Sylver Seeker

Sylver had assumed that the dark elves had the Garden wide power outage at the ready, and could start it at any moment.

In reality, it turned out that although everything was ready, and everyone was in place, because of all the backups they had to simultaneously disable, the time of the blackout couldn’t be altered, even if Sylver was the one asking.

What they had done was replace several mid-ranking Leafs, and using blackmail, threats, and bribes, got enough of a foothold in the Garden’s power distributing network to cripple it for a couple of hours.

It was part of the reason Sylver had decided to help them.

They were desperate.

Desperate in a way that meant nothing was off the table, desperate in a way that they wouldn’t shy away from using the most despicable, abhorrent, downright inhumane methods, to achieve their goals.

And Sylver loved working with these types of people. Because once you crossed a line the majority of the world was too proud to cross, it no longer existed.

Sort of like murder.

The first time is hard.

And by the time you got to the tenth, you don’t even bother counting.

Sylver had been in situations before where the people he was saving disagreed with the way he was doing things. They downright refused his help, if meant doing what he was offering. They deemed the method to be worse than their loss and imprisonment.

And while there have been moments where Sylver had to ignore them, because the Ibis needed them alive and went ahead with his plans anyway, the vast majority of the time he wiped his hands of the “honorable” people and went off to help someone willing to accept his dirty hand.

That was the first reason Sylver had decided to save the dark elves.

The second was much less rational.

He felt sorry for them, and a very tiny part of him believed that they might be descendants of Nyx. As such Sylver’s overly emotional brain decided that abandoning them would be the same as abandoning Nyx, and all the self-analysis and proof in the world wasn’t going to change Sylver’s moronic mind.

If they really were Nyx’s children, Sylver would have known it. Everyone alive looked similar to one another to Sylver’s undead eyes and senses, but he was absolutely sure he would have known if he was around someone with Nyx’s blood in their veins.

Zelvash’s ear shape was a fluke, a trick of the light, and more likely a trick of Sylver’s mind.

Reason number 3, and likely the most important, was that Sylver’s gut told him to bring them back to Eira.

He didn’t know what exactly he was going to do with a small city worth of dark elves. Some of them were capable of shapeshifting, some were gifted with dark magic, some could theoretically heal undead, and some were extremely well practiced at fighting creatures with over 100 levels above them.

Not to mention they had a myriad of other highly capable and talented individuals, all of whom would likely die for Sylver to pay him back for saving their families.

Loyalty was just about the scarcest resource in any world or realm. It was something you had to earn, buying loyalty very very rarely worked out well in Sylver’s experience.

And while most people would believe that a group that was willing to do anything to survive, would abandon Sylver at the first sign of danger, in his experience the exact opposite was true. Once a bond of trust is formed, it will survive through the harshest of conditions.

The only person Sylver could trust, could really trust, was Lola. He had hopes for Ria and Chrys, but in their cases only time will tell. He had Ciege and Yeva too, but it wasn’t the same as what he had with Lola.

Normally Sylver didn’t care too much about having trustworthy allies, considering he always had the Ibis. But now that it was just him and a high elf that wasn’t even a high elf?

Sylver needed every crumb of trust and loyalty he could scavenge.

The fourth reason, that a less honest person would try to describe as an afterthought, was that Sylver wanted to fuck Rose, Poppy, and Lily over.

They weren’t gods.

They weren’t [Hero]s.

Sylver knew that, he would have known if they were.

But they had to be parallel to gods to be able to effortlessly move through realms like this, not to mention the rest of their abilities.

The simplest answer was that Poppy had lied about not being a god’s apostle. And while that would normally mean she couldn’t lie, because gods and their minions can’t lie, who the fuck knows what is and isn’t possible anymore?

She probably got a perk that let her lie, or the “Poppy” Sylver spoke to was a doppelganger, a fake that could lie directly to his face with no repercussions for the real Poppy.

Gods lived off conflict.

The status quo didn’t interest them, they needed and wanted, war, death, depravity, they wanted as much chaos as was sustainable.

Because gods weren’t stupid, they were irrational, power-hungry, but they weren’t stupid.

They had goals, desires, ambitions, they didn’t just want a city to get torn apart by war, they wanted the city to be torn apart by war, in a very specific way.

Some liked to keep it simple, burn it down, while everyone is trapped inside, screaming for help.

Some liked the citizens being sold off as slaves to collectively suffer for the rest of their lives.

Some liked starvation, a slow death, the kind of death that makes the godless turn to god in their prolonged time of ache.

Some like their destruction to have a hint of irony in it. Such as a race that was nearly killed off, gaining the upper hand, and killing off their hunters the way they would have done.

Like an hourglass constantly being turned around.

Dark elves are hunted and oppressed, and then through a miracle, they suddenly fight back, win, and hunt down and oppress the surviving high elves. And while being hunted down, through some miracle, the high elves fight back, win, and hunt down and oppress the surviving dark elves.

This was all Sylver’s theory, of course, he was far too weak to sense or know if a god is actually involved or not. But if a god is involved, then what Sylver was planning to do was the equivalent of smashing open the bottom half of the hourglass.

You can’t have conflict if there’s no one to fight or exterminate.

Or at the very least it will take them a couple of centuries to prepare things to start some kind of civil war or something.

Not that Sylver cared, the gods on Eira very rarely helped their people without asking for something in return, but they would sooner die than allow a god from another realm to so much as send a breeze towards someone in their realm. Even if the gods in this realm realized Sylver was responsible for taking half the chess pieces off the chessboard, there was nothing they could do about it.

It was a bit like living with a feral animal. Sometimes it might bite you, sometimes it might kill your child, sometimes it might throw up onto your couch, but it will guard the house like its life depends on it.

Sylver continued to stare up at the sun in the sky, as the plant life around him slowly and gradually grew, changed texture and color, shriveled up, and regrew again. The patch of dirt at the front of his house looked like a hallucination, from how many different colored plants and flowers there were.

The envelope practically burned a hole in his pocket, as he considered when to open it to find the location of the book he was searching for.

He could wait for the blackout to be over and open it right after the Dark Year started.

But according to Zelvash, they locked the city down tight, during the Dark year, it would be near impossible to escape it, invincible angels under his control or not.

On the other hand, if he went after the book during the blackout, and failed to get it, he could escape and then would have a second chance during the Dark Year. Assuming he hid inside the city and didn’t get chased out.

But if the power came back before he was done, and he was attacked while under the effects of the sun, there was a chance they could capture him, and then do the equivalent of drowning him in holy water. In this case, it would be more like holy fire, the lasers they used had the same effect as a priest’s spell.

They’ll still have lasers during the Dark Year, but they’ll be extremely careful about how much they use them, to conserve ammo.

One of the plants growing near Sylver’s head sprouted barbed spikes from the petals and dripped some stringy slime directly onto Sylver’s forehead. The slime floated off him and was dropped back into the tightly woven grass bed on which Sylver was laying on.

As with everything in life, there was no right answer.

A part of Sylver wanted to get everything over with as fast as possible.

Every second he waited, was another second Chrys was being hurt, and another second he wasn’t saving Edmund.

But on the other hand, if he rushed in and fucked it up, and the Garden figured out what he was after, they could hide them and make it even more difficult for Sylver to get to the book and the girl.

Sylver didn’t have the firepower to force his way inside, even during the Dark Year. Or more accurately, it’d take too long, but Sylver already had several ideas of how to break down whatever defenses they had, assuming the dark elves helped him.

But if he waited until the Dark Year, the dark elves were still going to go through with the blackout, to get a piece of the high elves’ Eldar tree, and to cripple the Garden as a whole from the inside. Zelvash had been vague regarding what they were going to be doing during the Dark Year, and the reason for that was that Zelvash wasn’t in charge of it.

A woman named Ruslana was.

When they went their separate ways, Zelvash explained to Sylver how to contact them, but Zelvash would be leaving to talk to Ruslana regarding Sylver’s plan of opening a giant gate for all the dark elves to travel to another realm to live in.

In the meantime, Sylver’s contact was a man that was blind in his left eye, who hadn’t bothered to introduce himself, before he disappeared.

Sylver continued to stare at the sun, through the thin glass ceiling, and did his very best to pro and con his way into a decision.

The pros of opening the envelope right before the blackout were that the Garden was going to be preoccupied with a giant distraction, they’re not going to expect that someone would try to break his way into whichever house had the book, and getting Chrys out would be as simple as grabbing her, and then breaking out through the ceiling.

During the Dark Year, there would be impossibly thick plates covering the glass, that allegedly even the dark elves' strongest mages and warriors couldn’t break through. If that was the case, Sylver would have to fight his way through hordes of guards, all while protecting Chrys.

On the other hand, if Sylver waited until after the blackout, the dark elves would have time to infiltrate the facility keeping Chrys captive, and Sylver would likely be able to just walk in and then walk out with her.

Normally Sylver would discuss this with Spring, or more his more recent addition, Ria, but he couldn’t trust her to be objective about the situation. She would plan and argue with saving Chrys being her number one priority.

A part of Sylver very briefly considered something low, even for him.

The dark elves, in exchange for Chrys, and the book. Sylver knew enough about them, that he could hand all of them to the Garden on a silver platter. But that would require trusting the Garden to actually hand Chrys and the book over, and not simply kill him along with the dark elves he betrayed.

More importantly, Sylver got a stomach cramp from even considering the idea, even while knowing it couldn’t even really be called a last resort.

He would sooner vaporize the Garden than hand his dark elves over for slaughter. The consideration was more so he knew his options, even the ones that he would never voice out loud.

Sylver’s fingers briefly touched the seal on the letter, a very simple wax piece that was brittle enough to crack open with bare hands.

Sylver stood up from the multicolored grass, and walked back inside his house, and went to the room holding all the guns and ammunition.

“Chrys said “5 seconds before you unseal it,” right?” Sylver tapped out to Ria, as the liquid metal became slightly less liquid and whispered a response into his ear.

“He’s going to give you the information in a sealed letter. 5 seconds before you unseal it, I’m going to put the Garden’s clairvoyance based defenses out of commission. Because if I don’t the garden will immediately try to kill you. Only open it when you’re ready to find the book, and if you can, save me,” Ria repeated, in a perfect copy of Chrys’ voice and speech pattern.

“What do you think she meant when she used the word “unseal”? Did she mean breaking the seal, or does she mean me reading it?” Sylver wondered out loud, as his robe moved the envelope down towards Ria.

“Why are you asking… Right, she can’t see the future where you listen to my suggestions… You think the same is true for all the other future seers… So if I read the location, I can lead you there without you knowing where you’re going, and without letting anyone see where you’re going, or what you’re doing…” Ria explained, almost mirroring Sylver’s thoughts word for word.

“No one should be able to see my future anyway. But for some reason, some of them can… If you know where the book is, but don’t tell me, in a certain sense, nothing changes. The world as a whole doesn’t seem to recognize you as real or alive,” Sylver explained, as he could feel Ria slithering around the envelope.

He did his best to explain to her that neither mana nor the system seemed to see her as anything other than Sylver’s tool, but Ria was strangely still on the fence regarding whether magic is real or not. She believed in the existence of the system, for reasons she couldn’t say out loud, but apparently magic was less believable than the system was.

Sylver had to mentally slap himself to stop his mind from making a connection, and instead, he leaned down and checked to see if the ironically named minigun spun without making any sound.The name was ironic because it was the biggest gun Sylver had been able to purchase.

“If I read it, and you are wrong, once whatever Chrys did to cripple herself and the other seers is fixed, the whole Garden will be after you. You’ll have to fight your way over to Chrys, and the book, while under direct sunlight, and incapable of using your shades,” Ria said.

Sylver searched around his body until he found a root sticking out of his elbow, that he yanked out, and stopped the bleeding before so much as a drop of blood came out.

[Mutating Override (I) Proficiency increased to 96%!]

Sylver looked towards the clock on the wall.

“Now that I have the dark elves’ help… If I’m fast enough, I could get Chrys out, without letting the Garden know it was me… Then I can take my time getting the book,” Sylver wondered out loud, via small taps against his palm.

“And if the book is moved as a result of that? How much time will it take Kass to find it again? Or better question, will he find it again?” Ria asked, and Sylver was genuinely surprised she hadn’t just agreed with him, and egged him on to save Chrys first, and worry about the book second.

“Good point…”

Sylver looked around the room, stared at one of the robes lying on the floor. His eyes widened slightly.

“Don’t read the note yet, I’ve got an idea,” Sylver said, as he left the room, and asked to be teleported into Lady Demor’s house.

*

*

*

[Zombie (Petty) Raised!]

Lady Demor, or as she now felt comfortable telling Sylver, Dasha, had deeply regretted turning around when Sylver asked her not to.

Thankfully the bucket Sylver had insisted she keep nearby, had proved itself useful, and saved her dress and flooring.

Although it likely wouldn’t have mattered anyway, considering she wouldn’t ever be able to sleep in this room ever again.

Not to say Dasha was a wimp, quite the opposite, but there’s a bit of a difference between disemboweling a man during a fight and watching a person operate on their clone. Especially when the clone didn’t have a ribcage, and Sylver had to harvest a different clone for the bones necessary to make his chest not deflate.

Most of the problems were cosmetic, Sylver didn’t need this thing to pass a thorough inspection, but he needed it to look like him from a distance.

Magic-wise, making a zombie lifelike wasn’t all that difficult, there were fewer differences between a corpse and a living person than most people realized. A heartbeat was the big one, as was having some body temperature, and the rest were extremely easy to fake.

Luckily for Sylver, he already walked like someone being moved around by strings, so his stand-in didn’t even need all of his muscles to function.

But he needed a realistic heartbeat, which was dead simple while Sylver was within 50 meters of the thing, but a lot harder if he wanted to be able to move away from it.

In an ideal world, Sylver would simply rip someone’s already functional heart out and would substitute his copy’s heart. But that felt like it would make it too obvious, so Sylver had to do it the hard way.

Which, with the use of [Primal Override] wasn’t even all that hard.

Within roughly 20 minutes, Sylver had a “living” and “breathing” body double.

As Dasha threw up into her bucket again, Sylver turned around to continue the conversation his impromptu surgery had interrupted.

“If I’m not back in 85 minutes, you need to start arguing with it. Be as loud as you can manage, and then throw it out of the window. It will be good enough if people assume it’s in a coma, but if someone uses [Appraisal] or something on it, it’s all over,” Sylver explained, as he draped a sheet over the slowly warming dead body.

“I know-” Dasha moved her face back down into the bucket, but just heaved without anything coming out for a few seconds, “-I know someone who can help with that.”

“Can you get them here before the blackout?” Sylver asked, as Dasha wiped the mixture of drool and vomit away with the sleeve of her dress, and looked disappointed as she realized what she had done. She stared at the floor for a while, before both of her ears twitched with an idea.

“How much do you care about your reputation?” Dasha asked with a hint of excitement, as she stood up from the floor, and used the towel that had been floating next to her since she started vomiting to clean her face up a little.

“Not even a little,” Sylver answered, as the dead body on the ground started to move around, to help the capillaries open up, and stop the joints from creaking.

“Then if you’re not back, I’m going to tell a blabbermouth that I’m keeping you captive, to torture for information. It will explain your absence, and you won’t be in a position for someone to use any kind of identification skill on you. My persona has done this before, so it won’t even be out of character for her,” Dasha explained, as she changed back into a pale-skinned human-looking woman.

“That’s… That’s actually way better than what I had planned… If you gesture with your hands, he should understand what to do,” Sylver offered, as Spring split himself up to leave a piece to order the zombie Sylver around.

“I will-” Dasha made the mistake of glancing at the shaking dead body, hidden underneath a now blood-stained sheet, and accidentally remembered what she had seen when she made the mistake of not listening to Sylver when he said not to look. She sat back down and spent several minutes trying to throw up in her bucket again.

Sylver used this time to do the last part before the blackout started. Zelvash had said he had 90 minutes, on the dot, with maybe another half hour if they were very lucky.

Ria very gently covered up the bracelet on Sylver’s hand, as Sylver used [Necrotic Mutilation]to surgically remove the corpse’s forearm at the elbow, and used [Primal Override] to make the blood vessels slightly longer to make them easier to connect.

At Ria’s confirmation, Sylver did the same for his arm, and pulled the limb off, and placed it down near the corpse's pale elbow.

It was rough work, considering Sylver had to do it with one arm, but all he needed was heat and a pulse.

Sylver checked, double-checked, and triple-checked that there was a pulse in the zombie’s wrist, and then used [Primal Override] to patch up the surgery marks, and lastly stripped out of his robe, and had the zombie put it on instead.

It was like looking in a mirror.

If anything, the zombie looked less pale than Sylver did, but it was mostly due to the fact that it was overheating a little, and Sylver had to tinker with the spell until it was within a normal range.

Aside from the fact that Sylver was a pathetic physical specimen, to the extent, the system considered a “Sylver” zombie, a [Petty] zombie, everything else looked spot on. It wouldn’t be winning any fights anytime soon, but it could walk, and more importantly, was breathing and had a heartbeat.

Sylver poked it in the eye, and then made it do jumping jacks while he dressed himself in one of the costumes Dasha had, along with a limp wizard's hat, that was bright red with white pom poms. There was also a mask that had a white beard, and glasses.

Apparently, it was some kind of character from a book, but neither Sylver nor Dasha had read the book to know what it was called. It was a lucky thing that Lady Demor had a large collection of costumes.

Although the red pants Sylver had been given were missing material in the crotch area, there was thankfully a large selection of men’s underwear to choose from, most of which actually covered what they were supposed to cover.

It didn’t particularly matter, Sylver was going to cover himself from head to toe in shadows anyway, the costume was mostly as a precaution.

This wasn’t entirely an all-or-nothing situation.

But it was going to determine how long Sylver would have to spend in this realm. Zelvash had a list of what Sylver needed to create a gate, so ideally, Sylver would get his hands on the book, save Chrys, and then leave to slowly and carefully build a gate in the dark elf underwater colony.

Or, the Garden realizes the book is important, hides it, locks it up tight, locks Chrys up tight, and because they know Sylver is undead, gather a task force that wears lead armor, and wields positive energy laser rifles.

But that was a worst-case scenario, and even then Sylver was fairly certain he would be able to threaten his way into getting the book and Chrys.

The Garden has dealt with dark elves running amok and causing them damage, but they’ve never had the Silver Lich set his sights on their fair city.

But hopefully, everything will be resolved using stealth, and without anyone getting hurt or killed.

The bracelet didn’t see any problem with the fact that Sylver’s arm was now attached to a walking corpse, so at least Sylver had one thing going for him. His replaced arm was good enough, it could hold a dagger, and the rest could be handled using [Necrotic Mutilation]or [Deadly Darkness].

With 1 minute remaining before the blackout, Sylver instructed Ria to look inside the envelope without breaking the seal open.

Sylver kept his eyes, ears, and every other sense open, as Ria read the information on the letter. If someone somewhere saw Sylver in the future, Sylver would know it. But after 30 seconds had passed, there wasn’t any reaction anywhere.

Sylver would obviously need to further test this, but so far the theory that Ria’s mind didn’t exist anywhere other than the physical world seemed to be getting stronger and stronger. It wasn’t perfect, but if Sylver was right, he now had a weapon even a 10th tier clairvoyant couldn’t defend against.

Sylver ripped the envelope open with 5 seconds to left, and read the contents as the lamps on the ceiling sputtered out.

A smile spread on Sylver’s face, as he felt extremely weak reactions from all over the place, but they weren’t aimed at him, they were aimed at whatever had caused the blackout. Sylver could already hear screaming and shouting outside, as the sound of the explosion reached the window and shook it from the shockwave.

Off in the distance, the entirety of the Garden was focused on the giant pillar of pitch-black smoke traveling up to the ceiling, and blocking out the already dimmed sun. It was technically speaking “night” and without power, the Garden couldn’t make the ceiling let light pass through.

Not that the smoke would have allowed it in, even if they could.

“Keep the zombie around just in case, but I don’t think I’ll be back,” Sylver said to Lady Demor, who despite knowing this was coming, looked genuinely scared.

“What?” She asked after a brief pause, as Sylver sent the shades out to scout a good path towards the building.

“Well, there were two things I needed to do before I could leave. I just found out that both of them are in the same building,” Sylver explained, as the piece of paper disappeared into his [Bound Bones] storage.

Sylver heard a dull thud from the ceiling and was told by Spring that it was one of the drones falling out of the sky.

Sylver turned into fog and started to funnel himself out of Lady Demor’s room, and down towards one of the underground electrical wire shafts. There weren’t any rain gutters here, on account of there never being any rain, but this was almost better.

“The Story of The Seven Suns” wasn’t just in the same building as Chrys, it was quite literally 1 floor below her. Various Flowers came outside to see what the commotion was, and their bodyguards shouted for the others to stay back, as Sylver silently moved through the tight tubes that ran right underneath the main streets.

He made it to the facility keeping Chrys and the book captive, with 83 minutes remaining.

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