Ch230-A Friend Indeed

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Ch230-A Friend Indeed

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As far as matchups went, this was utter dogshit.

Sylver’s shades were all made with a relatively single purpose in mind. They appear out of nowhere, strike the opponent in the back of the neck while they’re distracted by Sylver, and then disappear back into the shadows.

Their weapons are mainly blades, swords, daggers, spears, and axes, the sort of weapons that benefit from being fast as opposed to heavy. Even the bows and slings were all in the “light” category, Sylver didn’t have any catapults, ballistae, or trebuchets in his back pocket, the closest thing he had to anything that could break through a solid defense was a war pick.

And while a charged-up shade might be capable of exerting enough piercing force to get through a steel helmet or enchanted chainmail, Ki reinforced rock wasn’t really on the table.

Maybe the Dai and Sho combined shade could make some cracks, but that “maybe” hinged on the reinforced stone in question standing perfectly still.

On the bright side, and you had to really squint to see it, the stone golems weren’t doing a whole lot better. All of their attacks were blunted and lessened due to the magical rain blood all the shades were coated in.

The reason this didn’t result in an automatic win for Sylver’s side, was that the golems weren’t the only ones being blunted by the blood.

Lion was the group’s heaviest hitter. To be more accurate, he was the group’s only heavy hitter.

He used a martial art that seemed to place very heavy emphasis on taking a metric fuckton of damage and then destroying your opponent with a single punch. If it weren’t for the blood, Lion’s face would have been barely visible under all the bruising, but because Ki was neutralized, Lion was merely out of breath, as opposed to dead.

After 6 minutes, and 52 seconds of combat, Sylver’s side only managed to defeat 3 golems.

In both cases, Abby and the witches did something that caused the golem to stop moving, and while it couldn’t protect itself, Lion punched its core out of its chest.

Hound wasn’t much use in this fight, his whole thing was a mixture of stealth and speed, both of which were worthless against these stone golems. They didn’t have any blind spots, and more annoyingly, Hound couldn’t do whatever it is he normally did while covered in life-saving Ki nullifying blood. And while he might be fast, his speed didn’t do jack shit against fucking stone.

Admittedly, that little knife he swung around felt to have a considerable amount of magical heft to it, but even that just barely managed to scratch the golems.

The thing that made the whole confrontation significantly more difficult than it had any right to be, was the fact that the golems weren’t stupid. There was nothing simple or pre-determined about their movements or formations, these things were actively learning the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents, and slowly but surely, they were getting closer to defeating them.

The second Sylver tried to pull blood off Lion’s fists, 3 jade arrows nearly sliced his hands clean off. There were 14 archers, that Sylver could make out, that were waiting for the smallest sliver of bloodless skin to tear into pieces.

On top of that, they kept moving around to the point Sylver was barely able to keep track of all of them.

Aurick was with the witches, being used as a human shield, and through some sort of witchcraft, every single arrow heading towards one of the women went out of its way to hit Aurick right in his uncovered chest.

“DOES ANYONE HAVE ANY GOOD IDEAS?” Sylver shouted towards his exhausted group.

Sylver’s shouting caused the nearby jade golems to turn their attention towards him.

Sylver used his left hand to deflect the blade coming for his neck, he used his right to push away the battle ax on its way to split him down the middle, towards the swordsman golem, and as the spear wielder tried to shove his tipped pole through the back of Sylver’s right thigh, Spring materialized on his back on the floor and kicked the spearhead off course.

As the trio attempted to force Sylver into jumping into the air, where a barrage of arrows would make him look like a porcupine, Sylver’s robe grabbed hold of the spear wielder’s head and pulled Sylver backward.

Sylver landed on his hands and ended up doing a backflip as he turned himself the right way round.

The shades closed the gap between Sylver and the trio, and the golems went back to exchanging blows with Sylver’s blood-soaked shades. If you forgot the fact that both of them were trying to kill the other, it almost looked like some sort of practice duel.

The golems were significantly stronger than the shades, but the shades had speed on their side, as well as the fact that the golems couldn’t do enough damage to most of them to make them burst.

“Alright, guess we’re going with my idea then,” Sylver said.

“You have a plan?” Aurick asked, as a bright green jade arrow collided with his open eye and shattered into a sparkling cloud of green.

“I wouldn’t call it that. I have an idea, but I need them to back off for about a minute,” Sylver answered.

The battle carried on as normal for a while. The golems were very careful to stay close to one another and were even more careful not to leave any gaps in their defenses for someone to slip past them.

If not for that, Sylver was fairly certain nobody other than Lion would be capable of holding his own against even one golem.

Sylver’s side kept their distance, in an attempt to bait the golems out of the safety of their peers, but those green things knew exactly how to attack without breaking the group apart. These weren’t just a loose collection of fighters; this was an army. It was coordinated, it utilized its strengths for maximum efficiency, it didn’t take unnecessary risks, and it never forgot that stopping the invaders, was more important than killing them.

In theory, if Sylver forced [Hare’s Great Escape] to activate, he should be capable of moving quickly enough to get through the 3 layers of guards standing around the doors leading to the emperor.

But if there were golems on the other side of the door, he wasn’t sure what his next move would, or could, be. At the absolute least he needed Lion and Owl to come with him.

Neither of them said anything, but Lion and Hound simultaneously jumped in front of Sylver and managed to force the 4 green golems about to attack him, into attacking them.

Sylver jumped away from the front line and found a good spot near the middle back of the large room. His robe puffed out, and spread out along the floor, like a tent, or like an extra-large gown.

Archers fired their arrows at Sylver, but the witches forced the projectile towards Aurick, and after exactly 1 minute had passed, Sylver’s robe returned to its usual shape. He got as close as he could to Lion and hoped the large man would understand the intention behind the vague hand gesture.

Lion barked a word in a foreign language towards Hound and Owl, and the two joined Sylver in pushing the guards back. Even the witches seemed to realize what Sylver was trying to do and used their odd magic to hinder the stone golems.

The green bastards seemed to be almost smiling, as Sylver and company got closer and closer, and were mere steps away from being in the perfect spot for a pincer attack.

The fancy marble shattered as Sylver slammed his foot down through it.

In a literal wave, the blood that had been carefully rationed between various shades flowed towards the dense group of level 500 golems and splattered all of them. The crack on the floor spread out, and created a circle around Lion, Hound, Owl, Aurick, and the witches, as they huddled together.

It’s hard to describe what happened next, but it worked sort of like an explosion-powered seesaw.

The stone floor shivered for a moment, and then the side on the left began to lift, the side where all the golems were, while the side on the right began to fall.

Sylver had spent 10 seconds mapping out the earth beneath the room they were in.

Another 5 seconds double-checking his math.

Another 10 seconds waiting for the shades he had sent out to return to him and spent the rest of his minute discovering that his [Rune Of Infinite Summoning] wasn’t as infinite as it claimed.

Somewhere in the 500 area, Sylver stopped being able to produce the bombs as quickly as he had been. He could still make them, but because of the delay, there was a chance the shades underground wouldn’t have enough time to set everything up.

There were 2 explosions.

The first tore the tunnels apart and created empty space underneath the right side of the room.

The second explosion functioned as a sort of catapult, and with enough room to move the way Sylver wanted, every single bright green stone golem was sent flying through the wall. If they had been human, they would have simply splattered against the wall, but because those green fucks were made out of extremely hard stone, they just broke through it and kept flying.

A couple tried to do some fancy footwork midair, but the blood they were all covered in stopped them from doing anything that would stop their flight.

“We have about 6 minutes until they get back here. Roughly, the smaller ones might get here quicker,” Sylver said.

He didn’t get much choice in the way of direction, the golems had all been flung eastwards, and were only a short stair climb away from getting back here. If he threw them towards the west, they would have just landed in the emperor’s garden.

Where before there was white polished marble floor, there was now a steaming ditch full of singed dirt. If someone paid close attention, they would have been able to see the traces the tunnels filled to the brim with explosives left behind.

“6 minutes?” Hound asked, with a judgmental tone Sylver didn’t need right now.

“Ish. There’s also a good chance they jumped off one another and are seconds away from coming back here,” Sylver said.

Hound scowled for all of 2 seconds before a light shove from Owl shut him up.

With the golems out of the way, the group was faced with its next challenge.

The door.

Sylver gestured towards Owl, “If you can create a barrier to direct the explosion, we could-”

One of Abby’s witches walked past the two men and placed her hands on either side of the spot where the two large doors met.

Sylver could tell no one else could see them, because they continued looking at the witch’s back, as opposed to the 4 enormous arms that had materialized a couple of feet above her. The two dainty-looking hands pressed their palms against the doors, and mimicked the small witch’s movements, as she pushed against the door.

With a squeak, the two doors swung open.

***

Everyone had been ready to find the room filled to the brim with high-ranking cultivators. Willing to die to defend their emperor, and his honor, almost suicidal in their zealously.

“I’m honestly at a loss for words… I thought I had a good half hour until you broke through,” the lone man said.

He was relatively tall, about Hound’s height, dressed in a clean white shirt and trousers, with a small leather satchel hanging off his left side. He was standing near the vacant throne and seemed to have been doing something to the seat.

The man gestured at Lion, then at Hound, and then at Owl.

“The strong warrior, the sneaky rogue, and the wise mage. Most can barely get one, and you have all three. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t just a bit jealous,” the man continued, as Sylver cocked his head.

Something about this man felt familiar.

“You can’t do this,” Aurick said in a tense, but calm, voice.

The man rolled his eyes at Aurick’s words.

“He’s gone, isn’t he…” Owl said in a defeated voice.

None of them were drawing their weapons, Hound had even gone as far as to put his sword away, the only people still armed were Abby, her witches, and Sylver, who was holding his ax in his hand.

“Normally I’d make a joke about how telling it is that your most perceptive member is the blind guy, but I’m not really in a laughing mood right now. The dragon is mere hours away from prying open what’s left of its cage. You came here planning to kill the emperor, but at any point in time, did any of you stop to consider the consequences?” the man asked.

Previously, the feeling in the room was a mixture of confusion, courtesy of Sylver and the witches, and resignation, courtesy of Aurick’s group.

But now, everyone was confused.

“Dragon?” Lion asked, with the sort of almost carelessness that can only come from ignorance.

The man made a strange gesture with his hands, as if he had grabbed something invisible in front of him, and tried to crush it, but changed his mind.

He closed his eyes for a few seconds and seemed to realize there were other people in the room aside from Aurick’s group. He pointed at Abby, and then slowly moved his hand and gaze towards Sylver.

“You’re the witches that live in the swamp, I know about you. But who…”

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been successfully blocked!]

“Huh…” the man said, as Sylver tightened his grip on his ax.

The man didn’t look particularly menacing, if it weren’t for the strange tumbling Sylver’s stomach was doing, he would have lowered his guard the moment Aurick had.

“Hmm… You know what, it’s fine, I don’t want to know, because I don’t care,” the man said with a shrug of his shoulders, as Sylver realized who he was talking to.

The man was using very subtle magic, not enough to obscure his whole body, but just enough to muddle the edges. Sylver couldn’t say what his face looked like, and now that he was aware of it, he could tell it wasn’t just because of his face blindness.

The man he was talking to was the [Jester Hero], Alyosha Popovich.

The [Hero] who gave Lola the sword contorted because of Edmund’s mana. The one he used magic to trick Lola into thinking the sword she was trading for belonged to her mother.

“What dragon are you talking about?” Lion asked, but the man, Alyosha, seemed to somehow know Sylver knew who he was. He didn’t stop staring at him, and despite his cautious nature, Sylver stared back.

Alyosha spoke without looking away from Sylver.

“The dragon that is, for the time being, trapped underground. The one that made it rain blood,” Alyosha answered with clear annoyance.

“Can we stop it?” Aurick asked.

He sounded like a child. Like a child that broke an expensive vase and was now suggesting they just glue it back together.

“See, that’s the difference between us. A real [Hero] would have known not to bring the girl here. A real [Hero] wouldn’t have needed to pay a bunch of witches to cause a plague that has already killed thousands. A real [Hero] shows up in areas that are in trouble, trouble, mind you, that he himself didn’t orchestra,” Alyosha scolded.

He took an exhausted deep breath and looked at the slightly frightened witches.

“You girls should probably get back home and pack up as best as you can. In about…” Alyosha closed his eyes for a moment, “2 hours, 41 minutes, you’ll be able to leave. And by leave, I mean the Schlagen mountain area.”

The witches remained where they were while Sylver unsummoned the ax in his hand, and while staring straight into Alyosha’s eyes, walked towards him. He knew what exactly was going on once he was 5 steps away from the completely fearless man.

But just to be sure, Sylver moved his arm through Alyosha’s torso. They had been speaking to what could be categorized as an illusion.

“I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere…” Alyosha said, as Sylver walked past him, and leaned down to look at what he had been doing to the throne’s seat.

“I get that a lot, just one of those faces,” Sylver mumbled, as he hovered his hand over the seat, and felt hot prickly needles sear the palm of his hand.

“Might be…” Alyosha said, but he didn’t even try to sound convinced.

“How do we stop it?” Owl asked, with an uncharacteristically meek voice.

“You’re asking me as if I would be allowed to tell you, even if I knew. I do have one question for you,” Alyosha said, as he stopped staring at the back of Sylver’s head, and locked eyes with Aurick.

“We won’t stop,” Aurick said, while Alyosha simply shrugged his shoulders.

“I know. But I thought maybe there’s finally enough innocent blood on your hands for you to at the very least take a moment to reconsider. Doesn’t some small piece of you feel bad about all the lives you’ve taken by hiring these women to spread a sleeping plague over this land?” Alyosha asked, as Sylver slowly lowered his hand until he was touching the edge of the carved seat.

He had never missed Faust quite as much as he did right now.

“If we didn’t destabilize the upper echelons of the-”

“It is amazing how deeply that wiretap has sunk its claws into you. You’re not just going along with it, you genuinely believe everything it’s told you,” Alyosha interrupted, with a curt gesture at the book in Aurick’s hand.

“What are you trying to do?” Ria tapped against the back of Sylver’s shoulder.

“I need to find a weakness,” Sylver tapped back, as a tendril of liquid gold slithered out of his sleeve, and formed itself into a golden nail, pressed up against a seemingly empty spot in the upper right corner of the carved design.

Sylver didn’t need to ask whether Ria was sure, because, at this point, her guess was as good as his. If anything, considering she had read Faust’s notes at least 50 times since he left them, her guess was better than Sylver’s.

“Are you sure we haven’t met somewhere?” Alyosha asked Sylver, as Sylver stood up from his crouch, and summoned his ax into his hand.

“I’m sure,” Sylver said, as he lifted the ax high above his head. He turned it a bit so the flat part would hit the nail, and not the blade. “You would have remembered me if we had.”

He could feel it happening, even as the ax began moving downward.

A shivering disruption in the primal energy surrounding Sylver’s body.

Sylver had lived long enough that he had experienced these “once in a lifetime” events, multiple times. Events that in 1,000 years would be used to mark the beginning of something.

Or the end, depending on the outcome.

Sylver felt it the moment Aether had been born, even though he was quite literally on the other side of the planet.

He felt the moment when his demon summoning books went from being a minor inconvenience, a distraction, to a full-blown apocalypse.

And he felt that very same feeling right now.

The nail entered maybe half a centimeter into the stone. There wasn’t some grand bolt of lightning, signifying the end of the world, no one was screaming, no fireworks went off, and if you ignored the blood dripping down from the ceiling, and flowing down the walls, nothing happened.

For 10 whole seconds, nobody moved a muscle.

Nobody made a sound, no one dared to so much as breathe.

Ria pulled her nail away from the throne and slithered back into Sylver’s sleeve and staff while Sylver unsummoned his ax.

“Best of luck with everything,” Sylver said, with a slight wave towards Alyosha Popovich, Aurick’s group, and the completely in shock witches.

There was a small hole in the ceiling, that Sylver utilized to get out of the room via [Fog Form].

It was still raining outside, but as Sylver looked up he saw the clouds were already dissipating, he saw that the blood currently raining down on him was about to stop.

Maybe a minute passed, but it was probably closer to half a minute, it just felt longer, because Sylver’s hearts were up in his throat.

His “guess” that the throne was the equivalent of a control panel for the barrier surrounding the country, and thereby the cage the dragon was trapped inside, wasn’t exactly a “guess.” Even if Sylver wasn’t all that familiar with Ki frameworks, his gut seemed to be.

Not to mention the throne is usually, what controls any kind of country-wide spell.

Part of the reason he rushed to action was that he didn’t want to spend another second with the [Jester Hero] staring at him, but that was a very small fraction of Sylver’s reasoning.

Aurick was a fake [Hero]. At least that was what Sylver had understood from Aurick’s interaction with the extremely real [Jester Hero].

There was no point trying to talk to Aurick, or the [Jester Hero], the person Sylver needed to sit down and talk to, was Poppy.

Or actually… Chrys might have an inkling… With Rose’s eye and all, surely, she would be able to feel something as massive as a nearly world-ending disaster…

Sylver’s foot tapped against the sticky ground, as he stared down towards the middle of the Schlagen mountains.

Any time now…

“What happened to not making them your enemies?” Ria asked.

Sylver didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

“I’m not their enemy. Our whole thing was to with the emperor, and since the emperor is gone, our deal is off… Look, the bottom line is, there are certain people you can’t reason with. And instead of wasting my time trying to get a clear answer out of them, I’ll go to the source so to speak,” Sylver explained, as he watched the base of the barrier become a touch more transparent.

“I see,” Ria answered dryly.

“Do you remember how I said that if someone is telling you a prophecy, and you don’t like what you’re hearing, you should punch them until they stop talking?” Sylver asked.

“I take it this a continuation of that advice?” Ria asked.

“Exactly. Always remember that you are always free to leave if you don’t like what’s happening around you. You just have to be quick about it. Or punch them, it depends on the circumstances,” Sylver said.

Sylver hadn’t blinked once since he started watching for the dragon, and yet, he missed it.

It didn’t erupt from the blood-soaked ground like some sort of scaled volcano, it didn’t send chunks of red rock flying high into the sky, it didn’t even make any sound.

It just appeared above ground. One fraction of a second it wasn’t there, and the next, it was.

Sylver felt every fiber of his being seize up as the dragon grabbed hold of every droplet of mana in the surrounding area. He remained that way for what felt like years, it wasn’t just that his body was an inescapable cocoon, his mind was the same.

Even the feeling of pain traveled so unbearably slowly through Sylver’s head, that by the time it arrived, there was already a queue of thoughts waiting for their turn.

It was the sort of inescapable intrusion that almost made finding Edmund not worth it.

When Sylver came to his senses, he found that the dragon was gone.

Ria would later tell him that the creature had spread its horrifyingly pale wings, which looked so brittle that she worried they would tear before they allowed the creature flight.

But despite Ria’s concerns, the creature flew with such a great speed that Ria had prepared for a gust of air to send Sylver’s body flying. But no gust of wind came, if Ria hadn’t been looking right at it, she wouldn’t have been aware that a dragon had been there at all.

The dragon was simply… gone.

It didn’t cause a fuss and simply left.

High above, the clouds raining blood gradually escaped their dome-shaped confines and began to thin and spread along the open sky. Sylver watched as a soft fluffy white cloud collided with the pitch-black blood cloud and didn’t like the way the black cloud merged with the white one.

But it wasn’t an immediate problem.

Sylver was still not fully here, and as he tried to take a step back, he tripped over something, and then fell backward, and smashed the back of his skull on the edge of something extremely hard. He heard a crack, and if the blood leaking into his brain was an indicator, the crack came from him.

He waited for the world to stop spinning for a while, before his robe gathered under him, and lifted his limp doll of a body to its feet.

Sylver turned around to look at the object and saw a larger metallic rectangular box.

There wasn’t any confusion on his part as to what he was looking at because he knew this box better than the person lying inside of it.

Even though it technically belonged to Ed, Sylver had always been the one who carried it.

Sylver ran his hand along the groove his shoulder had created over the many many journeys he’d spent carrying this thing.

With his hand on the clasp, Sylver waited a moment and did something he very rarely did and asked Igri for his blessing.

Sylver had to use his free hand to wipe the tears forming in his eyes, as he completely opened the clasp.

The lid opened silently, Sylver might not have been the world’s greatest craftsman, but he took pride in everything he did, and that included making a coffin for his dearest friend.

The body inside the coffin looked as if it was simply asleep, as opposed to dead. It was old, far older than Edmund normally allowed himself to get, but it was, unmistakably, him. This wasn’t a clone, a relative, from the curly beard to his stupid fuzzy eyebrows, down to this soul, this was without a single doubt, Edmund.

Sylver lost feeling in his legs as he fell next to the box, and for who knows how long, just lay there crying tears of joy.

He still needed to perform the resurrection ritual, but Ed’s body was already teetering on the edge of alive, Sylver wouldn’t be surprised if a campfire would be enough to wake him up.

Sylver closed the lid on the coffin, redid the clasp, and without even thinking about it, slung it over his shoulder.

With teary eyes and the biggest grin on his face since he took over Ciege’s body, Sylver made his way towards Faust’s sect.

He couldn’t bring himself to care about what had occurred today, because, for the first time in what felt like forever, he wasn’t alone.

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