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Ch259-Fish And Ships

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

Sylver continued staring at the dwarf, as snake-shaped pieces of [Black Mass] climbed up the net and the strings holding it in the air, and with Spring’s guidance, positioned themselves to clog up the mechanism the crane device was used to lift and lower the net and it’s contents.

The Spring-Half with Sylver split again, and while one Spring-Quarter remained with the [Black Mass] above to coordinate, the other travelled through the dark water and crane and materialized outside the dwarf’s window.

The dwarf flinched, and what could only be described as a bent sword shattered the window as it skewered the Spring-Quarter and continued flying out of sight, leaving behind a dimly glowing string that now passed through the broken window, Spring, and ended wherever the large hooked spearhead was.

The now skewered Spring-Quarter kept his hands by his side and slouched as much as he could, in an attempt to mimic a calm and relaxed living person’s body language, but even as he tried to explain to the dwarf that he wasn’t here to fight, a smaller bent spear pierced his head.

The [Black Mass] above clogged the mechanisms as it tried to move, and instead of being dropped back into the water, the sphere of salt merely bounced from a tiny amount of string slipping.

Sylver healed the Spring-Quarter in his shadow and had him fuse back into one Spring-Half, as he slowly climbed up the netting, and like a monkey climbed along the long crane thing sticking out of the inside of the large spherical boat.

The dwarf, and the human woman behind him, were both almost done reloading their fancy crossbows when Sylver enhanced his voice so they would hear him and said 2 phrases in Dwarvish.

The literal translation of what he said was “I, of clear eyes, still hands, and certain footing, request the warmth of your hearth.” But there were so many layers of cultural context that trying to explain the entire subtle meanings, promises, and linguistic intricacies would require an entire day.

The point was, Sylver had asked permission to enter their “home,” and that he wouldn’t break the dwarven rules of “hospitality.”

According to the cultural phrase he had used, assuming the dwarf followed them, he was required to provide Sylver with food, drink, something to wash himself with, and a safe place to sleep for a minimum of 1 night.

And in return, Sylver was required not to threaten or overly burden the host, and in the event the dwarf requested to be a guest in Sylver’s house, it would be unthinkable for him to refuse.

There were also a handful of rules regarding trading precious metals/crystals or similar items of value, but that part only applied when a dwarf was requesting another dwarf. As a “human” the expectation from Syvler was mostly to do with not ruining the man’s home.

Or boat in this case, but the rule applied to anything with a roof, with enough space for 2 dwarven men to sleep side by side without their elbows or beard hairs touching.

After a short pause the dwarf stopped loading his crossbow, and if Sylver read his lips correctly, told the human woman behind him to stand down too.

After the man nodded, Sylver nodded back and climbed to the hanging building. Once he reached the base of the crane, he made himself a beam out of his shadow to walk on and stood outside the now-open door.

The inside was quite cramped, the human woman and the dwarf could stand tall, but Sylver would have to crouch if he came inside. At the bottom of the window was a collection of metal dials, embedded with barely visible glowing crystals, that Sylver had to guess controlled the boat, the net, and the crane holding it up.

Sylver slowly reached into his robe, produced his adventurer’s guild card, and held it out to the dwarf. The woman behind him reached over him and took the piece of wood.

“I take it your vessel got caught up in the storm?” the woman asked.

She was in her 30s, maybe younger, but between the thick scarf covering the bottom half of her face, and the enchanted goggles covering her eyes, Sylver couldn’t say for sure. 

She and the dwarf wore the same clothes, dark blue overalls, with a black shirt that looked like it was made from rubber underneath.

“It’s a long story…” Sylver said, as the woman handed him his adventurer’s guild card back and nodded at the dwarf standing between her and the pale black-eyed [Necromancer].

“Which clan do you belong to?” the dwarf asked in Dwarvish.

“I don’t belong to any clan. May I come in?” Sylver asked. He did technically “belong” to several dwarven clans, but they were all on the other side of the Asberg, and if the Ibis was any indication, long dead and gone.

At the moment, with him standing outside the doorway, Sylver wasn’t a “guest.”

Dwarven culture wouldn’t consider it breaking the rules of hospitality if Sylver was killed outside, but the second he was given permission and his foot touched the inside of the “home,” so much as an intentional papercut done would bring the greatest of shames upon the unnamed dwarf’s family.

“We won’t be docking for another 3 weeks. And we’ve recently lost communication so we aren’t capable of providing passage to a different vessel,” the dwarf explained.

Sylver nodded at him, as thunder rolled above them and shook the glass fragments littered inside the room.

“We only ask to wait out the storm. Once the sky clears enough, we’ll be on our way,” Sylver explained, with a gesture towards the pitch-black ball hanging off the clogged-up crane.

“How many of you are there?” the human woman asked.

“4 in total, but I have no issue staying outside if you allow my companions a place to rest. They have… an affliction of sorts. It spreads by observation, so I would need to section off an area so neither of you accidentally look at them,” Sylver explained as the dwarf and the woman looked at each other. “The 3 of them are human women, slightly taller than you are, they won’t take up much space,” Sylver added with a gesture at the covered-up woman.

“What about the dark thing we shot?” the woman asked.

“He’s one of my summons, he lives inside my shadow,” Sylver explained.

Once again, the dwarf and the woman looked at one another.

“Just until the storm passes?” the woman asked.

“Just until the storm passes,” Sylver answered.

All three of them, Sylver, the woman, and the dwarf quietly looked at one another for a few seconds.

“Bian,” the woman, Bian said with a nod of the head.

“Lavotk,” the dwarf, Lavotk said with a nod of the head.

“Sylver,” Sylver said, as the dwarf took a step back and disarmed the barrier holding back the wind, rain, and hailstones bouncing harmlessly off his ship.

Sylver crossed the threshold and grasped Lavotk’s hand.

As with most dwarves, despite his hand being smaller, Lavotk had a vice-like grip, and expertly stopped just short of crushing Sylver’s hand.

Bian removed her glove and Sylver felt like he was shaking hands with a creature made from pebbles, from how hard the calluses on her fingers were. She put her glove back, and with a tap of Lavotk’s foot, several planks of wood folded out of the way in the floor to reveal a ladder.

Sylver climbed down after Bian and was surprised to see that there was almost 3 times as much space as the outside of the spherical ship implied.

The magic stretching out the dimensions felt… foreign, and not in a good way, but it was old, and although the northern section was slightly unevenly stretched, spending a night here wouldn’t kill anyone.

Most of the space was occupied by what Sylver would describe as “junk,” but amidst the weathered chests, there were sealed-up boxes that hummed with magical energy, and looked like they would sell for a good price in the right market.

“There should be a rolled-up sail cloth in that barrel over there. I can bring you some nails and a hammer, but you’ll have to do it yourself,” Bian said with a gesture towards the barrel in question.

The ceiling down here was high enough that Sylver could stand at his full height, which meant that Bian would need a ladder if she wanted to nail the sailcloth to the ceiling to create a makeshift divider.

Sylver pulled out a small ball of darkness from his sleeve, and gently rolled it forward. The blob of [Black Mass] spread out along the floor and stretched itself out until it created a pitch-black wall.

Bian nodded and returned to the ladder to climb upstairs.

Once he was outside, Sylver’s robe did the climbing for him as he made his way towards the Gorgon sisters, and as the rock-hard net became soft and stretchy, it fell off the pitch-black sphere and was pulled into the crane as if it were a fishing line.

Sylver formed a giant umbrella above him, and as Euryale cracked a hole in the top portion for them to climb out of, Sylver held out his hand to help them up.

As a precaution, he lowered the umbrella so it covered Bian’s and Lavotk’s view.

The front of Medusa’s jacket was drenched in blood, as were her gloves, and there were splotches of blood on Euryale’s and Steno’s gloves and clothing too.

And yet with all of that, all 3 of them look downright giddy.

Sylver raised the umbrella so they could look at the distant hurricane, illuminated from the inside by giant flashes of lightning bolts.

In perfect sync, all three of them said “whoa,” as bolts of lightning caused the flying water to explode, and as the electricity crackled through the droplets, it almost looked like a bright white firework going off.

“As Spring said, we won’t be here long. I’ll catch us some fish, and the shades inside are preparing warm water and towels to wash yourself with. They’ll also clean the blood out while you bathe,” Sylver explained, as the [Black Mass] wrapped around his body slithered out of the bottom of his robe, and created a bridge for the Gorgons to walk on.

Bian and Lavotk had their backs to Sylver and the Gorgons as they walked past, with their hands placed firmly against their tightly closed eyes so as not to see Syvler’s infected companions.

“Thank you for helping us,” Medusa said quietly in Eirish as she walked past them.

Euryale and Stheno repeated her words just as whisper quietly as they climbed down the ladder and quickly made their way over to the space Sylver had segmented for them.

Sylver handed off the towels, hair combs, and the miscellaneous bathing items he deemed necessary to one of the shade archers, that he had double-checked was a woman, and left the women alone while he climbed the ladder back into the control room.

***

Lavotk and Bian were on their knees picking up the small fragments of glass littered on the floor, and as they flicked them up at the empty space where the window used to be, the fragments turned so they were parallel to the window frame and floated in place.

It looked like one of those picture puzzles but made out of shattered glass.

The window made thin cracking sounds as the various pieces fused, and with a careful wave of his hand, Sylver made all the remaining bits float into the window, where they positioned themselves where they needed to be and softly fused into one solid piece.

More than a few chunks were missing on account of the window being broken from the inside, about a third of the glass fragments had slid along the floor and fell into the water below.

Sylver summoned one of his glass flasks from his [Bound Bones] storage and when he held it up to the empty spots in the glass puzzle, his flask shattered and the broken glass shards filled up the remaining empty spaces.

After about a minute of soft crackling, the whole thing hummed, and the window was as good as new. Shortly after that the barrier sprung to life and muted the raging thunder and crashing water.

“Are they your sisters?” Bian asked.

Sylver shook his head.

“No, they… I’m helping them with something in exchange for them helping me with something,” Sylver explained.

“But you’re from the same place?” Lavotk asked.

“Not to my knowledge, no. Why?” Sylver asked.

“You have a similar dialect in Eirish, so we assumed there was a connection,” Lavotk explained.

“I see… No, we’re just… It might be an age thing, all of us are a bit older than we may appear,” Sylver offered.

Lavotk and Bian spent a few minutes tinkering with the dials, and Sylver watched as the distant crane lowered its net.

While Spring handled the [Petty] infused [Black Mass] swimming blobs that were collecting fish, Sylver quietly summoned the piece of flesh that had been blown off him by the lightning strike and allowed Mora’s threads to stitch the charred meat into place.

He could tell by Bian’s and Lavotk’s stiff body language they could smell the scent of burning flesh, but they were polite enough to continue working on their net and didn’t say anything. Sylver lifted his hand up to his face and found that his left ear was missing, along with a good clump of hair on his left temple.

He didn’t have the ear in his [Bound Bones] storage so either it had been burned away by the lightning, or he missed it when he was gathering the blown-off pieces. For the time being, he grafted a piece of mushroom to his head, shaped it into an ear, and altered its colour until it was close enough that most people wouldn’t notice.

He was relieved to find that both of his eyes were intact, as was his nose, forehead, and all of his front teeth were where they were supposed to be. Some of his molars were gone, but he had no idea when or where he had lost them.

Once he was as healed up as he was capable of being without lowering his defences, Sylver climbed up through the hatch on the ceiling and watched the distant hurricane suck up a giant monster that looked like a 6 legged dog.

One of the [Black Mass] blobs slithered up the walls and showed Sylver the various fish the others had caught.

The fish floated into the air, and in a matter of seconds their scales were scaled, their guts removed, interior rinsed out with rainwater, and their blood was drained out of them.

All the waste was thrown into the [Black Mass] blob that was acting as Sylver’s armour, which converted the waste product into a few extra grams of [Black Mass].

Sylver summoned a large copper cooking bowl from his [Bound Bones] storage, and using the hailstones raining down on him, cooked the various fish fragments into a bland but nutritious soup, with only sea salt to aid the flavour.

Off in the distance, Sylver saw giant white sails flutter out of the hurricane and then saw a large wooden ship, split into pieces, moving up the spinning water.

Bian and Lavotk looked more shocked at Sylver’s soup than they had when Spring tried to speak to them.

“I won’t lie, it’s not great, but it’s very filling,” Sylver offered as he summoned two bowls into his hand.

“We don’t eat while we’re working,” Bian said with a hint of regret in her voice.

“Ah,” Sylver said.

“There’s a box of hardtack downstairs near the butcher’s table,” Lavotk offered with a similar regret that Bian had.

Sylver nodded at them and made his way down the ladder.

He almost walked through the black barrier, when he remembered what was on the other side and blindfolded himself.

He passed through the [Black Mass] barrier, passed the large steaming cooking bowl into the hands of a nearby waiting shade, and sat down a chain-wrapped chest to use as a seat.

“How long will the storm last?” Medusa asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Could be a few hours, could be a couple months with this kind of storm. But if it isn’t over by tomorrow night I’ll think of something,” Sylver said.

The tightly sealed area smelled strongly of oranges, and as Sylver stored away all the items the Gorgons didn’t use, he realized the issue with giving 3 women who had living snakes in place of hair wooden hair combs.

But they didn’t mention it, so he didn’t bring it up either.

Medusa ate standing up, with her back to the corner, so she couldn’t be snuck up on, Euryale had fashioned herself a table out of an empty box and had the warm red mushroom in her lap, Stheno sat next to the shade holding the cooking bowl so it could refill the bowl, and ate without once taking her eyes off Sylver’s blindfolded face.

By the time Sylver remembered about the hardtack, everyone had already finished eating.

Medusa stopped leaning against the wall and spoke loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Stheno will take first watch, and Euri and I will keep each other awake, and the storm will hopefully be over by then,” Medusa said while gesturing with her spoon towards Stheno, and then at herself and Euryale. Both sisters nodded at her.

“Do you have any books with you?” Euryale asked towards Sylver.

He summoned 10 out of his [Bound Bones] storage and allowed them to float over to Euryale.

“There’s no need for any of you to stay awake,” Sylver said.

“Spring told us you haven’t had a moment of rest since you came to Finland. You need to sleep while you can,” Medusa countered.

Sylver waited for a few moments, and allowed himself a smile as Stheno yawned, then Euryale and Medusa did her very best, but eventually lifted her hand to her mouth to cover her yawn. It didn’t help, because the small snakes on her head yawned, as they had when the other two snake-haired women had yawned.

“I do genuinely appreciate the concern. But even if I needed to sleep, I wouldn’t be able to rest in any meaningful way while over deep water,” Sylver explained.

The snakes in their hair made a kind of mewing sound as they pulled themselves back, so they were closer to the women, as all 3 of them developed a fear they hadn’t even thought about until a moment ago.

Sylver coughed into his fist to bring their attention back.

“That’s on me, I thought you were cool with the whole open water thing… We’re safe here, these boats are built for handling storms way worse than this. Even if the hurricane sucks it up, nothing will happen,” Sylver explained.

“There are storms worse than this?” Euryale asked.

Sylver’s smile became wider.

“Way worse. Hailstones that fly so fast they break bones, water that freezes on impact and can encase bodies faster than you can blink, rolling clouds of flammable gas, sometimes slimes just float in giant clumps and swallow ship and crew whole, this whole “storm” is barely a drizzle by my standards. The last time I was on a ship-”

Initially, his stories scared them, their hair mewed, but eventually the stories did what Sylver intended, and they realized that they were in exceptionally experienced and capable hands, and if he was saying to not worry, then there was no point in worrying.

By the time Sylver was finished, the shades in the background had finished preparing beds and had even stuffed the mattress and pillow with fragments of red warming mushrooms.

Stheno was out cold the second she put her head down, Euryale intended to read the book she had picked out, but she barely finished the first page before she was asleep, and Medusa stood up from her warm bed and made sure Stheno’s and Euryale’s blankets covered their necks, before she too got in her bed and pretended to fall asleep.

It felt wrong to him that they slept in their clothes, but it was understandable given how cold it was, and if something happened and they needed to leave suddenly, at least this way they wouldn’t need to waste time getting dressed.

Sylver left a decoy of himself sitting in the spot he sat, while he left the [Black Mass] sealed corner and climbed up the ladder.

It was surreal to see so much water moving around without feeling the motion under his feet. But even as wave after wave sent the ship flying through the air, skidding on the water, the small hanging cabin didn’t move an inch.

Sylver felt like he could have built a house of cards and not worried that it would topple over.

Bian was on her knees near the table with the dials and crystals and had her face pressed into what looked like a helmet someone had cut open.

“Everything alright?” Bian asked without lifting her face out of the half helmet.

“Yes, thank you for asking,” Sylver answered.

The more he stared out the window the more the whole thing reminded him of an apprentice’s attempt at an illusion. The image was perfect, not a single shadow or reflection out of place, but because the apprentice was so focused on getting the picture right, he completely forgot to add the sound.

As Sylver stared out into the sea, he saw a red brick wall sitting inside the foamy waves. It almost looked like it was a sticker on the window, and when he blinked, it disappeared.

He rubbed his eyes with his hands and stopped looking out the window.

“Is this kind of storm common for this area?” Sylver asked.

“Our navigations are down; we don’t know where we are to know if this is “common” for this area. On top of that, the currents have shifted so much that there won’t be anything “common” happening anywhere for a long while,” Bian said as Sylver nonchalantly nodded along.

He wasn’t going to complain, because that would be too much even for him, but he was getting a little tired of everyone constantly bringing up the consequences of an action he took.

Then again, he was on a ship, a vehicle that used a medium that relied on the very moon Sylver had nudged, so he had even less room to complain.

“You don’t seem too worried about your navigation not working?” Sylver asked.

Bian didn’t like him. And with that too he couldn’t blame her, he was a stranger, and they were in the middle of the sea, if he and his 3 afflicted companions did something to them, nobody would know.

Plus, he was a [Necromancer].

Which only further made her distrust him.

“We don’t intend to dock for another 3 weeks, Lav will figure something out by then,” Bian said flatly.

They provided his people shelter, for that alone Sylver wanted to help them out, but he had a feeling they wouldn’t be willing to give him their blood to create a tracker.

He also got the feeling they didn’t have any living relatives. But since they had refrained from asking too many personal questions, he would show them the same courtesy.

Sylver stood with his back against the wooden wall and stared through the back of Bian’s head into space while he waited for the storm to calm down.

Although the snake-haired women were fast asleep, the little snakes on their heads were wide awake, and while Sylver didn’t feel any hostility coming from them, they were watching their surroundings very closely.

He didn’t know if those things were “alive” but he removed his decoy to give them a chance to rest, on the off chance they were.

There was a great deal he didn’t know about the Gorgons. He knew enough that he wanted their skills, and his gut said he could trust them, but the details of who and what they were would have to be discovered over time.

Their conversation with Spring was mostly the half-shade answering their questions about the world above the sea, and whenever they spoke amongst themselves, they spoke in that language Sylver’s, and Spring’s, ears were incapable of hearing.

Sylver stopped leaning on the wall, walked over to Bian, and held his open hand slightly below her shoulder.

She lifted her head from the half-helmet and gave Sylver an understandably odd look, and as she blinked, a ballista bolt as thick as her arm pierced the wooden wall and shattered as it collided with Sylver’s palm.

It took maybe 2 seconds for Bian to snap out of it.

With a single turn of a dial, the white ceiling light turned red and began to flash, as the extended crane made a painfully loud clicking sound as it retracted and pulled the net out.

Lavotk clambered up the rope with astounding speed and just as quickly traversed the slippery crane.

For a second, a split second, Lavotk looked at Sylver, like he was about to take a swing at him, but unlike Bian, this wasn’t Lavotk’s first emergency, and with a single glance at the shattered pole sticking out of the wall he understood the situation.

While a smile tugged at the edges of his lips Sylver began to speak

“Water band-”

“Pirates!” Lavotk said.

“-pirates, yes,” Sylver finished as both Bian and Lavotk took a moment to look at him.

The outer layer of sticks changed shape, it became rougher in a sense, and with a speed that looked downright dangerous, the outer sphere began to spin, like a wheel, and sped along the giant waves.

All three of them heard an obnoxiously loud twang, and in unison, Sylver, Lavotk, and Bian turned and looked at the giant rope wrapped tightly around one of the sticks, tangled in the strings keeping the interior sphere afloat.

As their boat floated down and was now below the source of the taut rope, he heard a distant scraping noise, that he had to assume originated from the man sliding down the zipline-like rope, towards Sylver, Bian, Lavotk, and the 3 sleeping Gorgon sisters.

With a single nod of the head, Lavotk accepted the responsibility to keep the sleeping beauties safe, while Sylver went out to handle the water ba-pirates.

Just as the man sliding down the rope prepared to jump, one of the many hailstones harmlessly bouncing off his enchanted hat became slightly faster, broke through the enchantment, and made a sizable dent in his skull.

Sylver used his shadow to pull the unconscious body out of the water and carried the man with him as he walked along the taut rope.