Sylver Seeker

Chapter 243: Demons From The Past(1/2)

Chapter 243: Demons From The Past(1/2)

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

With this much open space, there wasnt a whole lot Sylver could do, going airborne would be suicide, and digging underground wasnt possible since the ground was Tulis flesh, which only left him trying to go through them.

Granted, these were vampires, Sylver would win, but the problem was that he would win eventually. And while Edmund appeared to be doing a good job of interfering with the demon summoning, he wasnt going to be able to keep it up for long.

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

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

There was a brief flash of light.

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

The horde of vampires on the other hand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophia said something, as did the priests standing by her side, but Sylver didnt hear a word they said as he stared at the metal obelisk.

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

Wheres Faust, Sylver asked as one of the priests managed to shake him out of his stupor, by physically shaking his shoulder. It was hard to think with this much holy magic surrounding him, even if it wasnt actively hurting him.

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

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

There was a reaction to his fire, but it didnt feel like the proper reaction. Then again, given the difference in Edmunds current magical output and what Sylver had grown accustomed to, this might have been the proper reaction for magic of this level.

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

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

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

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

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

[Zombie (Greater) Raised!]

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

The vampires-turned-zombies landed on the ground with a heavy thud. The ones that hadnt been damaged before being killed all wore heavy armor, and the only wound Faust had inflicted on them was a single hole through their left eyehole.

If these had been matured vampires, even removing their heads wouldnt necessarily killed them. But these humans had been infected less than a week ago, the curse likely hadnt even fully infected their bodies yet.

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

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

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

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

You had to have a very loose definition of what constitutes a fungus to describe the thing Sylver had created while experimenting in his workshop. It wasnt alive and it most certainly wasnt undead, but given that Sylver felt like someone set his spine on fire when he tried to analyze the plant matter he decided that calling it a fungus would be adequate for the moment.

When the door opened, Sylvers senses were immediately attacked by a painfully bitter scent.

The door that the zombie in front had opened revealed an unmoving cloud of red smoke. The smoke covered the doorway completely and was thick enough that Sylver couldnt see what was on the other side of the door.

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

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

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

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

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

And at this moment in time, Sylver didnt want to go to the demon realm.

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

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

The zombies didnt die all at once, and they didnt die one by one either, they died in batches of 3, which meant there was a good chance there were 3 enemies inside.

Sylver made sure to keep a zombie in front of him as he approached the smoke-filled doorway. He couldnt feel anything past the door and the wall, even with [Dead Dominion].

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

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

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

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

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