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Ch243-Demons From The Past

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They moved in a swarm, a tsunami of hissing, pale-faced, vampires.

With this much open space, there wasn’t a whole lot Sylver could do, going airborne would be suicide, and digging underground wasn’t possible since the “ground” was Tuli’s flesh, which only left him trying to go through them.

Granted, these were vampires, Sylver would win, but the problem was that he would win eventually. And while Edmund appeared to be doing a good job of interfering with the demon summoning, he wasn’t going to be able to keep it up for long.

Just as Sylver resigned himself to clawing a hole in the wall of bloodsuckers, he felt a presence behind him. He swung with his hand, and the dagger harmlessly bounced off the side of the paladin’s helmet.

The paladin barely reacted to Sylver’s attack, walked past him, and smashed her sword against her shield, pointed at the oncoming vampires.

There was a brief flash of light.

The outer layer of Sylver’s robe fizzled away into a fine ash, but otherwise, he was unharmed.

The horde of vampires on the other hand…

They were strewn all over the place, in big twitching piles. Most were clutching their eyes, or their ears, more than a couple were missing limbs and were waving their ash-covered stumps around, but there were a few that were faking it. Vampires that were too powerful to get damaged by the paladin’s attack.

The fact that they decided to hide amidst their weaker comrades meant they were either waiting to ambush whoever tried to get past them, or they were hiding to protect their stunned pile from being finished off.

Either way, it was a bad idea to get near them.

The paladin followed Sylver as he ran forward, and she used her shield attack again as they got near the small mound of stunned undead.

Sylver kept his eyes glued to the metal tree and used Ulvic to build as much distance between him and the army of vampires as possible. Surprisingly enough, the paladin covered from head to toe in heavy armor not only kept up with Sylver’s wolf shade but also seemed to be capable of moving even faster.

Up near the top, Sylver could see Edmund flying around the portal/egg, as he drenched it in ivory-white fire. Near the bottom of the tree trunk, Sylver could see the vague shape of Sophia standing inside a large silver-colored barrier, using her floating feathers to hold back the metallic thorns of the tree.

The branches grew in pulses and created offshoots every other pulse, which meant that it was only a matter of time until Sophia ran out of metal feathers to block the incoming spikes. More worrying was the fact that the trunk of the tree, the initial metal obelisk, was tilting.

If Sylver had to guess it was lining up with Tuli’s brainstem, to pierce it at a specific angle.

There was just enough room between the metal branches and the ground for Sylver to get to Sophia without being impaled.

She opened a gap in her barrier to let him pass and barely managed to close it in time after Sylver entered to block a giant metal spike.

Sophia said something, as did the priests standing by her side, but Sylver didn’t hear a word they said as he stared at the metal obelisk.

The framework was completely different since the last time he saw it. Sylver had decided on a handful of potential weak points to poke at when he came here but looking at the current framework those weaknesses had not only been covered but reinforced.

“Where’s Faust,” Sylver asked as one of the priests managed to shake him out of his stupor, by physically shaking his shoulder. It was hard to think with this much holy magic surrounding him, even if it wasn’t actively hurting him.

“How do we stop it?” the priest repeated and then repeated a third time as it took Sylver a moment to process the question.

“There’s nothing we can do up here,” Sylver said slowly, without once taking his eyes off Edmund, and the ever-growing glowing sphere he was attacking.

There was a reaction to his fire, but it didn’t feel like the proper reaction. Then again, given the difference in Edmund’s current magical output and what Sylver had grown accustomed to, this might have been the proper reaction for magic of this level.

The priest woman said something again, but Sylver pulled her hand off his shoulder and walked over to where there had been a door at one point. The bone had healed, and fused, without leaving so much as a trace of the doorframe that Edmund had torn out of it.

“Make a hole here,” Sylver ordered to the nearest paladin. The paladin pressed the tip of her spear against the bone, adjusted its angle using her shield, and with a single thrust, forced the entire blade inside.

The woman then twisted the spear, and a massive crack formed on the bone, stretching upwards, and to the left. Sylver gestured for her to stop, and as the woman pulled her spear out, Sylver sent a tendril of fog into it.

Sylver looked up at Edmund and then turned to look at Sophia. Her hair was glued to her head from the sweat, and her shoulders were shaking as she exerted her will onto the silver feathers blocking the oncoming metal branches.

He turned to the spear-wielding paladin.

“Don’t separate from Sophia, and follow after me when her barrier is half the size it is now. If you see Faust tell him to help Edmund,” Sylver said, as he continued extending his tendril of fog further and further down the tunnel.

When the paladin nodded, Sylver used [Fog Form] to materialize inside the tunnel.

The “tunnel” looked like it had been dug using some sort of square instrument, the walls, ceiling, and floor all had cube-shaped holes in them. The tunnel was in the shape of a curved spiral, and the downward angle was steep enough that Sylver could see himself slipping and sliding down the bumpy square “steps.”

It was pitch black, save for the small amount of light coming out of the crack behind him, and there was a noticeable foul smell in the air. Burned toast, along with a garlicky smell.

Sylver’s shades did their best to scout ahead, but with the massive amount of interference the obelisk-turned tree was creating, they couldn’t see a thing.

Sylver sprinted down the steps and lost his footing often enough that half of the sprint was handled by his robe carrying him.

Sylver stopped as he reached a door made from the same black metal that the demon summoning tree was made from.

He considered making a hole around the door, so as not to touch it, but while Sylver channeled mana into his fingers, someone unlocked it from the other side.

The sword tip stopped a half centimeter away from Sylver’s eyeball, and the wave of air the fast movement caused the small pieces of broken bone littering the floor to fly up and rattle as they hit the ceiling.

“Long time no see,” Faust said, as he pulled his sword away from Sylver’s face.

“What’s down there?” Sylver asked.

“A bunch of dead vampires and mercenaries, and a bunch of cages filled with dead goats,” Faust explained, as Sylver gestured for him to follow him.

As Faust had said, the large room was littered with vampire corpses, along with roughly 50 cages just barely big enough to fit the dead goats they were holding.

All the goats had the same square-shaped hole in their forehead. Going by the dry blood, that hole had been what killed them.

On the other side of the room, there was an open door, propped open by a dead vampire.

“Did anything happen when you touched the door?” Sylver asked as Faust shook his head.

“Not as far as I could tell. I threw a vamp at the door before I touched it, but it didn’t react,” Faust said, as Sylver held his finger up against the open door. When nothing happened, he pressed his palm against it.

Aside from being unable to send a pulse of mana through it, the door was just a normal metal door.

“Edmund will need your help. Go up the stairs and break through the bone if there isn’t an opening there already,” Sylver said, with a gesture at the tunnel leading up.

Faust patted Sylver on the shoulder as he passed him, and disappeared up the stairs, leaving behind only a powerful gust of wind.

As he walked amidst the various corpses, Sylver pulled them closer to him using [Dead Dominion]. The goats broke out of their cages as Sylver split their corpses in two, while the vampires were all gathered into an ever-growing ball. Their weapons rattled as they fell onto the ground, as did the cages when Sylver converted the goats into [Necrotic Mutilation].

The green liquid followed after Sylver and devoured everything it came into contact with. The vampires that were missing too many pieces of their bodies were discarded into the river of [Necrotic Mutilation].

The ones that were semi whole, had a mutated [Corpse Blossom] placed into their wounds. The glowing orange honey-like liquid oozed out of the wounds and spread out along the skin the way frost did on a cold window.

Sylver kept one hand on the bright orange liquid, and tiny flecks of blue began to appear on its surface. Little by little something akin to fine hair began to sprout from the blue flecks, and by the time Sylver reached the next door, most of the floating corpses were covered in the moss-like blue hair.

He moved the moss-covered sphere of dead behind him, and while he waited for the roots to finish spreading, focused on the corpses that were whole. The slits on Sylver’s palms opened up and pitch-black smoke oozed out of them.

The bubble of smoke disappeared into the first corpse’s mouth, and as it began to shudder, more smoke appeared and spread to the 3 nearest corpses. Within the span of a minute, there was an interconnecting web of black smoke stretching from the 32 dead vampires’ mouths and wounds.

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

…

[Undead Mastery (VI) Proficiency increased to 19%!]

The vampires-turned-zombies landed on the ground with a heavy thud. The ones that hadn’t been damaged before being killed all wore heavy armor, and the only wound Faust had inflicted on them was a single hole through their left eyehole.

If these had been matured vampires, even removing their heads wouldn’t necessarily killed them. But these humans had been infected less than a week ago, the curse likely hadn’t even fully infected their bodies yet.

The zombies moved in near perfect sync with one another, as they formed into a tight rectangle formation, with Sylver walking behind them. His sphere of [Necrotic Mutitlation] splashed onto their armor, reinforced it, and did the same for their weapons.

While the zombie at the very front reached for the door handle, Sylver moved the sphere of moss floating behind him, above the zombies. As he released [Dead Dominions] grasp on the orange/blue substance it fell and broke apart against the helmets of the zombies below.

The blue mass wriggled around like a collection of worms as it slithered through the few armor gaps it could find, while the excess landed on the floor and slithered towards Sylver. The zombies twitched violently and made their armor rattle as the “fungus” injected itself into their flesh.

Sylver on the other hand merely rolled his head and cracked his neck as the leftover “fungus” pooled together on his back and formed into a deep blue scab.

You had to have a very loose definition of what constitutes a “fungus” to describe the thing Sylver had created while experimenting in his workshop. It wasn’t “alive” and it most certainly wasn’t “undead,” but given that Sylver felt like someone set his spine on fire when he tried to analyze the “plant matter” he decided that calling it a “fungus” would be adequate for the moment.

When the door opened, Sylver’s senses were immediately attacked by a painfully bitter scent.

The door that the zombie in front had opened revealed an unmoving cloud of red smoke. The smoke covered the doorway completely and was thick enough that Sylver couldn’t see what was on the other side of the door.

The zombie that stood at the very front leaned forward for a moment and sprinted through the dark red smoke.

Sylver heard the sounds of metal scratching metal, followed by hissing, followed by a wet squelching noise, and finally, he felt the mana he had used to raise the zombie return to him through [Dying Breath].

Under different circumstances, Sylver would have simply strapped a bunch of explosives onto a zombie and sent it ahead.

But he was inside Tuli and wanted to keep the destruction to a minimum. Not to mention he needed to be careful not to destroy the demon-summoning framework.

Sylver’s goal was to stop it, in a careful, controlled way. Possibly use it to trap the demon, and steal its core, but the important thing was not to destroy it. Because demon-summoning frameworks tended to implode if they were damaged, and sent whatever was unlucky enough to be within its range into the demon realm.

And at this moment in time, Sylver didn’t want to go to the demon realm.

Instead of sending another zombie inside, Sylver sent 10, in a neat single file line.

There was a lot more noise this time around, a lot more hissing, and just when Sylver felt that his zombies were about to be victorious, he began to feel [Dying Breath] refund him the mana he spent on raising them return to him.

The zombies didn’t die all at once, and they didn’t die one by one either, they died in batches of 3, which meant there was a good chance there were 3 enemies inside.

Sylver made sure to keep a zombie in front of him as he approached the smoke-filled doorway. He couldn’t feel anything past the door and the wall, even with [Dead Dominion].

Very slowly the zombie in front of Sylver lifted its arm and pushed it through the smoke. Sylver channeled his mana through the zombie and tried to get a feel for what was going on with the smoke.

As far as he could tell, the only thing it did was conceal the things it surrounded. Not quite a perfect mana insulator, but more than enough to block a mage’s mana sense.

As much as Sylver disliked going in blind, he was slightly pressed for time, on account of the demon being summoned and all that.

He had some dirt and river water stocked up inside his bones, but he was saving those for an emergency. Even if he had a vine grow into the smoke, it was unlikely to yield any useful information, and if the thing inside was powerful enough to destroy the armored zombies, it was more than powerful enough to break an overgrown stick.

Sylver prepared his spell in his hand as he walked away from the doorway. The remaining zombies lined up, and got into position. Sylver tensed his legs, and sprinted towards the door as fast as he could, with the zombies running right next to him, covering his front, back, and sides.

***

“Welcome to-”

Sylver went deaf from the sound and hoped the same happened to the other 4 people. The auditory illusion had been pushed to its limit, and was closer to a blast of air, as opposed to a sound at this level.

But a blast of air was a single push, whereas this was a continuous high-pitched screech.

As he ran, Sylver took note of his surroundings.

The space he was in was a large dome, where the ground, walls, and ceiling were made from a bright red material that had the texture of soft leather. The ground was perfectly flat, with no buildings or furniture in sight, save for a single square pillar in the middle of the room, on which a man dressed in red robes stood, clutching at his ears. He had been the one that had spoken when Sylver broke through the smoke.

At the bottom of the pillar were 3 creatures that could loosely be described as large human women.

Their skin was the same shade of red as the inside of the dome, to the point it would have been hard to see them, if not for the pulsing black veins bulging against their barely contained muscles. Their heads were bald, and the interlocking teeth in their mouths had grown so much that they reached down to their chin and obscured their eyes.

They were almost nude, save for scraps of clothing covering their chest and hips, and thick metal collars around their necks, that were attached by a chain to the square pillar on which the man in the red robe stood.

Sylver’s zombies ran past him in a loose group, and only 3 stayed with him as protection. As they got near the pillar, Sylver wondered where the corpses of the previous 11 zombies were.

The floor underneath him rippled, and as Sylver tried to put his weight onto his next foot, he felt it go through the now liquid floor. The two zombies on his left and right grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him as hard as they could into the air, as they sunk into the floor.

While airborne Sylver felt the bodies of the zombies move underground, and a fraction of a second later, saw their heads poke out of the ground near the 3 red women. The women’s mouths opened, and continued opening, as they unhinged their jaws, and faster than Sylver’s eyes could follow, they bit off the zombie’s head.

As Sylver flew through the air, he tried to find the man on the platform, but he was gone.

And as Sylver lost feeling in his left leg, he also noticed that the three red women had been unchained and one of them had devoured his second favorite leg.

Sylver ignored her and instead focused on the red woman attacking him from his blind spot, or rather, where a normal human mage would have had a blind spot.

Sadly, even with the fungus empowering him an undead magic user was no match for a blood frenzied vampire. He was ready for her, managed to catch her by the hand, and by the neck, but all his effort was for nothing, as the woman dislocated his shoulder and almost effortlessly placed his arm up to his elbow into her mouth.

She, and the one that ate his foot, both tried to push themselves away from him, to tear the broken bone with flesh away from the main body, but they both ran into the same problem.

Sylver was flung into the air, as the two women essentially launched him on account of the tangled strings connecting Sylver’s stumps to their mouths, or more accurately, to the limbs inside their throats.

With the surprisingly sturdy strings connecting them, the women were pulled along with him, given that Sylver weighed a lot more than he appeared.

Both women attempted to use their claws to slice through the string, but this wasn’t some simple steel wire that any old vampire could break, this was wire made by a creature that Sylver considered an equal.

Suffice to say, the women’s claws were useless, and all they did was tangle themselves up even worse. Sylver yanked his missing left hand as hard as he could, and he managed to pull the woman who tried to eat his hand towards him.

She used the hand that wasn’t covered in string to protect the back of her neck and tried to get Sylver tangled up in the string with the other. It somewhat worked, but it didn’t matter, since Sylver wasn’t planning on using his hands to attack them.

The frenzied woman tried to predict what Sylver would do, and pre-emptively prepared her free hand to catch Sylver’s.

She guessed wrong, as Sylver leaned towards her, and while she reached for his right hand, he lunged at her face and managed to sink his teeth into the side of her head. Sylver’s teeth cut through her leather-like skin and stopped dead when they reached her bones.

But it didn’t matter, since the thing Sylver was after was her ear. The red woman made a pained chirping noise, as Sylver further tangled the string, and bound her as much as possible.

Before he could finish what he started, a third pair of hands appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Sylver by the neck, so tightly that his vertebrate disconnected from one another. His body went limp for a second, less than a second, but it was enough time for him to lose his grip. The woman pulled him away and sent him flying to the ground.

He collided with the soft-looking ground with so much force that his skull cracked from the impact. But before he so much as bounced, the floor turned liquid again.

Once he was underground, Sylver felt the owner’s mana touch his own, and he was relieved beyond words that it wasn’t tainted with demonic energy. The red women creatures were tainted with demon magic, but the caster was thankfully clean.

Sylver quite literally breathed a sigh of relief as only his head popped out from the ground, at the feet of the red robe-wearing man.

Sylver’s ears were still deaf from the spell he used, but because of [Lesser Perception] he could hear the red robe-wearing man loud and clear.

This close to him Sylver could see that the robe the man was wearing was moving as if it was liquid. It was flowing downwards, in much the same way Sylver’s robe tended to look when he wasn’t actively manipulating it.

The vampire with glowing red eyes crouched down so he was looking Sylver in the eye.

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

The vampire made a face, and reached out towards Sylver’s head with his hand, but changed his mind at the last second. A wise move on his part.

Sylver cleared his throat before he spoke.

“You seem like a man that can be reasoned with…” Sylver said.

The vampire stopped smiling, and his eyes went cold.

“I used to be,” it said.

While Sylver continued working on his disconnected foot and hand, via Mora’s enchanted strings, he suddenly felt something very strange. The two women he was trying to curse were already cursed.

Not just by the curse that made them vampires, or whatever it is they were now, but Sylver felt his curse sitting dormant inside their bodies. Which meant that the blood coursing through their bodies had come from someone that Sylver had cursed.

And the only person Sylver had cursed, that didn’t die, was Nautis.

Sylver got a better look at Nautis, and he was completely unrecognizable. Everything from his face to his body language, down to the way he controlled his mana was incomparable to the man Sylver had met before.

“You remember me… good,” Nautis said.

Wait, did Nautis have this accent in the past?

Also, Nautis was clearly not powerful enough to have been the one who built that demonic metal pillar. Which meant he was, as usual, working for someone else.

“Why are you summoning a demon?” you fucking moron, Sylver asked.

Nautis stood up from his crouch and walked over to the woman that had Sylver’s hand in her mouth. When he placed his hand on her forehead, she turned into a fine mist, and Sylver’s hand and the attached strings fell through her.

Sylver decided that since Nautis wasn’t in the mood to talk, he would have to persuade him. The “ground” Sylver was trapped inside was strong, but by no means unbreakable. The zombies were having a hard time with it, but they weren’t that far away from breaching the surface.

Very carefully Sylver sent a needle-thin tendril of fog from inside the woman chewing on his leg, and via [Fog Form] Sylver materialized directly behind her. His left hand hung limply from the strings coming out of his elbow, and Sylver stood on one foot while the other was being pulled towards his knee.

As he slapped his hand down onto the back of the woman’s head, the sleeve around Sylver’s arm exploded from the escaping steam.

The woman turned around and slashed Sylver through the face and neck with her claws. Her claws passed through a thin cloud of fog, but the woman from the back landed a direct hit on the very solid Sylver’s shoulder.

He crumpled to the floor, as his knee had shattered from the force, but before he could even start falling, the third woman kicked him away from the one Sylver had attacked.

While he was in the air, Sylver tried to use [Deadly Darkness] to create a platform for himself, but sadly, the solidified shadow didn’t have anything to grab onto, since the dome walls/ceiling were also liquid.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to dodge out of the way of the next attack and materialized as close to the ceiling as he dared, directly above the platform in the middle of the room. Sylver couldn’t fly, or float, his only means of not touching the floor was to use [Fog Form] to travel upwards.

The room was large enough for Will the wyvern to fly, probably, but he needed a running start, there wasn’t anywhere near enough space for that.

The woman Sylver had slapped was clutching at her head, while Nautis shoved the other red woman’s wrist into her mouth. He was probably trying to make her feed to dilute Sylver’s magic, but he was too late.

[Bloodied Demonic Thrall (Berserker + Bloodied Berserker + Unholy Berserker + Cannibal Berserker) Converted!]

The woman bit down on the red woman’s wrist and bit straight through the bone. The red woman screamed and tried to pull away, but the red thrall under Sylver’s control wrapped her arms around her and tried to bite her neck.

With something to anchor himself on, Sylver used his thrall’s shadow to pull him toward the remaining trio.

Sylver was about to reach Nautis when the man vanished into a cloud of red smoke. Sylver passed through the cloud and nearly collided with his thrall, which was now falling into the suddenly liquid floor.

“We can still talk things out Nautis!” Sylver shouted at the cloud of red.

The two red women's thralls that weren’t under Sylver’s control stopped moving, and Sylver’s thrall stopped sinking into the floor for a moment. The whole room went silent.

“Nautis?” Nautis asked, from his cloud of red.

Sylver used his thrall’s shadow to stay above the liquid floor.

“I’m willing to let you live if you help me!” Sylver shouted.

The keyword in that sentence was the “I” in “I’m,” because while Sylver might be willing to let Nautis live, there was a good chance Sophia wouldn’t be as kind.

“You think I’m Nautis?” Nautis or the man Sylver thought was Nautis, asked.

“Whoever you are! We can work something out where no one-”

“You bloody bastard!” the red cloud of smoke screamed, as it flew towards Sylver.

Sylver raised his hand towards the smoke, and his wrist made a clicking sound. As the smoke approached him, Sylver summoned an explosive into his hand and detonated it.

The result was that the cloud of smoke was dispersed and incinerated, while Sylver merely lost the skin covering his palm, and the edge of his sleeve got a bit burned. Without soft skin to keep the metal plates quiet, Sylver’s fingers rattled as he closed them into a fist.

“Bastard,” a voice said in a calm tone. Sylver almost turned to look at the remaining 2 red women thralls but saw movement in the edge of his vision before he did.

The man in the red robe was standing on top of the platform, so full of anger that his face was almost as red as his robe and eyes.

The two women that weren’t under Sylver’s control became even redder than they had been a moment prior, and faster than Sylver could blink, they tore his thrall into pieces.

“You fucking bastard,” the red robe-wearing man repeated, still calm, as he produced a wooden mask out of his pocket.

It was the kind that covered the mouth and left the nose and eyes exposed, and it had been painted to make it seem like the person had a giant red eye where his mouth should be. “Do you remember me now!” the man holding the mask asked.

Sylver waited a moment before he spoke. He searched around his head for so much as a hint as to who this mysterious, apparently not Nautis, stranger was.

“Not even a little,” Sylver answered honestly.