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Ch258-Fish Finish

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They could have asked for just about anything.

Mountains of precious metals, magic that the greatest of mages could only dream of, power, both personal in the way of enchanted items, and more general, in the way of armies and undead.

The Spring-half Sylver left with them went out of his way to explain just how much was on the table.

Instead, Euryale wanted to own a library, Stheno wanted a building in which to train and spar with fellow warriors, and Medusa wanted a cottage with a fireplace, with a stone chimney, and she wanted it to be within a day’s travel of Euryale’s library, and Stheno’s building.

If Sylver, or in this case, the Spring-half they were speaking to, could agree to that, they were happy to work with Sylver for as long as he needed them.

Now, in most cases, people would look at their relatively low demands and assume it’s a trick.

And in most cases, they would be right.

But this wasn’t Sylver’s first time meeting people who had been fucked over by a god or were actively being fucked over in this case, and on top of that, he understood where they were coming from on a personal level.

Sort of how Faust and Bruno tried to live before Bruno moved into the dungeon and cannibalized its residents for researching chimaeras, and Faust decided to conquer a country full of martial artists and was only stopped because Anastasia took his hand in marriage.

After Sylver agreed to the 3 sister’s requests, enough boxes to build a house began to float out of various rooms into a neat cube in the very centre of the now empty dome-shaped room.

While Sylver stored all their belongings away via [Bound Bones] the three sisters washed themselves and changed into the warm clothing Sylver had bought for them.

Buying those was a mistake, because if before Sylver could somewhat look at them and have enough space in his head to think with half a brain cell, now that they looked warm, comfortable, and were smiling, any attempt at a coherent thought was useless.

He ended up having to blindfold himself, but that barely helped since he had a crystal-clear image of how they looked in his head and could hear how happy they were in their voices.

When he was done packing their belongings, Sylver had a decision to make.

Whether to risk using [Xander’s Waystone] or to risk swimming through several kilometres of open sea.

His guess regarding the waystone was as good as anyone else’s, that is to say, he had no idea what would happen.

He had some idea, but most of those ideas involved the 3 lovely ladies being turned inside out or compressed into a sphere no bigger than an apple.

Aside from the metal obelisk, and the damage done to Tuli’s shell, there was also the moon moving, which was going to affect anything even remotely to do with teleportation, especially teleportation that involved a fixed point in space.

Sylver, while blindfolded, turned towards the 3 women and did his best not to focus on them too much.

“I’ll ask just in case, but none of you can breathe underwater, right? Or survive the high pressure?” Sylver asked.

He could hear the grins in their voices.

“No, and no…And we’ll pass out if we get too cold,” Stheno answered.

“If I made a sphere out of salt, would you be able to push it up to the surface?” Euryale asked.

Sylver temporarily ignored the oddness of “salt magic” as a concept. Crystal magic he was fine with, but salt was just a little too out there for him at the moment.

“How big of a sphere would it be?” Sylver asked.

Sylver heard a creaking sound, and after a short wait, extended his mana towards the spot where he had felt Euryale’s mana flow.

The framework keeping the sphere solid was simple, but it wasn’t simple because of a lack of knowledge, it was simple because the caster knew exactly what she wanted to do.

It could have been neater, but that’s something that would come with time and practice, the very fact that Euryale understood her magic well enough to form something this solid using so little mana reaffirmed Sylver’s decision to take the three of them to the surface.

Just to be safe, Sylver walked over to the sphere and pressed his palm against it.

It creaked, squeaked, and made a moaning sound as the multiple layers of crystal salt rubbed against one another, but even when Sylver gave it his all to crush it, it remained solid.

It would shatter to nothing if he pierced it with abyss magic, but for not being crushed by water or being smacked by a passing fish, it was more than adequate.

“How long will it last?” Sylver asked, as he gathered the water in the air into his hand and directed it towards the pale-yellow fungus growing in his palm.

“However long it takes to reach the surface,” Euryale said with a mixture of confidence, and just enough shyness that she didn’t say it very loudly.

Sylver rolled the yellow mushroom in his hands into a ball and made it float nearby, while he worked on a dark red mushroom.

“I can propel us…” Medusa added.

“With compressed sea foam?” Sylver asked.

Medusa nodded.

“That… Will help a lot actually…” Sylver said.

***

Thankfully for everyone involved, the ice magic user more than anyone else, there were 2 alternative secret entrances/exits.

Technically 3, but 1 involved getting past an enormous collection of Lucy worms, that refused to move out of the way regardless of how many turned into some form of salt.

With Sylver’s help, it was most likely possible to force through them but… Sylver was trying to build a relationship with that brown mass of worms, and on top of that, he got the feeling it wouldn’t be as straightforward of a process as Stheno made it sound to be.

The ice magic user was blocking the eastern exit, Lucy blocked the south, so the choice was between the north or the west.

Since the Gorgons didn’t know which one was closer to the surface, they picked the north exit, as it was the one that required the least amount of walking through the maze of tunnels.

Or in this case, standing on top of a flat piece of sea salt, that slid silently along the dust-covered tunnel floor.

The plan was to open the door, and while Sylver held the water back, Euryale would encase herself, Medusa, and Stheno in a sphere of salt, that Sylver would then guide towards the surface.

Inside the salt, they would have a mushroom that kept the air breathable, a second one to keep them warm and awake, and a third that would make the bottom of the sphere soft so they wouldn’t be covered in bruises from sitting on a hard salt floor, or if the sphere was jolted by something.

The biggest obstacle in this plan was that Sylver wasn’t 100% certain he would be capable of holding back that much water long enough for Euryale to cast her spell. With [Ka Of The Half-Lich] he certainly had the mana to do it, and the framework for that magic wasn’t all that complicated, but Sylver still worried about it.

When they reached the sealed-up door, out of caution Sylver asked the sisters to wait outside.

He entered the chamber alone, waited for the door on the ceiling to open, and then waited for all the air to escape and be replaced with water. Once the door opened all the way, he swam outside of it, and although he was able to create a bubble of breathable air, he had vastly overestimated the amount of time he would have been able to hold it.

He had assumed he was capable of getting to 30 seconds at least, but not even 10 seconds into the spell a gentle flowing current destabilized his framework, and if the 3 women were inside the bubble, they would have been crushed to death by the high-pressure water.

Sylver spent almost an hour slowly forming a mushroom and [Black Mass] sphere around the exit/entrance.

A number of creatures attempted to approach the faintly glowing and magically charged contraption, but they all either died and became a part of it or were just fast enough to avoid the tiny dark shadowy threads and escaped never to return.

Spring materialized inside the “bubble,” while Sylver kept guard outside. It took an incredibly annoyingly long amount of time for the door to open to let Spring in, and an even more annoying amount of time for the door to open a second time, to let the Gorgons out.

And on top of that, they were hesitating.

The round door was wide open, they could see the top of the spherical mushroom preventing them from drowning or being crushed by water, and yet they stood there, and stared at it.

Spring had the sense to remain silent, and pretended to check the bottom edges of the mushroom balloon while he waited for the trio of women to exit.

Stheno was the first to climb up.

As she did so, Sylver felt a powerful wave of nausea overcome him, as if someone had tightened a clamp around his head, and stopped right before it was tight enough to make his eyes pop out.

But before he could even lift his hands up to his head, the feeling disappeared without a trace. It didn’t leave so much as an aftertaste in his mouth.

[Koschei] has reached level 11!
+5AP
+Perk [N/A]

[Koschei] has reached level 12!
+5AP
+Perk [N/A]

Sylver was floating near the glowing sphere in a state of confusion when Euryale was helped out of the circular door in the ground by Stheno.

And just like with Stheno, Sylver’s already muddled mind was further muddled by a pressure so great and all-encompassing that he half expected to see fragments of his brain escape out of his nose.

And just like before, it disappeared without a single trace.

[Koschei] has reached level 13!
+5AP
+Perk [N/A]

[Koschei] has reached level 14!
+5AP
+Perk [N/A]

When Medusa climbed up, Sylver would have vomited if he had the capacity to vomit. It was like a vacuum formed inside every inch of his body, and for a split second tried to tear him to a million tiny shreds.

But just like it before, it was gone before he could truly notice it.

[Koschei] has reached level 15!
+5AP
+Perk [N/A]

[Koschei] has reached level 16!
+5AP
+Perk [N/A]

Sylver briefly opened up his status and side-eyed the 6 brand new [N/A] holes in his list of perks.

The total had now reached 10.

There were 10 [N/A] holes in his perk list, 10 places where a name for something was instead being occupied by big bold [N/A]s.

He focused on these 6 new names, tried to mentally pry them open, stabbed at them with his mind, but they ignored his efforts as if he were a child slapping his hands against a window in an attempt to pet the dog on the other side of it.

Total Level: 189
[Koschei-16]
[Necromancer-100]
[Swamp Lord-73]

CON: 200
DEX: 110
STR: 110
INT: 507
WIS: 288
AP: 80

Health: 1,942/2,000
Stamina: 996/1,000
MP: 20,582/33,385

Health Regen: 23.34/M
Stamina Regen: 20.00/M
MP Regen: 33,852.39/M

Between [Unholy Blessing], [Genocider’s Gift], [Mage Cap], and [Ka Of The Half-Lich], Sylver was capable of regenerating his entire mana capacity within under a minute.

Keeping in mind Sylver vividly remembered celebrating regenerating 1 mana every second and was overjoyed when he was at 100/minute.

And now he was almost at 34 thousand. 34 thousand points mana per minute, 564 per second.

Granted, maintaining his robe, protective barriers, and just generally moving around consumed a very fair portion of that regeneration, but even with all of that, Sylver still had more than enough to pose an extremely significant threat to whatever tried to get in his way.

In terms of healing shades alone he would be an enormous hindrance to all but the best armies, cities could be stalled, nations harassed, continents…

Sylver still had some room to grow, but he was proud to say he was growing at a very respectable pace.

Not as fast as Edmund grew perhaps, but Sylver wasn’t Edmund, and if it was stupid to compare himself to him back then, it was even more moronic now.

Sylver sat on top of the mushroom sphere, with a slight smug smile on his face, when a thin playing card-shaped piece of salt crystal came out of the mushroom sphere and sliced it perfectly down the middle into two parts.

The sphere of crystal sea salt sat on top of the slowly closing circular door and glowed with an oddly comforting pale blue light. The layers of salt made the light come out in thin strips and made the spherical contraption look like one of those floating glass-covered chandeliers Sylver had seen several dancing houses use.

Half of Spring was inside the sphere with the girls, while the other half was outside in Syvler’s shadow.

After a brief double-check that they had air and were warm enough to not pass out, Medusa placed her hands flat against the bottom of the salt sphere and gradually increased the strength of the sea foam torrent until the extremely dense piece of crystal sea salt began to move upwards.

Sylver swam alongside it, and after only 10 minutes of Medusa using her magic, he was no longer capable of keeping up with the giant salt ball.

The sphere slowed down, Sylver swam to the top of it, glued himself onto the very top and used [Black Mass] to make a cone to reduce water resistance, and held onto dear unlife as Medusa kept making the thing faster and faster and faster.

Whenever they began to slant, Sylver adjusted the angle of the cone and guided the salt power rocket back onto what he thought was the right course.

Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him, and he started to magically lubricate the whole thing, just to see how fast it could go, but he stopped once a giant piece of the cone tore off and Sylver very nearly was thrown off and left behind.

He couldn’t say how long the duration of their ascent was, but it was long enough that Stheno’s stomach started to rumble, and all three of the snake women took turns yawning.

They passed countless creatures on the way up, blurs of all shapes and colours, and a few that were eviscerated by the cone, but disappeared before Sylver had so much as a chance to grab them with [Dead Dominion].

On account of the “holding onto dear unlife” thing, Sylver missed the moment they were close enough that they should have been seeing sunlight, and it took him more than a few seconds to realize they had left the water and were now flying through the air.

Sadly Medusa’s foam wasn’t as effective on land, or in the air in this case, as it was underwater, and when-

Sylver could see bits of his charred flesh flying away from him, and instead of trying to stick his shoulder back on, he stored it away in his [Bound Bones] storage and turned in the air to find the falling, and spinning, badly charred sphere of salt.

He was a bit more ready for the second lightning bolt and used a piece of [Black Mass] to take the hit for him, as he reached towards the tumbling ball with a thin piece of his shadow.

He saw small jets of foam bubbling on the surface of the sphere, and by the time he reached it, it had stabilized and was no longer spinning around.

The Spring-half inside informed him that everyone inside was alright, apparently “fluffy salt” was a thing, and functioned as an excellent shock absorber. It wouldn’t be enough if they hit the water, but Sylver had a plan for that.

He climbed to the bottom of the sphere, and stood up, with his feet glued to it, while his head and arms were facing down towards the water.

In what can only be described as a “terrible idea, excellent execution,” Sylver made a hole in the water that gradually became smaller the lower the sphere fell down the hall, and instead of smashing apart on the sea surface, the sphere came to a relatively slow stop.

The 3 people inside were bruised, and the mushroom meant to provide heat had been squashed, but aside from that they were unharmed.

Moving the sphere up through the low-pressure water was quite simple, as was constructing a clump of hydrogen-inflated mushrooms to act as a floating device, but that still left the issue of the hurricane moving towards them.

Between the extreme wind and the lightning bolts the chances of Will maintaining his form long enough to break through the clouds was miniscule.

If Sylver was alone he would have funnelled his fog body into an ice sphere, and then had one of the shades throw the ball as high as it could. Then a second shade would materialize mid-air, and throw him again, and again, until eventually Sylver breached the clouds and could then have Will fly him where he needed to be.

But he now had 3 human-shaped bodies that would need to come with him, and although they all looked like they would be quite flexible, the problem was more to do with weight, than with volume.

As the salt sphere kept afloat by the buoyant mushrooms glued to it began to tilt, Sylver looked up and saw a wall of water that he a second later realized was a wave.

A wave that was so tall he had to look up to see the top of it.

Any explosion powerful enough to launch them high enough would break the salt...

Use [Black Mass] to make a catapult? Lightning would kill them before they got halfway up, and the wind might suck them up into the hurricane…

Mushroom hot air balloon? No, that’s stupid, lightning, wind, and the volume of fungus to lift that much weight would take hours to make, plus the weight of the fungus itself...

Might work if it’s just them, but one lightning bolt would incinerate them…

Sylver looked up at the giant wave and noticed that it was high enough that it was close enough to move the clouds above it.

He looked down at the charred salt sphere and had the Spring-half inside it relay his idea to Medusa.

Stheno nodded her head so enthusiastically it made the floating salt ball bob up and down slightly from the movement, Euryale said something in the language Spring was unable to hear, but going by her expression it wasn’t agreement, and Medusa waited a beat before she said “We have to trust he knows what he’s doing,” and placed her hands on the floor of the salt sphere.

The sphere of salt sank like a brick once Sylver unglued the fungus keeping it afloat, and a moment after that small streams of compressed sea foam started to bubble on the sides.

Within a matter of seconds Medusa’s magic started to move the sphere, and with a slight help from Sylver, began to swim up the enormous wave.

Sylver’s plan was, in its entirety, to get above the clouds.

How he was going to give Will a running start, he wasn’t sure.

If they got high enough that he had space for the wyvern’s wings to flap and pick up enough speed to fly that would be great, but if Sylver’s mental math was correct, and it probably was, they would be beyond fortunate to reach even a meter above the thunder clouds.

About halfway up the giant wave, the Spring-half inside informed Sylver that Medusa was bleeding from her nose and that the snakes in her hair looked like they were holding their breath, and were gradually changing from a brilliant green to a sort of vomit light yellow.

He also told him that Medusa told Spring not to tell Sylver, but she didn’t seem to grasp how Spring’s loyalty worked given the whole “shade and necromancer that created it.”

Medusa tried to argue that she could handle it, but mid-sentence she coughed up blood and wrapped both hands around her stomach as Stheno and Euryale made sure she didn’t hit her head on the walls as she fell unconscious.

Without the foam propulsion, the giant salt sphere stopped climbing up the wave, and because of Syvler’s inability to move it fast enough, it fell out the front of it.

He once again placed himself underneath it, and once again, through a great deal of skill, managed to halt its fall slowly enough that the 3 people inside it didn’t get squashed against the soft, but thin, floor.

Sylver sent out [Petty] shades infused into fish-shaped blobs of [Black Mass] to figure out when the wave would pass.

While he waited, he covered the salt sphere in blobs of floating fungus, just enough so it wouldn’t sink further down, and would remain at the same level underwater.

When the wave crashed it was like being inside of a wooden barrel that was tumbling down a cliff, the vibrations rattled everything Sylver had that could be rattled, and to Euryale’s credit, the salt sphere didn’t so much as crackle from the random waves of pressure.

It ruined half of Sylver’s mushrooms and swept another quarter away, but this species was cheap to cultivate, and there was more than enough water nearby to create floating hydrogen.

Medusa woke up surprisingly quickly for someone suffering from mana backlash, and since the other two didn’t seem to find it suspicious, Sylver chalked it up to their biology being stronger than the average human mage’s.

Sylver was in the middle of discussing a plan with the three women when he felt a sort of buzzing sensation all around him.

He watched with a cocked to the side head as a wall of dimly glowing squares approached him. They were maybe 30 centimetres in height and width and together made up a slightly slanted rectangle.

The wall of squares was maybe 50 metres in height and 250 or 300 in width.

Initially, Sylver assumed it was an illusion, a collection of small monsters organized in an unnatural pattern to confuse their prey, but as the wall of squares got closer and closer, Sylver couldn’t feel any life coming from it.

Eventually, it was close enough that he could feel it with his mana, and to his surprise it was a very cleverly enchanted net.

The buzzing sensation he was feeling was created by the thin ropes vibrating in a sort of wave motion, that made it feel like there was a giant wave passing above them. And to the credit of the enchanter, if Sylver’s back had been turned, he would have thought that that was exactly what was happening.

When the thing got close enough that it was about to touch him, the net strings created the gentelest of currents, that kept the net just far enough away from Syvler that he couldn’t touch it even if he reached for it with his hands.

The whole wall proceeded to wrap around Sylver and the giant salt ball he was sitting on, all without doing anything that would have caused a living monster to react.

Eventually, the net wrapped around itself, and Sylver, and the salt ball containing the Gorgon sisters, were effectively in a string bag, or cage, that wasn’t touching them.

Sylver lay down on his back on top of the sphere and covered the whole thing and himself in a mixture of [Black Mass] and a tough mushroom that he typically used for constructions, and told the sisters underneath him to stay as quiet as possible.

As he had predicted, the net snapped closed, as if they were bear traps, the squares tightened, and compressed, and the almost harmless-looking string bag turned into a very real and very tight trap.

But oddly enough it didn’t crush them, it tightened just enough to immobilize and then stopped when it couldn’t feel any movement.

The Gorgons did as Sylver had, and lay down on the floor inside the sphere, as something high above began to gently, but firmly, pull Sylver and the sphere upwards.

Sylver had the girls put on their gloves, veils, and just to be safe, masks that covered their faces. Dressed up that way not a single inch of skin was visible, which they said was enough to stop the curse from functioning.

Eventually, the string cage came out of the water and continued to be hoisted higher and higher into the air. When it was a good height above the water, Sylver pulled some of the [Black Mass] covering him off and poked his head out.

He had read about these types of ships in the past, but this was his first time seeing one with his own eyes.

There were 2 parts to the ship, the inner, and the outer.

The outer was a sphere, somewhat, it was a sphere-shaped collection of hollow wooden poles that joined together in the way a tumbleweed did, but slightly more orderly.

Like someone made a ball out of matchsticks they tied together.

The inside was a smaller wooden sphere, with a very clear top and bottom, that was held in the dead centre of the outer sphere by a series of interconnected strings.

The outer layer could turn upside down, or sideways, it could spin as much as it wanted, but because of the way the strings were woven together, the middle would always remain upright.

An inverse gyroscope in a sense.

Sylver stood up to his full height and used the [Black Mass] that was covering him to push the net off him.

He and the dwarf standing by the window in the inner sphere locked eyes, and Sylver waved at him.