Sylver Seeker

Chapter 280: Scary Snake

Sylver Seeker Book 7

Chapter 14 (280) - Scary Snake

Aside from Lostal, quite a few other people on the float-boat had solid enough sensory abilities that Sylver was wary of being overheard even while they were inside the float-boat and he was outside and a good distance away from it.

He had Nels double layer her silencing spell, and for added measure, he used really complicated words in multiple languages so even if someone had something that translated what he was saying, the meaning would hopefully get completely lost.

It started off being done for tactical reasons, but pretty quickly devolved into an unspoken competition, of who could stitch together the most languages in a single sentence, and use the most number of untranslatable words, without speaking gibberish to the point the other person didn’t understand what they were trying to say.

They weren’t keeping score, but Sylver was winning 18 to 3. Nels might have had firsthand knowledge of the old languages, but Sylver had to learn them from translating texts, which gave him a much larger vocabulary to choose from, even if he wasn’t as perfectly fluent in the languages as Nels was.

He rode on Ulvic’s back, while Nels’s head sat on top of the wolf’s neck, so they were facing each other.

He told her about the dragon in the Schalgen Mountains, about how it vomited clouds into the sky that rained blood, and told her about the fact that the blood clouds escaped from the dome when the dragon was freed.

Nels asked a really good question, which wasn’t odd in itself given that this was Nels, but what was odd was that Sylver hadn’t ever thought about it. Which was strange, because he didn’t usually miss things this obvious.

Could red blood floating around in the clouds have caused the moon to flash red?Now that Nels had said it, and Sylver thought about it, it was very cloudy during the night he and Edmund had slowed the moon down…

Was it just a coincidence? Did the magic simply get dyed by the blood somehow?

Or did the spell get boosted by it? Or altered by having the positive portion of the spell get weakened?

The spell worked as intended.

Or at least as theorized.

Or at least seemed like it worked as Sylver had wished it would work…

Was it possible Nels was just making connections where there weren’t any, and the red blood meddling with positive magic was unrelated to the effect moving the moon caused on Eira?

Which mainly affected an aspect of magic that is almost completely exclusive to positive magic…

In a stepping away from it, grand big picture of the thing, even if it did, so what?

The whole thing with the moon was the equivalent of throwing a dart at a dartboard with your eyes closed, it was more of a “hope” kind of move, than a “plan.”

Sylver just didn’t hit the bullseye as he thought he did, although given his intention, in the dartboard metaphor finding Nels was hitting the bullseye…

This was just the equivalent of the dart pushing through the bullseye and making a hole in the door the dartboard was hanging on, collateral damage so to speak.

Or if it wasn’t a bullseye, it was at the very least…

“What’s the green ring around the red dot on a dart board called?” Sylver asked in regular Eirish.

“Outer bull,” Nels said in just as regular Eirish, although Nels had a way of speaking that unlike his own voice Sylver could listen to her talking for days and never get tired of it.

It was also equally pleasant to talk to someone who knew him so well she knew the exact path he’d followed in his thoughts that ended with him asking about dartboards.

“It’s worth half the points by the way,” Nels said after a moment.

“Hmm?” Sylver asked.

“The outer bull is worth twenty five points. The bullseye is worth fifty. So the outer bull is worth half the points of the bullseye” Nels said.

“Not everything is a competition,” Sylver said, a win was a win, it didn’t matter how many holes he made in the metaphorical door, Nels was in no position to-

“On the topic of competitions. It’s raining blood from the sky. And there’s a giant group of Redcaps wandering around,” Nels said/thought out loud.

She didn’t need to finish her sentence.

Fuck.

Part of the difficulty with Redcaps was that the little hats they wore on their head gave them powers based on the blood they soaked them in. Normally they used monster blood, which gave even a small group a large variety of powers and abilities.

Very annoying to deal with, but a far cry from dangerous.

The danger came from when they soaked their caps in human blood. More specifically, the blood of people capable of using magic.

Although the powers they gained from the blood weren’t even close to the level of the blood’s owner, there were certain combinations of magics that elevated their threat level from “send someone’s apprentice to deal with it” to an Arch having to get involved.

The three men said the Redcaps had white cloth on their heads, so the ones they saw were likely juveniles, but if they had the sense not to dip their caps into the first human they saw… They could have done it out of sight of the three men, Redcaps were clever enough on their own to hide their methods from potential survivors.

It didn’t mean they had elected a leader, and had dragged all the people into one spot to mix and match their bloods for maximum compatibility...

“I’ll try talking to them first,” Sylver said.

“The Redcaps?” Nels asked.

“My “blood” isn’t red, so at the very least they won’t attack on sight. Depending on how many people there are in Merol, half a cup from everyone, all together offer five or six clean and well sealed barrels… It will depend on what their leader is like, or if they even have one,” Sylver said.

“There are healers in Merol, so the only obstacle would be the people getting stuck on the sinister nature of handing over blood,” Nels said.

“The biggest obstacle is if the Redcap leader hears their spirits. You can argue and talk your way out of a lot, but you can’t argue with someone who’s entire race is whispering in their ear. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever heard of Redcaps on this side,” Sylver said.

“They might call them something different here. Or, like the men, just think they’re a type of goblin,” Nels said.

“Spring, did you ever see a quest involving Redcaps in the adventurer's guild?” Sylver asked.

The fraction of the shade in Sylver’s shadow shook his head.

“Adventurer. C-rank, at that,” Nels said.

“It opens a lot of doors if I ever need to travel outside the High King’s borders,” Sylver said.

“I mean this genuinely, but do you know how absurd it is to hear you talking about needing documents to travel?” Nels asked.

“You would suffocate from laughter if you heard all the nonsense I’ve done in the last couple years. I was even a student for a few days. Went to class, wore a tie, the whole thing,” Sylver said.

“As in, you sat behind a desk and listened to lectures?” Nels asked with a grin.

“Took notes too,” Sylver said, as they both burst into laughter.

###

By the fifth day of the slow journey, the surrounding snow was an unnatural light pink colour, and the coppery rusty smell it produced was hard to mistake for anything other than blood.

The red glass like “ice” got larger and larger the more they traveled. The first two days the biggest chunk Sylver found was the size of an apple, but this morning he found a thirty kilogram ball that was as big as a sack of flour.

The float-boat was miraculously completely unaffected by the snow, ice, and the crystal chunks, but everyone who had a skill or perk that utilized mana said the effect lessened, or in a couple of cases, completely ceased to function while standing within ten meters of the thirty kilogram ball.

The frozen blood was gathering together, although it didn’t seem to be moving in any direction in particular, but during the night Sylver placed a handful of red ice shards on a flat plate, and by the morning they had all very slowly melded together into a single piece.

Nobody else put two and two together, because nobody here had even heard of the Schalgen mountains, let alone heard about what happened there.

Edmund was still a no-show, which worried Sylver, but not a lot, and he completely gave up on hearing from Chrys while he was here.

No monsters had done more than observe the float-boat from afar, Sylver sent shades out to hunt to help stretch out the thinning food supplies on the float-boat, but everything with enough meat on it to be worth carrying back to camp sensed the shades approaching and ran off.

Mora had more success in her hunts, she somehow found an elk that was twice as tall as her, and through her hunts even managed to gather enough levels to gain a new perk.

It either increased her range of control over her threads, or made them sharper, something along those lines, either way she was happy with her choice.

Aside from gathering all the frozen blood he could find into his [Still Water] he harvested muscles from the [White Hair Ape], and while the core parts of his body still needed very serious slow and careful repair, the outer shell was about as solid as it was going to get without Edmund’s healing to help smooth over the rough edges.

Ria and SAM were both exactly the same as they were back when Ria’s shifting saved his life, and he ended up with flakes of her trapped inside his torso.

The flakes conducted mana so well that even when Sylver sat down and really focused in on himself, he couldn’t feel them up until he physically dug around his insides with a sharp blade and heard metal mutely tink against metal. It was like pulling tiny bones out of a fish.

He placed the flakes he collected on top of Ria, and some melted directly into her, while others just sat there, like dust.

As the float-boat was lowered towards the ground, Allson worked with the shades to anchor it, and just as Sylver finished setting up his and Nels’ tent for the night, he and Mora both stopped dead in their tracks and turned their heads in the same direction.

“Something’s coming, get everyone on the boat,” Sylver said calmly towards Kalok, without once looking away from the completely ordinary looking snow covered trees.

He handed Nels’ head over to a Spring-quarter, who ran up the side of the boat, and wrapped his arms around her as he sat down in a corner and waited.

Mora’s body made a thin hissing noise as her four legs turned into seven, she got taller and longer, and the edge of her mouth traveled backward towards her head and stopped right under where her many eyes started.

To his sight the distant creature wasn’t making any headway, it looked like a small snake pointlessly wriggling around on a slippery marble floor.

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

But faster than Sylver was capable of perceiving or reacting, the shiny tip of a blade as wide as a carriage wheel skidded against Mora’s threads and sliced open about fifty trees as the blade flew back to the serpent.

It wasn’t quite right to say he was scared, just because his needle wasn’t encased in an unbreakable shell, but as Sylver took his first step towards the monster, it didn’t feel or seem like a good idea to fight it.

[Little King – Young Philosopher + Root Gnawer + Vorpal Chip - 354]

[HP: 50,440 – 702%]

[MP: 880,880 – 482%]

[Stamina: 900,550 – 249%]

[Corpse – Legendary]

[Soul – Unique]

Sylver saw the [Little King] flick its tongue out towards him.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been used!]

Sylver saw the [Little King]’s two beady eyes smile at him, at least as much as a creature without any muscle for facial expressions could smile.

It crawled directly towards him, trees fell out of its path as a blade too fast to be seen sliced them at the roots, and throughout that its head with the bright red blob of a crown of a rooster remained absolutely and perfectly still.

He could see it wasn’t looking at him, it certainly wasn’t following his scent, but he also didn’t get the feeling it was following him through just what little mana managed to leak through his airtight grip.

The wind quieted down, and in the silence that followed Sylver could not only hear the sounds of feet clambering on top of wood boards, but he could also hear the gentle swishing of the snake’s body effortlessly flowing through the fluffy pink snow.

He’d known the creature was smart the moment they locked eyes, but when Sylver tried to step to the side, and the creature’s gaze immediately switched to the float-boat, he had to recognize that it wasn’t just smart for an animal, it was smart even on a person level.

It knew the big wooden vessel behind him was important to him, and he also got the feeling it somehow knew that if the pale man it was facing managed to slip out of its field of view, it wasn’t going to win unscathed.

The serpent was about forty meters long, its head was wide as Sylver was tall, and a little over half that length in height. The hexagonal scales on its face fit together so well it almost looked like it didn’t have a mouth, and when its forked silvery tongue slid out, the tiny gaps on the sides of its head revealed four dagger long glassy fangs, accompanied by several hundred rows of acorn shaped frosted glass teeth.

It had ridges on the back half of its body, like fish fins, they slid down its body like a bead on an abacus, and with the faintest flick of its long tail, the fins gathered into a single long leaf shaped blade, and disappeared out of Sylver’s sight.

Just like last time, the blade skidded along Mora’s protective threads, but this time Sylver both felt, heard, and saw that the blade caught one of the threads, and tore it out of Mora’s grasp as the blade retreated back to its thrower.

With a slight headstart from Mora, Sylver ran towards the snake, ran straight ahead towards it, weaved around the trees as he did, and in the fraction of a second its line of sight should have been broken by the giant tree between them, Sylver tried to have a decoy dressed in his robe and made as similar as possible to him through [Mirage] run around the tree, while Sylver remained hidden behind it.

The snake ignored the decoy like it wasn’t there, and as Sylver, now in his birthday suit, came out of the edge of the tree and ran towards the decoy to get his robe back, the fins on the back of the snake’s spine started to travel down towards the tip of its tail.

If he dodged, it would slice the float-boat clean into two, if he took the hit, there was a chance it would get his needle, the only thing Sylver could think of was only going to work one time, so as the distance between him and the snake lowered to the point he could throw a dagger at it and it would reach it, he placed his left hand flat over his chest.

The way abyss magic differs from a regular compressed air blade for example, is that unlike the air blade abyss magic doesn’t cut. It, for lack of a better word, dissolves, sublimates, and most importantly of all, it doesn’t start at the outer layer of the item and work inwards, it works on the whole thing from one edge to the other.

As the [Little King]’s wide blade disappeared from the edge of its tail, Sylver dissolved the top layer of skin on his chest and shoulder with a beam of abyss magic as wide as his hand.

He’d made a mistake.

Instead of aiming for his chest, the snake had aimed for his neck, so instead of creating a gap just wide enough for his needle to pass through the snake’s blade, he burned through 90% of his mana, turned the bones in his left arm into smoking mush, and had absolutely nothing to show for it.

His head lightly bounced on top of his neck, the [Black Mass] armour he was wearing caught it before it fell away and pushed it down onto his neck, and as Sylver reached the snake, he swallowed his pride, and asked Nels to help out a little.

Its scales were slippery like a silk sheet, and were strangely soft to the touch when he tried to grab at them, worst of all through the physical contact Sylver felt the insanely tight muscles sliding around underneath its soft shell, and also felt that because of the giant difference in mana density, none of his magic was going to work on it.

Several hundred shades materialized around the snake, it barely reacted to them as it coiled itself towards and around Sylver, and when he used [Fog Form] at the very last second to materialize in what he thought would be its blind spot, it rolled over without uncoiling itself, and somehow Sylver was right back in its grasp.

He used [Fog Form] again and again, and each time it caught him and lost him like trying to grab a bar of soap that kept flying out of someone’s grasp.

Nels told Spring she needed at least 90 seconds, and the same way Sylver would have done, Spring mumbled a swear word at her and rolled his eyes.

On the tenth or eleventh attempt to get out of the snake’s grip using [Fog Form] it was like Sylver reached for a doorhandle and missed, because the perk didn’t activate, and in his stumble to use it right after that, the snake’s body coiled around him and locked his physical body in place.

For a second or two the intense pressure was pleasant, in the sense Sylver felt instantly warm on the inside, and the “pain” of the pressure hadn’t quite had enough time to inform his mind of its presence.

Even when it did reach his head, he ignored it, his bones bent, crackled, and once again, the majority of his possessions rained down all around him as the [Bound Bones] he’d kept them inside broke. He decided the perk was dead to him as far as personal belongings were concerned in that moment, and as a lake sized quantity of water and dirt magically appeared above Sylver and the [Little King] he took his words back.

This close to it [Advanced Water Manipulation] was potent enough for Sylver to fill the [Little King]’s mouth, eye sockets, nose, and ears with water, and because it was coiled all around him, he was also fairly close to an eight opening a little lower on its body.

This [Little King] was a female, and as Sylver increased the temperature of the water under his control as high as he could with the limited mana he had, it didn’t do all that much damage, but it did make the giant critter flinch.

When he escaped from its grip using [Fog Form] it coiled around him while keeping its mouth tightly shut, and with the lower opening pressed air tight against its body.

Sylver broke a nail as he tried to shove his thumb it’s the snake’s beady eye, it brushed off the gaseous and liquid version of [Draining Blight] like it was a suggestion, and as he used pushed [Mirage] to its absolute limit to produce what should have been a blinding bright light, and an eardrum tearingly loud sound, the [Little King] didn’t even bother to blink.

In the chaos of the boiling water, his own blood leaking out of his burst open flesh, when one of its fangs slithered out of its closed mouth and dragged its sharp tip against his wrist, Sylver didn’t notice it right up until the poison ran up his arm like a lightning bolt. It caused the muscles of one of his hearts to contract so hard the speed of its movement sent a shockwave through his flesh that made the rest of his internal organs bounce around like coffee beans in a tin can.

Sylver wanted to go limp and play dead, but the only reason it hadn’t completely squeezed his body into pieces was that he was moving around too much, even as a second fang dragged against his right bicep and turned his other heart into a dense black lump of soggy flesh, he continued to thrash around and push against the snake’s oddly soft scales.

His hips slid in the wrong direction and twisted 180 degrees, his outer spine was severed, and as the snake’s tail with the razor sharp fins slid through the middle they cut through him like he was a soft fruit being sliced into bite sized pieces by a knife.

Like with a lot of her magic, it didn’t make a sound, didn’t disturb the ambient mana, and because Sylver managed to get the snake to focus on him, it wasn’t even looking in the right direction to notice the handleless sword flying through the air.

As much as he could, Sylver angled himself and the snake wrapped around him so it’s head and as many coils of its body were in a single line. It was a pointless effort, because the sword that flew down from the sky, with enough force that it should have skewered through all six coils, instead only pierced maybe an inch into its skull and stopped right there.

The [Little King] didn’t flinch, as much as it spasmed, very clearly it wasn’t used to something getting through its scales, in its thrashing the sword fell out immediately, and as Sylver reached upward to its head and hooked a finger into the wound Nels had created, the snake tried to throw him off it.

He didn’t have enough mana for abyss magic of any kind, could tell that his blood would get neutralized by the snake’s if he tried to inject it right now, and because he could feel the wound warming up and healing around his finger, he did something he wasn’t proud of.

Sylver summoned his [Gnarled Staff Fragment of Igri] around the finger inside the hole on the snake’s head, and though he could feel it working, he felt the kind of shame and guilt he forgot was possible.

The snake buckled, spasmed, shivered, dragged its back against the ground and the trees to scarp Sylver off, and all the while he clung to its head and pressed his index finger into the wound through the hole being kept open by the indestructible ring shaped [Gnarled Staff Fragment of Igri].

The blood that leaked out of the hole in the snake’s head was a brilliant dark blue colour, like a saphire under sunlight, it even sparkled in the dark as it sprayed on the snow.

All the skin on his back had been torn off at some point, they were at least three kilometers away from where the fight started, and as Sylver managed to get a grip on the [Little King]’s mana through the hole in its head and his finger, he drained enough mana to fire a single straight beam of abyss magic as wide and long as a regular pencil inside its skull.

Its brain stem must have been a couple millimeters lower than where Sylver thought it was, because instead of immediately going limp the snake thrashed around even harder and faster, it rolled on the ground and in the air, and for its final desperate trick, it gathered the fins on its back into a single blade, and as it whipped it towards him, it sliced Sylver from his crotch up to about where his outer ribs ended on his left side.

Unlike the sword Nels used, the snake’s blade passed cleanly through its scales, the flesh underneath, its skeleton, and exited out of the other side.

[Little King – Young Philosopher + Root Gnawer + Vorpal Chip - Defeated!]

[Due to defeating an enemy 150 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Mirage (V) Proficiency increased to 100%!]

[Mirage (V) rank up available!]

[Draining Blight (VII) Proficiency increased to 100%!]

[Draining Blight (VII) rank up available!]

[Black Mass (V) Proficiency increased to 100%!]

[Black Mass (V) rank up available!]

[Arcane Insight (IV) Proficiency increased to 100%!]

[Arcane Insight (IV) rank up available!]

[Vigorous Conditioning (VI) Proficiency increased to 100%!]

Vigorous Conditioning (VI) rank up available!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 80!

+5AP

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 81!

+5AP

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 82!

+5AP

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 83!

+5AP

[1 perk available for [Swamp Lord]]

Sylver lay in the wet snow, and couldn’t even smile or grin at the cheerful notifications. He sucked out just enough health out of the [Little King]’s corpse to get his health out of the negatives and into the single digit area.

Mora, through a great deal of protest, remained where she was, near the float-boat, on the off chance a second [Little King] crawled up to it, aside from Nels being on board, he and Kalok had an agreement he’d get them to Merol.

Spring had shades roll the four [Little King] body pieces into a neat line, used what little [Black Mass] had survived the thrashing to make long container for the parts, and very very slowly Sylver melted the snow to create a layer of water in the container, and even more slowly, provided [Still Water] with the mana it needed to accept the snake’s steaming warm corpse.

The shades gathered the snake’s blood that had frozen into clumps in the pink snow, picked up its sharp tail blades, gathered Sylver’s belongings that were strewn all over the place, along with what little scraps and lumps of skin and flesh he’d had scraped off his body during the fight, and placed everything in the [Still Water] portal.

Sylver glued his leg back to what remained of his hip, held it in place with [Black Mass] and willpower, and lay face down on Ulvic’s back as the wolf shade very carefully and gently trotted back to the float-boat.

He picked up what remained of his robe on the way back, used black silky mushrooms to fill in the giant gaps, and lastly, placed a mask made of mushrooms over his face, so as to cover the fact that the front of his skull was very clearly visible due to the skin on his head being squeezed off his bones like a glove being pulled off a hand.

Instead of mustering the strength to stand up, and talk to Kalok himself, Sylver covered a male shade with a similar build to him in a robe made entirely out of mushrooms, provided it with the same mask as him, and used [Mirage] to speak through it.

While he talked to Kalok through the shade, Nels asked Spring to bring her over to Sylver’s real body.

He saw, through [Lesser Perception], since his eyes had been slapped out of his skull, that Nels would have been sobbing if she had slightly less control over her emotions and facial expression, and Sylver felt a great deal of conflicting emotions over this.

Firstly, how dare she even consider for so much as a moment that some wandering snake would be enough to kill him? The disrespect, from her, she of all people knew who he was, frankly it was worse than the whole crushed internal organs ordeal with the snake.

On the other hand, not the less personal side, but the side where he saw where she was coming from since Nels had been completely alone until Sylver showed up, he understood why she looked like she might cry, because if the shoe were on the other foot, he would probably react the same way if something happened to her.

On top of that… as a man, it was kind of nice to have a woman worry about you in such a way, he wouldn’t go as far as to say it was a cute colour on Nels, but the emotion he was feeling was in that general area.

“Any fight you can walk away from is a win,” Sylver mumbled through [Mirage]into Ulvic’s back.

The fact that she knew what he meant by that, and just nodded at him with a faint grin was enough for him to completely forgive her earlier transgression.

“Kalok says if we start moving now we’ll be in Merol by tomorrow night,” Sylver said.

Nels said, with her face and eyes, that nobody would blame him if he took a few hours to compose himself, but she didn’t say that out loud because she knew him well enough to know that his pride was so wounded right now that he would rather cripple himself than admit even a small form of defeat.

With the emergency being over the people on the float-boat returned to their regular rooms, Sylver moved from Ulvic’s back to Mora’s and had her help pull the float-boat.

He had a decoy of himself sit on top of his body so it looked like he was properly riding on Mora’s back.

As the float-boat slowly started to move in the dim light of the distant rising suns, Sylver, for the second time in very recent memory, sifted through the minced meat of his internal organs for what could be salvaged, and what would need to be completely replaced.