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260-Not Even A Flesh Wound

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It was like picking low-hanging fruit.

The pirates slid along the rope, without a single care or worry in the world, and between the waves, rain, hailstones, and rushing wind, had absolutely no chance of spotting the shadow-clad figure walking along the top of the rope they were sliding on.

It helped that the rope also blocked their view and that whenever lightning struck the surrounding waters, the bandits all closed their eyes so as not to be blinded.

Once they were close enough, Sylver sped up an already fast falling piece of ice, then skull fracture, concussion, and then the limp bodies were tied up by a piece of [Black Mass] that kept their breathing holes above the water, while simultaneously blocking their airway just enough to keep them unconscious.

If he could have, Sylver would have gladly stopped halfway along the rope and simply waited for all the pirates to come to him.

But then they tugged at the rope, and Sylver realized that the ship the Gorgon sisters were on might get torn apart if he allowed them to continue pulling.

It surprised Sylver how difficult it was to cut the relatively thin piece of woven material, he didn’t even feel any magical resistance from it, it was just a very high-quality piece of string.

But like most materials on Eira, it was no match for abyss magic.

Sylver left the 12 bandits he collected with the piece of rope attached to Lavotk’s ship and had the blobs of [Black Mass] holding the pirates captive swim back to the boat so the bodies didn’t get lost at sea.

He refrained from keeping the piece of rope he was standing on from floating, on the off chance they sent a pulse of mana through it to see what happened.

He hoped they would reel it in, and save him the trouble of walking, but the pirates instead simply detached their boat from the rope, and if the whistling noise Sylver heard above him was any indication, shot another harpoon at Lavotk’s ship.

The Spring-half Sylver left with the ship immediately reported back that the large blob of [Black Mass] he left to guard the ship did a fine job catching the harpoon, and at Sylver’s command, it split in half and allowed a portion of itself to be reeled in towards the pirate ship.

The blob spread out into the shape of an umbrella to mimic the sort of resistance a large ship would have.

Sylver walked on along the rushing water, and once the umbrella-shaped [Black Mass] reached him, he stepped onto it, and with his hands behind his back, waited to be brought to the pirate ship.

His illusion of being in complete control of the situation was shattered when a lightning bolt tore a hole in a rising wave near him, and Sylver not only didn’t see it coming but he flinched.

But oddly enough, instead of fixating on it, Sylver allowed himself that moment of weakness and maintained his positive attitude as he got closer and closer to the floating bandit hideout.

Maybe it was the fact that the people he was about to meet were extra unprepared for him.

Maybe it was that he was simply that glad to be above water.

Maybe it was that there wasn’t anywhere to run or hide, if they could easily traverse the wavy water they wouldn’t have bothered with the zipline.

Regardless of the reason, Sylver had a smile on his face, and instead of running up the rope to get to the ship faster, he stood there and enjoyed the ride.

But as with all good things, the ride ended far too quickly. The pirates somehow realized this harpoon was in something other than a ship and cut their losses.

The [Black Mass] platform disappeared underneath the water as Sylver jumped off of it, and without making a single sound, he reached the wooden ship and climbed down until he was underneath it.

The enchantment on the wood was disgustingly primitive, very minor and inefficient strengthening, weight reduction, friction reduction, and some fourth effect that was written so moronically that Sylver was fairly certain it was there just to take up space and make the framework appear symmetrical.

Sylver pressed his index finger up against the wood and made a hole not even wide enough for a toothpick to pass through.

He materialized inside the ship and then stayed perfectly still.

Some bandit had a sword pressed up against Sylver’s spine, but much much much more importantly, these bandits had four barrels of Atolonian brandy. Edmund would have been ecstatic if Sylver found so much as a bottle, but he stumbled his way into four barrels of the poison.

The bandit holding the flimsy blade was speaking, but Sylver didn’t even try to listen. As the man briefly pulled his sword back, he slashed at Sylver’s neck, and although his form was solid, his strength was decent, the thin piece of metal shattered against Fen’s rapier.

The fencer shade expertly twirled his rapier, and in the time a person needed to blink removed the bandit’s sword from his hand and smashed the bottom of his hilt against the man’s skull.

The pirate swordsman didn’t even have a chance to gasp in shock when a tendril of [Black Mass] extended out of Sylver’s shoulder and began to suffocate and immobilize the concussed man.

Sylver walked over to the four barrels, tied to one another using frayed fucking twine, and with the gentleness with which he would handle a newborn baby, he lifted one barrel, then the next, and surrendered the entirety of his [Black Mass] armour and three-quarters of his robe into a protective liquid sphere.

He gave the sphere composed of 47 [Petty] shades 6 daggers, along with 20 explosives, and gave the shades the order to get out of the ship if they at any point felt their cargo was in danger.

Sylver rolled his shoulders while he walked over to the door leading upstairs and yawned as a curved sabre tried to pierce his through the heart.

The blade’s tip was pressed up against Sylver’s skin, but he didn’t even look at the man attacking him and gave him a life-threatening concussion when he slapped him away with the back of his hand.

The second man was screaming, but as he pulled his mace back, Sylver materialized in front of him and grabbed his entire head using one hand. Blood leaked out of the man’s ears as Sylver released the now limp body and made his way through the ship.

5 more men were knocked unconscious in a similar manner, their weapons were either ineffective against Sylver, or he got to them before they had a chance to use their weapons.

The man armed with a blunt machete yelled out a lengthy battle cry, as he charged towards Sylver.

But when he lifted his weapon towards the ceiling, to bring it down on Sylver’s skull, the weapon was yanked out of the man’s hand by a shadowy tendril, and as his body continued moving towards Sylver, Sylver held out his hand, and with a single slap on the tattooed man’s bald head, sent him into a pleasant, massive internal bleeding of the brain, dream.

The next 3 men didn’t even see him, as the shadows under their feet rose up to their faces and slammed their heads against the walls.

As Sylver walked up the stairs, he began to feel a weight on his feet, as if he was walking through water. With each step, it got heavier and heavier, until Sylver almost couldn’t lift his feet enough to walk up the next step.

By the time he reached the top and final floor, every single step was a fight.

“Are you with Fiddle?” a man’s voice asked.

Sylver lifted his head and looked at the man dressed… like the piratiest pirate to ever pirate, eyepatch, wooden peg for a leg, a golden ring on every single finger, one of the greasiest beards Sylver had ever seen, teeth so crooked and yellow they were almost glowing, and he was armed sledgehammer.

The handle was as long as the man was tall, and it would be more correct to describe it as a spear with a blunt end in place of a blade.

Admittedly the weapon wasn’t very piraty, but it was a very small detail in an otherwise perfect caricature of a pirate.

9 men stood behind the pirate, dressed like regular men, with only matching dark red headscarves to signify their piraty nature.

“Have we met before?” the head pirate, the one with the sledgehammer, asked.

He was holding it in his left hand, the handle was pressed against the ground, and the hammer portion was pointing up.

“What?” Sylver yelled while holding his hand up to his ear.

Between the raging winds, the crashing waves, the thunder, and screaming lightning bolts it would have been stranger if he did hear him.

“Are you one of Fiddle’s men?” the pirate shouted back, but Sylver continued to look bewildered.

Sadly, the magic holding him down wasn’t lessening.

“I’m with-” between the well-timed lightning strike, the thunder, and that Sylver’s robe flapped just enough to cover his mouth, he could have said literally anything, there was no way to know.

But, to the pirate’s credit, he continued doing whatever it was that he was doing that was keeping Sylver’s feet just shy of welded to the wooden floor.

As the pirate leaned his hammer forward, Sylver felt the wooden floor creak from the increased pressure.

This wasn’t your average gravity-amplifying spell, and it wasn’t some kind of cultivator nonsense, no demons were involved, and yet with all his strength, both physical and magical, Sylver was incapable of lifting his foot to walk.

So, he just stood there, while the 9 men took their time to casually walk over to him, until he was surrounded from all sides.

“Who are you with?” a man standing directly behind Sylver asked.

Sylver turned around without making any sudden movements and looked at the man who had spoken.

He had intended to say something provocative, but the 4 barrels of Atolonian brandy were still fresh on his mind, so he just politely smiled at the man.

Sylver gestured his left hand towards the man, and as he lowered it, the man that had spoken, and the 2 men on either side of him, blinked slower than normal, and then placed their hands on their knees as they began to crouch, and eventually toppled over.

4 swords pressed up against Sylver’s chest, a one-handed spear pressed against the back of his skull, and a sort of large handcuff-type tool was attached to his left hand’s wrist and was doing its very best to pull Sylver’s hand off to the side.

The men grunted, tried to adjust their grips on their weapons, but after a couple of yellow sparks jumped from their hilts onto their hands, the dim lights traveled up their arms, the same thing that happened to the initial 3 men happened to them.

They blinked, drunkenly, and gradually lowered themselves towards the floor, and lost consciousness.

Sylver turned back around so he was facing the pirate armed with the hammer and looked him straight in the eye.

The man said something, but this time Sylver genuinely didn’t hear him, as a lightning bolt struck the water less than 10 meters away from the ship and deafened both men.

Sylver tried to find the thread of mana that connected the effect he felt in his feet, to the hammer, or the man, or a 2nd man that was hiding out of sight, but the connection was too thin for him to find.

Sylver had the [Black Mass] wrapped around the 4 barrels split into two, and had it tear a small hole in the wooden ship wall, through which it then crawled out into the water.

The man standing a fair distance away from the glued-to-the-floor Sylver was speaking, he was probably telling his life story, or he was begging for his life, but between the beard covering his mouth, the waves, and that Sylver wasn’t listening, he couldn’t say for sure what the man was trying to communicate.

He asked a few questions that Sylver responded to with a shrug of the shoulders. Sylver crossed his arms over his chest and used a few droplets of magic to warm himself up while he waited for the [Black Mass] downstairs to do the thing.

The man’s speech stopped completely as the ship made a sound he hadn’t heard before. A sort of creaking noise, but it wasn’t a normal creak of a part of a large ship bending from being lifted by a wave, this was a long creak, that implied a long kind of bend throughout the entire length of the ship.

The creak was followed by a sputtering sound, which then became a consistent whine, and eventually evolved to a squeaky popping noise that was barely audible against the storm and the ship hull bending.

But the pirate remained where he was.

He didn’t release the spell holding Sylver down, that also turned out to be like a carpet that stopped the shades from materializing near the man.

It wasn’t that powerful, but it was enough that Sylver couldn’t summon an archer to shoot the idiot.

Both Sylver and the stereotype of a pirate turned their heads as something slapped the side of the ship. On top of the wooden rails were a bunch of shiny black grapes, that with every second became bigger and bigger, to the point they were a pile of watermelons.

But they continued growing and expanding, and it was only when they started to stretch upwards that the pirate realized what was happening.

With a lurch that should have sent the man stumbling, the boat tilted sideways, as the side with the black watermelons, which were actually hydrogen-filled [Black Mass] balloons, lifted the ship’s side.

Obviously, Sylver wasn’t merely using balloons to do this, underneath the ship some of the hydrogen gas was used to impede the ship’s floating ability and he combined that with the tilting force of the balloons, Sylver was going to topple this whole thing over without lifting a single finger.

Technically he was lifting a finger, several in fact since the spell to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen wasn’t exactly simple, but he was lifting his soul fingers, his physical fingers were completely motionless.

The pirate looked at the balloons, turned his head to look at Sylver, turned to look at the balloons, looked at Sylver, balloons, Sylver, balloons, Sylver, balloons, and did that about 10 more times, until he eventually settled on looking at Sylver.

His eyes narrowed, he lowered his stance, and faster than Sylver was capable of reacting, the man lifted his hammer, and swung it to the left.

Once again, it wasn’t gravity magic. But Sylver’s feet suddenly felt like they were standing on an impossibly fast conveyor belt.

He couldn’t get a grip on the floor, couldn’t get [Fog Form] to work, and the more weight he tried to put on his feet, the faster the floor moved underneath him.

The end result was that Sylver was moved up the tilted wooden floor, crashed clean through the wooden rails, and although there was no floor under his feet, he continued moving as if there was.

His ankles threatened to snap from the speed, he was almost struck by 5 separate lightning bolts, and despite his best efforts, he kept moving away from the now barely visible ship.

But after only a few seconds of midair movement, Sylver was able to shuffle his feet, and by the time he reached the water, and was slammed into a tall wave, the effect disappeared completely.

He had to fight the wind, waves, the current and was almost vaporized by lightning, but eventually, he managed to return to the ship.

To say the stereotype of a pirate was surprised to see him was an understatement.

Sylver was standing on a circular piece of ice, that was being held up in the air by a pillar of water. His face was neutral, he was mildly annoyed by the experience, but he didn’t feel smug about the fact that he survived completely unscathed.

The pirate reached behind his back and produced a sabre with a golden handle.

He approached Sylver almost like he was dancing, his movements were refined, masterful, efficient, certain, he looked like he was dodging the fast-falling raindrops as he moved, and-

He went down like a sack of bricks when his sabre shattered against Sylver’s neck, and Sylver lightly punched the man in the forehead.

[Black Mass(IV) Proficiency increased to 44%!]

[Mutating Override (V) Proficiency increased to 16%!]

Sylver brushed off the loose bits of shattered metal, and as a tendril of [Black Mass] slithered out of his robe and tied up the pirate, Sylver braced himself and slowly deflated the hydrogen balloons tilting the boat to the side.

Going by the giant hooked bolts, with ropes attached to them, and the absence of any kind of ballista, Sylver had to guess that this man used his hammer to somehow launch the bolts.

The hammer in question was missing, Spring informed Sylver that shortly after he swung it, the man threw the hammer overboard, and it sunk with such speed Spring had no chance of catching it.

After just a few seconds of deflation, the ship was floating the right way up, but Sylver could tell it wasn’t going to be able to handle the storm.

It had been “steady” if he had to describe it when he first came here, but it appears that the hammer had something to do with the ship’s ability to traverse the intense waves, and without it, the whole thing was one good crash of water away from completely toppling over and sinking.

Thankfully for Sylver, he still had plenty of [Black Mass] to make flotation devices from, and after a few seconds of fiddling, even managed to create a strain of mushrooms that converted water into gas.

But, as a lightning bolt came dangerously close to one of the balloons, Sylver saw the folly in taking on a storm in a wooden ship, held aloft by an enormous amount of highly combustible gas.

“The storm will pass in an hour and a bit,” a voice spoke from every conceivable direction.

If Sylver wasn’t intimately familiar with how gods communicated he would have thought a holy being had just spoken to him.

“Chrys?” Sylver asked towards the thunderclouds.

“Trying something new. There’s a box hidden in the captain’s quarters, in the ceiling above the entrance, has a fancy lock of some sort. I’d like it if you opened it for me,” Chrys said.

Sylver could feel the words she was speaking inside his teeth, to call it unsettling was an understatement.

But he did as she asked, and found the aforementioned box exactly where she said.

The lock was indeed fancy, it required 2 very specific keys, its insides were sprinkled with lead, and the wood felt unusually tough.

It wasn’t tough enough to withstand a tiny beam of abyss magic.

And while it did indeed take a fair bit of fiddling to reach the lock latch from the inside using an extremely thin tendril of [Black Mass] it only took about a minute of effort.

Inside there was a pouch full of dark blue pearls, a golden key, a silver punch dagger, and a ruby as big as Sylver’s thumb.

“Ah fuck... Never mind,” Chrys said from the floor, walls, and ceiling.

“I’m only asking for the sake of curiosity but what are you trying to do?” Sylver asked.

“I don’t know how to explain it without making it sound stupid... I was trying to predict the future by linking it to things you were going to interact with. But it turns out that whatever is clouding your future also clouds the future of the things you touch... Or talk to since my predictions for Captain Primon were completely off,” Chrys explained, as Sylver pocketed the pearls, golden key, ruby, and left the silver punch dagger in the box, which he put left on one of the shelves on the left.

“I take it the guy with the hammer is Captain Primon,” Sylver said, as he walked around the room and as he ran his finger along the spines of the books, stored them all away in his [Bound Bones] to read and organize later.

“Hammer?” Chrys asked.

“He had a magic hammer that did something to my feet. He threw me off the ship for a bit using it,” Sylver explained.

Chrys didn’t speak for the entire time it took Sylver to gather up everything of value in the room. Which wasn’t much, if you ignored the gold, gems, and decorated swords and shields.

“Forget what I said, I think I was looking at a different pirate ship... Anyway, the storm will be over soon,” Chrys said, as Sylver nodded at no particular direction.

Sylver left the shades to clean up all the blood and had them move the pirates into one location, while he made his way over to Lavotk’s ship.

Even without Chrys telling him, he could feel the wind losing strength, and although the clouds above remained as thick as before, there frequency of lightning bolts decreased significantly.

He was weary about leaving the barrels on the ship, but they were safer inside the ship than they were if he tried to carry them with him. He didn’t bother with an ice raft this time and simply used [Advanced Water Manipulation] to propel himself through the water.

Lavotk and Bian both pointed their crossbows at Sylver but lowered them once they saw his face.

“Are you hurt?” Lavotk asked.

“All good. Any problems here?” Sylver asked.

“We’re fine,” Lavotk said, as looked away from Sylver.

The shades downstairs were done packing things up, and it turned out that all 3 sisters had been awake since the moment first harpoon hit the inner ship.

“Storm seems to be winding down,” Bian said as if they were casually discussing the weather.

What she meant was “you brought us bad luck, but you also saved us, so thank you, and I don’t want to be rude but leave as soon as humanly possible.”

Because these two had been polite to him and the Gorgons and were polite even now, Sylver didn’t argue with the thing Bian hadn’t said.

He thanked them for their hospitality, and once they turned their backs and covered their eyes, Sylver led the 3 sisters onto a raft made of ice and protected them from the falling hailstones as they made their way towards what was now Sylver’s ship.

“I’ve never been on a pirate ship before,” Stheno said as they approached the somewhat large vessel.

“It’s just like any other ship… Aside from the smell,” Sylver said.

“Do we need to cover ourselves or is everyone dead?” Medusa asked.

It occurred to Sylver, at this specific moment in time, that he wasn’t certain how these three felt about using living human beings as what amounted to research apparatus.

Instead of dancing around the subject, Sylver asked them point blank what their opinion was on carving sigils onto the pirates’ skins and then having them look at one of the Gorgon sisters to see how the curse interacted with their bodies.

“They lost, so they are yours to do with as you wish,” Stheno responded without even a second to consider the question.

“I somewhat assumed this would be part of the curing process,” Euryale answered, without answering the actual question.

And Medusa stayed silent and looked towards the pirate ship. When Sylver looked at her and waited for an answer she shrugged her shoulders in response.

“Alright then,” Sylver said as their little ice raft reached the ship. “Just wanted to make sure there weren’t any misunderstandings. I’ll run a few experiments while we wait for the clouds to disperse, and then we’ll fly the rest of the way undisturbed,” Sylver said.