficult issue of finding a realm with a good enough ambient mana concentration for all the women in Merol not to become barren the moment they set foot in it.
But that was all details, the idea itself was solid.
Sylver used [Fog Form] to materialize a short distance away from Nels, who was moving wooden boards around and weaving their strands into the boat’s hull to patch the hole the thorn had left.
He stood behind her with his mouth open, and ran his tongue along the back of his teeth as he tried to whittle his request down into its bare bones.
“How hard would it be to, one, find a realm with a high enough ambient mana density for regular people to survive and have children in it long term, and two, make a portal big enough to handle the volume of an entire city moving through it,” Sylver asked.
If he didn’t know any better he would have thought Nels either hadn't heard him, or was ignoring him.
“The timeframe would be to do it within 12 years,” Nels said to herself without once looking up from the wooden boards she was working on, or pausing her work.
Sylver leaned on the wall behind him while he watched Nels work, and waited for her to give him an estimate.
“I don’t know,” Nels said.
He didn’t bother saying “if you had to guess,” because she answered as if he’d actually said it.
“Conceptually, it’s possible, but if we’re talking, “here is a list of materials, here are the blueprints, let's go,” I don’t know. Maybe if I had another arch around to… Even then…” Nels said.
Sylver closed his mouth, stood up completely straight, which pressed the top of his head against the wooden ceiling. He wiped away a wrinkle out of his robe that wasn’t actually there, and he spoke with an uncharacteristic lack of confidence.
Even for him, asking Nels of all people, to do this was more fucked up than anything he’d ever asked of her, barring one thing that she’d made him swear on everything he held dear to forget.
“Alternatively then, could you… Could you whip up a list of materials and blueprints that even under extreme scrutiny would look like it was going to work?” Sylver said.
The thin dainty magic weaving the wooden boards into one snapped like overtightened lute strings. Nels slowly stood up from her crouch, turned around to face him, and gave him the dirtiest look she had given him since he found her.
Actually, it might be the dirtiest look she had given him, period, previous fucked up requests included.
But, Nels was Nels, she worked backwards from why Sylver would ask for such a thing, and the face that looked like it was going to spit at him and call him a slur, returned to normal the more she tried to find something to substitute the idea.
And, she figured out that he wouldn’t have asked if he had anything else.
“Oh…” actual steam came out of her mouth.
Sylver smiled at her, politely, only slightly, he didn’t want to force her into an answer.
Nels stared at the floor for a while as she thought it over.
Five minutes, maybe even ten.
“Could I give you the list and blueprints, and you write it out in your hand, so it looks like all of it came from you?” Nels asked.
“Yes,” Sylver said without missing a single beat.
“And you’d put your name on, on the, on the thing,” Nels fumbled out.
“Yes, absolutely. We don’t even need to tell Ed, anyone asks, all me,” Sylver answered just as quickly as before.
Nels closed her eyes and couldn’t think of anything to add that might dissuade Sylver from this.
“Alright,” Nels said.
If she could have waved her arm and erased him from existence, she would have. She knew why he was doing it, but the demon lord was far away, and a theory at this moment, whereas Sylver was standing in front of her in the flesh and blood and asking her to do what would be Sylver’s equivalent of…
There wasn’t a good direct comparison, Sylver didn’t care what people thought of his magical know-how, or at least, he didn’t care the way Nels cared. Him being “smart” wasn’t a thing he had ever held sacred, and at this point, subtrifuge was so commonplace in his life that he barely gave it any thought.
“It would need to be-” he started to say, but Nels finished his sentence for him.
“It would need to actually work, so if you’re asked by someone who can sense lies, you can say with complete honesty these materials and these blueprints will open a portal to another realm that an entire city would be able to travel through,” Nels said.
“Yes,” Sylver said quickly.
She just stood there for a bit.
“The boat will need a few hours to… be ready. I need to think about it... Be not here,” Nels said, and if she had the height and mass would have shoulder bumped Sylver into the wall as she walked past him.
He of course leaned himself out of her way to let her pass, and he did feel like a piece of shit, a little, the vast majority of him was so happy to have something so solid as a bargaining chip that he knew there was a giant smile on his face that he couldn’t control.
“Thank you! You’re the best!” Sylver said with a smile deep in his voice after Nels, who was walking towards the room with her tools with her shoulders slumped and her brown as furrowed as a brow could get.
While Nels whipped up what had now been proudly lifted up onto the #1 podium, and shoved aside his plan with the float-boat down into #2, Sylver used [Fog Form] to give her some space to work, and considered the wisdom of celebrating with the daphnaeae before his brilliant plan proved to work.