Sylver Seeker

Sylver had a series of plans in the event the building was locked down.

The vast majority involved finding someone outside, attacking them, and then pointing them in the direction of the facility and hoping that the guards inside would let the wounded person in to save them.

A beautiful woman worked best for situations such as these, a couple of cuts on the forehead for excessive bleeding, a crack on one knee to make her hobble instead of run, and maybe an illusion of a giant spider, to make the fear extra genuine.

More often than not, that was enough, especially if Sylver could find a local that the guards inside knew. When he was the Silver Lich, he carried around several corpses for this express purpose. Illusions could be seen through, but freshly animated zombies worked almost better than the real thing.

Oddly enough, children had the opposite effect, even if you would expect them to be better.

Guards got suspicious if a child managed to get to whatever it was the guards were guarding, a woman always made more sense.

Also, as one of Sylver’s zombies found out, sometimes the guards didn’t let the person in to save them, sometimes they let them in to do something kind of disgusting. The zombies didn’t particularly care, but Sylver did, and so did the guards, when Sylver ultimately revealed who exactly they had been passing around.

But in this case, Sylver didn’t need any scantily dressed corpses, because the door to the building was wide open.

Or more accurately, it had been blown wide open.

Going by the way the metal was bent and dented, and the fact that the giant door was on the floor outside, it wasn’t that someone had broken their way in, but that something had broken out.

Sylver could vaguely feel Chrys’ location through the shade in her shadow, so he ignored the blood-curdling screams in the distance, followed by reptilian-like roars and hissing, and simply picked a good path inside.

[Fog Form] did exactly what the name suggested, and allowed Sylver to move around in the form of fog. But 2 details made the perk exceptionally useful.

The first was that Sylver could instantly materialize. His body wasn’t spread out in a whole cloud of fog, with the barest thought he could be quite literally anywhere he wanted to be within the cloud. He didn’t need to have a whole cloud that equaled the volume of his body, he just needed a small tendril. Then he could materialize for a split second from that tendril and then turn into fog again.

If it wasn’t so painfully disorienting to do it more than once, Sylver could theoretically move at insane speeds via a series of “jumps.”

The second reason [Fog Form] was great, was that it was barely visible. If Sylver made a large cloud of it, it would make it hard to see, but if he moved around in tiny wisps and tendrils, he was neigh invisible. It kind of looked like the shimmering you saw rising out of a fire if that.

Sylver slithered into the building and allowed the shades out to search around for a path to Chrys, but as he had expected, the doors leading upwards were all closed off and quarantined. The people here were used to creatures that traveled through shadows trying to invade, and as such had sectioned off the building into separate “rooms,” all of which were airtight.

With the drones and cameras out of commission, on account of the electromagnetic pulse the dark elves had set off, Sylver didn’t need to worry about someone seeing him materialize. He doubted he was the only person in the Garden who could teleport, or appear to teleport in his case, but he didn’t want someone to make the connection if he could help it.

Sylver spent a couple of seconds allowing the darkness to build up in his stomach, before it started leaking from the wounds and scars on his arms, legs, torso, and head, and sat around his skin like a bubble of darkness.

Sylver moved around to check the connection was secure, and then changed the shape of the darkness to make himself taller, wider, and with a different stance from the person standing inside the bubble inside.

He came out into the main corridor and immediately noticed that there were fragments of corpses littered all over the ceiling and wall, and every single one was fresh. To the point that some of them were still steaming from how recently they had died.

Sylver walked past them, and had them all fall to the floor, and did his best to make it look as natural as possible, as the pieces of dead followed behind him by rolling on the floor. With his range of over 100 meters through [Dead Dominion], Sylver could make out the path of destruction whatever had broken out of the facility.

He followed the path of broken doors, walls, gates, and what looked like a turned-off force field until he arrived at the source.

Sylver counted out 8 busted open cages, all of which were empty, save for giant piles of shit in the corner, and large bowls full of fruit and meat pieces.

He walked into one of the cages, and with the help of [Deadly Darkness] found what he had been hoping for.

In his time Sylver had raided a great deal of similar-looking research facilities. Some of them were treasure troves of knowledge, while others simply called it “research” to make all the suffering they were causing appear to serve a purpose.

Which backfired on them, considering the facilities that sold slaves to be tortured were handled by the kind and almost gentle Ibis members, but the ones that contained “research” were handled by Sylver, who was a lot less gentle and forgiving.

But in Sylver’s defense, the crueler you are to those kinds of locations, the fewer there are in the long run.

Research was one thing, sometimes it was “necessary”, even with the looming threat of a Lich. Even knowing that eventually, a floating skeleton was going to break into your place of work, and allegedly skin you alive, and lynch the remains, people still took the risk because their country or people required it of them.

Whereas “pleasure dens” were opened for the sole purpose of profit, and there are safer ways of making money, that doesn’t involve having a Lich torture you to death.

Not a Lich exactly, Sylver had people do the torturing for him, but a Lich sounded so much scarier than 2 half-elves, and a dwarf, that had a personal grudge against the kind of people that paid money to torture someone to death. Sylver had a personal grudge too, but as long as the perpetrator was dead, he didn’t fuss around with extending the death longer than necessary.

Sylver coated his arm with a thin layer of [Necrotic Mutilation] and shoved the claws as deep as he could manage, into the tiny nozzle that was attached to what he assumed was knockout gas. Going by the way it lightly burned Sylver’s nostrils and tongue, it was some sort of extra strong concoction.

He waited a couple of seconds for the pressure to decrease a little, before he collected some of the air in the room into the palm of his hand, and inserted it into the hole leaking knockout gas, and then pushed the gas inside, as he forced it to expand.

Sylver felt the first valve burst open, and immediately forced a tendril of fog up through the pipe, and materialized inside the next room.

Except it wasn’t a room, Sylver was apparently inside one of the walls, going by all the pipes beneath his feet, and above him, along with several spider-like drones laying lifeless on the floor. According to the shades, the small space stretched out all around something and had a pathway that led upwards.

Sylver stopped dead in his tracks as he heard a sound on his left, and with an ear pressed up against the ice-cold metal wall, could hear a muffled screaming, followed by the sound of something scratching metal, followed by what Sylver assumed was the lifeless body of the screamer being flung at the wall Sylver was pressed up against.

Sylver ignored it and carried on running towards where he could feel the shade in Chrys’ shadow.

Chrys wasn’t moving right now.

Which Sylver hoped meant she was hiding, or simply asleep and unaware of the chaos happening outside. And because worrying about it wouldn’t change anything, Sylver didn’t bother thinking about other reasons as to why Chrys wasn’t walking around.

He continued to quickly move through the long pipe-filled corridor until he found himself almost directly below where Chrys was.

The shades returned without any good news, the corridor connected on the other side, but there wasn’t a path upwards to where Chrys was.

Sylver looked down at his hands and closed his right hand into a fist as he moved his mana channels around. It wasn’t exactly smart to do this, but Sylver couldn’t think of any alternatives that wouldn’t result in letting the whole facility know he was here. They were hopefully distracted by whatever it was that had escaped, and if he was lucky, Sylver would escape without being noticed.

Sylver sat down and did some mental math, as he grabbed his right hand on the wrist, and angled his pointer finger about a meter away from where the shade hiding in Chrys’ shadow was. The spell really didn’t like being confined to such a tiny area, but Sylver’s on-the-fly adjustments forced it into place, as the metal wall disappeared, and Sylver heard the distinct sound of glass shattering.

He was momentarily blinded as a bright light shone through the tiny hole he made, barely big enough for him to stick his pinkie into. Sylver placed his palm against the hole and forced fog into it. He followed the trajectory of the hole and ignored the other empty spaces around it until he felt the fog weaken as it came into open sunlight.

Sylver materialized inside Chrys’ room, and tried to take a step forward, but felt his knee shake from the effort. Sylver looked down at his hand and wasn’t the least bit surprised to see his pointer finger had been charred dry.

He ripped the dead skin off, and with a twist and tug, yanked the brittle piece of bone off as well. As Sylver looked down at the unconscious, and bleeding, body of Chrys, he remembered he still had 5 attribute points to distribute, and put all 5 into his constitution.

He used a tiny enough amount of 2nd tier magic that he shouldn’t lose consciousness, but it was going to hurt like a bitch.

CON: 160DEX: 105STR: 105INT: 259WIS: 225AP: 0

Health: 1,531/1,600Stamina: 788/800MP: 6,163/10,360

Health Regen: 18.67/MStamina Regen: 14.40/MMP Regen: 5244.75/M

Sylver touched his nose and pulled his fingers away with blood on them, as he felt something similar happening quite literally in every single inch of his body. For a moment Sylver worried that he had fucked up, and was about to go into shock, but as he saw the blood oozing out of Chrys’ nose slow down to a trickle, he was relieved it was just the effect of [Kindred Spirit Mitigation].

Sylver turned Chrys over onto her stomach, and inspected her back and spine, as he sent pulses of mana through her body, and used [Mutating Override] to get a feel for her primal energy field. With a very careful gust of wind, Sylver made the glass shards scattered all over the floor move away from him and Chrys and was relieved to find none had pierced her skin.

The good news was that she had a heartbeat, and her brain wasn’t shutting down from lack of oxygen, but the bad news was that her lungs, or whatever the fuck those two metal things could be called, weren’t working anymore.

“She’s dying,” Ria said, so calmly that it caught Sylver off guard. Her soul was practically screaming.

“I know,” Sylver answered equally calmly, even as he lifted Chrys’ head, and caused all the blood and fluid that had gathered in her mouth to pour out. She was way heavier than a person her size should be, easily within the 300-kilogram range.

Sylver turned her onto her side, and let the blood leak out, as he looked around the room, and decided on an order. Sylver pulled his fist back as he walked up to the first wall, and felt his reinforced bones strain as they shattered through white plastic and hit solid metal.

Sylver walked up to the next wall, and guessed right this time, as his fist shattered the plastic, and made the metal behind it wobble slightly. Sylver coated his right hand in bright blue flames, as he melted the plastic, and saw a square cutout, in the rectangular metal wall. He pressed his left shoulder up to it, and pushed as hard as he could, and got it to budge a fraction of an inch.

Teleportation was all well and good, but for anything important, there is always some sort of manual entrance, in the event of emergencies.

Sylver heard the metal groan as he continued to push, and used [Deadly Darkness] to use his shadow to insert one of the tablets laying on the floor, into the gap he had created. As Sylver stopped pushing, the glass in the tablet exploded, but the metallic door didn’t close all the way. Sylver sent a tendril of fog through the gap, as he walked over to Chrys, and dipped his finger into the puddle of blood around her.

Sylver moved through the fog tendril and materialized on the other side, and could see 2 men trying to open a door that had no door handle. Sylver stepped onto a crumpled piece of paper on the floor as he materialized, and both men turned around towards him. The room was pitch black, one wall covered in black screens, with two tables facing the screens, covered in various pieces of paper.

“Who’s there!” the one on the right shouted.

Both looked like human men, both were wearing glasses and white lab coats

[High-Elf/??? (Scribe) – 29][HP-1,496][MP-0]

[High-Elf/Elf (Scribe) – 24][HP-1,496][MP-0]

“Say something in the dark elf language,” Sylver tapped out at Ria.

She mimicked his voice perfectly and said a string of words that meant absolutely nothing to Sylver.

“What?” the level 29 scribe asked, and the level 24 scribe mirrored his confusion.

Sylver was glad he had spread fog on the floor as he entered, because the level 29 scribe pulled a small gun out of the holster loosely attached to his belt, and aimed it directly at Sylver. Sylver kicked more papers with his foot, as he used [Fog Form] to materialize with his back to the door, and behind the two men.

Sylver kept his eyes closed and did his best to ignore the ringing in his ears, as the man fired the gun, blinded and deafened himself and his partner, and Sylver placed his hands on the top of their heads and quickly knocked them together.

The level 24’s head made a faint crackling sound, as his head collided with the level 29’s head. The gun fell to the floor from the unconscious man’s hand, as Sylver tightened his grip, to stop the two bodies from falling.

Sylver used [Deadly Darkness] to make a small cut on either man’s chin, and pressed Chrys’ blood up to their bleeding wounds. As the magically charged blood mixed with the unconscious men’s, it curdled like milk, and Sylver gently laid them down on the floor.

Sylver walked up to the door the two men had been trying to open and felt around with his hands until he found that the bottom half had a little give to it.

Sylver turned around so his back was to the door, and kicked at it the way a horse would. Each kick threatened to break Sylver’s heel, but by the 4th kick, the door gave out and formed a crack as it bent. Sylver’s fog funneled through the tiny crack, as he materialized out in the open, and was once again under direct sunlight.

The walls were all the same white plastic as Chrys’ room was.

The glass above wasn’t broken, but from the way it shook, Sylver had to guess that something was running on the glass. On the edge of his vision, he could have sworn he saw a bright green tail, but he focused on the empty corridor instead.

“What are you doing?” Ria asked as Sylver rechecked that his coating of darkness was still on him, and started to sprint down the corridor.

“I need to find someone with compatible blood. If her brain and heart work, I can get the rest healed later,” Sylver explained, as tapped each wall panel that he ran past, and stopped when his tap made a new sound.

“What’s her blood type?” Ria asked after a moment’s pause, as Sylver just held up his blood-covered fingers as answer.

A small tendril of metal crawled up Sylver’s arm and sucked up a half drop of blood.

“O negative, shit! Can you filter out red blood cells?” Ria asked as Sylver shook his head.

“No, my magic isn’t suited for that kind of thing,” Sylver tapped out, as Ria swore in his ear again.

“So your plan is to run around and hope you get lucky and find a match?” Ria asked, with a tone that was between panicked and annoyed.

“No, my plan is to find a match, or find a healer and force them to heal her. There’s bound to be at least one somewhere. But I’m open to suggestions,” Sylver explained, as he melted the plastic away, and revealed another hidden metal door. Sylver pressed his ear up to it and could hear a very faint noise coming from the other side.

He looked around to check there wasn’t anyone around that could see him, before he summoned his ax, and with the help of [Deadly Darkness] slammed it so hard through the door that it crumpled, and flew into the room inside.

Sylver peaked his head in and saw more men wearing identical-looking lab coats staring at him.

“Is anyone here a healer?” Sylver asked as he filtered his voice through the floating blob of shadows surrounding his body and face and mentally crossed his fingers as he turned from one man to the other.

It was only when they all started to incoherently babble about who they were, that it clicked in Sylver's mind that high-elves, people who were incapable of being affected by magic, and couldn’t use magic, couldn’t be healers.

“Tell them to close their eyes in dark elf,” Sylver tapped out, as he stepped inside the room, and all the men scurried away from him. Ria said a string of words, in Sylver’s filtered and dense voice, but all the men talking over one another just continued shouting at him without closing their eyes.

Sylver spread fog on the floor and walked towards them, as one of them pulled out a laser rifle, and tried to fire it. To their mutual surprise, the gun didn’t do anything, even as Sylver materialized behind the man, and punched him on the back of the head.

The gun flew out of his hands, towards the open door, as Sylver grabbed him by the back of the neck and used a tiny claw made out of [Deadly Darkness] to make a cut on the man’s cheek. Chrys’ blood wasn’t a match.

Sylver dropped the unconscious man to the ground, and spread out his shadow along the floor, and simply moved it to the left for the briefest moment. All the remaining 5 men fell to the floor, and Sylver grabbed the nearest one by the back of the neck and pressed his finger up to the blood leaking out of the man’s broken nose.

Sylver threw the man to the side, and as his head hit the wall and shattered the plastic plating, he slid down to the floor unconscious.

Sylver grabbed the next man by the back of the neck, who was in the middle of getting up, pushed him down until his face hit the floor, and then held Chrys’ blood up to the man’s bleeding lips. Sylver threw him towards the building pile and moved on to the next one.

“I’ve got an idea,” Ria said quietly, as Sylver tossed the last man onto the pile of unconscious bodies.

If he couldn’t find a healer or matching blood type in time, he planned to kill all of them using [Draining Blight] and hope he had enough HP saved up to keep Chrys alive long enough to find a more permanent solution.

“Keep trying to find someone, I’m going to see if I can get her implants to work,” Ria whispered in Sylver’s ear, as she slid off his arm as if she was gold-colored quicksilver, and slithered down the corridor like some sort of metallic snake.

Sylver nodded towards her and went back to trying to find someone compatible. Despite the dire situation, a small smile tugged at Sylver’s lips as he remembered how nice it was to have someone to split up the work.

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