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Ch245-What’s Worse Than A Demon?

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It was important to remain calm and collected.

That Faust was as cool as a cucumber was extremely fortunate because Sylver wasn’t certain he would have had the capacity to deal with someone panicking right now.

The number one priority was preventing the demon from fully forming the portal.

Because if the demon crossed over, and it was 6th tier, or higher, as Edmund had estimated, then everyone was done. Sylver would be “dead,” as would Edmund, and Faust, and Sophia and her lot would likely die from the sheer magical pressure.

Then the demon would be free to wait for the winter solstice, after which the whole world would drown.

In theory, given the specific nature of this demon, there was a chance it would be weak upon crossing into this realm, but the sheer amount of mana it had in its possession would counter even the strongest of Edmund’s attacks.

But given that the demon wasn’t stupid, it was unlikely to stick around long enough for anyone to do anything.

As Nautis lowered his hand into the portal, Sylver felt the portal nearest to his head solidify. As the primal-energy-distorting hand materialized in Sylver’s blind spot, Sylver used [Fog Form] to get away from it.

But Nautis didn’t wait for Sylver to catch his breath, and repeated the exact same attack, using the exact same hand.

If this was anyone else, Sylver would have felt obligated to admit that this was a brilliant, and deadly, combination, but given that the caster was Nautis, Sylver refused to believe it was anything other than dumb luck and coincidence that he had combined those two abilities.

But, as impressive as the whole thing sounded, and as “unbeatable” as it may seem, this wasn’t Sylver’s first time fighting against it.

As Sylver continued dodging out of the way of Nautis’ teleporting hand, a shade hiding behind the altar at the top of the pyramid threw one of the rogue-type shades at Nautis. Sadly, instead of knocking Nautis out of the air, the shade merely passed through him and disappeared into a cloud of black smoke.

Normally, when a shade is destroyed, Sylver can pick it up, and heal it back into shape, but this shade was gone. The framework in its head and skull had been severed, and that in turn disrupted the magic that allowed it to exist as an undead shade.

But its death hadn’t been in vain, because Sylver now knew that Nautis’ defense was passive, given that he didn’t react until after the shade had already passed through him. He didn’t stop his assault with his teleporting hand either.

The fact that Nautis reacted at all meant he didn’t have complete confidence in his defenses. It was also possible he wasn’t accustomed to being untouchable but considering that this was a power “given” to him by a demon, the former was more likely than the latter.

Sylver had been building distance between him and Nautis, as had Faust, but as Sylver began to close the distance, Faust mirrored him and approached the floating white robe-wearing figure.

Nautis didn’t appear to panic, but then again, it’s hard to tell without seeing his face.

Sylver reached the pyramid and began to run up the bone cubes. With a flick of his wrist, a thin black staff appeared in his hand. It teleported with him as he used [Fog Form] to reach the top of the pyramid, and as Sylver spun the staff in his hand, the tip extended and stretched into the shape of a scythe.

“I hope you enjoyed this Nautis,” Sylver said, as he spun the scythe faster and faster, and increased its size and length with every swing.

Nautis lifted his hands out of the portals and turned his head to stare at Sylver.

“Won’t work,” Nautis said, as Sylver’s scythe began to flicker with golden sparks.

“Then you have nothing to fear,” Sylver said, as he moved the scythe from his left hand into his right and stopped spinning it.

The air was shimmering from the heat the blade was outputting, and even amidst the rumbling the turning pyramid made, it was impossible not to hear the dangerous hissing noise that came from the dark weapon.

Sylver threw the scythe at Faust. And as Faust grabbed the weapon out of the air, he disappeared.

And as Faust disappeared, so did Nautis.

Sylver vaguely felt Faust bouncing from the ceiling to the floor and saw a trail of shimmering air in his peripheral vision. As Sylver ran towards the top of the pyramid, Faust appeared on top of it, with a questioning look on his face.

Sylver almost spoke in demon tongue but remembered at the last second that there was a chance the demon working with Nautis would translate. So, he instead just winked at Faust, and as the cultivator disappeared to chase Nautis away, Sylver continued inspecting the framework that made up the bone pyramid.

The trick with this sort of framework was that the slightest alteration could cause it to implode. Which meant that Sylver couldn’t do anything until he figured out how it worked.

The heart was the source of the power, that was obvious enough, the blood was used as a medium, not the most efficient method of moving energy, but it made sense for something this big, and the only mystery that remained was why the pyramid was powering the metal tree, instead of opening the portal directly.

The most likely answer was that the metal tree was being used to refine Tuli’s life energy, into something more useful to a demon. Or it was possible that the flesh the tree could tap into wasn’t enough for the summoning and needed energy from the heart to supplement it. Or it was-

Sylver felt Nautis’ presence far above him, but Faust scared him off before he even finished materializing.

As a blob of congealed blood landed near Sylver’s feet, he got an idea. One that didn’t require a full understanding of the demon-summoning framework.

At the very top of the pyramid, Sylver leaned over the dark square into which blood was flowing, and he considered the wisdom of what he was about to do.

He waited for a breath or two, to make sure no better idea presented itself.

Sadly, given the scale, it was either this, or making an educated guess that the sigil Sylver would destroy would slowly shut the pyramid down, as opposed to imploding, and either killing everyone or transporting them to the demon realm.

The daggers in Sylver’s robe flew upwards and cut around one of the holes the spears had left. A lump of turtle heart meat fell downward and landed directly into Sylver’s hands.

The remaining skin on Sylver’s arms crumbled into dust, up to his shoulders, as the chunk of meat dried, and shriveled up. The piece of meat the size of a watermelon gradually shrunk until it was the size of an apple.

Sylver’s neck and cheeks flickered with golden sparks, and with a flash of light, the skin on the upper half of his torso tore apart, and dissolved into a grey liquid, along with the skin of his neck, and all of the skin on his head below his ears.

Mora’s strings hung loosely around his significantly thinner body as if he was a cloth puppet someone had abandoned before they could finish sewing all the pieces together.

Sylver rolled his shoulders as he got a better grip on the piece of turtle heart jerky, and with a grunt, began to squeeze it.

His bones creaked from the pressure, and steam escaped from the small cracks that formed on his humerus, but Sylver pressed on, and eventually, a barely visible droplet of pitch-black ink gathered at the bottom of the apple-sized turtle heart clump of meat.

Sylver was careful as he shook the piece of meat, and eventually, the honey-like black liquid fell. The droplet was smaller than a dried raisin, and it disappeared into the blood flowing along the floor without leaving a trace. The blood didn’t even ripple from the droplet and continued to flow up into the altar, into the black square.

On the verge of losing consciousness, Sylver had to use the altar to steady himself, and while he was at it, he grabbed the blood-soaked book and hid it away in his robe.

Just short of delirious from the labor he had just performed, Sylver stood on his shaking legs and waited for the curse to reach the portal above.

[Mutating Override (IV) Proficiency increased to 100%!]
[Mutating Override (IV) rank up available!]

Nautis chose that moment in time to return to the room, and to his and Faust’s mutual surprise, the black scythe Faust had been wielding melted out of his hands. Sylver vaguely felt a portal forming directly behind his head and then had the metaphorical wind knocked out of him, as Faust grabbed him by the back of the neck and carried him away.

Sylver was thrown from one corner of the room to the other, and although he managed to gather enough strength to stand on his own, his mind was too fried to properly predict Nautis’ portals.

Faust shouted something into Sylver’s ear and slapped him across the face, but Sylver couldn’t gather the mental force needed to understand language.

With the weakness of a man about to fall asleep from a fatal concentration of narcotics, Sylver just barely managed to tell Faust that they needed to get upstairs.

Faust said something in response, but it fell on deaf ears. Spring could only repeat what Sylver had said since he couldn’t understand what Sylver was thinking.

At some point, Spring decided to kill three-quarters of the remaining shades, and the influx of mana woke Sylver up like a splash of cold water in the face.

He was inside a tunnel, on Faust’s back, and Faust was using Sylver’s arms the way someone would use the straps on a backpack to carry him.

Sylver used [Fog Form] to get off his companion, and as he materialized next to him, and ran alongside him, Sylver saw that Faust’s face was drenched in sweat.

“Go ahead, I’ll be fine,” Sylver said as he sped up the tunnel.

It warmed his heart that Faust trusted Sylver enough to do as he said, and as soon as he finished nodding, Faust’s body became blurry, and he disappeared.

Sylver ran with all the strength and speed that he could muster, but his legs could only do so much.

He very nearly crashed, as he lost his footing, on account of not having any floor to run on. Very briefly Sylver saw that the tunnel he was coming out of was connected to a giant empty sphere of a room, and on the left he could see the pulsing black metal pillar embedded into the bone.

He continued running, climbed up the wall, and ran through the connecting tunnel on the other side of the spherical room.

***

When Sylver reached the “surface,” the space between Tuli’s shell, and her spine and body, he was relieved beyond words that Edmund was still up and about, firing painfully bright beams of white fire at the creature trying to crawl through the ever-growing portal.

Enough of it was through now, that Sylver could see what it looked like. It had the appearance of hundreds of worms that had been skinned and then molded into the shape of a one-armed human man. Every time Edmund’s flames scorched the skinless worms on the surface, they slithered downward and were replaced by a fresh batch of bright red gore noodles.

Aside from the occasional scream, the demon didn’t say anything, it merely continued pushing more and more of itself through the portal hovering above the black metal tree.

Sylver started running towards Edmund and the portal, and in the distance saw Faust decapitating one vampire after the next. Sylver searched around for Sophia, but he couldn’t find her.

He hoped they were merely hiding, or unconscious, as opposed to the significantly more likely outcome, and made the choice not to think about it.

The “tree” had seemingly toppled over, given that its trunk was now almost parallel to the ground, and Tuli’s spine.

As Sylver was approaching the portal, the struggling demon’s movements became slower, until it stopped moving entirely. Edmund carried on blasting it with white fire, but the demon ignored him. Its head turned, and Sylver saw that there was a glowing white orb inside the “head,” it was floating in the middle of the hollow bird cage-like collection of worms. The orb was the size of a mansion, and the texture looked like it was made out of chunks of rock and sand.

The demon focused its gaze on the small undead necromancer running towards it, but before it could do anything but see him, it felt something inside of it snap into place.

It wasn’t a gentle snapping either, this wasn’t the snap of a lock closing, easily opened again with a simple twist of the key, this was the violent and unreversible snap of a vault that can only be opened from the inside.

The demon then made the noise Sylver normally associated with a pig that smelled fresh pig blood. It didn’t squeal exactly, but it was that kind of high-pitched hoarse sound, a noise that bypassed language and was pure emotion.

With a pulse, the demon tree’s metal branches began to curl, the straight and razor-sharp blades rolled into tight cones, and as the branches bunched up together, they clinked and clanked, and when the bigger branches pressed up against the smaller one, the small metal sticks snapped off and fell towards the ground.

Once he was close enough, Sylver brought his bony hands up to his mouth and shouted with as much force as he was capable of.

“DON’T LET IT GET AWAY! I NEED THE CORE!” Sylver’s amplified voice filled the entirety of Tuli’s shell, and every single creature that was capable of comprehending speech simultaneously realized that they were trapped inside with something that viewed a demon as a resource.

The metal tree groaned with effort, as the branches bunched together into a net of blunt metal. It went from being a dangerous cactus to a dull shrubbery.

As the portal began to retract, the demon’s large body lost layers upon layers of grey worms. They seemed to dissolve into the air.

Sylver felt pretty good about himself at that moment. He was about to attain a demon core, he had prevented a demon from being summoned, and although the damage to Tuli was extensive, to put it lightly, he could still feel her life force pulsing underneath his feet.

Then the sky opened.

A crack so large that all the suns could be seen through it, raw sunlight blinded Sylver and cooked his exposed bones, and did the same for every unholy bloodsucker littered throughout the “cave” that was no longer a cave.

The crack stretched from Tuli’s front left foot, down to her bottom right foot.

Fresh air rushed in with a painful loud whistle, and on both ends of the crack, unfiltered seawater violently fell from the sky and splattered against Tuli’s bare flesh.

Sylver struggled to accept that what he was seeing was happening, and using the ancient practice of denial, he chose to ignore it.

Demon first, everything else later. He repeated to himself, over, and over, and over again.

As a fellow master of the art of not looking at the thing you don’t want to see, Edmund focused solely on the demon trying to slither back into the hole it came from.

To the demon, what had once been a wide-open door, was now an unstoppable guillotine.

Except it wasn’t trying to crawl back into its hole…

It had gone limp, and the only part of it that was moving was the “hand.” It lifted the many-fingered appendage towards the crack in Tuli’s shell, towards the sky, and as the skinned worms gathered together, they formed a single finger.

Sylver followed the finger with his eyes, and from where he was standing, he could see clear as day that the finger was pointing at one of the moons.

A disk of heated metal flew at the hand, and in a single controlled motion, sliced clean through the part that could be interpreted as the wrist. The worms that made up the hand became hysterical and wriggled around as they slowly floated toward the ground, dissolving into the air.

When Sylver reached the portal, the sphere had shrunk to half the size of the demon’s width, every time it pushed itself into the portal, thick layers of worm skin were peeled off.

He raised his arms towards it, and as he brought his hands together, the portal followed suit and shrunk.

With a final grunt, Sylver clasped his hands together, and as the steam escaping from his bones tore what remained of his robe apart, and the last remaining pieces of skin and flesh were flung away, the portal gently reduced in size, and disappeared.

Mora’s threads hung loosely on Sylver’s body, weaving in and out of the tiny holes near his joints. He looked like a skeleton covered in cobwebs, which was fitting, given that that was what he was. His dark bones had streaks of gold as if they were made out of black marble. His jaw swung in the harsh wind, and only the pale thread wrapped around it stopped it from falling off completely.

With the portal closed, the demon’s body began to dissolve very quickly as if it was a sandcastle being swept away by an incoming tide.

Sylver’s legs gave out at that moment, and Spring materialized behind him and pushed Sylver’s limp body onto Ulvic. While Faust continued moping up the remaining vampires, Sylver’s wolf shade ran towards the direction Sylver could feel dense waves of mana coming from.

Edmund remained in the air, circling the spot where the portal had been, above the tightly wound and bumpy mental tree shrub.

As Sylver was helped down from the wolf, a shade materialized under each of his arms and lifted him off the ground. They carried him forwards, to where a small pearl white sphere, the size of an apple, sat embedded into the ground.

The shades lowered Sylver, and he sat on his knees and reached out toward the pearl-colored sphere.

As his bony fingers touched it, they passed through it, and as Sylver tried to pick it up, the outer layer disappeared. Out of the pale ashes, Sylver retrieved a white orb the size of a cherry.

“God fucking dammit,” he said, as he closed his fist around it.

***

“I’m telling you, I would have felt it,” Edmund repeated, as Faust returned from his hunt.

They were using pieces of bone rubble as seats, and a small campfire had been built out of wooden debris Edmund had found laying around the area. Every now and then Sylver reached into his ribcage, pulled out a shard of metal, and flicked it into the campfire.

“You were right. Perfectly cut square holes. Roughly 100 meters between each one. Same way you would go about breaking a boulder,” Faust said, as he sat down on the only available seat.

“Why would it waste its mana on breaking the shell?” Edmund asked.

“It didn’t. It only started trying to cast after the shell had been broken,” Sylver said.

“So Nautis did it by himself? If he has this kind of firepower, why are you still alive?” Edmund asked, as he reached out to Sylver’s head, and picked out the metal piece stuck on the edge of his eye socket.

“He fell for my bluff with the scythe, it’s possible he was too frightened to think clearly. Or his power is limited while he’s using that intangibility spell. And he didn’t want to risk it while I was around? Something like that?” Sylver offered.

“It could be a limitation due to the deal he made. The demon gave him the strength to break the shell, but he wasn’t allowed to use that power on anything else,” Faust said, as Sylver nodded along, but Edmund only became more annoyed.

“So Nautis broke the shell, so the demon had direct access to the moons? Wouldn’t it make more sense to kill us, and then break the shell? Or kill us and simply wait for the demon to finish being summoned,” Edmund questioned.

“What if it wasn’t Nautis? What if whoever he’s working for did it?” Sylver asked.

Edmund raised his eyebrow.

“His mysterious, nameless benefactor, that wanted to summon the Moon Demon, and provided him with all the tools, but stayed out of sight until the very last minute,” Edmund said, with an almost mocking tone of voice.

“It’s happened before. With Nautis specifically, this would be the 3rd time. The prison, then the thing with Yeva and Ciege, and now this. The pattern couldn’t be more obvious!” Sylver said with a yelp, as the last crack in his spine healed and he could finally start working on the mana channels in his torso.

“So, someone broke him out, somehow healed him from your curses, powered him up, got him in contact with a demon, helped him gather what he needed for a demon summoning, provided him with an army of vampires, and mercenaries, and then sat back and hoped for the best?” Edmund asked as Sylver rolled his eyes.

Or did the motion for someone that rolled their eyes, given that he currently didn’t have any eyes to roll.

“Again, it literally, wouldn’t be the first time. On top of that, if I weren’t here, do you think you would have been able to stop it? If Sophia came without us, would she even make it to the pyramid?” Sylver asked.

Edmund didn’t quite glare at Sylver, but they exchanged a look.

On his way down, Edmund spotted an ominous piece of rust, that turned out to be a blood-soaked book. He hid it away in a rag he found, and he was currently using it as a seat cushion.

“Could be some kind of cult,” Faust offered.

“Could be. They funneled their resources into Nautis, and trusted that he knew what he was doing,” Sylver said.

He tried to laugh, but it was hard to laugh at someone who almost managed to drown the world. Sylver still didn’t respect Nautis, but the mere fact that he was involved in this meant he had no choice but to take him somewhat seriously.

The trio sat around quietly, with only the occasional pop from the campfire, along with a faint clink as metal bits came out of Sylver’s bones, and fell out.

“I’m asking just in case, but you haven’t found Sophia, right?” Sylver asked Faust.

The cultivator shook his head.

“Didn’t find any paladins or priests either. But there are a ton of holes that she could have fallen into. She probably just got lost,” Faust offered as he stood up from his seat.

“There’s fish and bread if you’re hungry,” Edmund said with a gesture towards the makeshift table Sylver had built out of wooden planks and hardened mushrooms. The shades had found backpacks that weren’t soaked in seawater and gathered the food for Faust and Edmund to eat.

“I’m good for now, thank you. I need to rest a little. I’ll handle the remaining vamps in the morning, assuming they don’t turn to dust on their own,” Faust said, as he walked into the tent.

Alongside Nautis, the head vampire wearing a red robe had also gone missing. The vampires that had been left behind were “strong,” but they weren’t a match for Faust or Edmund. Initially, the two tried to negotiate with them, but the ones that remained had all turned feral, and there wasn’t much to do aside from killing them.

Edmund cleared his throat and spoke in a language only he and Sylver knew.

“Do you think the three sisters are behind this?” Edmund asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. It could all just be a coincidence,” Sylver offered.

“He was summoning a demon inside someone you know, using a book you “know,” and despite being powerful enough to tear Tuli’s shell open, he got scared away by a fake scythe. Sounds more like someone wanted you here,” Edmund said.

“Don’t forget that the vampire he was working with knew me too,” Sylver added.

It was the middle of the night right now.

The sky wasn’t clearly visible, due to all the streams traveling up the inside of Tuli’s shell, which created a cloud over the crack. Now and then the cloud was sucked out, and the unnaturally bright moonlight seeped through.

Unnaturally bright in Sylver’s eyes, but since Edmund said this is how they always looked, Sylver trusted that it was just his lack of eyes playing tricks on him.

Sylver moved the demon core in his left hand, into his right.

“Is it possible you were wrong about it being a 6th tier? With how much mana you were manipulating, it-”

“I’m sure,” Edmund said.

Sylver turned the spherical pearl-colored demon core over and continued looking at it.

He waited for Edmund to finish healing his face before he spoke.

“I have an idea…” Sylver said with a hint of a grin in his voice.

“You want to move one of the moons off course. Just enough to disrupt Eira’s mana field. So that if one of our people is locked in a magical cage, this will provide them with enough wiggle room to escape,” Edmund said.

He somehow was able to keep all judgment out of his voice, he attached no bias, or emotion to the words that came out of his mouth.

Edmund was looking right at Sylver, and although he hesitated, Sylver eventually lifted his head and made eye contact with Edmund.

“You saw the shades inspecting the metal tree,” Sylver guessed.

“I also noticed you haven’t released the energy trapped in the pyramid. Moving one of the moons will mean all teleportation networks will cease to function, most barriers will break down, and the shift in mana will cause monsters to migrate to who knows where. Not to mention the fact that most modern-day mages don’t know how to adjust their spells will mean they will either lose the ability to cast altogether, or their firepower will be reduced to the point of uselessness,” Edmund counted out.

The reason he was so calm about the things he said, about the predictions he was making, was because he knew that Sylver knew all of that already. And because Sylver was Sylver, it meant that he thought that the reward of what he was suggesting, was worth the risk.

“There’s more… If I wait until I’m fully healed to cast the spell, it will be too late…” Sylver said as the brown flame healing him was snuffed out.

Under the light of a pitifully small campfire, the skeleton with black bones, spoke to the small human child in a language only they knew.

The result of this conversation would determine whether the realm of Eira would remain as it is, or if it would be thrown into chaos.