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Ch254-Tongue Tangled

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“Still here,” Sylver repeated.

The snake-haired woman once again looked away from him, along with the snakes on her head. A couple of loose strands of serpents kept an eye on him, but the vast majority were going out of the way not to see him.

“As tempted as I am to stand around all day and admire the view, I have people waiting for me,” Sylver said.

There was most likely a more delicate way of phrasing this, but the woman standing in front of Sylver was insanely attractive. So much so that if Sylver was anybody else he would have been worried she was using magic to affect his mind.

Even if you ignored her eyes, her face, neck, shoulders, everything down to her sandal-covered feet, calling her merely “perfect” felt like an insult.

Which was very strange, because Sylver was very aware of the type of woman he was generally attracted to, and the one in front of him, despite being “perfect,” was most certainly not his type.

Obviously, his mind hadn’t been affected because he would have felt the disturbance through his soul. And his soul hadn’t been affected because his soul couldn’t be affected.

Which begged the question, why was Sylver tripping over himself in front of a woman he shouldn’t be attracted to?

The answer had nothing to do with the physical condition of his body, he hadn’t been poisoned, and her soul, while impressive, wasn’t impressive enough to warrant such an overreaction.

So why had he spent the last 10 minutes staring at her posterior without a single care in the world?

He felt almost drunk from her beauty, but in a clean and clear-headed sort of way, like had just woken up from the world’s most comfortable and relaxing nap.

Sylver was content to simply stand here, and stare at the woman, but luckily for both, Sylver’s ability to ignore his desires meant he was able to press on, regardless of how his lower half protested.

“My name is Sylver Sezari,” Sylver said, with such an uncharacteristically meek tone of voice that his introduction almost sounded like a question. The snake-haired woman continued hiding her face in her hands, but a few more of the snakes escaped from her tangled mess of serpents to look at him.

He gave himself a few seconds to gather his thoughts and spoke with his usual level of self-assuredness.

“I am a C-rank adventurer registered in Arda, a necromancer, master of dark the arts, and anything associated with them,” Sylver explained.

A few more strands of snakes turned to look at him.

“I came here to speak with Medusa and Euryale, regarding the curses they placed on Tristen and Amelia. To see if there’s a way for them to remove their curses. Aside from that, I am also here to see if it is possible for the two of them to work for me,” Sylver said.

With each name he mentioned, chunks of snakes turned to look, and when he spoke of hiring them, more than half of the back portion of the snake-haired woman’s snakes were facing toward him.

But the woman herself continued covering her face with her hands. She didn’t look frightened exactly, it was more along the lines of… embarrassed?

“I was impressed by the wording of the contracts, as well as the rock salt and sea foam curse being used. And if either of them are interested we can discuss payment. There is very little I’m incapable of acquiring, just short of anything is on the negotiating table,” Sylver said.

“I’m also exceptionally knowledgeable in dark magic. I’m a master of it… Expert and authority on all things dark magic… I’m also… Can you understand me?” Sylver asked.

He’d been speaking Eirish and only now remembered the contracts were written in that weird mix of Elvish dialects.

Thankfully the snakes on the woman’s head nodded for her.

“Alright, good…” Sylver said.

He ran his hands through his hair, breathed in, and slowly breathed out.

“Shot in the dark, but is your race exclusively female? And you’re so surprised by my presence and immunity to your curse that you can’t decide how or what to say to me?” Sylver asked.

The snake-haired woman didn’t quite flinch, but she shifted her center of balance.

“I’ll take that as a yes… There isn’t much I can do about the being male part, but I can explain my immunity to your curse if you’re interested,” Sylver offered.

This time the woman nodded her head and made the snakes sticking out of her scalp bob up and down.

“Would you tell me your name in exchange for the explanation?” Sylver offered.

Sylver waited for another nod, but neither the woman nor the snakes made any movement to imply agreement. He gave her a few more seconds to think it over before he started to speak.

“I’m what my people refer to as a ‘pure-dark.’ You might know it under a different name, ‘hollow soul,’ Elves call it ‘black heart,’ Dwarves called it ‘spiritless.’ If there’s a specific word for it in your language, it’s most likely some variation of the word for ‘empty.’” Sylver explained.

He pressed on despite the woman’s lack of reaction.

“Your curse relies on pure negative energy, and there isn’t enough positive energy in my body or my soul for it to interact with. It’s the equivalent of trying to drink soup using a fork, it’ll just pass through the prongs,” Sylver explained.

The muscles in the woman’s arms moved, and she turned her body slightly but didn’t say or do anything else. Given her change in posture, she was preparing to run.

“I’m not going to make the mistake of trying to approach you. So, I’m going to turn around, and if you want to touch my head or something to confirm I’m not an illusion or a trick, you have my permission,” Sylver said.

He gave the shades infused into the clumps of [Black Mass] that made up his torso armor the order to stand down, Spring and the shades in his shadow, did the same for his robe, and then turned around and focused his [Lesser Perception] on the empty tunnel in front of him.

It wasn’t out of the question the snake-haired woman could sense where people were looking, and the last thing Sylver wanted right now was to give her a reason to doubt him.

There was a chance she might have her snakes bite his exposed neck, and inject him with her venom, but that was a risk Sylver was willing to take if it meant potentially acquiring such a gifted woman.

Assuming this was Medusa or Euryale and Sylver wasn’t exposing his back to a monster that was using some kind of wild magic to lull Sylver into lowering his guard by presenting itself as one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life, ever.

It would not be the first time he fell for such a trick, but unlike last time, he wasn’t naked, was at least somewhat armed, and Nyx wasn’t observing him from a distance with so much disdain and disappointment that it took almost 200 years before she stopped telling that story to new Ibis apprentices.

Sylver waited for a good minute before he started to speak again.

“I’m not leaving without at the very least a conversation. If you’re mute, I have paper and pens. If not that I have no problem playing charades with you. If-”

Sylver felt a surprisingly cold finger touch the back of his skull.

The snake-haired woman very slowly increased the pressure of her finger, to the point Sylver had to glue his feet to the floor to stop himself from being tipped over.

The snake-haired woman then grabbed a fistful of his hair, and pulled hard enough that a regular person’s hair would have been torn off.

She let go of his hair, placed her hands on his shoulders, and gradually made her way down Sylver’s arms until she reached his elbows, at which point she squeezed his bicep with enough force that her fingers left bruises.

Sylver realized a few things from the physical contact.

For starters, this relatively small woman had enough strength to break his bones if she so wished.

But she was unaware of this fact, given that Sylver felt no malice when she pulled down on his left arm and came dangerously close to dislocating it out of his shoulder.

Sylver suppressed a shiver as something wet touched the back of his neck. It was too wide to be one of the snakes, and given the position of the woman’s hands, he had to assume it was her tongue.

As for the woman’s soul, it was guarded, but Sylver couldn’t tell if she was actively doing it, or if her soul was naturally defensive against any kind of attempt to interact with it. He could see the outline, but the rest of the information was vague, and a guess, more than any kind of real observation.

As for her magic ability… the curse on her skin was most definitely not her own making, but she had a remarkable amount of control over it. Although it seemed to be the sort that was active by default, and the snake-haired woman had to go out of her way to suppress it.

She proceeded to slide her hand up his ribs, and froze when she reached the spot where the bodies in this dungeon had a “cut sack.” She breathed out as she pushed down on that area, whether in surprise or because she had been holding her breath and only now ran out, Sylver couldn’t tell.

Very slowly the woman took her hands off him, and the next thing Sylver felt was a breeze, followed by the sound of the metal door hitting the wall.

“I’m going to turn around now,” Sylver said to the tunnel in front of him.

He waited a few seconds, and step by step, turned around.

The metal door the woman had come from was wide open, and the light embedded in the ceiling was illuminating the significantly smaller tunnel inside. Sylver would need to walk while crouched to get through it, if it was even an inch smaller he would have had to crawl.

“I’m going to follow the light!” Sylver shouted down the tunnel.

He used his hand to balance himself, to stop his head from hitting the ceiling, while he duck-walked through the illuminated tunnel. Sylver kept the shades inside his shadow and went out of his way not to let his mana wander away from him, into the tunnels that weren’t illuminated.

Isolated groups were…

Some of them were difficult to interact with.

The ones worth talking to were typically smart enough to understand that Sylver was genuine in his desire to trade/negotiate/communicate.

But more than a few misinterpreted his desire to talk things out as a sign of weakness.

Sylver wasn’t above squeezing information out of people, sometimes in the literal sense of the word, but people were typically more honest and cooperative when they weren’t fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

Isolated groups that Sylver was interested in because of a natural resource or something physical that they possessed, that could be taken away without any consequences, were given a lot fewer chances to reconsider their decision to attack him.

Sylver never went out of his way to resort to violence and did his best to always be open-minded, and to a certain degree patient...

But if his option is to spend 5 years meditating in a wet cave, sucking diseased water out of tree roots, to prove he was a “man,” or to simply snap his fingers and have his legion of undead take the fucking enchanted spring water, he genuinely didn’t feel like he was the one being unreasonable.

But he couldn’t result to violence with this snake woman, because what he wanted wasn’t a physical item. He wanted their skills, their know-how, their abilities, and while it was possible to force them into working for him, with Edmund’s reluctant help in this specific case, people tended to work better when they were doing it out of their own free will.

As Sylver followed the illuminated tunnel, he noticed tiny strips of something hanging off the nails embedded into the walls. He let go of the “string” once he realized that they were shed snake skin, presumably from the snakes in the snake woman’s hair, given the small size.

Sylver reached a spot in the tunnel where the dim light in the ceiling continued through a hole in the wall that had been torn open with claws.

The smooth metal walls were replaced by a porous rock, that felt wet to the touch. Sylver tried walking, but even with how flexible he was, his body wasn’t built for this sort of movement. He lay flat on his stomach and had his robe push him through the tunnel.

The tunnel didn’t have any turns, and went downward, with a slight curl to the left.

At some point, Syvler’s robe slipped, and he began to slide down the tunnel.

Because of his weight, he built up a considerable amount of speed, and if he wasn’t deep fucking underwater, deep fucking underground, and going even deeper, this might have been a fun experience.

Just as he finished that thought, the tunnel curved straight down, and because of the speed he had built up, Sylver was sent flying down the cylindrical illuminated tunnel.

To not seem hostile Sylver had held back from sensing too much of his surroundings, kept the shades inside his shadow, and the result of that brilliant and polite decision was that he hit the ground head first, with so much force, that his head smashed through the rock floor, and Sylver was buried up to his shoulders in rubble.

His robe pulled him out of the ground and turned him until he was standing upright. While he looked around, it shook the loose pieces of rock out of itself.

Sylver had seen this place before.

Or something similar enough that he didn’t feel any confusion as to what he was looking at.

He was standing inside an enormous dome, so large that clouds were sitting inside the top of it. The curved walls of the dome were hidden behind thick brown colored plants, with pinkish glowing spheres hanging off them, that somehow made it seem like there was daylight inside the dome.

Sylver’s head snapped towards the sound of whispering voices, and he saw 3 identical women standing a fair distance away, with their backs turned towards him.

After 10 steps, he realized he had been walking towards them and stopped.

Underneath the gentle light of the glowing fruits the three women looked like they were straight from painting. The word was at the tip of Sylver’s tongue, but he couldn’t reach it, the women were perfect, but they were perfect in a way that was so dangerously close to something wrong that altering even a single tiny detail would ruin the whole thing.

The women’s backs were towards Sylver, but the snakes on their heads were looking right at him.

For some reason, Sylver checked if there was someone behind him, and when he turned around saw that one of the women had turned to face him.

It was the same one that had felt him up, he was certain of it, her golden eyes were aglow with such a unique color that it was impossible to mistake it for anyone else.

“My name of Sylver Sezari. I’m looking for Medusa and Euryale. I came here to speak to them, and if you don’t attack me, I won’t attack you,” Sylver explained calmly.

He still had a difficult time keeping his thoughts in check, but with every passing moment, his mind cleared up, as he got accustomed to the impossible beauty in front of him.

Just when he thought he had a solid grasp on his senses, one of the snake women turned her head, and Sylver saw eyes so blue that he felt every single heart inside his torso skip a beat.

It was indescribable, it was bluer than the bluest blue to exist, sapphires, clear skies, all the flowers, beasts, monsters, art pieces, anything and everything Sylver had witnessed to this day was a shoddy imitation of the color he was seeing now.

Sylver had seen unbelievable things before, shit that drove him insane, in the literal sense of the word, but this was the first time he was experiencing something so pleasant that it was impairing his mind.

“I’m…” Sylver searched around inside himself, for something even remotely close to a solid sentence.

Worse was, he was so confused himself that it had spread to Spring and the shades.

Maybe a minute passed after the snake-haired woman with blue eyes had looked at him.

“I’m struggling to speak because I’m overcome by a sense of… for the sake of simplicity I’m going to say ‘lust,’ because ‘enthralled’ or ‘infatuated’ doesn’t feel sufficient. Are the three of you silent because you’re experiencing something similar?” Sylver asked.

The two women initially merely looked confused, but once they processed the words he had said, they simultaneously turned away from him and covered their faces with their hands.

Sylver nodded his head.

“Completely reasonable reaction. A man you never met before fell into your home, stood there smiling like an idiot, and then explained that he’s being as odd as he is due to a debilitating sense of ‘lust.’ But in my experience, being upfront about these sorts of things works out better than dancing around the subject. Avoids potentially deadly misunderstandings,” Sylver explained.

He waited for a response, or even a reaction, but they continued standing there, without moving or speaking. They might have all been shivering, but it was hard to say from this distance.

“What if I close my eyes and turn around?” Sylver asked, as he placed his hand over his eyes, and turned around.

Before he even finished turning, he felt 3 presences standing close enough to him that he could feel the tiny currents their breathing produced.

“Did either of you understand a word he said?” a voice asked in the language the “elves” in the ice realm used.

The woman’s voice sounded… a bit higher pitched than he expected given their appearance, but he wouldn’t describe it as anything out of the ordinary.

“Some of it. I think he said he’s looking for silver,” a different voice answered.

“I didn’t think he was speaking Eirish for the first couple minutes,” a third voice said.

“Do you think it’s just a thick accent or a speech impediment?” the voice that had spoken second asked.

Sylver rolled his eyes, but the comment about his way of speaking helped bring his head out of the clouds.

“If you couldn’t understand me, you should have said something,” Sylver said calmly in the language the three snake-haired women spoke in. It was the same language the “elves” in the ice realm used, and the language Tristen’s and Amelia’s contracts had been written in.

There was silence once again, but it was different from the silence he had been subjected to earlier.

He could hear the 3 women’s clothing move as they looked at one another and unanimously decided to ignore his question.

“I am Medusa, queen of the Gorgons! These two are my sisters Euryale and Stheno!” Medusa said, presumably with a gesture towards the two women in question.

“I am Sylver Sezari, half-lich, world-class necromancer, master practitioner of the dark arts, with a specialty in curses,” Sylver explained, with as much emphasis as he could apply.

Just as Sylver started to turn around, a hand with soft palms and a vice-like grip appeared on his left shoulder and stopped him as if he was trying to push against a wall.

“Stay as you are!” Medusa, queen of the Gorgons, said in a significantly higher-pitched voice than she had used a moment earlier. Sylver tried not to smile, but even he could hear the grin in his voice.

“As you wish,” Sylver said and could hear Medusa, queen of the Gorgons, silently shushing her grinning sisters.

“Why did you come here?” one of the sisters asked. She was the one on Sylver’s left, but he didn’t know if she was Stheno or Euryale.

“To see if it’s possible for the curse Medusa and Euryale put on Tristen and Emilia to be removed, but mostly I came here to recruit the two of them,” Sylver explained.

There was a 10-second silence.

“Recruit them to do what?” Medusa asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Conduct research, perform experiments, write up magically binding contracts, guard certain locations for me, I don’t know your full skillset to answer the question properly. I wouldn’t ask something they’re incapable or unwilling to do,” Sylver said.

An awkward amount of time passed without the sisters moving or saying anything. Or rather, an awkward amount of time passed without the sisters making a sound that was in a frequency Sylver’s ears were capable of hearing.

“How did you get here?” one of the sisters that wasn’t Medusa asked.

“I swam down a crack in the ground, attacked a bunch of pipes at the bottom of it, got sucked into the pipes, forced my way into a door, ended up inside what may have been a dungeon, felt what I’m guessing is the spell you use for light inside one of the walls, made a hole in the wall, and traveled through it until I arrived in this area through a tiny crack in one of your walls, met the sister with the golden eyes, and followed her trail of lights into this place,” Sylver said in a single breath.

The sisters spoke amongst themselves for a while, at least that was what Sylver presumed given that he could hear them breathing between their sentences.

“Are there others like you?” Medusa asked.

“One of a kind I’m afraid,” Sylver said with a joking tone. “But if you’re asking if there are people other than me that could look at you, without turning to sea salt, or sea foam, the answer is maybe. I’m confident that I can cobble together something to block your magic, but there are tests I need to run before I can honestly say yes,” Sylver said.

There was more talking amongst the sisters after this. The talk turned into an argument since somebody was moving their arms around with enough force that Selver felt the wind their hands created.

He decided he might as well ask what he wanted to ask.

“Am I correct in assuming that there’s a connection between Medusa being the queen of Gorgons and the Gorgoneion?” Sylver asked.

His question ground their argument to a halt.

“What do you know about it?” Medusa asked.

Normally Sylver would have an issue with someone answering a question with a question, but given the peculiar circumstances, he didn’t dwell on it.

“The one I saw was a weathered metal disc. It was green. And I didn’t feel any magic coming off it. The woman that was translating for me said it’s a “representation of authority.” Everyone was very careful that I didn’t touch it,” Sylver explained.

As before, silence.

If these women were even a little less impressive in the wording of their contract and weren’t as mind-numbingly attractive as they were, Sylver would have confronted them on their rudeness and then turned this friendly conversation into something closer to an interrogation.

But they were as attractive as they were and as impressive as they were, so Sylver just waited for them to finish speaking in a language he not only couldn’t understand but couldn’t even hear.

Maybe 10 minutes had passed before Sylver spoke.

“Look ladies, let’s not overcomplicate this. I have already told you what I want. So, if you tell me what you want, we’ll be able to work something out,” Sylver offered.

“How do we know we can trust you?” Medusa asked.

She touched a sore spot with that question, but luckily for them, Sylver was still a bit too off-kilter to take serious offense at the question.

“Any proof I can think of is questionable at best. So I’ll just say that I trust you and that I hope you feel that the risk of trusting me is worth it,” Sylver said.

Less than a minute passed. Neither sister spoke, and Sylver got the sense they were just looking at one another, and communicating with each other through their eyes.

“The Gorgoneion is a key. There are 8 of them. We have 3, and the families in Finland have the remaining 5,” Medusa said.

“A key to what?” Sylver asked.

“It’s a key…” Medusa audibly gulped, “to the cage…” she lowered the volume of her voice down to the point it was almost a whisper and stood on her tiptoes to speak directly into Sylver’s ear “-of the Leviathan.”