Ch215-Sore Winner

-

-

Ch215-Sore Winner

-

-

Sylver clicked his tongue as he realized the order was still wrong.

He knew his internal muscle structure inside and out, when he had initially made it, but because he wanted his body to naturally develop, it was now a mysterious mess. It wasn’t just putting the discs in the right order, Sylver also had to make sure they were facing the right way.

It felt like building a house of cards, but the cards are made out of meat, and you’re also riding a giant wolf, while a very small arachnid attached to your back is actively siphoning your mana away.

Mora had told him she was doing something to help him catch those 2 but couldn’t explain exactly what it was. He gave her all the mana she asked for, since gluing his hand back into 1 piece didn’t take that much mana.

It wasn’t even that difficult, it was just annoying and time-consuming.

He had already tried to slow them down using Aleri, but Sylver didn’t have that much water left, and more importantly, one of them had a ranged attack that destroyed the flying shade before it got close enough.

They were slowing down, but Ulvic wasn’t even keeping up with them, if it weren’t for the fact that they couldn’t maintain their full speed when they turned corners, they would have been long gone.

It also didn’t help that Sylver was in a great deal of pain. It wasn’t a “physical” pain, despite the source being physical, it was more akin to the kind of pain men felt when they saw another man getting hit in the unmentionable.

An unconscious reaction, that Sylver had trained relentlessly to suppress. And yet he felt “winded,” despite not having lungs, and “hurt,” even though he had severed all of his pain receptors. His brain wasn’t even functioning right now, it was just a slab of meat he had stitched together so his head wouldn’t fall apart.

Sylver still had what some undead referred to as “humanity.”

He was “alive” enough that his soul treated his body as if it wasn’t dead, and similarly made him feel what it thought he should feel.

If it weren’t for his extremely high pain tolerance, and his soul manipulating capabilities, the “pain” would have incapacitated him.

Technically speaking, Sylver wasn’t undead.

It required a certain amount of mental gymnastics to call a man capable of getting chopped up “alive,” and yet, if you went by the standards certain snobby wights set, Sylver was one of the living. Even though he was a floating skeleton when they made this assessment.

According to them a “true undead,” felt nothing. It didn’t feel hungry, cold, it never felt anger, sadness, happiness, a “true undead” was basically a very smart animal. It did what its body required of it, and nothing else. A creature that was guided solely by natural instinct.

As something of an expert in all things undead, Sylver considered this type of categorization closeminded and exactly the kind of bullshit he expected those prophecy-producing wights to come up with.

But he couldn’t hate those see-through assholes, because as he remembered the conversation they had back then, he also remembered what he did to prove them wrong, and as a result, got an idea.

Sylver scooted back on where he was sitting on Ulvic’s back, and as he summoned the corpse of red robe and orange robe, and did his best to stop what remained of his lips from curling into a smile.

He grabbed the two corpses by the backs of their necks and focused on the inside of their chests. There wasn’t any Ki inside of them, but he could feel their flesh reacting to every slither of mana he forced inside of them.

Or perhaps Sylver was rusty, he couldn’t remember the last time he did this directly, he normally had one of his shades do it for him.

“I’m sorry,” Sylver whispered, as he reached inside himself, and paid close attention to how his vocal cords moved.

The two corpses sitting in front of him shuddered for a moment, as Sylver forced their diaphragms to contract. They made a strange sound as they breathed in air, and it took Sylver a couple of seconds to remember to open their mouths.

As he slowly relaxed their diaphragm and wiggled their vocal cords, they both seemed to murmur under their breaths.

Sylver tightened his throat and did his best to mimic red robe’s final words.

“I’m sorry,” Sylver said.

“I’m sorry,” Sylver repeated.

“I’m, I am, I’m sorry. I am sorry. Sorry, I am. I’m sorry,” Sylver repeated and forced the man’s mouth and throat to mimic his.

“I’m sorry,” Sylver and the red-robed man said in near perfect sync.

“I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. A little lower. Sor-ry. Spring remind me to practice this when we get home,” Sylver and the corpse said in unison, as Spring quietly added ventriloquism to Sylver’s ever growing list of skills to brush up on.

“Betty Botter bought some butter. His tongue is numb. How can a clam cram in a clean cream can? Actually, mine is numb too. Betty Botter. Betty Botter. Betty Botter. Betty Botter bought some butter. Near an ear, a nearer ear, a nearly eerie ear. Four fine fresh fish for you. Good enough,” Sylver and the red robe-wearing corpse said, as he tightened his grip on orange robe’s corpse.

“It’s his chest. It’s his chest? It’s his chest! It’s his chiseled chest! Che-st. Chest. It’s his chest. Chest. How close am I Ria?” Sylver asked.

There was a moment of pause, during which Sylver felt around for the source of his tongue’s numbness and discovered a small shard of blade embedded in the back of his throat, that had blocked a blood vessel. He very quietly made his flesh push the piece of metal out and spat it out.

“It’s his chest,” Ria said in orange robe’s voice.

“It’s his chest,” Sylver repeated, but Ria shook her head.

“It’s his chest,” Ria said.

“It’s his chest,” Sylver repeated.

“Can you genuinely not hear your accent?” Ria asked, as Sylver and red robe simultaneously coughed.

“I genuinely can’t. Is the pitch right?” Sylver asked as Ria nodded.

“Is this because you’re undead, or is this because you don’t breathe, or is it-”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Sylver interrupted, as he adjusted his grip on red robe’s neck.

“It hurts,” red robe said quietly.

“Help me, it hurts,” red robe continued, as Sylver struggled to get enough air into the man’s dead lungs.

“IT HURTS!” red robe screamed, louder than Sylver had intended, but too loud was better than too quiet, “HELP ME! IT HURTS! I CAN’T TAKE IT! PLEASE HELP ME!” red robe screeched, as Sylver shifted his attention to orange robe.

“I DON’T WANT TO DIE! PLEASE HELP ME! PLEASE! I BEG YOU! HE’S GOING TO KILL ME! PLEASE SAVE ME! IT HURTS!” orange robe screamed, as Sylver adjusted the man’s volume until it was about as loud as red robe.

“Does this actually work?” Ria asked as the two men continued screaming for help.

“More often than it should. But if it doesn’t, it will at least lower their morale. If anything, it should work better than ever, since they don’t know I’m a necromancer. But then again, they do seem disciplined enough to leave their comrades for dead,” Sylver said, as he summoned 2 wolf shades, and threw the corpses screaming for help onto their backs.

They weren’t as fast as Ulvic, but that was the point. Sylver wanted blue and purple robe to think they were losing him so that they would slow down a bit to catch their breath.

Although it was unlikely they would do that, since Sylver felt trace amounts of Ki brush against him from time to time and had to assume they knew exactly how far behind them he was. He did his best to meddle with their sensory Ki, but aside from suppressing his presence, there wasn’t anywhere to hide in this narrow passageway.

For now, all he could do was wait for one of them to feel sorry enough for their comrades to turn around and attack him.

He decided to check his options for [Vigorous Conditioning].

Oddly enough it was almost a repeat of the previous rank up. Sylver’s choice was between an increased resistance to darkness-based magic and another 20% decrease to his body weight.

Except this time there was a 3rd option, that Sylver had to assume was gained because of all the times he had taken an explosive to the face.

[Skill: Vigorous Conditioning (V) [A]]
Skill level can be increased by receiving damage.
I – Increase resistance against [Positive Energy] by 25%.
II – Increase resistance against [Physical Damage] by 40%.
III – Increase Stamina Regeneration by 50%.
IV – Reduce body weight by 20%.
V – Increase resistance against [Physical Damage] by 25%.

Sylver, Ria, Mora, and the two corpses begging for their lives, continued running after blue and purple robe, up until the point the stupidly long passageway ended in a dead-end.

Sylver immediately shut the two corpses up and jumped down to the left side of the closed door. He looked at his messed up left hand with regret and decided it would be faster to grow himself new muscles than it would be solve this meat puzzle.

As Sylver pressed his finger up against the wall, white smoke started coming out of his left hand’s sleeve. He ignored his body’s protest and allowed the magic to chew through his flesh, as he made a hole in the wall using a tight beam of abyss magic.

Sylver was left with a bumpy and uneven skeletal arm. He closed it into a fist and opened it a couple of times, to make sure the magic that held it together didn’t have any problems. It did, but as long as it could hold a dagger, and could form a fist, it was good enough.

Ria made short work of the mechanism inside the wall, and in mere seconds, Sylver was able to successfully force it open using a droplet of [Necrotic Mutilation]. Mora squeezed through the opening and moved Ria over with her, and Sylver materialized next to them on the other side of the door.

The surprised look on blue robe’s and purple robe’s faces, who were both sitting in the middle of the empty room, drinking tea, while crying, was almost worth the effort it was going to take to fix all the damage Sylver had accumulated.

While he was disappointed he hadn’t been able to trick them into attacking him back there, the cries for help had very clearly had an effect on them.

“HEAR ME OUT!” Sylver shouted as he raised both of his hands to show them he was unarmed.

He coated both of them in darkness, to hide the fact that one hand was missing skin, and for the exact same reason had a mask on his face.

It was hard to say if this was because Sylver was extra on guard against them, or simple luck, but he felt something, on his right side. It felt like his hand was caught between two impossibly soft cushions and on instinct more than anything else, he concentrated his mana and attention towards his right side.

The blue robe heir became blurry, and the next thing Sylver knew, there was a razor-sharp sword trapped in his fist.

In the time it took a normal person to blink blue robe twisted his sword in an attempt to pull it out of Sylver’s grasp, but all his efforts achieved was dislocating Sylver’s wrist.

While he tightened his grip on the blade, he angled his left hand, summoned his ax into it, and tried to push it into blue robe’s face.

Sylver had him, the edge of the ax head was a hair’s breadth away from blue robe’s eyeball, in another second the ax would be coated in enough [Necrotic Mutilation] to force itself through his skull.

He felt that odd soft pillow sensation again, but it was all around him this time, and too faint for him to figure out the direction.

Without even realizing it, Sylver lost all connection to his arms, legs, and his outside head, as his indestructible ribcage was pushed out of his “body.”

Thanks to [Lesser Perception] Sylver got to see the whole thing, as his squashed head and ribcage flew away from his body. Purple robe had his palm in the place Sylver’s chest had been a moment prior, and in front of that palm, was a Sylver-shaped hole, in the middle of Sylver’s body.

Purple looked as surprised as Sylver felt, as was blue robe.

It was a slightly rectangular hole, and as Sylver’s ribcage collided with the wall and bounced off it with an undignified ping sound, he honestly didn’t know what to say or do.

As his ribcage flew through the air, Sylver wondered if this was due to the massive difference in level, or if it was simply a bad matchup.

Brute force was one of those things that could only be countered by an equal amount of brute force, but as amazing as Sylver’s body was, it didn’t stand a chance in a direct confrontation against a cultivator.

Sylver could do little else but wait for enough magic to build up around him to form himself a set of arms and legs. Thankfully, despite the minor setback, Sylver still had the upper hand.

***

Using [Dead Dominion] Sylver had what was left of his body lunge at blue robe, and the moment the corpse with a hole in its torso made contact, he pulled at it. Since Sylver’s small ribcage weighed less than his dense body, he was flung towards it.

Blue robe made the mistake of ignoring Sylver’s large body as he aimed his sword at Sylver’s flying ribcage, which was leaking dark smoke, while Sylver’s large body’s head made a clicking sound.

Sylver used all the mana he could spare to create a flash of light from the spot blue robe was staring at, while he simultaneously made his old body lean down towards the man’s neck and allowed the spring-loaded jaws to snap shut. Blue robe screamed in pain, and-

Sylver didn’t get to see what happened next, on account of purple robe’s “push”, which once again sent Sylver’s ribcage flying, and made him lose connection to his temporary solidified darkness limbs. He bounced from wall, to floor, to ceiling, with incredible speed, like a gore-covered pinball, and heard the sound of a door opening.

Sylver didn’t even see what was inside that particular door, as purple robe disappeared through it, and the door slammed shut behind him before Sylver had even had a chance to stop his body from bouncing around.

Still midair, Sylver materialized himself a pair of arms and legs out of darkness and waddled over to his body. It was still wrapped around blue robe, who was currently incapable of movement.

The reason for that was the shiny lattice wrapped around every visible inch of the man’s skin.

A sweaterless, and slightly smaller, Mora was sitting on blue robe’s back and informed Sylver that he had about 4 seconds before blue robe freed himself.

Sylver leveled his finger with the man’s nose and flicked it upwards. There was a fraction of a second when Sylver’s beam of abyss magic sliced through Mora’s strings, that blue robe could have theoretically escaped.

Theoretically being the key word here, because the blue robe wearing heir didn’t react in time, and instead died from having his brain cut in two.

[Human (Claw Of The Blue Tiger) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 90 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

Sylver extended his hand towards Mora and grabbed her before the man’s corpse had a chance to fall down. She felt light in an alarming way, the word malnourished didn’t feel right, but going by the incredibly uncomfortable feeling Mora was emanating, whatever she had just done was a one-time thing.

On a later date, Sylver would discover that Mora had different types of threads that she used, and the one she used to restrict the blue robe heir took months to produce and refine. And while it was ridiculously strong, it also had a half-life of barely a minute.

It was one of her trump cards, whenever she fought something she couldn’t defeat, and she had used it up to help him.

In all the commotion, Sylver had lost track of Ria, and it took her shouting at him, for him to find her staff embedded deep in the wall.

“Are you alright?” Ria asked as she helped Sylver wiggle the staff around to get it out of the deep hole purple robe had created

Currently, Sylver looked like a man made out of solid smoke. His robe helped him maintain his form, but he didn’t have a face, hands, feet, and there were bits and pieces of his bigger body’s spine and muscles slowly floating towards the middle of the room, where Spring was being helped by Mora to piece some of it together.

“The important thing is that we won,” Sylver answered, as he summoned Dai to help him pull the staff. The shade fell over when it finally dislodged and came out.

“Is this what winning looks like?” Ria asked, as she absorbed the staff into herself, and floated over to Sylver’s hollow corpse.

“Why did we come here again?” Sylver asked, as he crouched down near his body, and tried to figure out if it was worth the effort to rebuild his outer ribs.

Flesh was quite easy to heal, all things considered. Even if it was extremely dense, it would only take a couple of days for Sylver to regrow all of his skin.

Bone on the other hand was a different matter.

Especially his very fancy bones, which required a number of specific components to repair properly. He had enough with him to fix an arm, and a leg, but he hadn’t planned on having to essentially rebuild his whole skeletal structure.

His right arm was mostly fine, his legs were fractured, but good enough, but his spine had been shattered, as was his outer layer of ribs.

The weird thing was that the damage shouldn’t have been that bad.

Sylver’s extremely educated guess was that purple robe used the same thing Abril, the woman he had cornered to get a meeting with the Bucklers, had used.

“We came here to kill the two heirs of the Blue Tiger sect,” Ria said, in an oddly muted voice.

“Did we kill them?” Sylver asked, as he gestured with his hand towards the two corpses lying near his own, who were going to be patched up a little before he tossed them at the front gates of the Blue Tiger sect.

“Yes,” Ria answered.

“So, we came in here with a goal, and we’ve achieved that goal, and in your mind, this somehow isn’t a win?” Sylver asked, as Ria very vaguely gestured towards his, arguably, destroyed corpse.

“How did he move that fast anyway?” Ria asked, as Sylver summoned a sphere of water into his hand, and fed it to his corpse, to make the flesh swell up, to fill in the various gaps.

“Cultivators can augment their physical abilities, it’s more or less the basis of everything they do. Mages focus on altering the world around them, while cultivators focus on altering the world inside of them.

“But this… He did something, just before he moved, blue robe did it too… It didn’t feel like clairvoyancy, but even at their speed, I should have been able to perceive them…” Sylver said, as he slowly raised his hand in the air, and made all the shredded blood vessels and nerves extend into the hole in the middle of the body until they formed a rudimentary net.

Sylver removed his robe, and Spring helped him put his small ribcage/head combination into the mess of dark gore strings.

“So how do we counter it? If it’s purely physical, I can’t stop it,” Ria asked, as Sylver used one hand to hold his small ribcage in place, while he slowly stood up.

Spring and Fen walked around him and wrapped a very thick bandage around his torso.

“It’s Faust’s problem now. I mean, I do hope that purple robe dies down here, and that’s the end of it… But the much more likely scenario is that this will snowball into something massive. He might get the “hat,” or maybe he’s already gotten out, and is halfway to his sect as we speak.

“Either way, he, and whatever problems he brings, are no longer my concern,” Sylver explained, as he threaded his robe through the gaps between his inner ribs, and the space where his outer ribs should have been.

“Wait… Are we leaving? Is that what you’re saying right now?” Ria asked, with the kind of tone that made Sylver remember she wasn’t as experienced as him.

“What’s the alternative? I chase after him, and he simply shoves me out of my body again? We can’t ambush him, since we’re chasing him, I can’t curse him, because he has more Ki than I have mana, and while I am very tempted to simply throw myself and my shades against him until he’s dead, it would take too much time. We’ve already been down here for a whole day-”

“91 hours, 22 minutes, since the moment we left the sect,” Ria interrupted, as Sylver steadied himself, figuratively, and literally, given that his center of gravity had shifted.

“Anyway… Faust is better suited for this kind of fight,” Sylver said, as he jumped up and down a couple of times, to make sure he didn’t fall out.

Sylver did a backflip, and then a front flip, and then went through a series of stretches. His body was fucked, but it was still in one piece, and while it would take weeks to properly reattach all the various nerves and blood vessels to his smaller ribcage, he could still move, and he could fight, and at this very moment in time, that was enough for him.

His aim with his magic might be a little bit off since he wouldn’t have the coordination his arms and fingers provided, but it wasn’t that bad, given the circumstances.

A normal man would have been crippled beyond any hope of repair, or so dead it wasn’t funny, so while Sylver wasn’t happy about the condition his body was in, he wasn’t going to complain too much.

He limped over to the door they had come into the room through and pressed his right hand against the closed door.

“How are we going to get out?” Ria asked, as Sylver limped to the next door, and placed his palm against it.

“Although it isn’t anything like any dungeon I’ve ever seen, this is undoubtedly, a dungeon. You made a map as we walked through it, did you notice anything strange?” Sylver asked as he moved to the next door.

“Aside from the fact that the only way it makes sense is if this world is non-Euclidean?” Ria asked as Sylver paused for a moment.

Thankfully she realized she used a word he wasn’t familiar with.

“It’s geometry where a straight line isn’t always the shortest distance between two points. Is this one of those things you need to be able to sense mana to understand?” Ria asked as Sylver shook his head as he walked over to the next door.

“More or less. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the inside of our house in Arda is just a bit bigger on the inside. About 10 to 20 percent bigger. I think I even explained it to you,” Sylver said, as he moved on to the next door.

“No, you didn’t. I asked about it, and you said you would give me a book on the subject, but never did,” Ria explained, as Sylver nodded his head, as he moved on to the next door.

“It’s… damn, how do I explain this properly… Do you remember how I mentioned that sometimes a trip from point A to point B can take 10 days, but a trip from point B to point A can take 9 days?” Sylver asked as Ria nodded at him.

“I always found that strange, since you always speak of teleportation magic as if it’s nearly impossible,” Ria said, as Sylver perked up as his palm touched the door, and he found what he was looking for.

“A person teleporting from one place to another isn’t the same as space being naturally compressed. Look, Ria… It’s just a thing here. I don’t know how to explain it properly. Remind me to get you that book I mentioned, because it will do a better job of explaining this than I will,” Sylver said, as his right hand flickered with golden light for a moment.

“Why this door?” Ria asked, as she floated over to Sylver, who was gradually making a hole in the wall for Ria to pick it open.

“Dungeons do this thing so clairvoyants can’t map them out, without coming inside. Sort of like extra locks on doors. But, if you’re able to sense primal energy, you’re able to tell which door has the most locks, and which has the least. Except since the locks are on the sides facing the dungeon core, that’s only useful when you’re trying to leave,” Sylver explained, as he paused for a few seconds to minimize the damage the abyss magic did to his weary flesh.

“Alright…” Ria said uncertainly.

“The point is, assuming Ki dungeons work the same way as mana-based dungeons, we should be on our way to Faust’s sect in a couple of hours,” Sylver explained, as he continued making a hole in the wall.

NEXT CHAPTER