Sylver Seeker

“At least we’re still in Eira,” Edmund said.

Sylver, Edmund, and the unconscious bandits found themselves standing in a giant cylindrical tunnel. The only source of light was the small glowing sphere floating above Sylver’s and Edmund’s heads. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all made from the same slippery dark gray material.

[Xander’s Waystone - Greater Quality]

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

[Amount teleported in: 25]

[Amount that can be teleported out: 12]

“The waystone seems to think it worked without any problems,” Sylver said, as he slowly turned in a circle, and observed what little there was to observe of his surroundings.

“The tunnel doesn’t look like it was dug, and I don’t-”

Edmund was interrupted by the sounds of wild hissing, followed by a wet squelching noise.

“I think I know where we are,” Sylver said, as he called his shades back, and snuffed out the ball of light floating above his head.

“You’re probably right,” Edmund said, as he snuffed out his light too.

The Arch-Necromancer, and Arch-Pyromancer, turned toward the source of the hissing noise and waited.

“It’s… glowing,” Edmund said after a bit of hesitation.

Sure enough, he was right.

The [Mage Cap] on Sylver’s head was glowing a dull red, too weak to notice in most cases, but in total darkness, it stood out like a droplet of blood on perfectly clean white snow.

“Having a glowing target on my head is a small price to pay for the magical boost,” Sylver said, as Edmund shrugged his shoulders in acceptance.

The wet squelching and slapping noise gradually became louder, and after a few more seconds, Sylver could vaguely make out pale hairless human-shaped figures running towards him. They had the signature long limbs, and squashed torso that most goblins had, but there was something off about their heads, they didn’t look right.

There were 4 of them, each armed with short white spears, that looked like they were made from a sharpened bone.

[Goblin/??? – Greater Dark-Scout– 99]

[Corpse – Inferior]

[Soul – Inferior]

“Hmm…” Sylver said to himself, as he tried to use [Arcane Insight] on the other 3, but got the same information each time.

He waited for the goblins to get closer.

Sylver raised his open palm towards them and produced a painfully loud pop sound. The goblins barely got a chance to recoil at the sudden onslaught to their senses, before a group of shades appeared directly behind them, and shoved a blade into the back of their skull.

[Undead Mastery (VI) Proficiency increased to 94%!]

[Mirage (IV) Proficiency increased to 90%!]

[Arcane Insight (IV) Proficiency increased to 48%!]

The corpses were thrown at Sylver, and all 4 landed at his feet in a neat pile.

Sylver turned them over using [Dead Dominion], and sent a pulse of mana through one of the corpses.

“What?” Edmund asked in response to the expression on Sylver’s face.

Sylver took his hand off the goblin and stood up straight.

“They’re human…” Sylver said, partially to Edmund, but mostly to himself.

“You mean they’re humans who evolved into this?” Edmund asked with a gesture towards the dead creature on the ground.

“I mean the last time I was here, these things were oviparous, barely had functioning eyes, and their muscles were nowhere near this dense… Maybe the ones I saw back then were the way they were because they were close to an exit?” Sylver said as he used a blade of [Deadly Darkness] to make a cut along the goblin’s spine.

Edmund moved his sphere of light towards the corpse to see it better.

“A goblin this size wouldn’t have a spine this long…” Edmund offered.

“Or hands without the muscles they need for retractable claws,” Sylver said, as he gestured at the hands in question.

“It’s like they devolved into-”

Their discussion was interrupted by a sloshing noise, the sort that made the hairs on the back of Sylver’s neck stand up straight. On instinct more than anything else, Sylver and Edmund began to run down the cylindrical tunnel, and left behind the 4 goblin corpses, along with the unconscious bandits.

The liquid brought with it an odd-smelling gas that easily passed through Sylver’s defenses, and burned his eyes.

Edmund glowed with a pale white light, as he healed himself, while Sylver tried to think of a way to slow down the oncoming corrosive substance. The sheer force with which it was moving towards them meant that any kind of blockage Sylver might have been capable of conjuring would be useless.

Edmund specialized in gaseous and plasma-based magic, neither of which worked well in terms of defense.

It’s hard to say how long the two men ran for their lives, but during their sprint, they were yet to find anything in their way. The tunnel was squeaky clean, almost as if someone had been pumping enchanted acid through it.

With Sylver’s shades scouting ahead for him, he gradually discovered that the tunnel they were running through was a loop, and if they kept running, they would very likely reach the original area they had arrived at.

Sylver’s current idea consisted of using a beam of abyss magic to make a hole in the ceiling and then using [Fog Form] to escape. The problem with that plan was that Edmund didn’t have a perk that would let him squeeze through such a small hole, and for whatever reason, he had never unlocked any kind of teleportation ability.

The second idea mostly involved running away from the wave of gelatinous acid, until they found a way out. The problem with that plan was that it wasn’t a plan, and was the sort of thing people would do in the absence of a plan.

Anything magical wouldn’t work due to the difference in scale, even if Sylver had an hour to grow and develop acid-resistant mushrooms, and then had enough nutrients to make a giant wall out of them, the force of the acid would break it apart.

“Can you latch onto the ceiling?” Edmund asked.

He sounded so calm, that Sylver almost stopped running from how at ease he felt.

“No,” Sylver answered.

“Count to eight, jump as high as you can, and make yourself as small as possible,” Edmund said.

With a beaming smile that didn’t fit the current “we might fucking die” mood going on around them, Sylver nodded at Edmund and proceeded to count to eight, as his muscles pulled themselves tight, and shrunk his spine and limbs.

Sylver used his [Deadly Darkness] shadow as a sort of spring to help him jump higher. He was airborne for less than a second before he felt Edmund grab him by the back of the robe. Edmund propelled upwards using two steams of barely visible fire, and pulled Sylver along with him, the way a dog would carry a puppy by the scruff of its neck.

If Sylver had any breath, it would have been knocked out of him, as Edmund flipped him over, and slammed him against the ceiling. Sylver kept his limbs as close to him as possible, as Edmund used one hand to keep himself and Sylver pressed up against the ceiling, and used his other hand to mold a stream of barely visible fire into a half sphere.

Sylver’s smile only got bigger as Edmund shifted the angle of the downward stream of fire, and was now sliding along the ceiling towards the incoming wave of liquid.

What made the current predicament so nice was that he didn’t need to ask any stupid questions, of course Edmund was aware that if the liquid wasn’t a moving mass, they wouldn’t be able to get out of it. The risk Edmund took was calculated, and while his gut wasn’t as tried and tested as Sylver’s, it still had a more than respectable level of durability.

Sylver watched as the edge of Edmund’s mouth curled into a grin, as they reached the acidic liquid.

Edmund’s protective dome of fire nearly buckled under the pressure, if they had tried to do this while on the ground, it would have broken apart. Sylver could feel Edmund’s heart rate increasing with every passing second, he could see the red cracks on his fingers and forearms lose their intensity, and just as Edmund was about to run out of mana, they slid out of the corrosive substance.

Edmund was out of breath, and his hands were closed in tight steaming fists, as he released his magic, and began to fall. Just as he had done, Sylver grabbed Edmund by the back of his shirt and used his [Deadly Darkness] shadow to create a platform underneath his feet.

He had been ready for the shadow to be burned away by the acid, but the walls were acid-free. Sylver and Edmund both watched the blob of shimmering liquid continue down the tunnel.

“I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to have you back,” Sylver said, with the sort of smile you would normally see on a proud parent.

“We need to get out of here,” Edmund said, as he continued healing himself in quick bursts of healing magic, and once he was done fixing his burned lungs, he covered Sylver’s face in the brown fire.

The skin Sylver hadn’t realized had been eaten away, quickly grew back, and Sylver’s melted eyes materialized inside his eye sockets and filled up with plasma.

“I would have been dead without you,” Sylver said, as he lifted himself and Edmund upwards, and aimed at the ceiling with his finger.

“You would have figured something out,” Edmund said, as Sylver pushed his glowing finger up to the slimy rock, and tried to make a hole in it.

He could feel the abyss magic working, it was most definitely doing something, but it wasn’t cutting through the rock.

Sylver lifted his free hand up to the rock and realized what was happening.

“It’s… healing?” Sylver said, mostly to himself.

Once he understood that, making an incision was as easy as cutting a piece of wet tissue paper with a razor blade.

The second Sylver made a hole, half as thick as his finger, a giant tear appeared, and both Sylver and Edmund were pushed out of the tunnel they had been inside.

Sylver watched as the flaps flapped around as the tunnel deflated for a moment, and in the time it took Sylver to blink, the giant tear was gone. The slightly deflated tube became inflated again.

Due to his weight, Sylver didn’t fly all that high, but he got a good look at his surroundings.

He’d seen this before.

Not exactly this, but he’d been inside giant creatures enough times to know what he was looking at. Thick pulsating tunnels were sprawled out to the very edges of the “cave,” weaving in and out of the oddly gray ground, which just like the tunnels, was moving.

Giant towers of meat connected the ground to the ceiling, and while it was too slow for Sylver to see it, he could tell the meat towers were growing with every passing second.

“You said she was hollowed out?” Edmund asked, even as he knew that Sylver’s answer was going to be “she was.”

“She was… 5 years ago…” Sylver answered, as he reached the apex of his flight, and began to fall down towards the ground.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to break his fall, while Edmund landed on his two feet and simply absorbed the kinetic energy. They both spent a while crouched and touched the oddly hard red “rock,” and both reached the same conclusion that it was indeed demi-god turtle meat. They were pretty sure, but it never hurt to double-check.

“It’s been 5 years since you made the waystone, so the fact that she’s healed so much, means the framework is inaccurate,” Edmund theorized, or in this case, said word for word what Sylver had been thinking.

“There was a forest and everything here back then. And a river over there. And a mountain over there, I used it as a landmark,” Sylver said and pointed towards the locations he listed.

Edmund was staring directly upwards and squinting.

“You said her shell was so deep underwater that you could barely make out her head,” Edmund half said, half asked.

“The sea was calm that day, and I had my shades help me with mapping out the sigils,” Sylver said, as Edmund squinted his eyes even more.

“The top part is above water,” Edmund said, while pointing towards the very top of the “cave,” they were standing inside of.

Sylver tried his best to see whatever Edmund was pointing at, but he couldn’t see it. The entirety of the ceiling looked the same to Sylver's eyes.

“The Sinis sea doesn’t have tides low enough for the top of her shell to point out, so that means she’s either floating-”

“Or she got bigger. Did her shell look deflated to you back then?” Edmund asked.

“A little, but she would have to be inflated like a balloon for the top to stick out of the sea…” Sylver said.

Edmund had stopped staring at the ceiling and was now looking at where Tuli’s neck would/should be. The various towers of meat made it impossible to see very far.

“Can you feel that?” Edmund asked as Sylver focused his mana sense in the direction Edmund pointed.

“Not really,” Sylver said.

He could feel something, but it could just as easily be his imagination. If Edmund hadn’t said anything, Sylver would have ignored it.

Edmund’s mana had a significantly higher concentration of positive mana than Sylver’s, which in turn meant he could sense certain frequencies that Sylver couldn’t. It was yet another reason he and Sylver worked well as a team, collectively they could sense just shy of 96% of all mana frequencies.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to quickly move across the waving hills of muscle, while Edmund silently floated after him.