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264-Interesting Companions

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Melo handled the waystone as if it was about to explode.

He wore thick gloves, used an almost meter-long pair of tongs, and wore a welding mask, that he had bent into a head-covering helmet.

The contraption he was using to analyze the little piece of amber Sylver had been carrying inside him for the last year or so, looked like a glass cauldron, filled with a clear gel, with a bunch of toothpick-sized pieces of obsidian floating on the gel’s surface.

When Melo submerged Sylver’s waystone into the gel, it appeared to unravel, layers upon layers of fluffy string came out of it and muddled up the crystal-clear gel.

The strings immediately got tangled up in one another, and as the gel crystalized and filled the cauldron with what looked like glass shards, Sylver understood why someone as sensitive to dimensional magic as Melo handled the tiny piece of yellow amber with so much care.

While Sylver watched the crystals silently shatter against other crystal fragments, Melo used a ladder to get on top of the glass cauldron, and using a long thin tube that was wrapped into a bundle of knots like a ruined silly straw, sprinkled a barely visible deep blue powder into the cauldron, and slowly stirred it.

The crystals inside became faster, their movement became significantly more violent, and although it was silent enough that Sylver could hear Melo’s tense breathing from underneath his helmet, Sylver flinched as if a bomb had gone off beside him.

Because he felt the space surrounding him shiver from whatever it was that Melo was doing.

Within the time it took Melo to climb down the ladder, the crystal vortex going on inside the glass cauldron had slowed down so much that if it wasn’t glittering from the tiny shards turning around, Sylver would have thought it had stopped moving altogether.

Melo used a magnifying glass that was bigger than his head to observe the crystals inside, then a handheld telescope, and finally climbed underneath the cauldron and spent the next ten minutes staring up at it.

Spring gave Sylver a quick rundown of what each group of shades had done.

For the most part, they were clearing rubble, aside from the danger of a rock shifting and crushing someone, some buildings had hazardous materials that could make unprotected living people extremely ill if they were to accidentally inhale any of it.

Out of the 9,692 shades Sylver currently had somewhere out in the city, and not inside his shadow, a negligible amount had come into contact with something that killed them. At Spring’s request, Sylver gave him ¾ of his [Black Mass] armour, and the shade spread the inky material out amongst the working shades to speed everything up.

The ones that worked with lumber made wooden nails out of wood scraps, the ones working with the stone masons made the bottom parts of the rocks slippery to push them around easier, and the shades working with the logistic guys slathered long rope with the material and created makeshift lifts.

Melo climbed out from underneath the glass cauldron, took off his helmet, wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve, and gestured for Sylver to sit down.

“I got nothing,” Melo said.

“All that and you have nothing?” Sylver asked.

“Your question was “will this send me to the demon realm or some other bullshit?” And regarding that, I have nothing,” Melo explained.

“Given the way you phrased it; I take it you have something? ” Sylver asked.

“Do you know what a “Realm Anchor” is?” Melo asked.

Sylver crossed his arms over his chest.

“I do,” he answered.

“One of the locations being used as a reference point is held in place with a Realm Anchor.

And going by your lack of surprise, I’m going to guess the Realm Anchor is somewhere in the cave,” Melo said.

“It is,” Sylver said.

“I think… To be completely honest with you, I have no idea what I’m looking at. If someone brought it in and I didn’t know who made it, I would have said it’s a fancy teleportation blocker,” Melo said while he vaguely gestured at the waystone Sylver had created.

“I understand that… If you had to make an educated guess as to whether it will send whoever uses it to the demon realm,” Sylver asked.

“If we’re talking in “educated guess” terms, my “educated guess” would be that it would work without any problems. Assuming it worked without any problems before,” Melo said.

“I mean… It didn’t, but that was because of Nautis,” Sylver said.

“There’s no real way to find out without just using it and seeing what happens… What about the clairvoyant with the eye?” Melo asked.

“First thing I thought of, but she can’t predict the result with a reliable degree of accuracy.

Sometimes everything works out fine, sometimes I disappear and never return,” Sylver explained.

Chrys had even tried having someone who wasn’t a walking blind spot use the waystone, but since the “source” of the waystone was Sylver, it was permanently unpredictable.

As to why Melo wasn’t offering to use the waystone himself, the answer was that he had 6

children, another 1 on the way. Shortly after his first son was born, he and Sherry had a discussion and agreed to do as few things as possible that might kill either of them.

In Sherry’s case, it meant no longer going out on adventures, and in Melo’s case, it meant not testing devices haphazardly crafted by necromancers that could potentially send him into the demon realm.

Melo would obviously never tell Sylver any of this, because despite his children, and his wife, he owed Sylver a life debt, so if Sylver asked him to help him, he would.

But Sylver liked Melo and wasn’t willing to risk his life just to make his own slightly more convenient.

Even if Melo himself said the risk was low…

And given that most mages were now incapable of long-range teleportation, having any kind of waystone would be quite useful…

If they took Edmund with them, even if Melo’s head got detached during the process, he wouldn’t die…

Assuming the thing didn’t move them out to space, and didn’t separate them, and didn’t separate their body parts, and didn’t mangle anyone’s primal energy field, and didn’t-Sylver stood up from his chair.

“I’ve got somewhere to be. I’ll leave the thing with you, give it another look if you have the time,” Sylver said, as he shook Melo’s hand, and promptly left the building.

***

The heavily bandaged man screamed out in terror as he became engulfed in golden flames, but as his skin healed, and his sight and hearing returned, his screams devolved into whimpers, and he eventually lost consciousness.

“What about one of those mages with a “recall” perk?” Sylver asked in a clicky language that the nearby healers had no chance of knowing.

Edmund shrugged his shoulders.

“It’d probably work, but everyone with any kind of functioning teleportation is already employed by Novva. And given how long the teleportation network is going to be down for, worth 10 times their weight in platinum,” Edmund answered.

“What about if we find what the requirements are for one of those types of perks, and help someone level up?” Sylver asked.

With a slow move of the hand, the roaring fire covering the man reduced to nothing, and after a few more seconds, extinguished completely.

The trio of priests standing at the entrance pulled the healed man’s stretcher out and placed a woman who was missing the left half of her torso down onto the metal platform Edmund had created.

When Sylver and Edmund were sent to help a devastated area in the past, they always erected their tents next to each other’s. So that if there was someone Edmund’s team was incapable of helping, Sylver was nearby to “dispose” of the body.

Not that he was going to be turning Novva’s people into undead, not without his permission, and Sylver didn’t want to put Novva in an uncomfortable position by asking.

Most of the people too far gone to be healed weren’t exactly “prime” undead-making material, so it wasn’t really a loss anyway. Just a bit wasteful, given that Sylver would have been willing to leave a portion of the created shades to help in the city’s reconstruction.

“It’d take weeks, if not months, unless we get extremely lucky. On top of that, someone already had that idea, anyone capable of perceiving mana has been recruited and is currently being trained in the hopes they unlock a mage class,” Edmund answered.

“At least something good came out of this. Is there any point talking to slave merchants?”

Sylver asked.

“Anyone worth buying would be out of our price range. There was a kid here with a missing arm, who could teleport to a set location once every 3 months. The noblemen that bought him paid over 150,000,000 gold,” Edmund said.

Sylver waited for him to finish healing the just shy of dead woman.

“We find a pirate. Or a bandit,” Sylver offered.

“What if the waystone teleports them, to another realm for instance, and their low-level

[Return Home] perk isn’t enough to bring them back to Eira? And 5 years from now, someone finds your waystone, and teleports directly into where the dark elves live?”

Edmund asked.

“They’d have to fight through Faust, the Gorgons, and the adult dark elves aren’t exactly pushovers, but I get your point… With that in mind, even a proper waystone wouldn’t be enough… We need someone who would be able to adjust to whatever realm we end up at…” Sylver thought out loud.

Edmund saved another 3 people’s lives while Sylver considered how best to approach this.

“Chrys said most actual waystones stopped working… Would you be able to fix them if we gathered a few?” Sylver asked.

Edmund shook his head.

“Maybe if we were talking about a minor recalibration… I mean if I… No, probably not. I could certainly give it a go, but I’m more likely to destroy them than fix them,” Edmund answered.

“Not to mention it would be pointless if we went to a different realm. We need a living breathing person,” Sylver said, as Edmund nodded and continued fixing people the priests and healers in Novva’s city considered “unfixable.”

Most of them lost the use of half of their healing spells. The ones that didn’t said their magic felt “weaker,” but couldn’t say for certain since nothing changed in their skill or perk descriptions.

Not to say the healers in this city were incompetent, some of them were, quite a few, especially the younger ones, but enough knew what they were doing that Edmund went as far as to compliment them on their work.

Sylver made suggestions, while Edmund poked holes in them, while he simultaneously saved people’s lives.

Anything they thought of either required far too much time and effort or was risky enough that they might as well just use the waystone and hope for the best.

Edmund held back a yawn, and with the faintest glance let Sylver know that he could argue all he wanted, he wasn’t going to go to sleep while there were critically wounded people waiting for him to heal them. Even if they were all stable enough to live through to the next week.

“What about the other thing?” Edmund asked.

Sylver took out the cube-covered metal chunk from his pocket and placed it down on Edmund’s table.

“Nano portals. Perfect cubes, some as small as one-millionth of a meter in height, width, and length. Which apparently is small enough to bypass the Gellmann constant, which for some reason also affects primal energy. Anything you attack him with either goes through him, or he reflects it and cancels out the attack,” Sylver explained.

“Same principle as Adam’s shield… I thought one fifty thousandths was the limit?” Edmund asked while he held the metal chunk that had once been Faust’s sword up to his eye and passed his mana through it.

“One fifty thousandth is the limit. For a mage using his own knowledge and skills, helped by his bloodline in Adam’s case. Knowing Nautis the demon is doing all the heavy lifting for him, and he’s just a mouthy puppet,” Sylver said.

“Would it being smaller than the Gellman constant mean that trying to desync the portals wouldn’t work? Adam’s shield worked because of Ethram’s principle, if Nautis is ignoring it that would mean-”

“Literally doesn’t matter. Nautis isn’t Adam. And I don’t mean just in the magical skill sense, Nautis isn’t Adam in the scale sense. Blast the bastard with raw heat and even if his itty-bitty portals are 99.99 recurring to the 100th decimal point efficient, enough heat will leak through to break him within less than a minute,” Sylver said.

It took Edmund about half a second to go through the same mental math Sylver did when Melo had told him about the nano portals.

“We’d need to get him into an open area... Or somewhere where we wouldn’t mind turning the surroundings into glass…” Edmund thought out loud.

“Given Tuli’s current condition, it would be a negligible loss compared to what Nautis can do if we tried to chase him to a good spot and he got away. If you see him, kill him,” Sylver said.

Edmund yawned again and nodded at Sylver.

“What if we-” Edmund covered his mouth and yawned into his hand.

Sylver’s robe glued itself to the tree branch beneath his feet and stopped him from falling over since the wall he had been leaning on was no longer there.

Edmund finished his yawn, opened his eyes, and simultaneously with Sylver saw that they were no longer in a small tenth with a line of wounded people standing outside, they were standing on a pair of tree branches.

The suns were high in the sky, and the ground below was covered in a thick layer of soggy snow.

Sylver patted himself down, and aside from his shadow being just shy of completely empty, his internal bits were all where they were supposed to be.

Edmund did a similar motion, and just like Sylver, was missing an integral part of himself. In his case, it was his sword.

“Don’t yell at him,” Edmund said before Sylver had a chance to so much as lift his head up.

“I wasn’t going to,” Sylver said.

“And don’t slap his teeth out,” Edmund added.

“What about a light back of the hand?” Sylver asked.

Edmund floated down towards the ground, while Sylver simply fell, and a tendril of [Black

Mass] that extended out of his back slowed his fall enough that he didn’t break through the frozen snow.

“Not if this was an accident,” Edmund said.

“Incompetence isn’t-”

“It’s not, not, but let’s at least hear him out before doing anything,” Edmund said as he began to float southwards, and made the log Sylver had stood on float behind him.

Within a matter of minutes, they reached a wide road, floated across it, and ventured into the other side of the snow-covered forest. A few seconds of flight later, they reached Melo, who was sitting on a toppled-over tree trunk and didn’t notice the two men silently land directly behind him.

Sylver walked on his own solidified shadows so as not to leave prints in the crunchy snow, and Edmund floated a couple of feet behind him.

Melo had an expression of utter horror on his face as he felt the two men’s presence and turned around to look at them.

“Tell me we’re not in the demon realm,” Melo whispered towards Sylver.

“We’re not,” Edmund answered while Sylver ever so gently placed his pale hand on Melo’s shoulder.

He crouched so he was at eye level with the man.

It took Melo a while, but he eventually stopped staring at his slippers and met Sylver’s eyes.

Melo waited a beat, he swallowed the lump in his throat and did his best to keep his voice stable.

“I apologize. I was careless. It soaked up enough mana to activate, and I didn’t notice,” Melo explained.

Sylver didn’t apply any pressure to Melo’s shoulder, if anything he opened his hand up as if he was about to get a better grip before throwing the man into the air.

But instead of doing that, Sylver chose to allow this very young child his fuck up, given that Sylver was at least partially responsible for giving him the waystone in the first place.

Just as slowly as he placed it there, Sylver took his hand off Melo’s shoulder.

“You alright? Hurt anywhere or anything?” Sylver asked.

He sounded… concerned might be a word to describe the tone of his voice, but there was an unmistakable… as if he was speaking softly to a dog that had had an accident on the carpet, as opposed to a fully grown man who could have killed all 3 of them.

Melo nodded without breaking eye contact.

“Aside from my pride, I’m fine,” he said.

Sylver stood up from his crouch and adjusted the collar of his robe.

“Alright then,” Sylver said.

He held out his hand towards Melo, who with great hesitation, took the lead-lined box out of his sleeve, and gave it to Sylver.

Sylver in turn opened the box and looked at the dull coloured piece of amber.

[Xander’s Waystone - Greater Quality]

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

[Amount teleported in: 25]

[Amount that can be teleported out: 9]

He placed it towards his chest, and his robe hid it inside itself.

“If we’re not in the demon realm, where are we?” Melo asked.

The snow had changed the surroundings past the point of recognition, and the fact that the large trees had moved around didn’t help.

“We’re a few hours away from Arda. The waystone teleported you to where we initially teleported from and teleported us along with you but kept the distance from where we were in Pere relative to you,” Edmund explained.

Sylver nodded along.

Edmund’s guess was frankly better than anything Sylver could have come up with.

Now that they were back in Arda Sylver could ask Bruno, or one of Lola’s actual experts as to the specifics of the tiny piece of teleporting amber.

Sylver felt something on the back of his neck and looked up to see roughly 100 thin rodents sitting on the above branches. They had grey fur, small black clawed paws, and every single one’s left beady eye was glowing with a vibrant white light.

***

A grey ladybug the size of a watermelon landed on the table and opened up its shell to reveal 6 paper-thin see-through wings.

Bruno waited for it to fully sit down and make itself comfortable before he began to talk in Demon tongue.

“Don’t raise your voice too much, it’s got incredibly sensitive ears,” Bruno said while he gently patted the ladybug creature’s head.

“Ed is sleeping back at home, Bravo’s got the waystone, and the dark elves and cultivators stopped to rest, in case they need to turn around,” Sylver counted out.

“Who knows?” Bruno asked.

There wasn’t really a need to ask him “knows what?” Bruno was one of the few people in this realm that Sylver could speak to without any worries.

“Ed, and Faust since they were there. I ended up telling Sophia, and her priests and paladins. And I’m pretty sure Chrys knows,” Sylver answered.

“Chrys definitely knows. Lola on the other hand, suspected, but ended up deciding that she doesn’t want to know. On the topic of Chrys…” Bruno said.

“If it’s something bad, can it wait until I’ve had a long bath and a drink?” Sylver asked.

Bruno shrugged his shoulders.

“See… I don’t know if it’s bad. But it is something that needs to be decided on sooner, rather than later,” Bruno said.

Sylver finished his cup of coffee and gestured for the old 8-eyed man to carry on.

“She and Lola had a disagreement, and apparently I’m close enough to being your peer that she decided to seek my council,” Bruno said.

“She went over Lola’s head?” Sylver asked.

“Technically speaking, no. I might be older, but the high elf has the final say as far as I’m concerned,”

Bruno said.

He dragged his hand down his face and continued.

“Chrys, she… Alright, the short version is; she wants to assassinate the 2 people who know how to repair the teleportation nodes and use her own team of mages with space manipulation magic to replace the teleportation network that used to exist. So that she controls all of Eira’s major trade routes,” Bruno said without so much as a hint in his voice, or his face, that he wasn’t being 100%

dead serious.

Sylver gave the words a few seconds to settle in. And another few seconds to really settle down.

“The fuck?” Sylver asked.

“She wanted to know how she could convince you, so you would twist Lola’s arm into helping her,”

Bruno added.

“Twist Lola’s arm?” Sylver repeated.

“Chrys’ plan requires a very significant amount of capital. So significant, that if Lola and the cats were to fund it, there wouldn’t be enough left to run the workshop at a profitable scale,” Bruno explained.

Sylver just sat there.

And digested the information Bruno had just thrown at him.

He initially stared at the wall but then looked at Bruno, who looked so calm and content that it almost felt like an insult.

“Chrys hasn’t been in this realm for even a full year, and she’s already trying to take control of the economy?” Sylver asked rhetorically.

Bruno had the gall to shrug his shoulders.

“Crazy right? I mean, it’s not like the person she looks up to the most changed the very fabric of this realm. I mean, where could she have possibly gotten the idea that doing something like this was even on the table?” Bruno asked without once breaking eye contact.

Sylver waited for a beat.

“In a… If anything… If you think about it her thing is about a hundred times less dangerous,” Sylver said.

“Closer to a thousand, or a million, but yes. For what it’s worth, I think she should go for it,” Bruno offered.

“She’d have one of the realm’s biggest targets on her back if she succeeded…” Sylver said mostly to himself.

“She would. But she would be rich enough to have the best armour, protective rings, and a private army big enough to make the High-King nervous. Not to mention the doors that level of control would open. If you thought being friends with nobles was useful, wait until they risk starving to death if they refuse your request,” Bruno explained.

“Hmm…” Sylver said.

***

As Sylver crossed the threshold into his house, he had to grab onto the door so that he didn’t fall over.

Magically speaking everything was fine, the house wasn’t physically shaking, the air was calm and breathable, but in terms of Sylver’s soul sense, he was standing next to an erupting volcano.

Misha presumably asked him what was wrong, as Sylver lost his grip on the door and just barely managed to catch himself before he toppled over. He sealed off his soul sense, as much as he could, and with legs that felt like someone had brought a hammer down on each knee, limped to the nearest secret entrance to his workshop.

He didn’t even try to move the books in the decorative bookshelf in the correct order and with a single swipe of the hand ripped the whole thing off the wall. He did the same for the thick metal door, and vaguely felt Edmund’s presence behind him, as he ran down the stairs, and stopped in front of the door that he used to store his cleaning equipment.

Mora was sitting on the ceiling, in the shape of a white horse, and as Sylver placed his hand on the door handle, she made an attempt to explain to him what she had done.

The workshop was calm, quiet, and peaceful, and the only noise was the sound of the door’s metal hinges being torn, followed by the wood smashing apart as it collided with the ceiling.

Inside the tiny room, barely wide enough for Sylver to walk through without his shoulders touching the walls, sitting on top of a rusty bucket, was a perfect golden sphere the size of a carriage wheel.

Sylver felt more than knew, that Ria had somehow convinced Mora to bring her half-dead monsters, and for some reason, Sylver’s companion agreed and brought the liquid metal woman a literal mountain of high-level monsters.

And Ria was now performing surgery on their souls, in an attempt to transplant them into the black liquid parasite Sylver had been storing in several jars.

Except this wasn’t a surgery that used sharp scalpels, and everything was handled with sterile gloves, no, Ria was hacking away at the monster souls and was placing whatever she managed to lop off into a blender.

But the worst part was that, although it was faint, there was undoubtedly a soul forming in the dead centre of Ria’s golden sphere.