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Ch267-Of Cat And Mouse

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Sylver tossed his flask towards it, and the crack stopped glowing.

As Mora’s string slowly pulled the flask back, the barely visible glow reappeared.

She flicked the flask back towards the wall, and the glow disappeared.

Sylver moved the flask away and pressed his face up against the glowing crack.

It glowed with a dull blue light, almost invisible against the matching dull blue ice. The crack was just smaller than the width of the tip of Sylver’s pinkie. It was jagged, somewhat sharp, and zig-zagged down the wall in an uneven pattern.

“CHRYS!” Sylver yelled at the dark snow above them.

Once they had stopped moving, Mora made a small barrier, and the sphere of strings became buried deeply enough that the dense snow blocked what tiny amount of light had been shining through the cloudy sky.

Sylver waited for a good 5 minutes but the glowing-eyed girl either couldn’t hear him, didn’t have anything to say, or was weary of reducing the probability of him finding Nels by saying something.

Not that Chrys needed to say anything because Sylver was willing to bet his good arm Nels was somewhere in here.

He wouldn’t go as far as to say he could feel her presence emanating through the crack, but he could feel something, so at the absolute least whatever was on the other side wasn’t going to be boring.

Sylver turned around to tell Mora to shrink down as much as she could, but the horse/spider creature beat him to it and was already sitting on top of her neatly folded-up horse-shaped outer layer.

He stored it away using [Bound Bones] and went back to touching the crack in the ice.

Mora made a sound.

“It’s not a portal don’t worry,” Sylver answered.

She made a different sound.

“Yeah, kinda. It’s called a “hollow vault.” Used to be a thing wizards made, back when they knew how. Effectively a pocket dimension, but without the danger of a living human body being compressed into a droplet if something damaged the spell,” Sylver explained.

He tapped his finger against the very bottom of the crack, and it made a clinking sound as the ice crystals inside rubbed against one another.

Mora tapped the icy ground.

“It works on the concept of parallel space. It’s like the basement of a house. And this crack is the stairs. If you try to enter through the front door, you’ll simply enter the house. Impossible to get inside unless you use the stairs, but you can get out of it just about anywhere if you want to,” Sylver explained.

He took his hands off the crack as it whined and shrunk to half its size.

Mora tapped the icy ground again.

“It’d take too long. If it’s this reactive to a simple enchanted flask and basic probing spells, a walking mass of positive mana like Edmund would make it disappear entirely. No. Yes. No. He could, but it’d take him over a month, and there’s no guarantee the entrance won’t move somewhere else,” Sylver explained.

Mora made a clicking sound.

Sylver turned to face her and squinted his eyes.

“It’s weak from the inside, even without me you should be able to break out. Yes. Yeah. That’s the backup plan. Yes. Again, it’s not a portal. No. The inside will be as big as the mountain. Yes, I promise. Time dilation? Mora, we’re effectively just going inside the mountain, but it’s like a layer inside 3-dimensional space? No. No, pocket dimension is spatial stretching and compression. It matters,” Sylver explained.

Mora tapped the icy ground.

“Same reason why Edmund was being held by a dragon, I don’t know. If she’s not in here, we’ll keep looking,” Sylver explained, as he pressed his hand up against the crack and pushed as much fog into it as he could.

Mora wasn’t entirely convinced, she for whatever reason seemed more worried now than she had been a moment prior, but Sylver got the feeling she was uncomfortable with the entire premise of this crack.

There was likely some sort of enchantment to ward monsters away, but it must have been very weak since Sylver couldn’t feel it.

Nevertheless, Mora walked over to the crack and extended a thread through it, while Sylver felt around for an open space to materialize on the other side.

He used [Fog Form] through the wisp of cloud he had extended and was surprised to find that he was standing in an incredibly dense and green forest.

His hand was pressed against a faintly glowing crack in a toppled-over moss-covered brick wall that was almost completely parallel to the ground, and after a few seconds had passed, a see-through thread came out of the crack and wrapped itself around Sylver’s wrist.

When Mora tugged the thread three times, Sylver very slowly began to pull the thread towards him and wrapped it more and more around his wrist.

Mora came out of the tiny crack face first and looked like a burst balloon as her completely boneless body gradually slithered out of the crack. Within a matter of seconds, she had inflated herself back to her normal-looking spider form.

Sylver placed her horse-shaped outer layer on the ground next to her, and he sent his shades out to scout the area while he waited for her to regain a form that could carry his weight.

He was standing upright, but he could somewhat feel the spell pulling him “down” towards the ground, and how it was cancelling out Eira’s normal gravity. Technically speaking he was standing on the inside of the mountain wall, but because of the hollow vault’s magic, he couldn’t feel the altered gravity.

Once Mora was horse-shaped again, she brought him up onto the top of the canopy, and Sylver saw the oddest thing in the distance.

There was a giant 8-pointed start with a square face in the middle of it. Painfully bright beams of light came out from the 8-star tips, the eyes, and the mouth of the square-shaped face.

He couldn’t say for certain, because of how slow it was, but it seemed like the mouth and eyes were moving.

Sylver looked around and saw that he was standing inside a giant green cone. When he looked straight up, instead of sky, he could see distant green foliage. Like someone had taken a map, and rolled it into a cone.

The square face was where the tip of the mountain was, the north, and the opposite end… there was like a dark fog near where the base of the mountain was. A dark grey cloud with tiny glittering specks of something floating around in it.

Mora shivered underneath him.

“I feel it too yeah… Could literally be just weird fog… Or outside air leaking in through the base…” Sylver thought out loud.

Spring materialized next to them.

“Does the air feel funny to you?” Spring asked.

Sylver sucked in a breath through his nose, and his throat burned.

“Fucks sake, it’s almost 80% oxygen… But normal air pressure, I wonder if it’s on purpose or natural,” Sylver asked.

Mora made a sound.

“Usually, wizards fill it up with some sort of inert gas. It’s a vault meant to preserve things after all. But since the air is breathable, and if this is anything like the reports I’ve read, this is where the people who disappeared ended up, had kids, and over the course of a 1,000 or so years their inbred descendants developed a civilization,” Sylver answered.

“They’re probably cannibals too,” Spring added.

Sylver looked around again.

“Maybe not. With this much greenery I highly doubt they’re short of fruits,” Sylver said.

On their way back to the ground, Sylver lifted his hand up to the left side of his neck and pulled out a tiny glass bead.

He looked at it, and as he tried to turn it over between his fingers, he saw that there was a barely visible glass needle on one end of the glass bead. As the light caught it, he saw that it was hollow on the inside and that there was a tiny tube connecting its empty centre to the needle.

He looked down and saw a nearly identical glass bead on the left side of Mora’s neck. As he reached toward it to brush it away, the pearl white horse reined backwards and Sylver fell off her like a sack of potatoes.

His back hit the thick with leaves mud with a dull thud, and his outstretched arms spread out on either side of him. As his enraged horse disappeared into the maze of thick trees, Sylver opened his mouth and let out a weak whimper.

The people who had shot Sylver, and his horse, with poisoned darts waited a good 10 minutes before they approached him.

There were 5 of them.

5 thin human men, dressed in matching white cloth pants, with a repeating square-shaped red pattern painted on the sides. One carried a thin flute, that Sylver had to guess was the blowgun they used, the other 2 had large machetes made from yellow-tinted bone, while the ones standing the furthest away had bows.

The man with the blowgun pressed two fingers against Sylver’s neck.

Satisfied with the slow but human-like pulse he felt, he leaned over Sylver’s face and stared directly into his eyes.

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

The language the man spoke sounded eerily similar to Eirish like he was speaking in a thick accent, but out of the 9 words the man said Sylver didn’t recognize a single one.

He most likely asked one of the men with the bow to come over and take a look, since one of the men with the bow walked over to Sylver, did the same as the blowgun man, and made eye contact with him.

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

He had thought it was a trick of the light, but the alteration was a lot more noticeable in the bow man’s eyes.

It was very hard to see in the dim light, and even harder because the man’s eyes were dark brown, but he undoubtedly had slit pupils, like a cat.

The man’s eyes narrowed and for a split second Sylver saw a green mask flicker over the man’s face.

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

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

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

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

Each time the flickering mask appeared Sylver’s [Faceless] perk felt like it was going to buckle under the pressure, but despite the man’s and the mask’s efforts, Sylver’s perk held firm.

The 5 men had a discussion after that, long enough that Sylver began to pick out fragments of their language.

It was unmistakably Eirish in origin, but it was either an evolution of the language or more likely it had been merged with something foreign.

Almost all of the words they used started with a vowel, and the amount of repeating sounds was too regular to be a coincidence. “inini, ed-ed, oll-oll,” and while it was impossible to tell from this single conversation, Sylver was pretty sure pronunciation changed the meaning of a word.

It helped that they used a lot of gestures while they spoke, Sylver was an “uel,” which he hoped just meant “man,” but given their cat-like eyes, more likely than not meant “food.”

Their conversation was cut short by the appearance of 5 more men, 2 of which used a long pole to carry a frothing-at-the-mouth white horse.

They placed Mora down next to Sylver, and while he wanted to give her a round of applause for the performance, he also made a mental note to explain to her that foaming at the mouth when pretending to be affected by a venom wasn’t a good idea.

Because if a venom does make an affected living person foam at the mouth, and the undead pretending doesn’t produce foam, there are about a million reasons to explain why there isn’t any foam.

On the other hand, if the venom is a simple muscle relaxant, like this one felt to be, and the undead trying to pretend to be affected has a seizure and foams at the mouth, it’ll just make the attacker suspicious.

And if they’re suspicious, they’re unlikely to lower their guard and give you room to kill them in a single thrust of a dagger.

Or in this case, unlikely to bring Sylver and Mora directly to their home.

Just as they did to Mora, Sylver was tied to a wooden pole by his wrists and ankles and was lifted and carried between the two men.

Like most people who spent their entire lives traversing a forest filled with winding roots, slippery mud, sharp rocks, and a myriad of other obstacles that would cause a lesser man to trip and smash his head open, the 10 hunters moved with such ease and grace that it looked trivial.

At a certain point, Sylver reconsidered the wisdom of this move, since wounding a couple of men and then following them home was also an option. His hands had gone numb from the pressure of the rope on his wrist, and his hip was beginning to hurt from being in this position for so long.

But then the men carrying him and Mora moved two vines out of the way and walked directly into a village that hadn’t been there a moment prior.

Sylver was grateful he had the foresight to consider the possibility these people had access to magic he was unfamiliar with, and therefore wouldn’t have been able to find and crack open if he attacked them and they ran away from him.

If the itching sensation he felt in his gums and behind the ears was any indicator, these men lived in a village-sized “hollow vault.”

Was a “hollow vault,” inside a “hollow vault” possible?

It was a good question to ask, but sadly the only people who could answer it died off a couple thousand years before Sylver was born. The Ibis obviously tried to investigate hollow vaults, but as far as he was aware no one had ever managed to replicate the spell.

The village was mainly built out of a yellow-coloured sandstone, and the roofs were either made from sandstone and flat or covered in thick dry leaves.

The walls were left clean, but the doors and windows were all painted in bright colours that matched the pattern on the men’s pants, and the more patterns Sylver saw, the more similar they looked to the distant square face inside the 8-pointed star.

Sylver lost track of 4 shades as they reached what had to be the edge of the unwalled village and presumably passed through whatever was hiding the village from outside eyes.

There were children and women out in the streets, all of them had dark hair, either black or brown, and what stood out to Sylver the most was the shape of the children’s spines.

Even from his peripheral vision, he could see they were struggling to stand upright, quite a few were hunched over, and more than a couple were bracing themselves on whatever was nearest to maintain their balance.

As an undead Sylver and Mora were immune to all forms of disease, and because of Sylver’s abilities, were immune to all forms of curses.

But Nels was a living human woman, and if these yokels infected her with their feline lycanthropy to say it would be challenging to cure her was an enormous understatement.

At some point during their trip, the men carrying Mora went in a different direction, and Sylver sent a shade after her to tell her to run away if they started trying to butcher her for the meat.

On the topic of meat, these “people” were undeniably cannibals.

Among other hints, like meat hooks that hung in odd places, butchering tools that were the right size for a human body, there was also a dead guy with two thick sticks shoved through his torso, that was being slowly turned over a firepit.

He had an onion in his mouth, and what might have been garlic shoved into where the cartilage of his nose used to be, and his skin had been professionally peeled off his body. Sylver couldn’t see where his skin was, but if the cuts along his shoulders were anything to go by, it was probably removed in one single piece.

Presumably, while he was still alive.

Sylver was lowered onto the ground, and his wrists and ankles were untied from the pole. The two men who had been carrying him took off his shoes, and when they couldn’t figure out how to remove his robe, they used a bone knife to cut it down the middle and took it off him as if it were a coat.

The [Black Mass] armour Sylver had underneath his robe had been stored away via [Bound Bones], along with his weapons, and while it was very uncomfortable, his robe had made an incision along his stomach and shoved both Ria and Ria’s creation inside of him.

Her creation wasn’t radioactive, but it was warm, and while Sylver liked being warm, he didn’t like having something inside him that was radiating heat that he couldn’t control.

Aside from stripping him of his possessions, one of the men clipped the nails on Sylver’s left hand, cut off a handful of his hair, wrapped the hair and nails in a piece of white cloth, and then dipped the bottom part of it in the liquid that came out of Sylver’s body when they made a small cut on his wrist.

Admittedly he was curious as to what kind of curses these people possessed, but he wasn’t curious enough to let them try. The red liquid fungus they had dipped the cloth in was going to turn the hair and nails into useless ash the moment the guy currently holding it handed it over to someone.

Sylver lay fully nude in the open, his unconscious half-open eyes staring up at the green sky, and he remained that way for almost half an hour, as the hunters that captured him talked about him, about the weather, about his robe, tried to put his boots on but found them too big, and in the end Sylver was placed onto a flat cart, and 2 tall teenagers worked in tandem to pull him away from his belongings.

As to why Sylver was content with being treated like a literal carcass, the answer was he didn’t care how these people perceived him, and he felt like if he jumped up now and started trying to threaten answers out of them, whoever had hidden this village was going to wave their hand, and Sylver would be back in the jungle.

If they were moving him towards a butcher then he would have to go that route anyway, but he was hoping that like most cannibals these people recognized that the best way to utilize human meat is to keep the people alive until you needed them.

Luckily for everyone, Sylver was right.

With surprising care, the two teenagers that had been pushing the cart Sylver’s body was on lifted him off it and carried him over to a square hole in the ground. The one with the lazy eye picked up a small vial from the cart, held it over Sylver’s open mouth, and counted out 4 drops.

Sylver was then pushed towards the hole, and he slid down the slimy angled wall.

His limp body landed into a heap of wet grass.

The hole/slanted tunnel was angled in such a way that there weren’t any shadows on the walls, and because of how much light was coming in through it, the room was illuminated well enough that Sylver could see clearly even without any night vision.

A rolled-up cloth bumped against him as it slid through the hole Sylver had been tossed into, and shortly after that, a thick wooden grate was moved over the hole. His shades informed him that the grate was locked into place by 2 large boulders.

The two teens that had brought him here were looking down through the hole, and Sylver waited until they began to worry that the antidote wasn’t working, so as not to raise suspicion.

There was 1 other man in the room with Sylver, but he was content with hiding in the distant corner, practically invisible unless you were a mildly paranoid necromancer who had shades that scanned every single room you stepped into and reported every single minute detail about who and what was in it.

Once Sylver felt a faint amount of concern from the two boys above him, he pretended to take a shallow breath and rolled through the wet grass until he was out of their view.

He waited until they left, and in a single motion rose up from the ground and made all the filth that covered his skin slide off. He made the cloth bundle float into his hand and saw that it was the same white pants the local men wore.

There were a series of knots near the back that allowed them to be expanded or shrunk, and to Sylver’s great surprise, they were relatively comfortable. They covered about the same amount of skin as underwear did, but half the village already saw everything Sylver had to hide during his trip on the cart, so he didn’t particularly care.

“Going by the beard stubble you’ve been here for about a week,” Sylver said towards the motionless man.

He was wearing the same white fabric Sylver was, except his was stained dark brown, along with the rest of his body since he wasn’t capable of magically cleansing himself.

The man in the shadows remained where he was for a couple of seconds, and then made a show of keeping his hands away from his sides, where he was hiding a sharpened femur.

“12 days. You should sit down, the antidote takes a while to reach the limbs,” the man said with a gesture towards the wall behind Sylver, where there was a slab of sandstone that was the right shape and size for a bed.

Instead of explaining that he was pretending to be immobile, Sylver sat down on the stained rock and scooted backwards until his back was resting on the wall.

“Sylver Sezari of Arda. [Necromancer], adventurer, and master of the dark arts,” Sylver said to the man.

The room was a 25 meter, by 25 meter square, with a pile of grass near the hole that provided light, 4 stone beds on each wall, and the floor was slanted towards the centre, where there was a melon-sized hole in the ground.

“Lostal. Of Pere. I was a 2nd class scout,” Lostal explained.

“You’re a scout with the word “lost” in your name?” Sylver asked.

“The -al actually makes the name translate to “finder.” Did you ask that to distract me, or are you in shock?” Lostal asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Neither, just seemed like a strange name for a scout,” Sylver said.

Lostal walked a few steps forward, and stopped at roughly the distance Sylver would need to physically lunge at the man and the distance Sylver guessed Lostal needed to lunge at him with the sharpened bone.

“Not as strange as a man who’s only pretending to breath being named silver,” Lostal countered.

Sylver took a long deep breath through his nose and realized he forgot to adjust for the extra oxygen in the air. He made the necessary alteration and his chest started expanding and shrinking at the rate a living person’s would.

“Fair enough. I’m going to guess the reason you’re here and haven’t broken out is because they cursed you to black out if you leave this room?” Sylver said.

Lostal shook his head.

“They have a doll, and if bend its legs, your legs will bend too. I think they can also see and hear through it, but I’m not 100% certain,” Lostal explained.

He did his best to hide it, but Sylver smiled at the description.

“I see… Heh… Also, have you by any chance met, or heard of, a woman named Nels?” Sylver asked.

“I haven’t. I uh… Are you alone?” Lostal asked.

“I came here with a 7-legged horse/spider creature. And I have a bit over 1,000 undead shades inside my shadow,” Sylver explained calmly.

Lostal narrowed his eyes.

“Inside your shadow?” Lostal asked.

“A few are in the village streets, they’re mapping it out for me, but the rest are waiting down there,” Sylver answered with a gesture towards his feet.

Lostal looked down at Sylver’s pale legs and shifted his centre of gravity to the left, then back to the right.

Sylver waited a few seconds, lifted his hand, and as he snapped his fingers a bit over 200 shades stood in a dense formation chest to back, shoulder to shoulder, and surrounded Lostal and Sylver.

Lostal for his part didn’t even flinch, and after he had a chance to take a look at the shadowy and smoky figures, Sylver snapped his fingers again, and every single one of them disappeared.

“Damn…” Lostal said as Sylver nodded at him.

“You wouldn’t happen to speak the language they speak?” Sylver asked.

“Only reason I’m still alive,” Lostal said.

“I thought so. If you help me interrogate them, I’ll help you get out of here,” Sylver offered.

“Out of here as in this room, this village, or this… jungle area,” Lostal asked.

“All three. I’ll even personally escort you to Novva if you help me find Nels,” Sylver said, as Lostal completely abandoned any semblance of having his guard up, walked over to Sylver, and the two men shook each other’s hands.