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Ch263-Consequences

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There were 2 men left.

Everyone else was either incapacitated, to put it very mildly, or dead.

Most of the deaths were from friendly fire, but a few unconscious people had their necks snapped, as the [Black Mass] being piloted by a [Petty] shade readjusted its grip while carrying the body, and moved the head too much to the side.

But out of the 744 pirates that had been on the ship when Sylver had landed, 701 had been successfully incapacitated, and only 41 had died.

As the last two remaining pirates began to move towards his hiding spot, Sylver was determined to keep the number of dead at 41. At least until he was ready.

Sylver had picked the absolute last place anybody would look for him.

Inside the captain’s quarters of the very largest ship, he had been in the process of trying on the soon-to-be undead captain’s hat.

The two relatively small men crashed through the door, and Sylver greeted them with a giant triangular hat on his head, and a decorated curved saber in his hand, that he pointed at them. He spoke with a drunken almost lisp-like accent.

“Ahoy mateys! This be-”

Sylver lost his eyesight as the priest swung his holy fucking sword, and blinded Sylver with his holy fucking beam of light.

Sylver had travelled through the fog he had spread throughout the inside of the ship, through the various cracks, and materialized at the very bottom. His eyeballs had melted out of his skull, and he got the feeling the skin of his face was in one piece, but at the same time didn’t like how loose it felt.

Sylver waited for a few seconds, as the two men smashed their way down through the wooden floors, and just as they were about to reach him, he metalized on the ship’s deck.

One of them must have been somehow tracking him, because they turned on their metaphorical heel, and very quickly climbed up to where Sylver was.

Sylver, in turn, dived off the side of the ship and disappeared into the bubbling with black smog waters.

Sadly the two men had enough sense not to follow him, and they instead remained on the ship and effortlessly destroyed every single shade Spring sent at them. They were killing the shades so quickly, that neither Spring nor Sylver could tell what exactly they were doing.

Asking Edmund for help was out of the question, a big group of priests armed with silver weapons was one thing, but 2 pirates that just so happened to be “holy” enough to counter Sylver’s minions wasn’t enough for him to call for help.

While he floated amidst the bubbling hydrogen and was in the process of coming up with an elaborate strategy to knock out both men without damaging them, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to use corpses with this much holy energy anyway.

So there was no point taking him in alive.

Sylver stopped manipulating the fast-moving bubbles to flow around him, puffed out his robe, and flung out of the way into the air.

He pushed himself towards the boat and landed 9 steps away from the holy man, and his equally calm and relaxed companion.

Sylver broke 5 lower ribs, and the ship deck became buried under an avalanche of rocky dirt, and seawater. It blunted the holy man’s magic, some of the dirt became “blessed” but it didn’t matter, since Sylver was using his relatively high amount of mana to simply drown both men in dirt and frozen water.

He couldn’t get a grip on the muddy slush near the two men, but since the pressure he applied on the outer layer of the mud ball, translated to pressure on the two men in the very centre of it, he didn’t need to touch the dirt that they were touching.

Steam came out of his arms, and as Sylver slowly walked towards the ever-shrinking earth sphere, he felt a very sudden lack of movement inside the mudball.

[Elf (N/A) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 70 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

His skin fell off his hands from how hard he was pressing, but either there was nobody alive inside, or the remaining pirate was too strong to die from being crushed to death.

Sylver maintained the pressure, and after a few seconds of nothing happening, forced open a small hole in the dirt ball.

The man inside tried to extend a razor-thin wire through the hole, and although the wire managed to pierce Sylver’s bony finger, and was about to travel up his arm, into his heart, the equally razor-thin beam of abyss magic coming out of his finger-tip severed the wire’s connection, and continued through the small hole, until it reached something that flinched and sent a stream of blood through the tiny hole.

There was a great deal more movement inside the dirt ball after that, but despite his absolute best efforts, the man inside was locked in, and Sylver’s abyss magic was unblockable, and eventually hit something genuinely vital.

[Human (N/A) Defeated!]
[Due to defeating an enemy 90 levels above you, additional experience will be awarded!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 74!
+5AP

[Undead Mastery (VII) Proficiency increased to 41%!]

[Mirage (V) Proficiency increased to 22%!]

[Draining Blight (VI) Proficiency increased to 100%!]
[Draining Blight (VI) rank up available!]

[Black Mass (IV) Proficiency increased to 80%!]

[Vigorous Conditioning (VI) Proficiency increased to 94%!]

As Sylver released his hold on the dirt and water, it exploded open and rained down on everything with small rocks, mud, and bits and pieces of the man who had been trapped inside and had been effectively cut up into tiny pieces by Sylver’s beam of abyss magic.

Upon inspection, Sylver guessed that the man had used his wires to protect himself from the high pressure of the dirt, and once Sylver started poking his side with abyss magic, panicked and moved around so much that he couldn’t keep up his defence and died.

As to why he didn’t dig down and escape through the wooden floor, where Sylver had summoned a literal room full of armed explosives in preparation, Sylver didn’t know, but it was a bit too late to ask him.

He waited for the shades to finish searching through the other ships, took care that they checked every single conceivable nook and cranny, and only when there wasn’t even a cockroach left that he wasn’t aware of, did he start gathering the unconscious people onto the main boat.

Sylver wasn’t certain which boat would best suit the dark elves’ needs, but he liked the shape and look of the second-to-largest one, so that was the one he was going to keep while selling off the rest.

He concentrated the fog on the boat in the very middle and used it to hide his shades and [Black Mass] blobs that were moving the bodies over to him.

Out of the 701 available bodies, and soon-to-be corpses, 80 were completely unusable. Either their soul had slipped away, or they had too many missing pieces to become proper shades.

He of course could have Edmund heal them up, but then he would need to flush Edmund’s positive mana out of their bodies, which could take anywhere from a day, to several weeks. These pirate bodies were great, but they weren’t great enough to warrant that level of effort.

So, the 73 men, and 7 women, promptly had the life sucked out of them through [Draining Blight], were stripped clean of clothing, and their dried-up corpses were converted into an extra large blob of [Black Mass].

He did the same for the 41 who had been killed by their friends in the confusion. The ritual needed people to die during it for it to work on this scale.

More than a few of the pirates had a tattoo on their left shoulder, that Sylver had to guess was the symbol of some pirate deity, on account of him getting a faint headache when he spent too long looking at one of the men’s tattoos.

The remaining 621 pirates were inspected and had every tattoo and marking that felt even faintly holy cut away.

The loose pieces of skin were converted into a bucket full of [Black Mass].

Sylver split his shades until he had 1 shade for every body, and handed them out straight-edged scalpels, that looked more like chisels than surgical instruments.

They made 6 careful incisions, 3 on the face, and 3 over the heart, and placed barely a teaspoon of [Black Mass] on the every single body’s face and chest.

The dark blob dug into the living people’s flesh, and after it made a connection to their hearts and brains, began to very slowly extend a tendril towards Sylver, who was sitting in the very centre of the impromptu ritual site.

The tendrils joined together as they got near him, and from a bird’s eye view the many black ropes looked almost like roots coming out of a tree.

Once the four thick tubes reached Sylver, he rubbed his recently healed hands together to warm them up, and very gradually began to produce smoke so thick it was almost liquid, out of the slit on his palms.

The smoke disappeared into the tendrils, and one by one the bodies closest to the centre where Sylver was, began to shake as they hit their heads, elbows, and the back of their feet against the wooden floor.

Initially the sound was disorganized, chaotic, but with every added layer of seizure having body, it evolved into a rhythm, that was more pleasing to the ear than any music or song any bard in the world could make. To Sylver’s ears at least.

Out of 621 pirate bodies, 14 turned out to be duds.

Or, not exactly duds, but they turned out to be children, and their not fully formed bodies didn’t agree with Sylver’s framework, and in their rejection, ruined the corpses. In Sylver’s defence, this was a ship full of pirates, and these children were very tall for their age.

They were stripped and converted into even more [Black Mass].

It took a while for the spell to really get going but the remaining 607 were turned into shades without any problems.

[Human (Warrior+Warrior) Defeated!]

[Shade (Common) Raised]

[Human (Warrior) Defeated!]

[Shade (Common) Raised!]

[Human (Bladesman) Defeated!]

...

[Shade (Greater) Raised!

[Undead Mastery (VII) Proficiency increased to 100%!]
[Undead Mastery (VI) rank up available!]

[Black Mass (IV) Proficiency increased to 100%!]
[Black Mass (IV) rank up available!]

[Mutating Override (V) Proficiency increased to 72%!]

[Swamp Lord] has reached level 79!
+5AP

At first, the never-ending steam of notifications regarding a human’s death, and a shade’s birth was infuriating, but at some point, Sylver started to enjoy it.

It was a reluctant pat on the back from the system, a sort of “congratulations” it had no choice but to say to him.

With that in mind, he began to downright savour every little message, considered each [Reached Level] as a round of applause, and when the final message came and stayed floating in front of him, Sylver could almost feel the system’s glare just behind the large screen.

He stood up from his [Black Mass] throne and swung his arms in a circle to stretch his steaming shoulders. His throne liquified and condensed until it was as small as a stool, after which it jumped onto Sylver’s back, and melted into the rest of his exceptionally dense [Black Mass] armour.

Spring finished the headcount, and informed Sylver that he had just shy of 1,000 shades under his command, 905 to be exact, 880 of which were human, or close enough to human for Sylver’s magic to affect them.

If he counted the ones left with the Gorgons inside Tuli, Sylver had well over 1,000 human shades in his army.

Sylver had intended to evolve one of the shades just so he knew what would happen, but he was exhausted from raising so many undead, and on top of that, wanted to wait for the captains to settle in a bit more before he did anything to them.

He also realized it would probably be a good idea to have Ria nearby to observe the process. In case it was something she would be able to explain enough for Sylver to force the evolution process on the rest of his undead. Assuming the evolution did something good to them of course.

It turned out that the last 2 men were not in fact captains, the holy man was a ship doctor of the largest ship, that Sylver was currently on, and the man with the wires was the second in command on the smallest ship.

During the ritual, Sylver’s hold on the dark fog slipped, and the darkness had spread all the way out to the city and was only stopped by Edmund’s barrier.

The mushrooms underneath the ships stopped producing hydrogen and oxygen, and with a shaky wave of the hand, Sylver made all the loose fog fall towards the ground.

He made a circular gesture with his finger, and enough darkness to engulf a city began to gather underneath the second-to-largest boat.

The wood made a sound that was eerily similar to a man’s scream as the darkness forced itself into it, and within a matter of minutes, the previously light brown wooden ship was such a deep and dark black that it looked like it was covered in multiple layers of soot.

As Sylver took a step forward, he felt an actual army step with him.

Before he had enough to harass a city, cause enough problems that people would struggle to stop him, but now he had conquering numbers.

Obviously, only time would tell how many of the 805 would stick around for more than 1 fight, and Spring had a lot of work to do in terms of organizing their armour, weapons, and positions, but all in all, Sylver felt just shy of unstoppable.

***

Sylver refrained from entering the city, because they were in the process of sorting everything out, and currently hadn’t decided on who was going to be in charge until the High King sent someone over to them.

There was also the manner of punishing looters, arsonists, and people who tried to take advantage of the chaos and were stopped by a floating metal sphere, that hit them on the forehead and knocked them out cold.

Regarding the pirate ships, Sylver found a merchant in the docks that he thought looked trustworthy and offered the man 10% of the total sale in exchange for finding a buyer for the ships.

When the man tried to negotiate to increase the percentage, Sylver told him to fuck off, and walked over to the ship floating right next to his, and the merchant in that ship agreed to Sylver’s terms without any nonsense.

Edmund caught on instantly as to why Sylver was so eager to leave because he got the same idea Sylver did the moment he heard how disorganized the whole city was.

They were going to have Novva send someone to “organize” it.

And if that person happened to help them out in organizing favourable trading terms for when the dark elves used this port, all the better.

Edmund once again carried Sylver high into the air, and effortlessly matched the summoned wyvern’s speed, as the winged creature flapped with all its strength to cover as much distance as possible.

Not even an hour into their flight, Edmund gestured for Sylver to look down, and he saw that a bunch of ravens were flying in the shape of an S.

Edmund flew down and grabbed one of the birds and brought the glowing-eyed creature up onto Will’s back.

“Good news and bad news,” Chrys said through the small beady-eyed bird.

The bird barely opened its mouth as it spoke, but both Sylver and Edmund could hear Chrys’ voice so clearly it was like she was speaking to them in person.

“At this point, the fact that there’s good news is good news in it of itself,” Sylver said.

“What’s the bad news Chrys?” Edmund asked.

“Fredrick has left… As has a portion of his staff… You’re not going to be blamed or anything but there’s-”

“Dead canary…” Edmund guessed.

The raven with the glowing eye nodded.

Sylver and Edmund simultaneously crossed their arms over their chest.

“When did he leave?” Sylver asked.

“Last night. As far as I’ve been able to tell. Kitty’s people confirmed it, but we’re waiting for further details,” the raven said.

Sylver stared at the bird.

“Didn’t she take him with her when she left? I’m fairly certain-”

“He was here until last night. He left a note that the Marquis read, but we don’t know what was on it. Because he burned it,” Chrys explained, as Sylver and Edmund exchanged a look.

“What’s the part you’re not telling us?” Edmund asked.

The raven looked down and managed to appear embarrassed as Chrys tried to find a good word to use.

“I have a really bad feeling about him leaving… Worse than Moon or Sun Demon bad…” Chrys said after a short pause.

“When you say bad feeling…” Edmund asked.

Sylver waited for him to finish his sentence, and when he didn’t, finished for him.

“Are you sure this is a clairvoyant-based bad feeling, or do you have a headache from not getting enough sleep?” Sylver asked.

The Chrys raven first stared at Sylver, then moved its head, and stared at Edmund.

“So I shouldn’t worry about it?” Chrys asked.

In perfect unison, Sylver and Edmund nodded their heads.

“No,” Sylver said.

“What’s the good news?” Edmund asked.

The light in the raven’s eye flickered.

“The uh… Novva of Pere had a feeling what happened in Laketula was going to happen and had sent a group of guards to every seaside city. At least that’s what he’s going to say if anyone ever asks him,” Chrys said.

“I’m guessing he started sending these groups when the Marquis pulled back his troops…” Edmund said.

“It’s tantamount to treason to “steal” land from a nobleman during a time of crisis, doubly so since the kingdom is currently at war... It’s a completely different story to take over an “abandoned” city. Some might even call it heroic,” Chrys explained.

“Adoption, as opposed to kidnapping,” Edmund added.

After a short report on the situation in Arda, and the area around Tuli, the glowing-eyed raven jumped off, and did its best to find its way home, since it had travelled several kilometres on Will’s back from where Edmund had picked it up.

They both waited for a good while until Edmund broke the silence.

“Why now? Did it take her this long to find someone to open a gate for her? Or did something we don’t know about happen after the thing we know about?” Edmund asked.

Sylver scratched his chin.

“If it’s the latter we’ll find out soon enough… I say this with a great deal of love, but just because she has a bad feeling, doesn’t mean something is going on. Given where her eye came from, it’s more likely than not that her bad feeling is a byproduct of Fredrick’s wife using her powers,” Sylver offered.

Edmund shrugged his shoulders.

He and Sylver exchanged a look, and they unanimously decided there was no point getting into an argument about this.

The rest of the trip was without any vague warnings of potential future danger, Sylver mainly lay on his back and rested his eyes, while Edmund quietly worked on the spell inside his sword.

Once they were close enough for Novva’s wizards to spot them, they flew down to the main road, and Sylver rode on Ulvic’s back, while Edmund floated alongside him.

The guards at the gate waved them through without so much as a pat down, courtesy of a small mousy looking man who had been waiting for them on the other side of the gate.

From the outside the city looked just shy of pristine, the walls were whole, the barrier was stable, if not particularly powerful, and the only clue as to what had happened was an enormous crack in the ground, that a group of men had were in the process of filling up with boulders.

The inside of the city was a different matter.

Even from the entrance, Sylver could see entire rows of houses that had been demolished and were in the process of being cleared away. Large swaths of fabric were used to create roofs in the less destroyed homes, certain doors had giant X’s painted on them in white, and as Sylver walked down the street, he felt the many many corpses hidden underneath the debris.

There was a stench in the air, sawdust mixed with some sort of burning smell, and while there wasn’t much smoke anywhere, Sylver’s skin itched from someone casting an extremely wide spell over the city.

“I’m going to see if the healers need any help,” Edmund said.

Sylver nodded at him, and the man flew off into the air.

“Is it this bad everywhere?” Sylver asked his chaperone.

The mousy-looking man silently scowled and continued walking.

The more they walked, the less destruction Sylver saw.

Not in the sense that there was less damage, there was a lot more near the city centre, but most of it had already been cleared away, and a few buildings already had a finished foundation.

The man Sylver was following was leading him towards a large dark grey tent, that had a steady stream of children entering from the left and exiting from the right.

Sylver entered the tent through the front entrance, and in the right corner saw 4 ancient-looking men writing things out on scraps of paper that they handed to the awaiting children.

The huddled-together ancient men in the left corner were being given scraps of paper by the children that entered, where they sorted the scraps and made markings on the giant map on the table in front of them.

Nobody spared Sylver so much as a glance as he made his way through and knocked on the door on the other side of the tent room.

A guard with shoulders as tall and wide as the doorway opened the door.

“Sylver Sezari of Arda to see Novva Da’Pere,” Sylver said, as the man closed the door.

A few seconds later he opened it again and moved out of the way.

The room had 4 wooden walls, something resembling a ceiling, and behind a desk and chair facing the only door sat Novva.

He had a thin glowing string floating above his head, that illuminated the contents of his desk, and made his exhausted face significantly older than it had any right to be.

He had rolled up maps on his left, a large pile of loose pages in the middle, and a box full of paper scraps on his right.

“Did Anastasia have any trouble getting to the island?” Novva asked, as he stood up from his tiny stool, and even from 4 feet away, Sylver had to lift his head to look the man in the eyes.

“She arrived fine, thank you for asking,” Sylver said, as he and Novva grabbed each other's hands and tried their best to crush the other’s.

Unlike last time, when Sylver lost, this time the handshake ended in a tie.

“Would you like some coffee?” Novva asked with a grin that looked out of place on his tired face.

“I’m good thank you,” Sylver said.

Novva sat down on his seat, as Sylver sat opposite him on the equally small stool.

“How can I help?” Novva asked. Given the circumstances, Sylver understood why he was skipping the small talk.

“I need to consult Melo on something. And while I’m here, if you need help with the city or anything, I have nearly 9,000 men with me,” Sylver said.

Novva sat up straight and tilted his head to the side as if he was waiting for Sylver to admit that he was joking.

“When you say men… I take it you mean some kind of undead?” Novva asked as he remembered who he was talking to.

“Shades. Don’t need to eat or sleep, don’t carry diseases, can see perfectly in complete darkness, and they will work tirelessly until whatever command they were given is completed. They can’t do anything too complicated, but they can move rubble, carry bricks, chop wood, dig or fill up holes, simple manual labour basically,” Sylver explained.

He summoned one of his newly acquired pirates, and made the man split into two, then into four, and then into eight.

Novva slowly stood up from his seat and walked over to the completely motionless shadowy figures. He reached out with his hand and placed his shovel-sized palm onto the pirate shade’s shoulder.

“And you have 9,000 of these?” Novva asked.

There was something in his voice, it wasn’t fear, but a sort of hesitation.

“Roughly. Some of them can split up into more than 8, others can only split once, I haven’t checked what the actual overall maximum is yet,” Sylver explained.

He could feel Novva pushing down on the pirate shade’s shoulder, but the shadowy creature stood firm and didn’t break apart.

“What do you want in exchange for the help?” Novva asked.

There was about 5 seconds of silence. Sylver spoke in a calm and almost gentle voice.

“I’m well aware of how much pressure you’re under, so I’m not going to dig too deep into what you just said. I don’t want anything Novva. The only reason I asked instead of just sending them out was because I don’t know how your people will react to a bunch of undead helping them,” Sylver said.

There was another pause. The large man turned so he was facing Sylver.

“I didn’t mean… I apologize,” Novva said.

“Apology accepted,” Sylver said.

Novva turned to the guard that had been silently standing next to the door.

“Find Patrick, have him talk to the healers and bring anyone who can speak to the corner of Warwick Street,” Novva said, as the guard nodded at him and left the room.

Novva turned towards Sylver.

“Once things settle down a little, we’re going to sit down and have a proper drink,” Novva said, as someone knocked on his door.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Sylver said as he and Novva shook hands again.